but you're still, and you're bright, and you're quiet in the heart of it

Another soft Tuesday, another standing in my kitchen this time making Caribbean tacos, listening to the rain. Writing this, letters, stories, my captivity narratives. I have a lot on my mind. I'd love to call it Lent season coming on, but it's all just sort of this rambling. Drinking detox tea while I wait for my tequila. Happy Mardi gras. Happy Shrove Tuesday.

Drew the Tower, so I took no action. I feel kind of pretty today. Gym late: speed running, weights. Tired now.

*

Camping went well. Went just me and Josh Sunday night in the dead dark, then this weekend with the big group--almost twenty people. A lot of people from town showed up. It was good to see the younger generation picking the tradition up: Evin and his girlfriend made the banners and set up the glow lights, Isaac brought a bunch of new timers who were enthusiastic and could not say die, though they tried very hard to. I had good times with my mead brothers and sisters--tromps up the cliffs to drink in thunderstorms. The weather was volatile. Storming one moment, then brilliantly clear, then gale winds and bitter cold. Me, I spent most of the time tromping out in the woods with Sven off leash, who took to the idea beautifully. There's something magic about ranging off in the deep forest with a dog. He likes to be able to zoom around, but he takes his supervisory roles very seriously. He always stops, looks back to me to check in, doubles back if he hears something behind me. I can't believe how much I love that animal. I never thought I'd be able to walk far over the ridges with such good company.

That place always has something of what I need. 

*

Talked to my mom at some length last night. She seemed to need to talk long like that, and I did too to be honest. I hope that I gave her good advice. I know she did.

She also told me she was trying to understand the difference between something being true, and believing something. Something can be impossible, or you can believe it to be impossible, and how can you tell the difference sometimes in yourself? I didn't quite understand why it was important to her, but I kept returning to it today.

the highway signs say we're close

on that anniversary

A year ago this week,* my closest friend left.

It's a long story that got a little longer last month, when he had the bad luck to send me a sort of apology, which may have been legitimately welcome, except it arrived during a suicidal week when I was in a terrible state. It was an unfortunate coincidence of timing; I'm not proud of what I wrote back, though I suspect he's long past caring. Still, I meant the heart of what I said: that I'm willing to listen if he ever wants to say goodbye for real, and that I'll always care for him.

Maybe he didn't send it as a conscience jerry-rig; maybe he meant it deeply, and it was a difficult and considered thing for him to write. He always hated that kind of letter; I copyedited several for him over the many years. But I'll likely never know.

I'll leave it at what will always be true about him: my beautiful, painful, clever, sorcerer boy: I'm sorry I'm not sorry. You were, and will always be, worth it.



*I mentioned my knack for assigning significance to dates in a different context to Isaac a few weeks ago, and he shot back "It's that part of your personality that refuses to let go of the past; it's the worst part of you as a person." Aw, well, fair. I hate it too. I especially hate that this particular one lines up with my mom's birthday. But that's what it is. I am who I am, worst of worst.

Fiat justitia ruat cælum

I have the feeling of doing all this before. Up in my old bedroom, playing with a stone knife my grandfather found on a mountain in Georgia and now I have inherited, looking at my parent's vegetable garden. Everyone still in bed, so just hanging out by myself. Opened a window. Wherever you are in NoVa, you can always hear the highways.

When I logged into my gmail, I found a note to myself in my phone from earlier: Fiat justitia ruat cælum. I got it out of a book I'm reading about Thomas Jefferson; obviously not something he came up with, but what he adopted as his personal maxim up on his little mountain, contradictory as ever.

Justice, even if the sky falls.

Last night, my mom and I sat down by the creek until it was too dark to see. She told me how every time you access a memory, it changes, takes on a little of the flavor of your day, your version of your own story, whatever would come to pass afterward, until whatever it is looks entirely different from whatever it was. I thought about that as we watched all the color and light from the sunset extinguish in the creek ripples below that good sycamore. My grubby little fingerprints all over my head. But I guess it's making something new, too, it's generative. It doesn't fade every time, it just changes. You retell it to yourself.

this is a story of forgiveness and breaking things in my hands

Working with a bunch of engineers like:

Mentor: Are you wearing lipstick?
Me: Yeah.
Mentor: Do you usually wear lipstick? You don't. Why are you wearing lipstick?


*

Trying to vary up my runs. Sometimes I get so focused on one thing--speed, distance, a certain mileage that I leave some oversight and then injure myself. So I'm doing speed runs, incline runs, and distance runs. Oh, and puppy runs.

Over the weekend, hiking, I rolled my ankle bad enough that I ended up scraping the top of my ankle. (I don't know how it was physically possible.) But I forgot that, like, you get injured and then you have to take it easy for a second. So, swapped out a run for a walk, but good again now.

*

Josh and I got into a spat when I had a little bit of a breakdown the other night and he lost patience with me. He said essentially what I myself--and probably everyone around me--has been thinking. How are you still not over this?

*

I went over to my friend's house to watch a nostalgic princess movie. She likes them; she's pretty and petite and blonde, and it's fitting that she's amused by them. (I always figured myself more in the evil witch role.) But I like to sit on her couch and drink prosecco and make fun of old movies, so we watched Sleeping Beauty, which I'd never seen.

About halfway through, apropos of nothing, she turned to me and said "You know, when we started hanging out, you warned me that you were impossible to be friends with. You said you didn't return texts, that you liked to flake, and that you were a bad friend. But you've been over here more than [a closer friend of hers.] You actually show up when you say you're going to, and you listen to me." I didn't know what to say. I think she might have brought it up because she wanted to talk about her friendship with the other friend in the context, or maybe my warning had bothered her from the start, and she wanted to address it. Eventually, all I came up with was to tell her, "Ali, I'm really not a good friend."

*

I had a real weird ghost time happen. It was funny. Having genuinely no explanation for it, I don't know what to say. We have this clock that's over 100 years old: Josh's great grandmother's. We'd unplugged it a year or so ago, since the chimes were rather loud and we'd had company.

So, on Sunday evening, I was alone in the house lighting a few candles in the living room. I stopped to look at the clock; I don't really know why, it just sort of caught my eye. And all the sudden it started chiming. It struck 12 chimes, to midnight, and then stopped. As this was happening, I thought that Josh must've fixed it and plugged it back in, but then I saw the plug hanging off the end of the couch, the empty socket. There's no battery in the clock--I've been all over the thing, trying to see where there was some kind of electrical reserve or something, but there's nothing.

Josh said that folk legends say that a clock will strike 12 in a house where someone is about to die, but we didn't die that night, and nothing else odd happened. I keep remembering it, and thinking it was strange, but then half forgetting it. I don't really have the energy to be more haunted these days.

*

Odd day: started with a snow squall over my town as I got into work. Probably the best snow we'll see again the rest of this year, and I'm not sorry, though any other year I'd be crushed.

I want to be buried in Virginia

It feels like no season I've ever known. Yesterday, on the 7 miles of the hike, I was sweating at times and shivering at others. The wind on top of the narrow mountain backbone switchbacks felt like it would like to tear me off, fling me down on that valley I love so much.

*

I realized that something of my current preoccupation with self harm is feeling worthless, and that's the difference for the peculiar and unusual flavor of what has been going on with me the last few months. I also realize that's nobody's fault but my own, no matter how much I gasp and flop around like a landed catfish.

Today I'm going to clean house. Last weekend I cut the stalks of sunflowers and tomato skeletons, and today I'll clean the leaves and decaying morning glory out of my flower beds. Maybe if I have time, throw a little topsoil on. Wash the sheets. Scrub the floor boards. 

But now, I'm just drinking coffee. I swept the front porch. I have the windows open again. I impulse bought a dress from American Apparel in the color "moonlight."

*

Next weekend is my mom's birthday, so I'm going up to NoVa, but by myself. No dog. No Josh. I always used to be going around traveling by myself, but I haven't done it in months and months. I won't even go to Charlottesville. I've been holed up here.

*

I've never done this and I think it's kind of stupid: I doubt anyone is reading this, let alone reading this for music recommendations, but sometimes I find my life chaptered up by songs I like. Just for my own remembrance of this time, like how 2013 was Mister November, I'd like to remember the last year and a half, when this song was the song I liked. 

I like how half way through the song, at been riding lots of trains, same ones as you it turns into a different song. Sometimes halfway through a thing, it turns into something else. And I like the lyrics. 

what a day to die trying

Tonight, I'm cooking dinner in my kitchen.

It's not that it's light outside, but there's a blue glow to the darkness. My house smells like onions sauteing, like the Starfighter lilies I brought home, and when the brief exhale of the breeze comes in, it brings a bit of the February night itself: the way the earth smells when it should be cold, but isn't, and everything thaws and starts to take on the scent of itself. I'm marinating a brilliant piece of salmon to go with cous cous, brussels sprouts and a lemon butter sauce.

This is peaceful. I am enjoying my own company, settled a little from the fury and sense of unfairness that had risen up in me unbidden when I was running: emotional exercise vomit, like happens sometimes, choking. But quiet now. Alone, nice. I love to cook, and this is a meal I like to make and tend to make often. I like to fall into the rhythm of it, cleaning as I go, checking three pots and the oven, balancing the time, writing on this awful blog a little. I have my hair in a long braid down my back, and I'm still wearing my running tights.

I feel different than I have felt, but not in a good or bad way. Simply different. Changed. Awake. A little feral. Maybe it's that I'm building toward some great or terrible thing, gathering speed for it.

Haven't pulled this card for myself in over a year. Funny to see it here in this context. 

The Emperor: the authoritative, commanding aspects of men, power, aid, reason, conviction, doing the right thing when it is not easy, architecture  

how can anybody know how they got to be this way (you always knew I'd do this someday)

Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat
by Charles Wright

East of town, the countryside unwrinkles and smooths out

Unctuously toward the tidewater and gruff Atlantic.

A love of landscape’s a true affection for regret, I’ve found,

Forever joined, forever apart,

outside us yet ourselves.

.

Renunciation, it’s hard to learn, is now our ecstasy.

However, if God were still around

he’d swallow our sighs in his nothingness.

.

The dregs of the absolute are slow sift in my blood,

Dead branches down after high winds, dead yard grass and

undergrowth—

The sure accumulation of all that’s not revealed

Rises like snow in my bare places,

cross-whipped and openmouthed.

.

Our lives can’t be lived in flames.

Our lives can’t be lit like saints’ hearts,

seared between heaven and earth.

.

February, old head-turner, cut us some slack, grind of bone

On bone, such melancholy music.

Lift up that far corner of landscape,

there, toward the west.

Let some deep light in, the arterial kind.

you were supposed to walk me home from the river, man, this is heartbreakin, heartbreakin, heartbreakin, heart breaking

Groundhog day, year of the cock. (as if I didn't say "rabbit rabbit" outloud to no one the day before.) Fool inverted. Another morning. I go through the effort of picking out a work appropriate top, but plan to wear my new hoodie all day like a surly teenager. Smear my mascara. As I dress, my husband tells me he didn't sleep, tells about a nightmare he had about his father that woke him in the middle of the night. He tells me he touched the flat of my stomach when I was asleep, did I feel it? He's late, so I take the morning dog chores and he switches me for the evening ones. There's coffee.

I walk the dog with my Canadian geese mug of coffee. Sven goes airborn out the house, jerks the leash and I spill it all over the porch and my blue gloves. Mental note to sweep. Mental note to mop the white wood of the porch. Mental note to paint the porch. Mental note to clean out the beds.

Put the dog to bed and go. I listen to music I liked in high school. Battered-up tan La-Z-Boy recliner parked on the side of Spring Hill road, facing the street like it's waiting on somebody important. Another one of those milk and stone sky mornings, cloudy, with the sun coming up in a fuzzy, hot pink line behind the Blue Ridge to the east. Buzzards. I drive to work in my new hoodie that still smells like secondhand cigarettes from the bar last night. I look at the mountains and think of Charlottesville. I think about a story I told Chris yesterday about that same stretch of mountains, about how Stonewall's men got trapped up against them, and the Yankee's thought they had him caught and burned all the bridges on the Valley side so they couldn't slip away. But they didn't realize the Confederates knew about a gap back there, and Stonewall was stepping on a train in Charlottesville by the time they realized the smoke from the guns was just a diversion, and they'd just burned the only way of pursuit.

Always thinking about fire these days. The lights have taken to flickering routinely. Google: house lights all flickering fire? every light in the house flickering cause?  I ask Chris about this, too, and he says it doesn't sound great; am I overloading the lines? Mental note to call an electrician. Mental note to die in a fire. Reminded about a thing I read about the survivor of a serial killer attack who said getting your throat cut doesn't actually hurt, it's just that it looks so dramatic, and maybe a fire death is like that too. The crazy bitch who lived in this house before us once told me that when there was a fire in an adjacent house, the house itself woke her up to warn her.

Big thump sound from one side of my car. I have an appointment for new tires, so I'm paranoid about tire failure, and pretty certain the sound it related to one of my tires popping. Pull off on the Weyer's Cave exit, stop at a gas station to stomp out of my car and stare at my non-popped tire. Must of just hit something on the road, but that doesn't make sense. Didn't see anything on the road. Decide to take 11. My mechanic lives/works on 11, and if I get into trouble, I could just call him. Love my mechanic. He told me a good place to hunt arrowheads and rattlesnake stories from Elliot's Knobb and Elkhorn. A rattlesnake once went off at me at Elkhorn, but it was a shy little serpent and I never even saw it, just the place where the grass parted as it shot off away from me.

11 is horrible. Take 42. Little farms, then little gas stations. Everything kind of pink and Harrisonburg hazy. I get into a really pissy mood for no reason than it's taking an absurd amount of time to get to work, a place I go almost every day. When I finally get to work I realize I'm really no later than I am sometimes from dicking around, and my Team Lead has assured me that if I keep doing the work I'm doing, I can do whatever the hell I want. Listen to Team Lead holding court in the breakroom, discussing the merits of a picture of a dog. Resent Team Leam.

Work. No walk today, catching up. Work late. Write half a scene. Check traffic. Check traffic for Charlottesville.

Decide to take 81 in spite of potential tire-popping climate. Bizarrely turned on like I always am when I drive home from work for some reason. Sky is blue by now, growing dark. See a big paper hornet's nest hanging in a bare tree I never have noticed before. La-z-boy recliner missing on Spring Hill road. Husband taking the dog's evening walk; plan to go straight to the gym. Wear my good hoodie. Wear my run club top my hags made for me for Christmas. I say outloud to my reflection, "Oh, I look cute."

Run. Think about breasts. Think about winter camping email to send out. Think about own story. Think about showering off gross second-hand smoke smell and washing good hoodie. El Vy stuck in my head.