Little Weirds(36)

It is you.

You are happy for yourself that you have received the honor of a new day on which to ride. You realize that you love yourself easily in this gravity-free space between the worlds of waking and dreaming.

You are dear to yourself in the morning and it is the morning now. It is very private to have such a love for yourself. Closer, closer to the curtain. How funny, your face is right right against the curtain now. How funny to know what side of it you are on! You are asleep! How wonderful to pay attention.

On the other side of the curtain, a small, white elderly dog is moments ahead of you, and he decides, he decides, to come up to where your head is, to where your eyes are closed. He has observed you for over a decade, so he knows where your doors are.

He knows your hand is a door to your heart.

He has seen you drag your hand over your eyes to wipe away drops of sorrow, he has seen you place the hand on your heart, or press it against the hand of the ones that you loved. And so, while you feel the gentle rustle of your creature that you keep, you still stay asleep, but now you sleep with the attitude of a person who is about to walk into a surprise party that you are guessing might be there and that you really wanted, because it proves that your friends love you.

You feel the force of love pulling you into the day and you keep your eyes closed.

You could maybe float out of the bed. Your palm is open.

The dog presses a small, dry black paw into your open hand and the curtain between the dreaming and waking worlds blows away and the day is opening to you and you are invited in by one of your dearest companions. And you, you sweetheart, you good creature, one of your dearest companions is this old animal.

And he has said nothing, just this gesture: Paw to palm, on purpose.

He has spoken the most important thing, which is “Here we are again in a new day. I want you to see it with me.” And this description above is an example of how you can gaze on yourself with love when nobody is there to do that for you, and how you can make it so that your own loving gaze is truthful and not obsessive or vain. You can wake up like this, be this, and tell yourself that this is an example of how a day can start on Earth.





Blue Hour

At the end of the summer, after many returns of waking up in safe, muggy gray mornings by the Atlantic, after a brief trip to New York City during which I get my picture taken a lot, feel both gorgeous and also that there is no place or life for me in that city anymore, after I go back to a Massachusetts so heavy with heat and an orchestral din of nighttime bugs, skunks under the porch, old people coming out of the woodwork to say, “There is a whole group of sisters on the Hurwitz side that you never met because of how your great-grandmother died in the fire,” after my sister gets married in a darling and pure dash of light, I spend two days eating leftovers, feel a heavy heat in my body, and leave.



But right before I left, it was the wedding.

I spent the wedding weekend with couples. I was not sorry for myself. I was just fine. I was more disturbed that it seems impossible to me that I will ever find someone for myself after all of this. I am bitter sometimes. I think, “Why should I have to sleep alone? What is wrong with me? What happened to my allure, which in my last decade seemed almost problematic?”



And during the wedding, I was working on forgetting the past, letting myself only have the buoyant and real glee that was the soul of the event. But it was harder to hang on to my newfound knowledge of contentment with solitude. The jostling and interrupting was occurring. I put my own habit of fretting over myself on hold. I let myself be a drifting wisp in the wedding.

A young man said, Hello, are you the sister of the bride?

Yes, I am the older sister but not the oldest sister and I am the middle daughter and I am here by myself. And then the conversation begins but it is very boring.

The reason I think that it will be hard to meet someone who I am actually interested in is that I cannot stand these preliminary moments when you can’t deeply know each other and be together forever. My ex-husband says to me on the phone, after I tell him that I am lonely and I think I am weird around men, that I am not weird but that I am trying to force an intimacy that needs time to grow. He is right and he knows me very well.

The other problem is that lots of people are simply not the right fit, but somehow I always make it my fault, even though it is nobody’s fault at all when you don’t fit.

This man here now is talking to me about something about computers and I just can’t listen well because I don’t like computers. I could never love him. There is no way of getting around it. I can imagine him drinking apple juice and eating graham crackers and having crumbs on his wet mouth, drinking that juice that is the color of pee-pee. Not a good sign.

He is telling me something that I don’t care about. The next thing that happens is something I care about: My deep-self jumps in to protect me from being bored and starts to tell me something that kind of slides over what he is saying. I make sure to provide a listening face for the talking fellow and then I let myself listen to the voice inside of me.

My deep-self asks, “Would you like to hear something that is useful to you?”

Yes. But aren’t I doing the thing that I’m supposed to stop doing? That thing where I am either forcing the intimacy or completely ignoring somebody?

“You only force intimacy because you have a hungry heart and you have been displaced. It’s a condition of the heart, based on your situation. You are looking for a place in another.”