Some self TLC...

Last night I decided that after this week of treating myself horribly I was going to be kind. I had one of my perpetual arguments over whether to go to yoga when I am tired and don’t really want to go (but this is when you SHOULD go, Annelies – but I am too tired and unhappy to go! Etc) SO I decided not to, which is usually what happens, and I cooked a fantastic meal of sauteed squash and onions in sesame oil with sesame and fennel seeds – with a new trick of adding the garlic at the end – and some Indian paneer, and tea and seven grain bread with yogurt and peaches for dessert, and watched Talk to Her in the dark on my laptop on my living room floor, and then sat outside and wrote. This is what I wrote:

It is death that turns the heated days of July into night, into soft cool hours lit by a street lamp as home waits or doesn’t wait for your arrival. Death brings the breeze and the sleep we indulge in, with its final wish death leaves us alone, unburied in our beds, unaware that its true horror comes when we wake, knowing that the sun only whispers the impending eternal visit of doom.

I have sat on these steps for years now, in between my doorstep potted herbs, the door light offering only the shadow of my hand on the page while the street light pouts, watching the dance of the leaves on the sidewalk. It is no longer hot, in dying day released us from her burden but the breeze brings little comfort when it is greeted by me alone.

A man once loved me – he is not yet dead he is dying. He has held me many times, and as his arms grow weaker and mine longer I have held him. I am always his dancer, as a girl in a tutu and now as a woman in the games I play with love and dreams.

I live on a busy corner – there is a fire station across the street and a hospital down it. Buses drive by announcing the address as it stops, and cars keep their radios loud when they rest at the stop light. Their horns are starting to anger me – the repetition of the insistence of rushing, the communal impatience, the monotonous misunderstanding that comes from being utterly self absorbed.

Thoughts on water inspired by this weekend:
Water is its own mother, it needs no nurture, no hope, no reassurance. Water is the daughter of the moon, following it with devotion unique and awful. Because of this water refuses engagement, not needing love, it in turn, cannot give it back, yet it demands y our attention. Therefore, water is a terrible lover, a sociopath we cannot break away from for an addiction to its charisma. Water controls us completely by its shameless distance.

And boats are the enablers of this abuse, providing a way for waters’ talents to get into our skin, revealing every fine nuance in its loveliness and strength in its passion the creativity, the vitality, and occasionally the violence. We are stuck going back, again and again only to realize we will never be able to engage water with our love, it is futile and we can do nothing but continue to give ourselves entirely with every rock of the keel, every small breath of the sails.