Napdream from earlier:

In the childhood basement. You were dressed like a stage hand and staying in our furnace room. Nobody but me was glad that you were there. You brought with you strange gusts, tremors from forbidden places. The nieces came downstairs as I was telling you not to leave, to stay longer. We fell silent. The nieces sat on the couch and stared at you. They were waiting for you to do something. They had a terrible look. When they went upstairs I continued murmuring to you, and you murmured back. When the mother came down, you approached her, filled with pleading. She stared through you, inched away from you, said a word that turned the room into a baby's throat being squeezed by its mother. I went to you and cradled your wet eyes.

FIN.

It's quiet, and I'm thinking about sleep, half-believing that I will soon ready myself for it, half-believing that more hours will pass in this state until I can no longer go to it as I would an altar but will rather get dragged there, a prisoner. The table in front of me is covered with clean, folded laundry. Some things with holes. Some things very small.

I can feel my hairs growing. It hurts a little.

I have been compiling a list of Beatrice's words but there are too many, more every day, so that it's beginning to feel like an index of everything in the world. It makes me realize that most of the time I exist in a state of unawareness for any object that is not immediately useful to me or that does not make demands on me.

Lately I'm thinking a lot about the internet, how bad it makes me feel, and how good it makes me feel, and how it very much is in this way like a drug. What is this Facebook, anyway? How long are we supposed to stay on it? I thought about shutting it down and felt genuine fear. I'm not sure, but my guess is that this is not a good thing. I want to use the internet like my mother does. She checks her email, she reads a thing or two, she moves on with her life. I am a terrible mover-on with anything. I might argue that I do not, ever, move on. I stay. I'm a stayer. I stay around and I stay up. To a pathological degree, I can't stand endings. Sometimes I do not start a book because I know I will be loathe to finish it. Then I start it and I read it slowly. Then I put it down and look at the internet.

Because the internet never ends.

Two things: gum and the internet.

This is a solid revelation about myself and about two things I lay claim to.

If I leave a party before the party ends it means it wasn't a very good party.

If the party is good I will have grave difficulty leaving. It will not appear this way to others. It will appear to others as though I have just said a lofty goodbye and tripped on down the lane. But if the party is good I will tie it around my ankles and drag it with me for as long as I can before the rope snaps.

And when the rope snaps I will cry.

And when I cry I will enjoy it a little.

And when I'm finished crying I will feel sad.



Today I laughed so hard that a little bit came out.

Love, asphyxiatedly / Dear Mom / On Vienna Sausages & Bad Radio

I'm home again, after having been gone again. We were in Portland seeing family and friends who are like family. We were eating and drinking things, kissing babies. We got deep into it and high up out of it.

I think that I am good at loving people. I think that I am better at that than I am at writing, and I am ashamed to feel a true, bitter loss over this.

But I don't know if what I'm doing for/at/near people is loving them, or begging love from them. Or if it is one and the same movement, like throwing a ball up in the air. You know it must come down.

*

The body is in a perpetual state of decay. We know this. We forget, but we always know it, even amidst our forgetting. We are fine, we are good--and then we are sick. It's not one person, one time. It's all of us, everywhere. Acquiring the sickness or the sorrow in the face of someone else's.

*

The sickness within the body of my mother has become a sickness unto me. There is this pain in my back that is specific. I think it is the mother pain. I feel it when I roll around with Beatrice and I feel it when I drive away from my mother. Maybe it is the daughter pain.

*

Dear Mom, I'm trying, but I can't seem to write to you.

*

Can I face the burden of being loved into blindness?

*

I love the wide streak of bad taste that runs through my immigrant family, my dear parents. I am so bored by "good" child-rearing tactics, nutrition, play. When I finished grad school, I felt myself abandon the idea of "expertise." How deadening it is to be an expert--more deadening still to follow one around. I miss our electric can opener that made the cats come running. I miss Billy Ocean at top volume in the brown Buick that baked us while we, unbuckled, waited in the parking lot for the errand to end. I wish sometimes I didn't know what flax seed was. What "time out" was. This is beginning to sound like one of those forwards that I delete before reading but I was struck anew several times over the weekend by the amount of statuary in my parents' house. I used to condemn such things as false elegance and later absolve them as kitsch and now I see that they are evidence of an imagination purer than my own. The leftover relics from the Sharper Image. The Liberty Bell from an inconsequential field trip. The entropy of what has been kept, collected--and what has been lost or hidden. The food in cans. The supremely intelligent, worldly, and accomplished, rubbing against the caricature of the foreigner, the thick socks in summer, the incessant tea.

I want to say something else about love and contempt, the body and the immigrant and suffering.

There & there & back & back

This past week, I was in some unlikely places. A sports bar that had bowling lanes and rapey music. A Marriot, a beautiful beach house, a Holiday Inn Express, a hospital. That's what happens when one minute you are away at a very fun wedding doing the Jane Fonda, and the next minute you are visiting friends in the same state but on the edge of that state, and the minute after that you are getting a phone call about your mother who has suddenly become very ill and gone to the emergency room. And you think, how did I get so far away? How is it possible that two locations in the same region can be days apart? You feel terrible at math and geography, all over again. As you start driving, you have no sense of scale, because every mile seems only to draw attention to the many miles left to go, and you get pulled over for speeding by an action-figure cop and told that you must, must, appear in court on such-and-such day, or have an attorney appear for you, and what he is saying is making no impression on you whatsoever, and you want to tell him that you are driving fast because because because, but you can't or don't, and then it is over quickly and there are bad feelings in the car and you sit in silence with the ones you love. Eventually you stop for the night and you feel better, distilled, and you take a gratuitously long, gratuitously hot bath, after which you walk in your pajamas down the hall and fill the ice bucket with ice and buy a Coca-Cola and return to your room and fill one of the plastic cups in the bathroom with ice and then with the Coca-Cola. You drink a few sips while you look at your computer, and then you brush your teeth and go to sleep, thick like never, unfurling like all the road behind you and all the road ahead.

I'm tired, now, of second person--

In many respects.

In a hotel room, the actions and routines of human existence and human behavior become autistic, pronounced. The teeth brushing. The bathing. The getting dressed. The lounging. The room is made to sustain us in these moments most of all. Some people might say that hotels are made for sex, secret trysts, etc., but this is untrue. The hotel room can easily become a scapegoat, a locus for our transgressions, a no-place where consequences temporarily stop gushing, scab over, until check-out. But this to me is the least interesting aspect of the hotel room. The most interesting is how semiotic it is, how it can make a person aware of her most immediate and basic needs, and then how resolutely it can fulfill those needs. Plastic cup = thirst. Bed = sleep.

We eventually arrived, and spent time in the hospital, and felt alternately scared, sad, agitated, and reassured. We felt the immensity of family, its stupendous, incomparable weight. We stayed up very late. We brought things to the hospital, and when my mother was discharged five days later, we brought things to her at home. I made her laugh a few times but since her lung is collapsed, the laughter was painful. Still, she is supposed to do things like cough and breathe deeply, to get air back into her lung, so laughter was, actually, medicine. I feel inordinately glad, and sort of proud, when I make my mom laugh. So there were these good moments, too, however laced with wincing.

Now I am home. Today I made a clafoutis and did a fair amount of languishing. Usually when I get cracked open I spend time in repair. I'm thinking I've had it wrong. I'm trying instead to expand the fissure, really break myself apart. To let more in, and more out.