Galore

                                                                                                                                                     Mary Tryphena was a child when she first laid eyes on the man, a lifetime past. End of April and the ice just gone from the bay. Most of the shore's meagre population - the Irish and West Country English and the bushborns of uncertain provenance - were camped on the grey sand, waiting to butcher a whale that had beached itself in the shallows on the feast day of St. Mark. This during a time of scarcity when the ocean was barren and gardens went to rot in the relentless rain and each winter threatened to bury them all. They weren't whalers and no one knew how to go about killing the Leviathan, but there was something in the humpback's unexpected offering that prevented the starving men from hacking away while the fish still breathed. As if that would be a desecration of the gift.

I devoured this book over the summer. It had yet to be published in America, and I bought my copy at The Bookery, a tiny bookshop on Signal Hill in St. John's. The shop is over a hundred years old, and the walls tilt and dip. On the top floor are antique clocks and a very friendly cat. And books. And books. I swooned. And then I went nose deep in this novel and didn't come out again for days.

It's unfortunate, really - this is the novel I meant to write. The cod, the whales. The myth and magic. Crummey got there first. And did it better, the jerk. And now he's been shortlisted for the IMPAC. Next to Kingsolver and Oates and Toibin. And I am almost as excited as if I had written the thing myself. Which I didn't. Not even close.

random act of bravery

Today I commended one of my favourite authors on a recent accolade.

Inner critic says this is lame. Inner therapist congratulates me on my willingness to be vulnerable. I revere authors. In theory they are supposed to be my peers (ha!), but I blush and shake and stumble in their presence. (Cue Michael Chabon story here.) My mom kept encouraging me to just email authors while I was camped out in St. John's this summer, to ask them out for tea. Hogwash. I'm trying to think of an appropriate metaphor that would highlight the gap, but all I can think about is how my aunt was once obsessed with The Monkees. Maybe it is something like that.

Anyway, I did it. So pats on the back all around.

Other good things that happened today, since in the midst of this rashy patch of knee-high stressweed a reminder is sometimes necessary...

- My nail polish did not chip
- My therapist said she would miss me
- My best friend's star rose higher
- I set up another informational interview
- I learned the lyrics to an Iron & Wine song
- The barista accidentally charged me for a grande chai instead of a tall...and I DRANK THE WHOLE THING
- I remembered I own a trench coat
- And an unexpected social cancellation lead to two blissful hours alone, eating a frozen pizza, reading my new O magazine (no judgement, judgey-faces), stretching, clomping around the apartment in my new shoes, and wine

wrung dry against the rocks

We have these mice. 

They are terrible. We want them gone. At night they scratch up the inside of our radiators, the charming old radiators with beautiful wire covers. The mice burrow behind my knitting basket, they trace the moulding along the bottom of our walls, they shit in our kitchen. We want the mice gone. Someone is going to come tomorrow and use disproportionately large tools and fill all the holes with steel wool and poison, any hole that is larger than half an inch, since that is the smallest dimension through which a mouse can squeeze. 

We catch them on sticky traps and they are tiny and heaving, barely longer than my pinky finger. One fell over on the trap, his whole pathetic body glued lengthwise. One lost his back legs and tail and dragged the trap with him back under the radiator to hide. I pulled him out and dropped him into a plastic bag filled with water, held it shut for whatever length of time I deemed appropriate to drown a mouse. 

I'm telling you this because I didn't used to be able to do these things. When T.'s house was infested I would hide in bed in the mornings, woken by a frying pan coming down hard on a stoop, the sound of one of his roommates's bludgeoning a caught mouse. One morning I was making breakfast, and as I went to throw the eggshells in the trash I saw a mouse corpse laid out on the top of dirty paper towels, plastic cups. I was inconsolable. T. held me as I wept and he buried the mouse deeper into the trash, out of sight. 

Something happened this year, in these past few months. I became capable. There is nothing I need him for, not really. I used to say I still woke up scared during thunderstorms, and I do, and he isn't there to comfort me. So I comfort myself. It's not that hard. I open jars with a few good whacks on the countertop, hot water, an elastic band. I grab a chair when I need to reach the highest shelves. 

I used to be one of the tender-hearted. The thick of my heart was exposed. I cried over every commercial with a dog in need, stories of endless suffering, the Gilmore Girls. I just cried. I cried because he would look at me with something I recognized as primitive and essential, and he would fold me up and I would be reminded of just how safe I was. 

It's inhumane, yes, what we're doing to these mice. It is cruel and vicious. But I want these mice gone, you understand? I want the jerks dead. I look without pity on their tired bodies. I am not interested in weakness anymore. 

does it make a sound?

Alone in Wyoming, 2006. 

I think my ankles have shrunk. The straps on my sandals that have seen their last summer are looser. I wiggled the fastener through a new hole this morning. I have muscles in my back I have never before seen. My body is changing, maybe, but there is no one here to confirm it. If a tree falls in the forest...

Love in the Time of Cholera should not be read alone. 622 love affairs, slowly unwound. The book reads like a vacation - its lushness, the exotic prose. A vacation best enjoyed two-by-two. 

Still, there are lessons. 

"After having known so many of them during his incursions as a solitary hunter, Florentino Ariza had come to realize that the world was full of happy widows. He had seen them go mad with grief at the sight of their husband's corpse, pleading to be buried alive in the same coffin so they would not have to face the future without him, but as soon as they grew reconciled to the reality of their new condition he had seen them rise up from the ashes with renewed vitality...They wasted their overabundant hours doing what they had not had time for before, sewing the buttons on the dead man's clothes...But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate...They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality. And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return... 

In the restorative idleness of solitude, on the other hand, the widows discovered that the honourable way to live was at the body's bidding, eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone."

Today I'm wearing the feather and turquoise earrings I bought on the side of the road as I was driving alone through Arizona. They turn my ears green, but it's a good reminder today - I've moved through the world, fully independent, since my first day on this earth. We choose to move closer to each other, we choose to create more space, but we are always, always alone in our bodies.

random act of bravery

Express mailed my visa application today, hideous passport photos and a cheque to the Department of Homeland Security included. Change your plans, change them again, change them once more.

saturdays, after carnage

I caught a lot of mice last night. A lot.

So you'll excuse the frivolity today, yes?

Jeff Buckley, with beard. 

Jeff Buckley, with guitar. 

Merino Cool, it's called. Not sure why. Someone described it as falling in the range of Greige. That's a hideous word.

Earl Grey tea, yes. Risotto recipes. Resumes being fired out. Want one?

this is not a post about ryan gosling

Trust me, I have hundreds of those to come.

This is about beards.

It is in reference to this post.

Just go look at the beards.

You're welcome.

random act of bravery

Today I had my first massage.

This might not sound very brave. Really, it is closer to self-indulgence, to luxuriating. And I'll admit that as the massage therapist placed heated rocks on my lower back, my first thought was, "Oh. So this is why people do this."

But I think it is a little brave for me. Just a little. I've never been very good, you see, with touch. With people touching me. Correction: with strangers touching me. I don't get pedicures. I slide away on public transportation. I'm big on personal space. And the idea of a massage - of having my entire body in someone else's hands - had always been too much to fathom.

I have a friend - a beautiful, elegant, audacious friend - who has always used her body as a vehicle for touch. She is unafraid to grab our hands in public, to throw her arms around her friends, to put her lips against our cheeks and hair. I'll admit that it was startling, at first. She has a fluidity that shocks people. But you realize, after spending time with her, how generous it is. My friend was a dance major in college, and she told me once, in the back of a cab, how much she missed that - how much she missed the community of bodies. She told me that she had recently been called out by a co-worker, someone who apparently found her willingness to touch and be touched "inappropriate." Foolish.

It is exposing, I think, touch. It forces a recognition of the body. I used to spend most of my time ignoring my body. Defying it. Tucking it up. Lately I'm starting to realize what a gift my body is, how flawed and human and lyrical. Strangely, it is now - now that I'm not being touched, by anyone, with any frequency - that I'm starting to appreciate the physical, that I want to put myself in another's hands.

Plus, I'm never going to look this good again. 18-year-old me, you should have been naked ALL THE TIME.

I feel dried up. I miss theatre, where my body was an instrument. I miss physical improv, eight bodies working as one, bodies both sensual and utilitarian. Confession time: sometimes I go to yoga just to be touched. I get extremely (unhelpfully) stressed when the instructor is adjusting someone next to me. PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME, I want to scream. When they do, I feel my joints, my bones, my muscles - I am aware of my body in a new way. It was like this during the massage. It felt good, yes, just the contact - but it was also enlightening. Like, hey, what is that thing you are pummeling in my thigh? What is that? A muscle? I have one of those there?

The short and straight of it: I need a hug. Always.

first photo here, second & third mine. 

preparing

"To choose an apartment here is to select one particular vision of what New York life can be. The crowds who troop around to open houses every Sunday are never just counting bathrooms and closets or calculating mortgage payments. They’re wondering whether they want to join the centennial parade of families who have occupied this particular enclosure, whether a refurbished tenement speaks of hoary miseries or new excitement, whether the view out each window is one they want to see every day, or whether they can see themselves in their prospective neighbors. To hunt for an apartment is to decide which New York you belong in, and what specific droplet of the city’s fickle soul has found its way into your veins."

text from nymag, 3 yr. exposure photo by michael wesely, found here. 

the sky bruising at its edges/dust on the books i have yet to read

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe