I've been home alone for the past 36 hours. First time in this new house, and tomorrow will mark the first time so long away from Beatrice. Brian went with her to my parents' house and I stayed behind to meet a deadline. Work has been a bit insane.
This alone, I am liking it. I stood for a few minutes in Beatrice's room today, and lingered a little while I was putting her laundry away, but I'm not sad. I know she is having fun.
Tonight I intensely craved a body. But I wanted to remain alone. But I wanted to feel the heat of something, skin maybe.
Yesterday and last night, I worked. I did the thing I typically do where I procrastinate obscenely until a kind of fever seizes me, and then I work within what feels like a beam of pure light, drinking a lot of tea and bubbly water and regular water. I slept for a few hours and then returned to the same spot this morning and continued with little interruption until I was finished. Finishing anything is pleasurable, but my pleasure was heavy, because I wanted to have been sitting with my own work rather than the work for money.
My feelings lately have been many. A spindle of hope keeps creeping in and getting strangled almost immediately, and this happens maybe 498 times a day. It's exhausting.
I'm making peace with the house more. We are friends now. I found a couch at an antique store with strawberry thief all over it that I think we will buy. I have wallpaper on a couple walls that makes me unreasonably happy whenever I see it. In general I'm starting to think I should've gone into textiles. Lately they are making me feel better than books and words.
I like to roast vegetables in the oven and then eat them with hot sauce. Today I had a not-short debate in my head about which I preferred, Texas Pete or Sriracha. Last I dropped in, I think Sriracha was still in the lead.
The weekend was very social. We laughed hard with friends who were visiting from LA and other friends who were also excited to see them. It's good to laugh hard with friends, sitting around a table, drinking things.
Tonight I took a bath. I picked a book from a stack in the still boxed-up office and filled the tub and got in, remembering not to submerge my hands. I got in a good reading position and opened this book and immediately remembered that I was about 9 pages from the end. I'd started it ages ago, and though I tried to sort of dawdle, still finished it in about 10 minutes. I really thought I had at least 50 pages to go, and the bath suddenly felt wasted. Getting out and toweling off and finding another book didn't seem worth it, so I just sat for a while, playing with my phone a little, convinced that the ended-too-soon-book-bath would get even worse when I dropped my phone in the water by accident; I really convinced myself that this would happen, and when it didn't, the bath felt like a good idea again, a small victory even.
Edna St. Vincent Millay. I know only the scarcest bit of her poetry and knew nothing about her life before I read the book. I enjoyed it. I like reading biographies sometimes of people about whom I know very little.
We have books in boxes and books in stacks and books on some shelves, but we need more shelves, but we also need a couch, and we figure the books will be more comfortable on the floor for the time being than we will. I'm thinking that when we have room for all the books, I will probably not alphabetize them or impose any kind of specific order, beyond designating a "to read" and "currently reading" area.
I have been sort of riveted by Beatrice lately; I hesitate to say more because I have odd bouts of superstitiousness (Mash'Allah as certain family members might say), but I don't know, I've been transfixed by the phrases and sentences that have been flying out of her, as if with actual wings, and the connections she's drawing between people and places and objects and feelings. I'm also trying to say "fuck" less when she's in earshot. But it's strange, I feel like her infancy was like this protracted enchantment in many ways, there were constant milestones, and each one seemed to happen in slow motion, so I could watch it from end to end, and reflect on it, and then see it again, and it was like this slowly-turning gyre of tiny events like smiling and sitting up and so on. And you know, she's really only rolling over or sitting up in one way each time. But this, this verbal stuff, the development of her understanding and intelligence and emotional response--it's all so varied and unique and her that it's like nine million quarks per second all over my heart and in other parts of me that I can't even locate. I keep meaning to get video so I can play back and watch and process my responses, and I keep not getting video, mostly because our camera is probably under something that we haven't unpacked, but also, I suspect, because it would be a two-dimensional experience of something that has 97 dimensions at least, and then I would want to record everything because I am obsessive, and maybe I'd be contriving scenarios, and I would probably really annoy her and miss out on organic events organically happening because I would be too busy trying to see what I "caught" on film.
It's late. I am driving to my parents' house tomorrow. I will have a little more work to do from there this week. Christmas is soon. I'm getting hungry for breakfast. The house is very still and a part of me wants to just stay in it, in this nice loneliness.