It cost $10, a major splurge.
Thursday, January 2, 2003
When I sit down to write, I put my computer in my lap and I think about my tattered journals and resolve to do them justice. I eat an organic pecan and a raspberry bonbon from a little tin with a French girl on the cover. I think over the Times, the days I’ve seen and the beauty, and I try to forget it all and I try to forget the page and I try to forget everything but the flow. If I want to write it is best that I not think. It is best that I not see the words. It is best that I forget them after my fingers jiggle them out. The little click of keys, like scurrying rats on parqued floors, that is what matters, not the letters, not the pauses, not the themes.
I don’t have much in my life and I have too much. In this moment I have the imaginary rats and I have the messy room and the grey sweatpants I’m not wearing underwear under. Uma, my stuffed emu chick, is looking at me out one eye, and my lover is coming home and I am excited because we got a coupon for a free pizza in the mail. And I get to tell him his mother called, and that she asked me if I were gaining any weight, and this is good because it is Something to Say, which is not always so easy to come by.
My own mother send me a card. I was sitting on top of the pizza coupon, and inside, it says that Virginia is just called “Old Dominion.” I spent a long time trying to think of the state’s nickname on the drive up here from Georgia, and on the way home she stopped at the tourist center and asked, and sent me the card.
There are clementine seeds on the file cabinet, next to the TV we never watch, and my saint Jude necklace, and the pecans and the bonbons and a lot of junk. Uma is on the TV, with some chewable calcium supplements. The walls are getting covered quickly. I decorate them when I should be cleaning. There are threads of emboidery floss snaking toward me on the floor, the tail of an unfinished friendship bracelet, all pastel colors, for my mother.
I learned to make the bracelets while I was traveling. I bought a book on it from Target. It cost $10, a major splurge. I made them for James. I gave him all of them except the one I kept for myself and the one I made for Jennifer and kept with me until I saw her again and the one I gave Robyn, who was my best friend for a couple days. He got mad at me and tore them off in the wheat field, and I got crazy and chopped them up into little bits with the scissors, and then chopped off the heads of thistles with quick, hard, swipes. I felt like laughing maniacally, but I don’t think I really did.
My own bracelet fell off in September, and I don’t know what Jennifer did with hers, and I don’t know where Robyn is now, or if she’s okay, or if he’s fucked her too much. But I’m going to finish the one for my mom and make them for Wayne and Ray and send them all in the mail. And maybe I’ll make James one too, but he might tear it off in rage, and there aren’t any thistles around here to behead, so what would I do? Fingers maybe.