Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

About twenty-five years ago, I gave my father the widely popular book, 14000 Reasons to Be Happy About, by Barbara Ann Kipfer, as a Christmas present. It lay on the kitchen table for a long time, and I used to open it and read a couple of things at random whenever I was at the table. I don’t know if father ever read the whole thing, I don’t think it is that kind of book anyway, but I saw him reading it several times back then. We still have it in the bookshelf at home. I know my love for lists precedes the time I saw the book and decided it was just the thing for dad, but I think it did further my devotion for order and clarity. While I don’t agree with Monica’s famous exclamation about how rules help control the fun, I do like to have my books and records and DVDs in autobiographical order, exactly like Rob Gordon suggested in High Fidelity, and also like to punctuate and assemble my writing in segments of threes or sevens or nines. I love categories and subcategories. I even lov

I was walking through a snow-ridden Helsinki. It had started snowing while I was on my way, on train, the first snow of the season, and I didn’t have a hat. I was on my way to meet this guy. I was in love with him. He was my first real love. I was young. I thought because he had given me a mix tape including There Is a Light That Never Goes Out meant we were meant to be together forever and that his love was undying and solid. I was cold, and the way was long, so I popped into a clothing store. It was this hip, indie store, an expensive place the guy had shown me. It was dark already, it was late afternoon or early evening. There was a bargain bin, and an old-fashioned brown tweed cap in the bin. It was a little bit large for my head, it was a man’s size, but I liked it, it made me look like one of those newspaper boys from the Thirties. So I bought it. I had no idea. Love by nature is transient and fickle, and everyone who tells you they will love you always are either l

I don’t know if you can hear me. I don’t even know where I am supposed to go to talk to you, since the juniper is gone. It was a mistake. I know that now. I never should have gotten rid of it, I never should have summoned you. You promised me it would be alright. You promised me. It is not alright. He is not the same. He has no recollection of our time together, he doesn’t know who I am now. I don’t know who I am. I do things for you, I do whatever you tell me, and all you had to do was to bring him back. We went to the museum in the city the other day, and grabbed a bite afterwards. The photographs moved me to tears, and Mark held me and told me it was alright. Yesterday he referred to the trip as something he had done alone, and urged me to go see the exhibit. When I said what the hell is wrong with you, I was there, he seemed genuinely surprised. Why would you do this? I was loyal, I did everything you asked, even that one thing! When I remembered how I got him back, I

I was eating tangerines at home earlier, now it’s tangerine in the sky. Coffee rushing right through my body. Pen not working. ( The shark is not working .) The needles working just fine. Scissors! No scissors, because I absentmindedly thought they’d poke a hole through my brown bag. Now who’s absentminded. I’m without scissors and therefore cannot cast off. (But already you’re a castoff skating away on Joni’s river ha ha.) Smiling at other passengers. Telling a woman trying to open the door to the toilet that it is just probably stuck, you saw a kid struggling to open it earlier. Hearing a vague thank you through the music. Because you didn’t want to interrupt the song, you just helped her with the headphones on. You don’t see anything wrong with that. It’s times like these you learn to love again. Foo Fighters were wrong. Its times like these time and time again. Foo Fighters were right. Thinking we are the final frontier of people af

When it happened to Mimou, she was seventeen. She was so perplexed and stunned when it went down, that she felt later she had not sufficiently opposed, and wondered for years if she could have fought him off instead of the pathetic attempts of a surprised school girl's feeble verbal nos. Yet at the same time she was full of childish astonishment and wonder: was that the way it was done, was that – abyss - what being an adult was all about? Did everyone else go through it, too? Was being with a man like that, forced, a secret rite of passage? She was stupid. Afterwards, she never told anyone except Peri, and even then she would not use the actual word for it. She wouldn’t use it for another twenty years. The guy was flamboyant and suave, he wore a striped jacket, had carefully disheveled hair with too much gel in it. He had a gap between his front teeth. He wrote her a poem on a piece of napkin. He went to an extremely prestigious and hard-to-get-in art school. Ten

You grind it Ornate it You decorate and paint it Get louder Get higher A cataclysmic mire Then shake it Repeat it Now you begin to feel it If you try to bookend the pain And be fool enough to think that makes it go away Ten seconds more will prove to you The truest pain lies true in you Silence turns into howling wail Distorted sounds of midnight rail All morning wishy-washy Cries turn into sea of gushing Sediments of those stupid tears Squint and they are chandeliers Hardened by the tides of years A century till they disappear In the middle of a family feud An awful way of breaking free No one can tell you how to feel Not anyone, even if it’s not real Remorsefulness is not the key To end the pain, but today it’ll have to do.

WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS! Don’t burn the eggs. Burnt scrambled eggs taste what you would imagine rust tastes like. Don’t cry the whole morning. Crying ages you, and takes a ton of energy, energy you would be wise to use in some other, more positive, way. Call Jared Leto and tell him to get the hell out of the idiotic oceanic echo-chamber with the pair of expensive-looking leather chairs, and the replicant woman standing silently in the shadows. The big bad sitting in a chair in a graphic, majestic setting, oozing menace and prestige and unspeakable evil, is not very believable – what do you do, sit around all day, looking at the shadows of water on the walls, contemplating how wonderfully calculable and under your command everything is? - and doesn’t make you look scared or scary, it only makes you look lonely (unless that is the point) and like a phony, kind of like you are in an Austin Powers movie, petting the white cat in a pretend-bald headpiece. Also, obviously, it

Where, if the sky fills with birds between the yellowing birches, the geese and the cranes and right above the field she can see the pair of swans who lived by the meadow right there in the summer take flight. They fly low at first, while the hundreds of cranes overhead are yelling goodbye goodbye for now, it is a beautiful grey sky. In the large linden jackdaws are chatting away, but they don’t want their picture taken so she walks below the tree silently. Where, if the monsters don’t come, she will reflect on how her heart keeps beating so irrevocably and instantaneously, and the left side of her body is hurting a little, but she can read a book still, without breaking a sweat. Where, as is witnessed by many a generation of angry old men and their silent spouses and well-behaved children, now all flown from the nest, all except her, who keeps coming back and coming back, because there is something in the air and the flocks of cranes and geese in the fall, and the smell t