What Writing Feels like Today

It's as if I've been given eight stars and been asked to map out the universe.

On Metaphor

"I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass--our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?"

from Paper Towns by John Green

Black-throated Warbler

Identification may be difficult and may be made on the basis of song alone.

The Calender

I keep promising myself I'll write about other things: write about those late days of summer, or the pumpkins, or the wind, or how these last few weeks the sunsets have been so pretty, always a different color. Pink, I say to Eva, or Gold, or, Look, baby, look how the bottoms of the clouds are bright white and the tops are heavy and gray.

Yesterday, we played outside until our fingers were numb, and I could swear I saw my breath. But surely it's too early for that--isn't it?

There's a calender that hangs in our kitchen that I look at when I'm washing apples or heating up a can of soup. So-and-so's birthday, it says, or Dinner with the Who's-It's. But lately I can't stop noticing the scribbles.

On the calender, in the lower right-hand corner of every Friday, I had counted the weeks. 1, 2, 3, all the way to 40, and at 40, I had drawn a big heart. 40 was when the baby would come. It would be the dead of winter but we wouldn't mind because we'd just hole up until the flowers bloomed and then, come spring, we'd emerge.

Now, though, I've scribbled out the numbers. There's nothing but a dark blue mark (scrawled with my favorite pen), and unless you get really close, unless you really try to see it, you'd never know what week it is, never know how much longer to go, or--as fate has it--not go, never know any of it, really. Still, at the end, there is the heart: fat and white, a would-be snowflake hanging onto the edge of the new year, in danger of little more than disappearing with another turn of the calender page.

The Aesthetician

There are people you must tell, people who knew you were pregnant: the lady who wanted to start the book club, your boss, the Russian woman who waxes you.

Today, she has your leg lifted in the air and you remember absently, something in her voice, how she once told you of her brother, back home, how he suffers from schizophrenia. The winters, she had said, are the worst.

Now, she clicks her tongue at you. Exercising? she says. Not when you are with a baby! In my culture, she tells you, it is believed that a pregnant woman carries a bundle of glass. Glass, she repeats. Too fragile. She shakes her head.

The g in her fragile is a hard g, the g of fragments, of figments, of figs. She lifts your other leg, and you think again of broken things. Outside, the sun is warm, maybe the last really warm sun of the year. Don't worry. You'll be back in it soon.

To Lose

To lose; as in, misplace; as in, it took my mother years to forgive me for losing that old blue sweater; or to lose, as in not win; as in, every time I play Scrabble with my mother I'm reminded of what it means to lose, I mean, really lose.

And then, there is this: after a long summer and the sideways glances, the saying it: I lost the baby. Louder, again, because maybe they didn't hear. Lost. Or understand. I lost the baby, I say; the baby was lost. Or hearing it whispered through thin cubicle walls: there was a baby; she lost it.

I keep imagining flipping the couch cushions and dumping out all my bags, tearing the whole house apart, root to stem, the whole place unearthed for a singular recovery.

Instead, I roll the grammar of it all in my head: to lose, to have lost, lost. Lost. And suddenly, I find myself in the classroom with my new students, and I am fumbling with folders, Welcome, I say. Where do we begin?

And with the water, my heart

There are peaches growing on the neighbor's tree. All these years and I hadn't noticed them, but today they are there: plump and golden-bottomed. I can't imagine that they're sweet. Brooklyn peaches--who ever heard of such a thing?

But still I want them. If I close my eyes, I can smell them. Close them a bit longer, and I can maybe even taste them.

I also see: a blue ribbon tied to the sliding glass door, a glass of iced coconut juice, a ring on the wood beneath the glass, a vase with flowers, the ceiling fan going forever around. All this from my bed, where I've been two days now on doctor's orders.

Wednesday night it rained so hard, raining and raining, and the sliding door was open, and I was dreaming of all the rain falling, and it was falling still. At almost dawn, I woke up, and I knew my water had broken. All that wild rain. Broken. Water.

We had just found out that I'm carrying a boy, have been carrying him for twenty weeks; found out that he has a strong spine and two beautiful femurs and a perfect brain, and then this: this which has me laid up in bed begging for prayers.

Outside now, the sun is starting to set. Nights, I've found, are hardest, especially after Eva has gone to bed, and I don't have her laughter to make me forget. Or make me remember. To accompany me. To calm me.

Rain on glass. A late summer storm. Clouds moving in and away and in again. The smell of peaches, the pinking of the sky. Send love our way. Send love. Love.