Trying of late to let my heart be an open curtain of water but certain difficulties continue to prove themselves activated sugar-fed yeast. What bread am I baking? Did it start with me?
Developing a penchant for tea, undergoing a tea kick, absorbing a habit by way of hearing it be pleasant to another. The neatness of an always that means less to the speaker than the recipient.
Encountering some other, more nagging and existential, hazards. Reading, writing, listening, the basics, they are entryways and meant to form a sculpture to something beautiful: a conviction, an easiness, a clarity—such means so, and all the rest is abundant but minimal. In a fast landscape I am less sure I have the posture to stick it out, filter utility from apparition. Part of the task is asserting that there’s a topography which you wouldn’t dare to put so bluntly—seeing it but providing the chalks and pastels first—and believing (outright cherishing?) that it has its charms, potent welcomed and a trace addictive. This is one way of saying I’m adrift and increasingly despondent. An okay thing to admit, in my ledger, because Joan Didion dug up correspondence she wrote to her mother—midcentury but freshly emitting that specific pine of adolescence—“never been so depressed in my life” as when returning to college. (That specific pine of adolescence…or something endemic and useful to letters, encapsulated in questioning whether the delusion is peachy enough to outwit demand in the first place?)
Waiting to see if my instincts were shoddy or if losing something beginning to foment cobwebs, however owing to volition, is probably for the best anyways.
Focusing on the infertile, putting a stained eye on richness.
Reusing and adding more of something evaporative to keep it up. You get some things right during the stretches where you get many other—ostensibly larger—things amiss, and this is noxious in its own way, in its own blunting fuzz.
Imagining competing stories and losing, hard and quickly. Cracking it all out, or elsewhere. Winding up in the same lot, in search of a new wick without having to pluck from a hundred-pack, stumbling on some semblance, activating briefly.
Fathoming it’s mostly in the un-doing, this business of distance between beloved cherry and old saliva dome/afterwards of memory.