I am living for two weeks in my aunt’s apartment while she and my cousin are on a cruise. The apartment has two bedrooms and a big sitting room kitchen area. Every room has good light and the kitchen cabinets above the stove open upwards like the doors of the Dalorian time machine car in back to the future.
The front of the cabinets and the tiles in the shower are a light sea green. Everything feels very clean until I cook and then I leave buttery stains and grains of hardened rice around the stove top- that is not why there are flies though.
There are flies because the cat likes to go in and out from the balcony and I have to ‘leave to door open for her or she panics.’
The cat is beautiful and gray with light blue eyes. She follows me from room to room and when I sit down she curls up in my lap which is intimate and comforting until she starts flexing her cat palms like she’s nervous and sticking me with her needle claws in the process.
At first she wasn’t eating her food. I have a few observations about this but not yet any solid theories. I noticed that she will usually eat while I am out or while I am not paying attention to her. Also I spilled some dry food on the floor by her bowl and though she had not touched the food already in the bowl, she readily lapped up the fallen nuggets. Interested, I put some more food on the floor and she ate it right up. Like I said, I’m not sure what the problem is. But I can hear her eating now, she’s crunching out of site on the other side of the counter.
When I sit here at the kitchen counter the tops of my thighs brush the underside of the counter and they get covered in white dust. Maybe the dust is left over from the construction of the counter and no one usually sits here so it never got worn away. This feels like a new building. I know it is a new building. It is the light stucco walled building with wide glass windows on the block of matching red brick townhouses.
Sometimes I feel like the only white girl on the street walking up to the only white building on the street. “You are that.” says Sam when I relay this feeling.
The dust under the counter makes me think of plot possibilities. Some dangerous white drug dust gathers on the undersides of surfaces and is discovered only because the character who will later solve the mystery sits down and collects some dust on her pants and so becomes an accidental detective.
From three windows on the side of the house you can look down three stories and see the Brooklyn shuttle passing in its subway track canal. Looking down on that canyon from the windows I feel like this building is perched on a cliff. Its not that far below but it looks like another world, a more natural, jungle-like green world that is meant to be a secret between two shelves of city.
I read Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins which is a lovely spewing ramble of a book. I read it on the express train going back and forth from the city. Express trains are a new thing for me. I have never lived so far away before. I try to sit on the edge of a bench so that I can link one elbow through the metal side bars and anchor myself there while I read while I bump along. I hold the book with two hands and my elbow keeps me steady. I look up from the wordplay sentences to catch my breath and my focus only to watch the panicked blinking of tunnel lights flash past past past the windows then suddenly past past past the columns of a local station platform where we do not stop because we are an eeeeeexxppreeeesssssss train.
What I mean is, the pacing of the movie in my mind- the editing of the words in the book- the images in the book and the reading it on the train and the flick flick flick of my thoughts and my grins- the tunnel light tunnel light stranger stranger stranger eye contact smile blush- The pacing is good.
I feel like the whole world discovered Tom Robbins long ago. When I asked a bookseller today if they had any used copes of Jitterbug Perfume he smiled in a 'ah your life is changing isn't it?' sort of a way and informed me that the book is sold out because everyone is always already reading it.
There are many things I am meant to be editing. My senior film I know about and am working towards but the others- a music video for jake, five montages for a summer camp- they quite literally slip my mind. I looked up in the middle of my lunch today and remembered for the first time in three weeks that I will receive $900 as soon as I finish those montages. My brain feels slippery.
And my face feels dangerous.
I walk around feeling like my dangerous face is pulled forward on the end of my neck which I feel is too long and I have visions of dropping my face onto the sidewalk where my teeth shatter like ice.
My hair is a woman and my face is a woman and they announce their femme ness and blow in the wind above and ahead of me like a kite and the kite is a banner which announces my importance and imminent arrival so that you can all be ready with your ‘pretty eyes’ comments by the time I pass.
And my eyes feel like water and my face is a bright glowing kite with my thoughts written in legible font across it.
So I bury my kite-face deep in a ramble book written by one Thomas Red Breasts and let my brain get heavy and my string neck bends into a kite-less posture and anchored by one elbow to the side of the bench, I ride the express train far far out to here.
When I finished the ramble book this morning I typed the last and poignant paragraph into a text message and tried to send it to one of you and then to another but I didnt send it to any of you. I kept thinking of reasons why you would misinterpret or dislike or be damaged by it.
I also worried briefly that, because in the book these final thoughts are printed onto the page in the author's handwriting, there might be something sacrilegious about typing it up in legible computer font. But, I realized that outlaws have no rules so I laughed at myself for making up a rule about the book about the outlaw.
In any case, I will post it here in case you want it.
'It isnt love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection is merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery and we long for love to last so that the ecstasy of being near the mystery will last.'
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