lately

As it turns out, I don't do well in bridal shops. I have a tendency to gag loudly around poly chiffon. These are good lessons to learn. Also a good lesson: your life will appear almost pathetically uninteresting when it is being recited to you in a series of charges by the fraud detection department at your bank. You will wish you were the one spending $600 at sneaker stores in the Bronx, rather than the one buying two discounted boxes of bran cereal at Key Foods for $6.99.

***

I had a far better Valentine's Day than I anticipated, or deserved. I woke up and unwrapped my gift to myself for the second time, taking exactly the right amount of enjoyment, believing both that I deserved the gift and that I was a moron for believing I could afford it. A bouquet showed up on my desk at lunch and I ponied up the $5 I owed a coworker for betting against people being good enough. I ate a spicy red curry with pineapple in a dark bar over whiskey with a friend, celebrating a relationship that grows richer by the day. And then my roommate and I ran drunk through the rain to the deli, where we bought two pints of ice cream, just the way girls who don't believe in love are wont to do. When I was young my mom used to set out breakfast for us on Valentine's Day, lay real silverware on the table rather than rushing us through cereal at the kitchen counter. There would be small gifts wrapped in tissue paper. This year she sent me a stack of hardcovers, the ones I would never buy for myself.

Brooklyn Anchorage

and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.

                                         Lisa Jarnot

***

Do you want to know a secret? Sometimes on the subway I look at the girls wearing their rings on the right finger and I try and figure out what separates me from them. I think it is the hair. They always have great hair.

***

Sometimes things happen. Sometimes you say, "I want to go to the beach," and he says, Okay, I will take you to the beach. They happen just like that. Sometimes on a Sunday night you will be studying the way the light hits a glass and learning about the wine they make in the Canary Islands, how the volcanic soil makes it taste of black pepper, and you be so sad and so happy all at once, your body almost not large enough to contain it all. And sometimes you are in bed and a cat who barely knows you climbs up to hold onto your neck like she can't bear to be torn from you, and she doesn't care that you've been sleeping without sheets for almost a week now because you can't muster up the energy to walk to the laundromat. And sometimes you have a headache for three days straight and then it lifts in a dark theatre and you can finally breathe cleanly again and it's all because there is a guy onstage with the most beautiful arms you have ever seen. I can now pinpoint the moment I knew I loved this city. All it took was a car driving by the bar I was drinking in, alone, and the lights on a street freshly slick with rain.