Little Weirds(31)

Somehow my fur had crept in quietly and achieved its regrowth. It didn’t even notify me, maybe because it thought that I would put a stop to it. It was benevolent, the way it slipped in and went to work in and on me so that I could be whole again after feeling emotionally shorn and corralled.

In the dream, I put my fingertips into my fur and I stroked it against the grain of the growth and I let it spike up and turn down onto its pattern again. It knew where to go back onto itself on me and I felt a relief when I realized, I have been trying to destroy myself and I don’t want to anymore.

In the dream, I wanted so badly to have and keep my fur. I wanted so badly to not even know about the possibility that I could get rid of it.

When I am in my morning, I brush my teeth with no shirt on and look at my torso and touch that area on myself where the fur was in the dream, and I ask out loud, Who will let me be the real animal of myself? I am asking it out loud into the air but of course the only person that I see is me in the mirror and so I become the first one to say yes to my bare self, which is proper and right.

All day long and in my life after I have this dream, I pet myself in the space that lives under my breasts and down to my waist and I feel calmed when I think of my fur. I sometimes imagine a man petting my fur. I will know him as the man who is allowed to be here because he is the one who will be at ease with my fur and pet me when I am nervous and not be mad at either of the following: that I have not removed my fur and that I live here in this non-dream world where it does feel that often people hunt me for my hide and I am nervous a lot.





Tart

There was a tart little taste in my mouth when I remembered the appointment at your office. Your office, which is a white rectangular room with pleasing, wide square windows of clear light. Your office, which is a space for plants that are green hang-down pals and indoor tree-things. And of course I am also a plant and so I like to be in there too, drinking small glasses of water, sitting around, taking in sun, absorbing our conversations.

But when I thought about the appointment in your office, I was not a plant but I was suddenly a cross little woman. There you would be, at the appointment in that space in the future, where you would be yourself and I could be anyone because it is the future, but there you also were back in time, in the past, when it was dark and we were angry, and the whole thing made me uncomfortable here in the present and I felt fussy.

Luckily there is a supermarket in the present, and supermarkets please me. Luckily, I am of sound enough mind, even in my puckering tartness, to drive a car to the supermarket, buy egg-yolk-colored daffodils, and cream for my coffee and get myself into a livelier tempo in general.

I pushed the cart. I said things to myself like, “Stop looking for things to be sad about, that’s not what it actually is anymore,” and of course I was right, that’s not exactly it. There is nothing sad anymore, there are only tiny and tart truths. I saw that I was wise to instruct myself in this way. So I said, “And furthermore, start looking for eggs.” I did. I found myself some eggs, and tender butter-leaf lettuce and a prissy endive and some jokey Kirby cucumbers and some standard butter and a new giant olive oil because I was anticipating filling my mouth with salty, lemony, glistening leaves.

The sourness about the appointment got in line with the rest of my feelings. It made itself into a goldenrod color in my chest. “Oh, I see,” I said. It wanted to be beautiful, this sourness. It was ready to be a part of something useful. Oh, I do see.

I got what I needed in that moment and I went home to do more of what was required.

I picked two Meyer lemons off the tree outside of my house where I live alone and where you do not live with me. There are other ways to say that but since I was still a bit sour I had to frame it up like that, make a statement in black-and-white. But it can never hold, that black-and-white way. I never want it like that. I’m just too much of a color wheel now to limit myself to statements like that, and I know it, so I buck up and I say, “Well, what can you do? What will you do now with all of this tartness and all of this yellow?”

I would never be this whirling wheel of colors if we had not changed the shape of who we are together. I knew that, but still, there was a bit of bitterness left in the rotation.

In the night, while I ran the bath and waited for it to fill up as a warm place for me, I chopped up the lemons, orange-yellow rinds and all, all color, all juice, all flavor, all pucker and pleasure. I held that whole fruit and I said, “I will use the whole of it because nothing is un-processable, and I will not discard any parts, because there is a wholeness here if I can be resourceful and think about things differently,” and then I did that, and I baked a tidy little lemon tart. I sweetened it. While it was becoming a treat in my oven, I took my body to the bath and I did my best to wash any grit away from myself.

I brought the tart to your office and we sat there and we each ate one long yellow triangle piece. You stood up and took my picture while I sat back like a good little plant holding a piece of a lemon tart on my tender green leaf-hand. I thought maybe the tart was too tart-tasting. But I had been right about the amount of sweetness to add so that we could sit there and have it and have a conversation and not have our mouths screwed shut from any sourness.

One can put sweetness into something, on purpose. I can never take away the color of the feeling. Yellow is yellow so what are you going to do with it? It was in me and it was almost acidic and corrosive and I held it long enough inside of myself so that it went from a burning canker to a glowing color and the color was yellow and so I followed the color from one of its forms to the next. I ended up with a treat. I shared it. It was not easy, but it was certainly not hard.