RestlessRavenousForTheNew

Chunks from my May notebook.

May 2, 2008

Something odd is happening these days. Everything is a novelty. All tones are introductory. I am not the shabby saved newspaper clipping in the desk drawer. THAT is what I’m used to. Instead, I am a magazine in the front room, in the middle of the coffee table alone. I am new, glossy and impersonal. Front and center, but in a haphazard no-second-thoughts kind of way. This place is not my own, and I cannot make it mine. I can contribute, but the home-feeling that I belong to faded pages in desk drawers will lock-in on its own. Until then, I squint in the fluorescent living room lights, I bake monotonously in front of the drowsy window. I need to burst, but I can’t push it. I try to be wise, to keep my senses open to natural reaching, innate seeking.

There is a feeling in the air, particularly in this place… there is something out there I want so bad but I can’t yet see it clearly. It reverberates within me, but its pulses are quiet, unassuming, waiting to be found.

I am coming.

12:45 AM

“Loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”
Gretel Ehrlich The Solace of Open Spaces

May 3^rd, 2008

The grass feels new on my hands, waxy like the skin on an apple. Stiff, but willing to bend and mold between my fingers. I pull hard with my closed fist; it stays with its roots. The bell tower wakes. I close my eyes and feel the mountains that encase me. This is the west. I live here. On my own.

I roll more towards my stomach and feel the spiral of the notebook go up and down the tip of my nose. I sink into the ground beneath me, the slope of the hill molds my stomach, hips, toes. My heart thuds against the opposing ground. I wait: they find each other, calm each other, and I am hidden away.

4:11 PM