Diary #3
Ephemeral understories
I go to the park. It’s January and the day before was nearly sixty degrees and the sun is bright and loud. A group of people has a tightrope strapped between a tree and a pole. Unmounted, it swings in frantic, tension-whipped ellipses. There is a flickering lightness that alters everything. Words move around and get caught under nails, in my hair. I think about “longevity literacy,” a concept encountered in this week’s sprint toward expertise, the awareness of how long one might live, specifically after retirement but, hauntingly, casting a shadow forward from any living moment. Longevity literacy is particularly crucial for women, because in the end, women live longer. How do people really feel? I wonder. How do I really feel?
I sleep nine, ten, twelve hours a night. Long swaths of slant-rhymed death. When I wake, with a glancingly desperate cheeriness I refer to hibernation, that winter is the time for thinking and planning not for action, to distract from the wan look one gets while still half-inside a dream that hasn’t concluded. Certain functions act as seeds, and if left unattended, will apply themselves simultaneously to every point, and by repetition make generations; the evolution of the game is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. The skin gets thinner and thinner until it’s possible to see through it.
“Hollowed out,” I think. Deposits withdrawn. Cored, like a mine out of a mountainside. Relieved of a great heap of language that would otherwise frizz, pop, race, squander into the ether unattempted.
I buy coffee for three colleagues. The air is eerily warm. I’ve been hunched over a computer long enough to struggle to stand straight. I can’t quite keep the thread of conversation, it dances around beneath my gaze, eludes me.
I go to dinner. I am thinking of the adopted skulls of Naples, rescued from the ossuary and set up in public shrines. I am thinking about how the light shines around corners in a comically celestial halo. I am thinking about the clarinet and French horn wandering out of the music conservatory. I am thinking about the evening’s soft and blinding golden haze. I wonder if, definitionally, a paradise has to be something lost. It’s an illusion that one can hide anything from anybody, I think.