sticky mango

my mother told me my last post was like this:
"my. mother. says. I. am. not. writing. enough. I am typing. I am not dead"
I burst out laughing.

Humidity had shackled me to my bed, wrapped its heavy arms around me and murmured into my ear until my brain became a homogeneous goop. Heat so close to body temperature my insides merged with the outside. Molasses spilled onto the crevasses: slow thoughts and sticky fingers.

But I try and persevere! Today I met Sar'ka at Haymarket. I bought: blackberries, lemons, radishes, broccoli.
She bought: a box of mangoes, ten count, for four dollars. We went to the water and ate them, slicing the skin with our nails, devouring them with greedy lips, juice running down our arms right to the elbow. Seven mangoes gone as she told me about her semester in India, decadence making our heads spin and bellies yearn in summer heat.

Last weekend on the way to the park I thought about how my past is not my destiny, and by the time I met up with Matt I was almost crying. Kelsey said: yes, those are good thoughts! but also terrifying. He watched as I picked purple wild flowers.

A thunderstorm is coming.

white border

My mother asked me why I haven't been writing lately.
And here's why:
Every attempt in my head of cobbling together words and thoughts about my everyday existence cascades out like a white boarder around an honest black square. The white mundanity simply a frame for everything that needs to be said but I am not yet ready to say; all of my time at the hospital, year and a half, the river that I keep dammed up. Black square white frame, one simply a complement to the other how funny that things can be so simple when there are so many complex horrors in the world. 

But I will try, I will try to take that white border and make it it's own gray world. For no day-to-day is truly banal when taken on its own terms.

This weekend was a long one, fourth of july, fireworks and patriotism. My family usually goes up to the north of Maine to escape it, camping with leeches and moose, mosquitoes and gnats. This time we left too, but not quite so barbarically far away - up to a friends vacation house in Vermont, just us five (both my parents wrote to me: K's house! But they won't be there. Join us?) We walked paths in the woods and I noticed how we always pair up: two people talking and one person wandering in their own thoughts, but switching off. In the morning, my brother - startlingly - in my mother's hat - dutifully washing the dishes. Bickering and wine and hopping on rocks along a river. On the ride back: the sky - a pink so delicate, like sooted paper after a bonfire, print legible, it falls apart at the touch of a finger.