Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

I remember reading. I was in a terrible state, yet I still wanted more. The first time it happened in my lit class in high school, when I picked a book from the list at random. Never an easy read, Duras gave off a perfumed scent of dusty rose colored danger mixed with tiny beads of sweat on a girl’s upper lip, and if one really had a clean palate that day, the faintest whiff of gin, behind the precipice and the hesitation. Or perhaps it was whisky. The book was The Lover . I read The Little Horses of Tarquinia when in Paris for the first time with a lover. It was about a married woman contemplating taking a lover while on vacation on the Mediterranean, I always pictured it being set in Italy, with her husband and child, there is the beach, the heat, the hotel with nothing to do but to get drunk. An alcoholic herself, the book was also a testimony on how Duras drank. The second time I was there with the same lover, he bought me the huge illustrated biography of Du...

It is past midday, as I make my way through the busy street vendors and clothes racks filled with fire engine red and cobalt blue and soft pink ball gowns and dusty and sandy shelves full of knick-knacks of all sorts and cafés and their outdoors wicker chair and table units, positioned so that every one of the chairs is facing towards the street, to take in the nonexistent view I guess, but this is how they always position their chairs here, whether there was a view to be taken in or not. As I make haste on the narrow street, a fleeting question hovers in the back of my mind, regarding the ball gowns, for there is a similar ball gown boutique district near where I am staying, and now this other one here, and by judging by a quick glance of the items themselves, and the worn-out t-shirt and corduroy jeans -ensemble that seems to be the basic uniform of the salesmen, not entirely high quality merchandise, either. But perhaps there is a growing market for run-of-the-mill ball gowns unbe...

Like when the coffee is just too freaking hot to drink. Like when they tell you you are a bad person enough times for you to start believing them. When all you have is small potatoes and you decide to buy the sweater anyway. When you wake up every night to what can only be described as an existential stomach pain. When you just can’t seem to find it in you to start doing the spring cleaning. When you cancel everything to stay in and stare at the wall. When you linger in bed, eyes closed, wanting the day to just go away. When you pick up the book you were dying to read and feel nothing. When you stop trying to tell people, and merely answer “Fine, I’m fine.” When you start using the same phrase with your husband. When you feel life is being measured with a tea spoon instead of buckets. When you look outside and don’t want to go there anymore. When you feel you can never ever get rid of all the dust in your house. When they won’t answ...

On Valentine’s Day, I went to see Guillermo del Toro’s thirteen-time Oscar nominee with my valentine. Because I adore El laberinto del fauno, Pan’s Labyrinth, and am a famously huge Jaws fan, not to mention a fan of both Richard Jenkins and Sally Hawkins and romantic fairytales in general, I figured this film will be a shoo-in. As it unfortunately so often goes in these situations, I am afraid to say that the news is not good. WARNING MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!!! There is absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with The Shape of Water. Not one beat is missing from its deep green and blue tones and the David and Goliath reference and the soft and hard juxtapositions. One might say it is a disgustingly perfect film. A well-oiled piece of emotionless work; an odorless, humorless, and, most of all, soulless, film. A useless machine, to quote Grace and Frankie. About a week ago, I read on IMDb’s news section, how Jean-Pierre Jeunet had publicly complained about Mr. del Toro’s use of the ta...

Her house breaths with her, as she curls up in her bed, curls up with a book. Curls up, back against life. She smells the faint smell of blood about her. On the wall there, amid the pastel dotted wallpaper that feels silky and still brand new to the touch, father has hung a wicker shelf unit, not very big, not very sturdy, you certainly cannot store books there, but little things, beautiful things, like a diary, and the old Raggedy Ann and My Melody figurines, and pencils in a pretty little mug with a picture of a penguin on it. She is sitting there, on her peach colored bed covers, a poster of Monet’s water lilies above bed, The Water Lilies, oh, oh , the sun hat, a mock safari hat, on her chair over there, the lace gloves peeking a little underneath it, the lace gloves mother let her buy at a flea market even when there is really no point to lace gloves when you are thirteen, living in the country, none, apart from them being pretty and indulgent and romantic and making you...

I was talking to him on the phone the other day. He had been to the movies with a friend, to see Wonder Wheel, actually, and when I complimented him on the sheer nerve subjecting himself to be seen entering and exiting that film at this moment in time, myself having sorely missed it while at work, he told me that yep, he was having a delayed hostile response from his friends right now, because he considered the film one of the better ones of the notorious filmmaker, and trying to give people recommendations when they asked what to see was proving extremely volatile. “Well, you have no worries here. You know I love his work to bits. Remember when I forced your hand into handing over your DVD copy of Annie Hall, when we were breaking up, because it was the dawn of the DVD age, and all I had was the wretched video cassette, one of father’s rescues from those rummage sales he used to love?” “Yes.” Followed by Desert Silence, another term I coined in my diaries when being with the Yawn...