“mixed notes on aesthetics and urban design and linguistics…” is what this was supposed to be. To say I’ve returned from island time to the corner of pie-slice sirens and everyone’s uselessly urgent theater is blurry—wiser still would be to say I’ve (col)lapsed. Memory no longer serves me, locations are chiefly not worth dredging up, burrowing is unpleasant and the weather is of an equal mortal jump.
But the notes were (are?) to pertain to that island, where something—of forthcoming precision—in my manner or voice or attire sometimes made my words hydrophobic. Streets were compendiums of vegetation and traffic and relationships of bluntness or disrepair. Language in the vehicle of question: why is it so easy to understand and respond in parallel lines, where in the history of both is convergence found when geography is not?
Vanity’s cool aunt to top it off. People speak to me in English “porque luces como te luces”, because of blue eyes or because of a polite timidity. I look the way I look partially against my will and action. A flaming condition affecting only (“only”) my appearance raises a foul question—does the necessity of a longterm medication start and stop at its ability to prevent lethal deterioration? Insulin is a do or die: can you get to a point where attraction is a do or die? If it is enough to garner choices ahead of my name and above my head?
If it is enough to resent others for not thinking about the heft of their own?
(How much of genius and intellect in women will always be indecipherable from their beauty?)
A different sort of looking:
My floors are clean but visibly speckled because wax that would trap and compensate is an undue luxury for their age. My mind is clean but visibly speckled because wax that would trap and compensate doesn’t look right. For that matter nothing looks right. Pillows shouldn’t go where they are, bulk doesn’t belong so close—especially if it is meant to serve a purpose I keep avoiding. I know inward newness belongs here and I fear what it would mean to get it wrong until I get it right. I fear ticking time bombs of a future; I know, usually, inviting it in is established by wishing it never came closer.
Certainly it is indicative of something to return from a voyage and turn your quarters upside down, exhaust of repairing and repair from exhaustion. I’ve extended my lease for short breaths and in many a crunched space; to send the odorous email a day late from the beach is a new kind of postcard, but the general apprehension of failure remains. What if I complete it and it is all so much object, three dimensional in the very measurable, self-containedly articulate way that raises a curtain for denouement of meaning?
Some of us are messy and others of us clean; still a third population, unobserved and irrelevant but punching up anyways, is bemused by how significance is often ugly to the eye.