June 24, 2012

Bees

I'm so melancholy and morose this morning, this fine blue-sky Sunday June morning...but in the most satisfied and most welcome way. Nothing is normal - everything is so atypical with me, right now. And I'm embracing it. Where to begin, as always, unsure...this past week's Monday found me attending a friend's reading at KGB Bar (why again have I never been to this literary New York institution??) where I found my friend Ashley and another long lost friend in a red room to listen to Daniel read a portion of what turned out to be like an exquisite corpse-type piece. Daniel has a beautiful soul. That's all I want to say on that.*

Wednesday we held a Book Swap Happy Hour at Scratcher Bar to promote International Short Story Day created by an organization based in the UK who sought out our assistance (I love Lit Crawl NYC!) This organization celebrates short form writing on the shortest day and shortest night of the year, June 20 being the shortest night...ahh. A short night. So much daylight it could send you mad. I love the thought of it. Our Book Swap was successful and everyone brought short story collections (I, of course, brought an Aimee Bender collection since I can't get enough of that woman and want to share her with everyone) and we cheered beers to each other and the whole thing just went well. That's all I want to say on that.*

Random. I was riding the subway Monday and my eyes drifted upward to an advertisement for a pet store, and at the edge of the ad swam a fish. For some reason I immediately wanted an aquarium. Like, right then. And so when I got to work, at some point I chatted to Johnny that I had this random thought, and he got SO excited at the thought of it and now??? Johnny, Nilla and I are getting an aquarium. How excited am I??? Johnny has already done such awesome research and Nilla sent me this adorable text: "so excited can we just please be sure to get fish that don't eat one another? i want my fish to be kind and sweet"...(Ha ha, of course! Nilla's tenderness is so endearing!) I hope we can make this happen. My summer is headed down a path of mandatory Saturdays at the office and that renders me fractionally dead inside, so coming home to gaze at little colorful fishies circling one another should lower the aggravation front tremendously. Let's hope.

Yesterday I took myself to new heights. And do you know what? Taking yourself to new heights is probably one of the only ways to get there. Sometimes others can do it for you, and sometimes it just unfolds before you without you realizing or expecting it. But yesterday I needed to do it for myself because that was what my Saturday walked up and said to me. So what I did is I showered early and left the apartment armed with my laptop and the book of Sylvia Plath poems that Johnny bought me for my birthday. I wanted to write. I wanted to sit somewhere and drink wine and just write write write write. Instead, what happened is that I walked for a really long time. There was so much sun and brilliance and I wanted to walk and look. Looking is something people don't do enough of, and I'm not high-fiving myself for doing it, all I'm saying is that I did it. The world deserves to be observed.

I finally settled in somewhere (see photo above) - Simone, a French place on St. Marks, and the A/C was kicking so hard in there that I almost requested a blanket, but it was nice...I didn't pull out my laptop to write; instead, I read Plath. And I felt completely insane. How can I love this woman so entirely having never met her yet through her words?

I read "The Arrival of the Bee Box" and was absolutely reminded why being a poet is my main mission in life. I want to be that good. I want my words to hurt someone as badly as these do. Sylvia Plath is my hero.

I cannot say much more. I miss Greg, hearing from him. He's in Buenos Aires and has emailed me just once from there and I hate that I've handed him my heart without his acknowledgement thereof, and I want to curl up somewhere and cry over it. But I won't.

Instead, here:

"The box is only temporary."--Sylvia Plath, 1962.




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