Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

  Are we needing to cater and cow down, endlessly, in front of the imagined other, who will tear us apart anyway? The carelessness comes after taking care of business, but the brightness is so fast to hide from me. Now, I can see it. Now, I cannot. Listen, can you hear the birdsong now and now and now, as the dragonflies gather and the light is the brightness, so much so that in communicating with myself I am communicating with the universe, my closest person who looks after me, my friends and family, and the holiest of holy, the interpreter of my emotions, the conveyor, the immaterial lover who is touching me to make sure I am still here, relentless, proud, myself, frail. I become lust in the evening sun and feel warmth on my face and toes and hear the ice clinking in the glass as invitation to better things. The liquid is orange and pink and I feel how my body relaxes, it is hot to sit in the sun. Physicality means more in the summer, the heat brings me closer to my core self...

We are not great friends. In fact, I have only seen you once, at an event we both frequent. I have no idea what kind of woes or joys you have in your life, and they aren’t any of my business.   The last couple of nights I have been having vivid dreams about my ex-husband. In each of these dreams we have been on the verge of reconciliation, and this has been something I have very much wanted; the dreams have been a continuous showcasing of what a wonderful wife I could be if he would just let me, and him accepting my many offerings but remaining mean and distant, and if not mean, then taciturn and avoiding eye contact and not returning any of my gestures of warmth. Since I have no desire of reconciliating with him in real life, the dreams keep leaving me perplexed and emotionally drained. We did not leave things well, and the easiest and most probable explanation to the dreams is that my mind keeps working on the downfall of the relationship and my part in it, and of course th...

I wake up with a start in a foreign bed in what is obviously a hotel room. A nondescript, fuzzy peach colored room with twilit shadows creeping on textured wall papers from between the Venetian blinds. Evening. An alarm of some sort has gone off, and I realize I need to leave my room. With haste, I do so, getting a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I pass towards the door. I am wearing a white tank top and what appears to be a man’s light blue cotton boxer shorts. The sudden change in temperature as I get up from the warmth of the covers makes my breasts very visible under the top, but I feel like I should be moving, and there is nothing I can do about it now anyway. I go into the hall, also fuzzy peach, and walk, barefoot, on the shaggy carpet. I am by nature a friend of cleanliness, and I feel slightly disgusted by the feel of the fabric against the soles of my feet. There is a corner, and I stay there, leaning on the wall. A door, perhaps the main entrance to the floor, is behi...

Somnambulant espionage, the everyday kind that goes on in houses; it went on. A shadow. They saw a shadow, the doctors did, and they took her away into the pines. The Lung Unit in the pines outside the city proper, in the pines because they have a good reputation as respiratory helpers and these historical pulmonary blooms may go, they just may go away. Look, there is mother now, on the balcony, can you see her, she is there, on the balcony! Wave, wave to mother! Every Sunday. The child then getting her own heavy machinery X-Ray, hoisted up on a bench because she is so little still, and no one spoke at all it was serious, because they had seen a shadow inside mother. A shadow was like a ghost, or when behind the Christmas tree there was a dark spot without decorations. See, little one, there she is, on the balcony, waving! Let’s wave back to mother! A Shadow. With the shadow gone, she later worked at Helios and when things were slow she would bring the little one to have he...

  One still needs to gear up to come sit on the balcony in July; I don’t recall when it was last this cold for this long in the summer. The soil is so soft and wet from the constant rain the county worker’s lawnmower leaves large trails of brown on the green, as if the entire vast lawn is suddenly striped. I was given some hard advice about you. I have always been headstrong, but the advice I got has given me pause. The worst damage from the storm was the age-old aspen ripped from the ground in one fell swoop, with the roots now exposed and an enormous chunk of soil still attached to them, with the majority of the tree now in Lake Pyhä. The sight was simultaneously devastating and magnificent. The littlest damage was my scarf leaving my hiking provisions bag unobserved as I was down there on my walk, my smoky pink silk scarf, I loved it so. A token tribute to the gods of weather, most likely also now in Lake Pyhä, since I followed loosely the bike trail, that is my hike now...