tuckova

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parlayed into a memory

When I met you, I was crying, because it was cold. An involuntary response, I would have explained if you'd asked. Fortunately I'm a master, and it is possible that you didn't even notice.

We talked for hours. I learned so many things about you. It is my best trick, to lay myself out as on a blanket at a flea market, so obvious in terms of tarnished and broken and hidden treasures. You couldn't help but pull the trinkets from your own pocket in response, a snowglobe holding a childhood memory, a knife you'd used to cut yourself free. By nightfall I'd wrapped my blanket back up again, stuffed everything into a carpet bag, and you were showing me your scars. It is interesting how quickly one can establish intimacy, when it's needed, how fast we can go from perusing the menu to tearing flesh from the bone. 

But eventually it is over. It is always over, one way or the other. These things don't end themselves, and so somebody has to end it. You did the honors, surgical and simple, none of the nonsense of waving a tear-soaked handkerchief as the train pulled away. I am glad it was clean like that, I am. And yet when you left I was crying, because it was cold. An involuntary response, I would have explained if you'd asked.  Fortunately I'm a master, and it is possible that you didn't even notice. 

Effort at Speech Between Two People, by Muriel Rukeyser

Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair:
a pink rabbit: it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid: and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you. I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days. 

I am not happy. I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.
There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate
On what a tragedy his life was, really.

Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death:
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.
I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.
I will be open. I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth: I love you. Grow to know me.

What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a chinese puzzle... yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving... Take my hand. Speak to me.  

Good Charlotte (in which I distill some Czech history)

I keep thinking about her and wanting to say something that is as deep as her feelings, something worthy of her pain and her sacrifice, her love. And because there is nothing really to say beyond the fact of herself, and nothing more important in my mind, I find myself nearly mute.

She came from the future, I start, because how else could she have continued into a future that offered her little other than one disaster, one rejection, one sad ending after another. How could she have gone on unless it is because she knew she went on. Her dedication to each thing, and failure, and dedication to the next thing, it's almost too much to bear unless I think that like me she sees the future and knows that her dedication will ever be enough but it is what she has to offer, and offer, and offer. Hands crippled by one love nevertheless reaching out in optimism? or certainty? to take up the next goal, purposeful. 

Even in love, I don't begin to understand the strength she had. To love a man who took her name when she took his; it must have felt at the time like she was the equal she knew she deserved to be.  She learned his life so that she could help him lead it; learned his language to help him preserve it. And he listened to her, believed in her, credited her. And yet when I mention her to others she is most famous for how he betrayed her, again and again. 

What would it be like, to watch your husband leave to do work you find important, to watch your son die, to write your daughter cheering letters because it's the only thing you can use to sustain her in prison? What would it be like to know you'd given up your own freedom, things you were promised with ease, in exchange for this? I mean, he won; she won. She had five years of knowing they won, but that whole five years she had to remember all the things she lost to get there. I can't imagine. Or rather I can't stop imagining. 

lent et douloureux

Last night we went to the ballet. I wanted to see the Israeli ballet style - more Russian or more New York? Like I know what I'm talking about. Seriously they used music by Erik Satie, and that's why I wanted to go. We got total nosebleed seats. It was three different short ballets by three different troupes (the one we wanted to see was second, "Things I Told Nobody") and I thought: well, variety is good. The program had typos in it (they misspelled the name of the ballet, awesome) which did not bode well in terms of their attention to detail, but I had hope anyway.

The sets were 20 minutes, plus about 10 minutes each for clapping (MAN do Czechs like to clap), and then 30 minute breaks. The first set was fine, the second set was also fine, and we walked out before the third set because a) we were tired; b) the people behind us were getting drunk and annoying me (cheap seats, whatever, I know, but why give people an hour of drinking for forty minutes of dancing? is it a ballet or a disco? grump grump); c) the third set used Philip Glass music, and I have already had to run out of one Philip Glass performance in hysterics, so why risk it. 

Anyway, as Squire said, the Satie was played so slowly that it looked almost too hard for the dancer. And I said how classical music was sort of open to interpretation in a way, but he pointed out that 3/4 time is 3/4 time, and that was not. So I agreed to keep him and we came home and ate tortellini and watched an episode of Community and that was perfectly fine.

you connect the dots

‎"all that a woman of forty-three need do to become invisible is to go without makeup, leave her hair uncolored, and wear ordinary clothes" -from an article in the New Yorker about Daphne Guinness.

At the Burger King at the bus station in Prague, you can get 10 Kc off your meal if you first have a ticket from the bathroom proving that you paid 10 Kc to use it. The rule used to be that BK would give you a ticket that you could take to the bathroom, and get in for free, but now it's reversed. No signs anywhere to explain this to you of course, which resulted in the BK employee getting all mad at me, and me reminding him that it wasn't my rule, etc. It was necessary to ring up each order separately in order to get the full available discount (10% of the total, so it seems worth fighting for). I have nothing more to say on that except obviously one should never use public bathrooms or eat in restaurant chains and then be surprised to need to argue other concepts of "fairness" with anybody.

On Facebook this week, Squire was inadvertently signed up for a group of "Let's show the atheists how much better it is to be Christian!" Uhm. Also a friend of mine posted a "One nation UNDER GOD; Love it or leave it!" thing. And another person went on a rant against feminists. What this proves is that Facebook is the devil. No, but I should probably not take things so seriously. Still, it is hard to look at people the same way when they are so clearly putting a blanket of hatred over me, even if they didn't know I was standing there. Not that I can't hate with the best of them, but my hatreds tend to be either specific individuals or are targeted at some behavior. I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it feel like --and isn't it meant to feel like-- a punch in the stomach when somebody hates a group you belong to? And so why are people stomach punching? What does that get done?

You know how when you dream of home it's often the same house, and it's not the one where you actually live? For years I have lived in the stairwell of a large apartment building, but lately I have also been inhabiting a small room hidden under the floorboards in a house downtown. It is a very nice room, kind of nest-like in its coziness. 

What else? It's fall. My parents came to visit for a few days and we managed to not see a whole bunch of things. We did drink a fair bit of booze, though. And I tracked down the cabbage they wanted. So: mission accomplished. I got a box of chocolates with a pretty orange ribbon around them. 

that one

Sits beside me and feels bad 
about taking up the space.
Wants desperately to be heard
and does not want to talk.
Rides alongside me everywhere I go, 
occupies a whole seat on the tram,
or sometimes sits in my purse
and wants to be read instead of a book.
Is insistent, is unbearable.
Says, "yes yes but now back to me!"
and it is not kidding.
Blossoms forth when it is least wanted,
racked with sobs in the night when sleep is needed,
is boring holes in the wall
is boring gaps in the conversation 
is boring, boring, boring.
Sees you on the street and bursts into tears.
Cannot shut up for a goddamn second.
needs to be medicated to sleep, to sleep.

I almost believe that they're real

Going through a massive project of reorganizing all our photos, moving them from photo albums to boxes with little index cards. Nobody goes through these anymore, nobody is that interested in what I was doing 20 years ago that it needs to be in a bulky album taking up massive space. Yet I can't quite throw them out, and there's something about organizing things that makes it okay to keep them. And so here I am, writing in careful ink "Kokura, spring 1990, salarymen playing baseball outside the castle" even while I realize that if I haven't forgotten it yet I probably won't forget it ever; who are these notes for? And yet and yet.

Looking at these I realize I've always been the same, I'm like a tree, you can just read my rings and tell which years were sad and which were happy but in every picture I'm pretty much the same tree, hair longer or shorter, face wider or thinner, in a black tank top and jeans that don't look good at all, or in someone else's t-shirt and baggy pants rolled or cut to my knees, barefoot or boots. My insistence on lace-up shoes despite 20 years in cultures that make me take them off is a little odd, as is the fact that I only started wearing interesting socks about five years ago. My persistent dressing like an overweight stagehand even when I was slammin', and black has never looked good on me, though I feel good in it. The refusal to wear makeup even though everyone told me I would be pretty, because I knew I would not be pretty and I might as well spare myself the effort and the disappointment. I wanted to be menopausal when I was 18, I wanted to be excused from caring fairly early on and it shows, it shows, making faces to break the camera, see I'm not ugly it's just my face. 

And the pictures of other people, whoa. How to label this, to say "here's a person I thought I'd know forever, and now he's dead, or alive but we don't even talk; here's a woman I loved like a sister and now I can barely remember her last name." What it means to look and see how clear it is that I haven't changed, and so why have so many people disappeared, living only in these pictures? Did they change? I suppose people do. Or they get bored with my being the same, the way you can get tired of even your favorite picture if you have to look at it every day.

It is of interest now to watch people my age, women who were especially pretty in particular, but also the men, the sweetly balding men, watching with horror as their youth drains away but for me it is the same relief as a uniform: finally I don't have to decide. Or rather I seem to have decided finally already 30 years ago and now here I am. I could buy alcohol without getting carded from about age 15, which is possibly why alcohol was not particularly alluring for me. And now here I am, not merely the mother in the school play because I look older than everybody else, but the mother in real life and I may still look older than everybody else or maybe I finally look my age, I don't know. I recognize myself in these pictures but not because I haven't aged. The tree gets taller, and it's stronger or it's bowed but it's the same tree. Can you see what I mean? Do you want to see the pictures?

with mosquito nets for the shooting stars

A bed is so good for so many things. To slide between cool cotton sheets on a summer's night. On a winter night, it is pure comfort to get into a bed that is already warm. It is cozy to make a nest of several blankets layered on each other - the fuzzy one that reminds you of childhood slumber parties. The quilt your aunt made. Or it is nice to have a thick warm comforter stuffed inside a soft flannel cover, all that warmth in one sweet weight. It is lovely to have a selection of pillows - the big one for sitting up, the small one for tucking under one ear when you curl catlike around yourself. A big one for pretending. How absolutely luxurious it is to spend almost a third of the day with things that you picked, all the softness and color of your wishes. It is healthy to keep the bed only for sleeping, but it is also, oh such a treat to pull in a thick book, under a light that is just for you, and read until the words slide into your dream and the weight of the book falling across your legs wakes you, and the light is a reach away and you slide down under the covers, the transition from pleasure to pleasure almost seamless. It is a blessing to have a bed of one's own, to wake startled from a dream and feel immediately safe, to say, "Oh, here I am" and know where that is. And while it is delicious to wake with a heavy arm across you, long fingers spread across your stomach, the heat of love, it is also fine to wake for the sunrise, the light filling the room and the whole day in front of you and a good night's sleep behind you. But first you need to get a bed.

serendipity-dooda

Yesterday I had 200 Kc credit mysteriously added to my phone. One of my numerous fans, I assumed. About an hour later a stranger called to say she'd made a mistake and could I send the credit back to her? She seemed not entirely convinced I would do it. In the store, the clerk forgot to charge me for the credit and I almost walked out before I realized and went back, giving her the 200 Kc. I can only hope that sooner or later someone will succeed in just handing me 200 Kc because I'm awesome, and not because they're confused. It does seem like the karma wants me to have it.

Yesterday evening's pub quiz (where I went despite sort of knowing it was a bad idea, healthwise) was fun. And yes, we won again, duh. It helps to have savants on the team, is my thought. I mean, knowing the band Boy George played for is child's play, and the twin ship of the Mauretania is fairly easy, but to identify a few bars of Neil Young's Heart of Gold played backwards takes a certain kind of brain. It does not help to have me being sick, because everything irritates the heck out of me, from other players to factual mistakes in the questions, and it's hard for me to remember that it is my problem, and not that the world conspires to annoy me. Anyway, winning team gets half off on drinks. I stuck to hot whiskey with lemon for the throat, which probably kept things from getting worse.

Last night I dreamed someone was yelling at me and it was awful; trapped in a house with less space to maneuver than an airplane and being shouted at to get out of the way. I wished to be smaller than a dormouse but even that would have been in the way. When I tried to speak, I found had no voice at all, and when I woke that was true, and my general malaise had escalated into a fever.  

Drifting in and out of fever dreams all day today, then. I fell asleep in a sunbeam today and woke up an hour later, disoriented, in a different sunbeam. Read some Gertrude Stein because it fit and drifted again, dreaming of circles. The next time I woke up, the little old couple across the street had assumed their afternoon stations at the window, watching the traffic pass, pedestrian and other. Can they see me through the window, resting in these dusty shafts of light, and if so do they think I am lazy or ill? Perhaps both.

Squire is at the store. Today he will learn to make chicken soup because both my previous chicken soup makers are gone and I need a back up plan. It might be better to teach him to make hot and sour soup, which I think is what might actually cure me, but we'll start with the basics so he can take care of people besides me. Generously expanding the resume. I'm thoughtful, even when my head is on fire.