the habit of being

[ I heard a most exquisite story yesterday about a man's friendship with a groundskeeper at Chartres. It was told in such a deep and knowing voice, accented and erudite. The whole world seems to echo in a voice like that. I wish the world would vibrate in my voice. Where is the world in such stale conversations as I have day by day? Where is the heart in tick-tocking awkward silences?

Could I somehow modify one of my genetic attributes, I would choose to make my brain function in the same manner when I am speaking that it does when I write. A cautionary fence is placed between what I think and what I communicate when the page and pen are snatched away from me, the letters merged into sound. The flow is halted, uneasy, inevitably inferior. I quite literally think differently when I am recording myself in print. It is as if a thought cannot truly mature until it has been written down, and until that moment it many times hides so well I do not know it is there. Upon my investigating it through writing it becomes so much more real and tangible. I can metaphorically touch it, fold it, mold it into a thesis, flesh it out into a story. It can be examined from all angles, studied from any number of perspectives other than that of a seventeen year old girl. If the same were true in speech, if I could process topics in such an in depth manner just by conversing about them, I think I'd find myself much happier in my relationships with my peers. In whole, my ability to quickly comprehend and digest material given to me would be quite increased. ]

As the hypothetical leaf slowly falls, cells divide and divide again under fingertips and before eyes, “a person” blinks x number of times a day, a hundred metaphors are created and broken, my doll (Esme) sits still upon my art table, eyes fixed in a wide stare, lips falsely moist, floppy hat flopped in precisely the same manner for weeks, porcelain hands gracefully (limply) touch the table, palms-up, pale, and breakable. My own more liquid palms, while more pink and less prone to crack, are more questionable - the fate line outreaches the life line considerably and the head line appears to be either nonexistent or too faint to be easily spotted. (Yes, the heart line is deeply and noticeably branched, but no one ever led me to believe it would be easy. I’m not even allowed to fall in love until I’ve completed graduate school, says my mother. The Indian professor finds undergrads unready to think, I suppose not even the thinkers are ready to love.) I see one vein, slightly blue, even in the dim light, and slight chipping of the nail polish, dark red, on my thumbnail. I quite adore my hands, I find them lovely and capable and poetic. I would have them talk for me. I would have them play scales on the skin of a lover.

Love? I know two strains of love, love in a minor chord and love in a major chord. One, painfully electric; the other, unbearably comfortable. Both are addictive, unrealistic, consuming. They refuse to be superimposed; it frightens me. Is love desire? Is love everything but? What does it mean? Question love, attempt to classify, dissect : feeling, art, vibration, chemical reaction, myth, blessing, enigma, curse. The more effort one puts into figuring it out the more tempted one will be to disbelieve it all. The more skeptical one is about love, the more affected one will be by it, the more hurt. Our philosophers, our scientists, our great lovers of logic are also our great romantics. It is the most lovely irony.

People play games as if they were part of life. The world may as well be a giant chess board.