Views

Interiors.

Out of everything wonderful life had to offer, interiors. But not just; The Hanging Rock and the pathways that are starting to loosen their grip on me. The sorcery is fading.

I get out of bed and immediately almost faint. Sudden change in blood pressure, vertigo, lack of human touch, brain tumor, who knows.

Cooing doves in the morning, and the sound is conspiratorial and homey. This view.

The newspaper articles are about war, or cutting funding, or killings, or maga propaganda, and as if these were not enough, the science section tells me how studies have shown that women whose bodies go into early menopause tend to lose their synaptic activity in the brain sooner and more often than those whose period continue into their fifties, resulting in catastrophic cognitive problems, with Alzheimer’s looming at the darkest end of the spectrum. Also, that persistent nightmares reduce lifespan, and those who tend to have bad dreams often are bound to die sooner with 70% accuracy.

The sense of vertigo persists.

I can see the church tower from my balcony. Also, the soccer field. Also, how the dove’s whole body vibrates accordingly to his coos. I find looking at him go mysterious and lovely. Also, the astoundingly optimistic long thread of web from the bottom of the upstairs balcony to my balcony railing; these big city spiders have sometimes even greater delusions of grandeur than their country cousins.

Early morning sunlight, and my room with a view, and being able to come outside to write and look at all the magnificence.

“But what on earth do you do with all these knives?”

“I look at them.”

My heart races out of fear and loneliness, but I have you and my interiors and this view, and I don’t need you to tell me I am great, although hearing it would be nice, sometimes.

Greatness in people, of course, is relative, unlike greatness in, say, nature.

Did The Hanging Rock let me go in peace, or was I kicked out and not allowed back there anymore?

Per the paper I should just give up now. Perhaps it is all an elaborate scheme concocted by my ex-husband to stop me from reading the news under his membership prescription. Yes, news, the only thing that still binds us together. That, too, an astoundingly optimistic thread.

I think about everyone and love everyone long after they have ceased loving me. That is my greatness and my downfall.

I was walking home yesterday evening after doing laundry at Roberts’, she of the rose gold mood board one-bedroom apartment and a glimmering view of the lake, and on her second balcony a discarded, top-of-the-line gas grill under a tarp.

“Look at these, my Mesozoic Era sweatpants with seven holes along the crotch seam that should have been burnt to cinder years ago, and here I am, gently spreading them on the line to dry.”

“But they are perfect now!”

Roberts of the curiosity principle and unwavering faith in laughter being the best remedy and highlighted hair and total inability to knit a heel to a sock no matter how aggressively I was instructing her, her whimsical, dangling wood earrings with obscenities such as fuck this shit and the best goddamn attitude towards life and its delicious lemons I have ever seen.

The evening was pretty and warm, unlike this summer in general, and the lakeside was teeming with people. The summer theater project was mid-show, folks were gathered all over to drink or play or exercise, and there was a sense of sweet urgency in the air to grab it now because tomorrow it will be gone.

I kept a brisk pace and walked amid the ancient pines as if I had never left. I took the stairs up the ridge and passed the old watchtower; the terrace was packed with people having ice cream and coffee and donuts, and the aroma of the fresh pastries covered the entire yard and made my mouth water. The scenic view spot was crowded, everywhere was crowded, and I kept walking.

Ascending to the tippy-top of the entire historical district was surprisingly hard, the long wooden staircase I had climbed many times before I was granted access into the NetherRealm and inside The Hanging Rock crossed the border to the other side seemed to go on forever now, and I thought of nothing then but the next step and how out of shape I was and how my heart was racing; nothing else, not even you, and when I reached the top there may have been the briefest instant of clear and complete mind-body understanding, or, satori, if you will.

The other side of the steep ridge was still bathing in sunlight, so I descended the steps that lead to the road and walked with the cars and buses until I could not walk anymore and waved for the bus to take me home to my interiors and view of the park and the stillness of the rooms and my love for everyone preserved in jars in neat rows in the fridge. The moment of illumination stayed with me for some time, but became polluted with thoughts in the end, and I was reminded of a story by Natsume Sõseki where the ticked off samurai tries to will himself into angry enlightenment as fast as possible so he can off the oshõ by midnight.

“You better grow, bitch.”

 

I would like to go swimming, but I am afraid to go alone with my bad leg.

Is love swimming, and the lack of love submerging underwater?

Or, is solitude swimming, and falling in love submerging underwater?

Interiors, and book spines, and the cooing in the maple. Silver willows by the pond and leaves rustling as the bird takes flight.

The almost pointillist cloud formations in the sky; it looks like Van Gogh’s nocturnal view of the Seine.

Wilting, but not dead.

What an oversight to unguard my emotions like this! Is the lilting, euphoric voice really my voice?

But I misconstrue on purpose, you know this, and all my characters gather protectively around me like in a Fellini film.

The wind grows milder and even sweeter; one can almost lose the thick wool cardigan now. When I am gone The Hanging Rock will still be there, and I guess I am not the only writer in the region to describe it and include it in a book.

Someone once said to me that we are, none of us, unique, nor are our thoughts we so egotistically claim as our very own original, but the uniqueness in one’s life comes from the relationships one forges with others, and the thing that makes the threads and knots once-in-a-lifetime is the interaction of people, thus proving that it is only through others that we become immortal, singular, and extraordinary. But if one is communicating only with oneself, then there is no such other, and that particular life is rendered meaningless? Or, is there friendliness in the hours of uneventful alone?

To have a clear path to others becomes harder for me the older I get and the more inordinary, almost deviant, in my demands, and, hence, the stronger the sense of loneliness, yes, even in my remarkable self-involvedness and self-sufficiency that is often found off-putting.

But I kept my enormous needs under wraps and instead listened to the swifts, my favorite sound of summer, as they flew past the balcony like Maverick and Iceman and the instructor, I can no longer bring to mind what Tom Skerrit’s character’s call sign was.

Was I made so I could only love from afar?

The attempted web makes me think of Lullaby by The Cure, and how afraid I was of it when I was young. Then, when I was an adult, I named a whole poetry book after Disintegration.

“Your intensity is a wonderful and very special core quality, but there are times when I can’t take it.”

Inward, Alex, inward.

So I became an old lady, writing in my journal in my oversized cardigan on the rattan chair at six-thirty in the morning, marveling at how decrepit and worn out my working-class woman’s hands now looked, trying to remember what my name was. The sun crept slowly from around the corner, the dogwalkers appeared at seven-thirty, and the day was now beginning in earnest while the lady silently wrote herself into sublime, corporeal ekstasis.

The spell lifting may have robbed me of my youth, but it gave me this.