A Snack for the Bear at the Window
Went upstairs, planning to go to bed -- long work day tomorrow. But then I went out on the roof for a few minutes and the stars were out and I could feel the writing life, outside me but maybe looking in through a window, hands cupped around its eyes, knowing I'm in there somewhere. And I know it's out there, too, even when I can't see or feel it. I know it, but sometimes I lose my faith that we will connect again.
Twenty-two minutes til midnight. I will now pull three words from friends' blogs, the first word I notice from each, and I will write something real quick, and that something will help me to feel that the big blue Denver Conference Center bear of the writing life is closer, that maybe I'm letting him in for a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, maybe we will feel familiar enough with each other to put our feet up on the coffee table together, as I'm doing now alone.
Words:
Symptoms of Loneliness (Lyle's blog), Calm (Rebecca's blog), Album (Marshall's blog)
1.
Sometimes I miss the symptoms of my loneliness. The way everything unfamiliar looked so clear. The way every brick in the sidewalk stood separate, like everything looks when you get done crying. But also still edged with sadness, like when I got my new glasses back from the eye doctor, and every lampshade had a line of rainbow on the edge, primary colors that expanded if I moved my head just so. Chromatic aberration, my dad said. We were a crossword family, a Jeopardy! family. We were precise in naming things. Some winter nights my dad and I trudged with flashlights down the rocky path to the lake, crunched across the frozen cove to the spot where the sky was a bowl above us. Dad found Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor, Io and Ganymede and Betelgeuse, his professor voice naming them for me, a most important class of one.
2.
Sometimes I think I've traded alertness, traded art, for this hard-won calm. Sometimes I miss the churned-up lakewater, legs kicking panicked akimbo, the sink-or-swim of it all. Many drowners, I hear, forget which way is up.
Once I knew for sure what home was, and I held onto my loyalty like a banged-up shield, bending and shifting the light with its dented planes. It was, of course, the same light I watched from the balcony, booming back and forth between the buildings, slow-motion pinballed, lunch-truck morning to anxious afternoon to relieved evening.
I couldn't get by without music, album after album, a different one every day. I needed it -- it was a pair of sunglasses that kept me from taking too much in. The abandoned buildings were enough, empty windowholes with black behind them, signifying something lost, something gone. It was enough to see them without thinking, the music like aloe on my raw skinless skin.
Midnight, so I will keep my promise to myself and post this, as messy as it is.
(But of course I will then take another twenty minutes to go back and sand it down, rearrange the words, reshape. Still messy, but I still have to go to bed.)
Twenty-two minutes til midnight. I will now pull three words from friends' blogs, the first word I notice from each, and I will write something real quick, and that something will help me to feel that the big blue Denver Conference Center bear of the writing life is closer, that maybe I'm letting him in for a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, maybe we will feel familiar enough with each other to put our feet up on the coffee table together, as I'm doing now alone.
Words:
Symptoms of Loneliness (Lyle's blog), Calm (Rebecca's blog), Album (Marshall's blog)
1.
Sometimes I miss the symptoms of my loneliness. The way everything unfamiliar looked so clear. The way every brick in the sidewalk stood separate, like everything looks when you get done crying. But also still edged with sadness, like when I got my new glasses back from the eye doctor, and every lampshade had a line of rainbow on the edge, primary colors that expanded if I moved my head just so. Chromatic aberration, my dad said. We were a crossword family, a Jeopardy! family. We were precise in naming things. Some winter nights my dad and I trudged with flashlights down the rocky path to the lake, crunched across the frozen cove to the spot where the sky was a bowl above us. Dad found Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor, Io and Ganymede and Betelgeuse, his professor voice naming them for me, a most important class of one.
2.
Sometimes I think I've traded alertness, traded art, for this hard-won calm. Sometimes I miss the churned-up lakewater, legs kicking panicked akimbo, the sink-or-swim of it all. Many drowners, I hear, forget which way is up.
Once I knew for sure what home was, and I held onto my loyalty like a banged-up shield, bending and shifting the light with its dented planes. It was, of course, the same light I watched from the balcony, booming back and forth between the buildings, slow-motion pinballed, lunch-truck morning to anxious afternoon to relieved evening.
I couldn't get by without music, album after album, a different one every day. I needed it -- it was a pair of sunglasses that kept me from taking too much in. The abandoned buildings were enough, empty windowholes with black behind them, signifying something lost, something gone. It was enough to see them without thinking, the music like aloe on my raw skinless skin.
Midnight, so I will keep my promise to myself and post this, as messy as it is.
(But of course I will then take another twenty minutes to go back and sand it down, rearrange the words, reshape. Still messy, but I still have to go to bed.)
posted by Elizabeth Thorpe at 11:34 PM
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