staring-to-keep
salad week, dementor's kissing my friends, & a poem
happy salad week. salad week happens once a year, usually around now, when the leaves have all finally grown back to their peak, wet greenness and thus become my primary topic of thought. i really want to eat the maple tree across from the best parking spot on the street, which i considered mostly a joke until i got stoned and googled “can you eat maple trees” and learned you actually can eat most of your average maple tree, excluding dried red maple leaves, which are toxic to horses for some reason. that’s how they say it in the scientific articles, too: “which are toxic to horses for some reason.” anyway, i’m looking forward to foraging some tender baby leaves for my salad tomorrow, assuming i get the good parking spot, the tree consents to being picked from, and no horses will be joining me for dinner.
a month ago i was in denver, where the spring display was lush enough to prevent me from considering the trip a mere distraction from the spring already undressing before me. they say you shouldn’t leave a good time to find a better time and i do think that applies here, maybe one of the only documented instances of the better time actually existing: i drank at least a gallon of dry riesling, laughed loudly with my friends, watched an entire season of love on the spectrum, ate a very delicious poke bowl in the park, and smelled so much lilac at the botanic gardens that i had “allergies” for two days, in quotes only because i’m not usually someone who has allergies. this made it somewhat challenging to determine if they were, in fact, allergies at all, though i was sneezing up a literal storm (we experienced a brief and indescribable weather event between the tulips and the roses), which felt like compelling evidence.
since said indescribable weather event, i bought a camper, gave my landlord my 30-day notice, went to france and back, played four sets, cut my own bangs, and pet a hairless cat at walgreens. in just a few days i’ll be wine drunk in greece with my sister.
the inevitable moving-on is approaching like a predatory feline, and if i stir too suddenly or with any perceivable fear, it will surely attack. i find myself in my brief idle moments staring hard at different corners of my apartment in alternation, trying to absorb them permanently into my person as though they could transcend memory and fuse directly with some concrete aspect of my personality.
it seems unlikely i will ever be able to appreciate any of this enough, which is a beautiful thing to feel because it implies a depth of gratitude even pointed, prolonged staring can’t compete with. i’m at least comforted knowing i won’t have to part indefinitely with all of my gorgeous items and things, because in many ways i am very much a material person and not ashamed of it.
the other night it was the new moon in gemini and it was all i could do not to throw myself (the baby) out with the bathwater. so often i want to wake up early but i also want to stay up late rereading my old instagram captions, trying to figure out where i went wrong and, every once in a while, pinpoint the exact instances in which i went right. personally, i prefer when the opposite of right is left.
how “together” can one really be after their own going away party? near the peak of the evening i’m doing, again, the staring-to-keep thing, subsuming the souls of these people i cherish, one by one, ballpark twenty dementor’s kisses. to accomplish so much discreet loving and remembering in one night i need to split myself in equal slices, ever the pie, only to find i’m crumbs and pan by midnight, not much of anything particularly delicious left to share. and so the slices become smaller, slimmer, and at what point, to a hungry guest, is a sliver no longer worth eating at all? it makes me think of serving tables and how, for some reason, leaving coins as a tip was more of an offense than a compliment.
i don’t know what will become of me, which feels hilariously sylvia plath to say out loud. i’m positive there are a thousand things i’m forgetting to do or say or buy, and it frustrates me that i can’t think of them, because of course i’ve forgotten them. and what do you do then except collapse on your bed and open instagram like a novel you keep trying to read while stoned? the same sentence over and over again, and maybe one of these times it will mean something.
my dreams of late: plane crashes and confessions
i can only hope the good one happens to me
i notice the world the way i’d like to be noticed
differently depending on the light
by may i’ve seen peach blossoms
and the beginnings of peaches both
and provence in the brick house on the corner of apricot
and the street with a less memorable name
time is pushing against me like wind or a wall of water
erosion happens
i walked a block and turned to see the sunset again
but there was a tree there in front of me where the clouds had been
and around its branches only a thin halo of orange light
there was also the smell of a distant cigarette
and the poppy as big as my head
i saw a snail on the sidewalk and stepped over it
didn’t know if it’d be helpful to touch it or not
it’s actually a myth
that if you touch a fawn its mother will abandon it
just don’t move it or make it leave where she left it
there in the grass: the shape of waiting
which is also the shape of going
and the shape of being gone
by the time i got home and back up to the balcony
i could tell what had been the most beautiful
cloud in the sky had turned to gray
is this how it ends?
obsession of the week
wasabi tuna melts. been eating these like my job, which is hardly hyperbolic considering i had one for breakfast the other day.