stapler

I recently started working at a the front desk of a neurology office in Mt. Auburn hospital. I make packets to give to patients when they come in, call them to remind them of appointments coming up in a week, take vitals, call other offices for notes on new patients, scan some papers and fax others, check if insurance is active. I staple things a lot. It's dull but I won't get another concussion. As my former boss and family friend said "they pay you more for easier work, right?" - which is exactly the case. Do the paper shuffle till you drop.

In all this route work, I had this moment of child-like surprise when my stapler ran out. A second later I wanted to laugh out loud at the fact that I somehow expected the stapler to never cease stapling.

It really did feel like being a child: I suppose as you grow older there are fewer genuine surprises in store. I certainly didn't expect my surprise to be sourced in a stapler.

I remembered that in kindergarten we had a project were we had to bring in 100 of something (jelly beans, crayons, stickers...) I, inevitably doing it the night before, panicking in a way that seems almost humorously familiar now, having procrastinated on the project which we were likely given at least a month to do, stapled a piece of cardboard 100 times and brought that in. Not very aesthetically pleasing, but it did the job. It was for the 100th day of school. Now everything is counted in months, years, pages written, books read, places lived. 100 days. How quaint. How kindergarten.


(I had one of those flying dreams last night: put on warm clothes but couldn't track down warm socks for the high autumnal air. Was brought into the air by air sweeping up a kite which was held by a string which held me and carried me up until my arms spread out could hold me, along with magical powers, sand I was swept up by the current for hundreds of miles. Landed somewhere and something like a spy movie, or like His Dark Materials not quite clear. I love flying...)

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.

Montréal

I chased the cold up north to Montreal. And it bit, hard, right into my ears and numbing my forehead and placing tears in my eyes. During the coldest night, it dipped down to -28C.

There was snow there and it sounded like rubber cows mooing when stepped on. There was hot chocolate and crepes and wine. There was some street art and underground tunnels too cold to explore properly. There were very few people outside.

After watching steam coming off the water by Old Port, and people ice skate on a rink, Matt lost feeling in his left toe and I left feeling in many more toes so we made our way over to the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.

There was an exhibit there by Ragnar Kjartansson called The Visitors - projector screens, maybe ten of them, set up around a room, each containing a scene. One holds a man with a guitar in a bathtub. Another is a couple in stout bed. A third a pianist in a large room. The porch with people lounging. The man in the bathtub begins to sing, the woman on the harp joins him and it builds. In the end they all stumbled in front of the porch and onto an open field, frolicking as they receded towards the mountains. Viewers walked from screen to screen as focus shifted. Filmed in upstate New York it made me nostalgic for Bard and the landscape there. But Montreal is nice too, Old Montreal was charming in exactly the way it sounds it would be.

I did find some winter there.

The funniest grocery purchase of my life. The most awkward hotel tipping experience. Maybe I'll come back when it's possible to stay outside past sunset.

Burlington

This winter has been weak, so I have tried to travel to track it down.
The first trip was the first week of February; found winter curled up in Vermont.

I stayed with Hannah and Will and got to peak into Adrienne's work life at the co-op.
I walked on a frozen lake. Saw the same vast lake break against the shore and stretch into the mountains at sunset.
I slept in perfect darkness heated by a wood stove, a little cabin on a bed with Sorrel.
I drank hot cider with Luisa.

I wanted to escape the hectic expectations of my own life and stumbled into those of traveling to a place with so many familiar faces. I wish miles apart didn't foster the fear of other types of distance. I wish I could slow down a bit, and sense more of their warmth.

Instead, I kept chasing the cold biting air.

Construction

On October the 19th, we were over at Em's. This was the night I had smoked a full cigar, exhaling it through my mouth and inhaling the smoke through my nose into my lungs until I felt too dizzy to sit. I lay down and listened to the sounds of the room, exclamations and roaring laughter gave way to chitter and chatter and quieter conversations, and by then the world had stop spinning so much around my body. Em and Launti had gone to bed. World Matt and I stayed up watching "That's My Boy", which World claims is the movie of his people (set in his hometown of Somerville). I said we should go for a walk, but a little past midnight World fell asleep in his chair, mid-sentence.

It was drizzling outside when we left the apartment. I used a gray blanket from the couch as a cloak and Matt pointed at a building not too far away and said it looked like Christmas lights so we went towards the twinkling, found the gates to the site unlocked, and climbed, ten stories up, with a view of the city spreading out below us on all sides. I wanted to return to take photos so on the 14th of December we did. It was unseasonably warm and rainy, and in two months glass had arrived to the first nine stories of the building, and wooden beams had appeared on the first couple floors. But the gate was still unlocked and the security guard was not doing his job, so we went up and up again. Here are a few of the photos from that hunt -

different building, still twinkled

 

 

 

Truth and Beauty

At the very end of my shift on the 31st, a code was called that resulted in three restraints. That was how I exited 2015.

They say your year will go the way you entered it. I entered it with warmth. I was surrounded by people I've known since I was ten. I called my family in Arizona. I messaged those who I wanted to carry with me from 2015 into 2016.

My first conversation of the year was
Eloosha, with a smug look: Huh, doesn't feel very different.
Me, insistent on magic: almost like New Years is an artificial time construct, you jerk.

traditions carried for generations: Oranges or clementines. Champagne. A table laden with food. Ирония судьбы (The Irony of Fate) playing in the background. Saying goodbye to the Old Year before saying hello to the New. Family. A New Years tree. Sparklers and fireworks. Snegurochka and Ded Moroz. Gifts. Love.

First Day of the Year, discussing bunnies as secret illigal pets during college
"I only ever saw two bunnies at Yale, one was named Truth and the other Beauty, and one of them almost certainly overdosed on cocaine" (which one though, is unknown)

I woke up the next morning and knit for a little bit before falling asleep and waking up with everyone else: all of us soon transitioned to one bed, a lump and warmth and promises to try to stay horizontal for as long as possible. Liza said "my new years resolution is to keep my heart over my head for as long as possible". Eloosha said "I think with my hands". I tucked those away.
Wasting time to the fullest with cuddling and music and late brunch. 
The next morning I woke not in my own bed yet again, and read Autobiography of a Corpse (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky translated by Joanne Turnbull, 1920's) while surrounded by sleeping beauties.

I made it back to my apartment eventually, only to go back to the same company for a conversation that lasted hours, a midnight visitation and trying to breathe and be brave.