Knitting and Listening to Blue on A Bus

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 after the revolution who still remember what life was like when Friends didn’t make you long for a time when people spent time together for no other reason than to be together.

Now, caring is creepy.

A Ross or a Monica would fly right out the window.

You look around your round table of absent friends.

They aren’t there, because they are busy jogging, taking their kids to soccer practice, doing yoga, furthering their careers, at a meeting, hiking solo, choosing just not to see you.

You aren’t there, because you are busy jogging, taking your kids to soccer practice, doing yoga, furthering your career, at a meeting, hiking solo, choosing just not to see them.

How, in fact, dare you call it your table? That’s so conceited. Then again, you always were. (Arthur! Hey man! Where’s everybody? Oh, who knows, here and there.)

But in the Nineties they found her whimsical with the coasters and the hospital corners and general lack of bohemia.

Pen ink rushing through my body.

Pen ink on the tissue, all over my fingers, the pen itself is smeared in it.

Why pen ink? I am doing two things at once. I am two people.

Suddenly missing the second and third season of The X-Files. How sad Mulder was when Scully went missing for several episodes.

Well, here we are, just the two of us.

Two of us wearing raincoats standing solo in the sun.

Looking for something, what can it be?

Us, the final friends of the final friend frontier, what are we?

I buy hats and books and dresses, I buy beautiful cardigans with embroidered dots and hearts on them and think it’s so pretty Roberts will flip out, only she won’t, because we are just work people who meet at work and that does not a friendship make. She’ll never see the cardigan, she’ll only hear me describe it in minute detail, as if describing the pretty garment will somehow sustain us.

For all intents and purposes, she and Hanks are my imaginary friends.

You don’t know what they put on in the morning. You don’t know the routine of their ease or unease, breakfast, ironing, assembling. Maybe they don’t iron. You don’t. Hanks sure as shit doesn’t.

Richard got married to a figure-skater, and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator.

This is what happened.

(“Who is it?” “It’s Alessandro! From Alessandro’s!” insert laugh track here)

All this love it echoes records books the blue duvet cover with large, expressionist tulips on it. That kind of love is never one-sided.

(Doesn’t describing sustain it, though? What is friendship, if not describing? Our feelings, our moods, our experiences, the little embroidered hearts on the fabric? Who do you think you are, coming off as such a drama queen this early in the morning? There should be laws. No drama till noon.)

When I was a little girl with a best friend, I knew all her clothes by heart. This is something Lorrie knows well. The Cats tee-shirt. The huge striped sweater. The various Madonna tee-shirts. The ponytail. The curve of the ear when she was mad at me.

I always loved how they used A Case of You in the scene where Gillian drives across America to be with her sister Sally in Practical Magic, and Nicole Kidman really belted it out, smiling.

Now you are singing it in a car, on your way to see Sally.

On the way to discuss important issues and feelings and hearts on fabric.

You and me chasing paper getting nowhere on our way back home.

Who else?

Annette Bening singing All I Want in The Kids Are Alright.

I want to have fun I want to shine like the sun.

Mitten’s almost done – do we really need to have thumbs?

I think I’ll go home and mull this over.

Tangerine sun accompanies me on this early morning ride to see my friend.

A man finds a long hair in his piece of cake, and complains to the waitress in the sweetest way, this was earlier, at some coffeehouse, where morning people were drinking their morning coffee, same as you.

I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee.

Uproot us, why don’t you?

It’s not like any generation after us is going to put much value into a piece of land.

How dare you try and steal my castle?

How dare you take my center away from me?

How dare I become unglued like this?

Get a grip. She is waiting, and she always makes me laugh. And I love her.

Colors: yellow, orange, deep red for the vines, grey for the birches, and myself.

Young women discussing the driving exam: “I hate the roundabout in Nokia. I feel I’m a better driver if someone is talking to me instead of driving in silence.”

I’m so hard to handle I’m selfish and I’m sad.

Coffee and cake taste better with friends. Talking tastes better. You don’t get old.

If there’s a hair in the piece, it doesn’t matter, if you are with her.

Except, it’s not all of us. It’s just me. They have no idea what I’m talking about.

With a little help from my friends: Foo Fighters, The Beatles, The Shins, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorrie Moore, Carly Simon, the ladies and gentlemen of the show Friends, and of course, The Joni Mitchell