Little Weirds(18)

Darnit. I was so close to being clasped by him! Timing is everything, little one.

But, listen, right when I died a good zag of lightning was zooming through the sky and it saw what had happened—that I had died from being eager to use my heart and get my body touched—and it decided to blow its last charge on me so that I could have what I hoped, and so the bolt bombed down and bonked me just like the other one did before and I sat right up in the sand and the Big Sweetie was blinking at me because I was a four-time miracle of dying and living and he said, “Do you think you’re well enough for a dunk?” And I said, “I could probably manage a little dip,” and so we splashed into the sea, and that’s the story of how I met your grandfather. And we fell in love and we were together for a long time but it only felt like a zip, because that’s what true love feels like. And we saw the sun and sipped our coffee together every single morning with our legs all tangled up under the sheets and we snoozed together every night and were each other’s only boo-boo until the day that he croaked.





The Pits

I’m always picking at things when I am nervous or working up a real lather in my thoughts.

I’d gone to town on my fingers and I wasn’t about to bite off my lips or fuck with my feet, so I went ahead and peeled the rind off my heart. Then I sort of ripped it apart and down to nothing, and I looked at what was there and I said factually, This is the pits.

The pits are also the seeds. The pit is also a deep place with an actual bottom. You could argue that the bottom of the pit is where you plant the start of the thing that is made to travel to the light. You could prove, if you tried to or wanted to, that the bottom of the pit is of course the start of getting up to the top.

But it is the planting of the pit that is the hard part. The part where you have to go down there and cover a small hard thing with dark matter. The part where you are supposed to believe in a process and the part when you must admit to your desire for the thing to work, and that is hard too. But you can do it if you want to try to do it, and the act is singular and special even though also you may have to do it many times over and a few of those times the pit will simply stay a pit. You will have to be comfortable with the truth that there is a stone in the dark, a grave for a hope. But if you can get a better view of what is going on, you can see that the problematic pit is really just a small hole along the path that is otherwise lined with the other living things that shot up toward the light.





To Norway

I got on the plane and I went from Los Angeles to Norway.

Every time I’m in an airport alone I have to remind myself that I am neither an orphan nor a plain virgin governess on her way to be insulted by the competitive and haughty family of her disagreeable ward.

In an airport in Norway, I was alone and looking at the different candies and snack foods. This is one of my favorite things to do in other countries. Also, I love being alone in airports and sitting at the bar and drinking a pint of beer. I do not get glasses of wine because that seems sad to me and even when I am happy, it sometimes happens that the slightest things can tip me into nonspecific sadness when I am alone. A glass of white wine would be devastating, for example, if I were alone. That’s the kind of thing that would make me feel—again, for example—very divorced.

A pint of beer just keeps everything steady. Hello, I am just a beer drinker, in neutral transit.

I was drinking my beer and I saw a business lady buying a hot dog, and she was doing this in her business outfit and it was normal to her. In the USA, a businesswoman would not feel so free or dispassionate about buying a hot dog in an airport. I can’t really imagine an American businesswoman doing this without imagining her either laughing or crying about it. Her hot dog purchase would be a sign of something going on with her. This Norwegian woman was just having lunch.

I thought that this was good news about what it might be like here in Norway, in terms of what this culture is and how the people are existing within it. They are eating what they like and doing their different works. No big deal about being an adult who is eating a hot dog in the middle of the day like a kid at a birthday party on a weekend. Here, it is hot dog on Wednesday in your midforties and there is nothing to even say about that but “Of course?”

On my connecting flight, there was a young baby with a huge bag of potato chips. The bag was as big as the body of the baby, and the baby would not let go of the bag even though its mother was trying to help it bear the burden of such a large parcel. The baby wanted to hold the bag but also it was thirsty. The baby spoke Norwegian to its mother and must have said in baby-Norse that it was thirsty, and so the mother got a drink out and the baby started drinking water through a straw and saying “Ahhhh” with great satisfaction.

The baby did not know that when I was a little girl in the eighties and nineties I used to take big gulps of drinks and say “AHHHH” as a joke, to my sisters or friends. The baby didn’t know that I used to be a baby, somewhere else, but because I saw this baby I sort of knew it anew, that I had been a baby too.

There was a farmer on the airplane in the row behind me. He was talking to a stranger about how he was a farmer. Once we were in the air, the pilot got on the intercom and wished a sixteen-year-old boy a happy birthday, saying to this boy and all of the passengers that he hoped the birthday boy would “get lots of presents.”

And then, because it was the thing to do, I prepared to sleep, fully clothed and sitting up next to a stranger while we shot through the evening sky.