the habit of being

I’ve been trying to get started on the entry for three days. Needless to say, it hasn’t worked out very well. It seems like whenever I actually have events occurring in my life, writing becomes harder, perhaps because I feel more obligated to not only write but to write well. Here is something I want recorded. Here is something that I’ll want to read again later. Here is a -moment- I do not want to forget. Here is Katharine with writer’s block.

1. preamble - a car ride

First off, she’s upset. She’s spending her days dealing with a bunch of people she just cannot reach, despite all her efforts. The problem haunts her and she cannot sleep. It won’t leave her until she finds a solution, though she knows that is unlikely to impossible. She is tired and emotional and soon will be crying. I am listening. I have no answers.

Somehow, the telling of a tragic love story follows. I sit there amazed as she recalls this tale with tears in her eyes, because it is so real. I didn’t know such things could be real, because I am so used to dreaming them up. Here beside me sat the carbon form of some fairy tale vignette I hoped to write, and how horrible horrible I was to think it was beautiful. On paper it would be beautiful. Written out in a perfect simple soft manner, on pages with ruffled edges and grains showing through the type, it would be the most lovely thing. But there, in her eyes, only tragedy for tragedy’s sake, and the pain was so deep and the love torn away so true. Better writers than I will be in ten or twenty or however many years it’ll take me to mature would not be able to hint at it.

I want so much to attempt it. But the crime against my readers I commit by leaving an enigma is not remotely comparable to the crime I’d be committing against her by telling a story I neither own nor understand beyond my petty love of sacrifice. (The -idea- of sacrifice, no less.) It would certainly be a sin beyond.

Yet I must say I am enraptured now with this thought of my birth and what it means. I feel a bit of responsibility to an ideal that, for once, is not my own. I am actually quite literally a product of metaphorical beauty. Perhaps I was damned with drama from the very start.

She never even thought to wonder if it were not real.

The streets are dark and scary. We lock the doors. “Most of Atlanta is like this,” she says. “It’s not all Buckhead.”

2. bread and wine

I took a deep breath in when she walked on to the stage. The way she situated her wrists about the microphone stand for that first song, it took me away. The first line and my jaw just dropped. I whispered an “oh my God” to none of the people crowded around.

There is a definite high to making music. You can get so lost in it you never want to find your way out. It reminds me of a relaxation exercise last summer. “Breathe in. See your breath as a color. See it travel down your arms. Release it. Watch it retreat. Slowly. Breathe in. See the color extend down your fingers. Hold it in your fingertips. Hold it. Release. Slowly.” She said I was good at it. Was it apparent from my positioning it on the floor, from the look on my face, that I really could see it? That comes from five years of playing the flute. I can see the music that way. I block everything else out and just float along with it, inside my body or wherever else.

Trying to explain things that are beyond words makes them so sappy. But inside that theatre Friday night there was such a vibe, such an appreciation, and everything just felt alive. The music high works both ways, and we were all hanging on to those notes as if we never wanted to let go. It could have been ages or seconds. I fire could have broken out in that room and I would have continued to start in my place, mesmerized. It’s all about atmosphere. A concert or an orgy, there’s not much difference, if the mood is right. Synchronicity.

So on my bruised feet I danced. And I am so grateful.

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3. also

New books to eat: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, Innocent Erendira and Other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. The last I have already read once and adore. If you are a writer, you Need this book. If you are not a writer, you need it too. I promise. It will inspire Things to happen.

I swiped a Vienna Choir Boys poster from outside the B-n-N from which the above reading materials were purchased. I want a choirboy of my own. I’d pet it comb its hair and feed it creme brulee and passion fruit. I’d build it a pretty little cage and give it its own lapdog. It would sing for me in the mornings and look angelic with long girlish eyelashes. I’ll snag one when I move to Vienna.

4. tangent (and signs)

I painted my fingernails graffiti, but it’s really a very tiny blue.

It just occurred to me that despite all the time I spent tracing the lines of Jennifer’s palms, I still have no idea what her future with bring. I’m no fortune-teller. But that is neither here nor there.

5. last night and more days

With each passing second it becomes more evident that we will always Be.