today, in the cabinet with all the pots and pans: an old tied publix bag
filled with my grandmother's prescription medications.

i felt sick, and decided not to make the cupcakes.

it hits me in waves like that, knocks me down.

my parents put her life to rest, cleaned up the house, when i was in india, and so i still find fragments all over the house. sometimes i smell her in the linen closet, and i think, she used that towel last. and the undeniable truth of the past hits me--of the way her life is suddenly obsolete, the way it only exists in the past, in the smell on the towels, or in the bags buried at the bottom of the cabinet.

sometimes i wonder--with it being so built into our lives, why we are so unprepared for death. it seems more like anomaly than destiny, something we can't find a place for, something we try to bury under the pots. but it still forces itself upon us, lurches into our consciousness, when we're trying to make cupcakes.

and not knowing what else to do, we close the cabinet doors.

went out bike-riding today. i've been doing that a lot lately, ever since i realized that--like jogging--if you just keep going through the ache in your legs and chest, it eventually fades, and you feel like you were born to do this, like this 130-beats-minute, sweat-on-your-face is your body's natural state, and you could go forever--or at least for 20 minutes, until i limp into my driveway, and slobber all over the bottle of water i've left there.

and no matter what i'm wearing, i imagine it's a silky gown flowing out behind me, like priscilla, queen of the damned. it's like i am made of silk and ether, slipping through the atmosphere. hushed. under the radar of the gods--i am camouflaged in the wind, the width of trees or clouds.

and while i'm running or riding, waiting for the seratonin to kick in and make me forget myself, i often think that i wish that were a metaphor for life, that there would be a point it all just feels like flying.

i remember it was suitable a metaphor for culture shock-- that there was a week it all just fell into place--like adjusting the focus on a camera. there was the week it just got easier.

and i thought of jogging.

i did it often. i'd jog through the streets of the village with a stream of 9-year-olds behind me, perfectly imitating me, their arms folded at their sides at 90 degree angles, their legs moving in slow-motion, at exactly the same rhythm as me, their posture perfect, trying not to laugh.

so maybe, i think, life is just a matter of getting used to the culture of life on earth--language, for instance, or the way the wind feels, or the hard fact of time that holds us in, like gravity, pushing against our skin. maybe it's just a matter of adjusting, and there will be a moment it is easy, all of a sudden.

i've heard of freudian ideas that birth is traumatic, and we're all still recovering from that moment we crawled into the world of bright lights and lenolium, orifices covered with hospital gowns. and we're all still reeling from the shock of that, suffering from post-traumatic stress from a cause we can't remember. i like that theory because it makes my sadness universal, my inexplicable emptiness a a part of life on earth, like a chemical deficiency in the air itself, the way we are hold our heads up to the blinding sun.

and it also leaves room for progress, for recovery. for a moment someday when i will ease into the ether, just a woman on a bicycle in a silk skirt, forgetting she even exists.

o, my loneliness
without your company, i
would be so lonely

rachel and i would have dance parties

my mom and i were talking yesterday about how we feel like we personally know certain celebrities, because we know their temperaments and the stories of their lives. she said she realized that when she was walking down the street in NYC, and she saw Dustin Hoffman, and she grinned at him like she would if she were running into a friend, but he looked away. And she felt crushed. And it suddenly became emotionally real that he didn't know her, even though she knew him--the cognitive dissonance of it.

i especially feel as if i know the obamas. rachel maddow. stephen colbert. david sedaris. it's almost as if i could go out to dinner with them on a saturday.


sometimes i think, "o, barack would really appreciate that! i'd like to talk to him about it". and then i imagine sitting across a table from him. he's wearing that thoughtful furrowed brow, pouring it over with me. and i sip my tea in satisfaction.

sudden clarity: in this moment, i absolutely trust that if i put love and growth first in my life, everything else will fall into place.

thinking: ok, but what does that mean in practice? what does that mean when i feel that pressure on my chest that i've got to study for this class, even if i'm miserable, even if i have nightmares in social theory because of all the force behind my choice to put that first?

what is that force?

Love Song for Sadness

O Sadness,
i want to fall in love with you.
i want to know the way your skin smells,
the way your looks across the room
taste.
i want to run down the street to give you flowers
in a rainstorm.
i want your hand against mine
to anchor me.

Sadness,
i want to marry you
in a field of purple flowers taller than we are.
i want to sing my vows to you
like opera,
and make love to you
just after the song is over,
the flowers looking down on us
like angels or apparitions
wearing purple ball gowns
that bow in the sunlight,
our bodies bowed together.

Sadness,
i want to write you love letters
that glide across oceans
as if they have wings,
and i want you to be the wings that carry them.

i want to plant a garden for you.
i want to watch the flowers open for you,
the buds breaking the earth,
like breath in cold air--
a sudden completeness.
i want you to be my hands in the earth and sun,
the cloth of sky,
the strings of silence,
plucked and still sounding.
i want you to be the silent music
my feet move to,
when i walk across the room to you,
the tip-tap rhythms my eyes blink to,
out-of-sync to anything but us
a morse code to count the emptiness and silences and desperations.

Sadness, i want to find you under my fingernails and be grateful,
the way i am grateful
for the miracles
of stars,
lizards scattering on the sidewalk before me,
conversations.

i want to wear your glances like jewelry,
draped around me.
i want your body against me to be reason enough to exist,
to leave me emptied of wishes for anything but
this moment, this ache,
this breath in the night.

i notice how writers use the same imagery and motifs again and again.

the author i am reading now writes about "eyes scratching darkness," in many different contexts. e.e cummings has his flowers and his moments ever-opening. billy collins dances. linda hogan has impressions and indentations. i write of things being rounded out, worn, softening. these are not conscious choices or devices--they are beyond my control or conscious understanding, something innate, like a mannerism or an accent. like the way i limp a little when i walk, run my tongue over my lips when i'm nervous, my finger over the bridge of my nose when i'm deep in thought. they are signifiers of mysteries.

so i wonder what this imagery means to us, where it comes from, where it lives inside us, if we found it accidentally in our dreams. i wonder of the day these images crystallized inside us, became the closest expression of something otherwise unnamable, something that spoke of the essence of something we needed but couldn't understand. when billy collins looked through the window and first saw the dancing of the moths, what was dancing inside of him? i wonder if there is anything deeper than that?

for myself, i think perhaps i can find the "rounding out" on the beach as a child, in the seashells and seaglass, and the motes i dug, the walls i'd carefully square against the tide that softened them again and again. and perhaps it was also in my father and mother, sitting a little ways away, their marriage crumbling. the beach was the good days. there was no fighting there.

but then, later, the beach was the walks i took with my father and step mother, when he'd scream at her and she'd sob, and i'd look for the colors in the sand, like glimpses of a world made whole, remnants of another way to live. i'd pretend i didn't understand the "goddamn whore," suddenly a foreigner, suddenly ashamed to witness this, apart from it, like the shock of rounded-out blue glass in the sand. my father filled jars with it, proudly displayed them.

i'd play a game when the sand was hard where i'd try not to break the its surface, try not to leave a single mark.

and the days were rounded out by rain and wind in summer. we'd watch from the balcony, the tornados spiralling miles out, rounding the air and water into cycles the size of children, so small and yet so scary because they were impossible to understand. they seemed to defy this flat earth, this horizontal sea. and sometimes we'd get stuck in the storms, the sheets of rain coming towards us, and we'd try to outrun them and fail-- the sand in its countless shades and shapes of beige whipping our legs like curse words spit into the wind.

we went walking every day, religiously. i lagged behind, lonely, but also not wanting to catch up. loneliness was the way life was--the color of the sea and sand. on good days, my dad taught me the names for the shells and the clouds from a little book with pictures--the whispy ones, the ones that burrowed in on themselves. the ones that hollowed out, and rounded the horizon like the sun.

the sudden squawk
gripped me: my grandmother in pain,
a cry from the dead.

it had been a bird outside, but my impulse was instinct, a thought without thinking, an involuntary memory.
i felt shaken for a long time.