7/2/23

You should avoid a view at all costs.

You should face yourself with a blank wall when writing, because inspiration comes from within. Bullshit. I’m sitting here at a gorgeous lake with the sun just kissing its way across the water, the sky woozy and pink from a delirious morning. Would I have been able to imagine that?

No. It would’ve been a lot more heartache.

The water here looks closer than it is, and I feel a little like if I were to just tip my feet off the porch they’d feel that lake, rather than the wash of poison ivy between me and it.

If inspiration comes from within, why not give yourself a view, too?

I suppose it’s because looking up is to be avoided at all costs. Looking up costs time, and encourages cigarettes. Looking up means I’m not typing. Except, look at that, I’m typing. How’s it going?

I quit smoking for fifty six days. It wasn’t the view that made me smoke again, it was Helena Troy, who smokes more than just cigarettes, whose crazy positively made me want to crawl out of my skin. Who was beautiful and broken and just a little ruined.

I love all my characters.

Another thing some writers say (I’ve been on a kick lately, reading writers’ writing about writing) is that you are in charge of your characters. I think this is maybe true for people who are in charge of themselves, and I am not quite one of those, much as I wish to be. So.

Helena Troy smokes cigarettes. She rules me more than I rule her, apparently.

And I love her, I do. I have wanted each time to reach into the pages and cradle this part of myself, and never more so than with Helena Troy, who’d bite any loving hand. Who I am both jealous of and pitying of and desperately hope my daughter never understands.

I also want to shake her. Want to take her in my arms, hold her, and then, soon as she’s made young by my love, give her the very most extreme shaken baby syndrome. Live, damnit!

Live.

I think I’ll have another cig.

7/4/23

I love everything about this house, including the things one–strictly speaking–shouldn’t love about a house.

I love the slope of the floors, how they rise and fall like stationary waves. I love the big screen door that doesn’t quite close all the way, but we leave the watered glass door open anyway, to let the lake in. I love the great huge trunks of trees and stones that make up this porch, with two hammocks, one on either side, a grill in the middle, all of it standing sentinel before the lake.

I love that it is, even as we live inside it, being taken back by the woods around.

Some photographer dude said a thing I love, once: we are living in future ruins. I think it’s more: if a place is lucky, it will someday be a ruin. In the same way we will too someday, if lucky, be a ruin of a person, all wrinkles and fumbling fingers and memories that swish like tea in the bottom of a cup, only sometimes making a shape.

My fraternal grandmother is dying while I’m up here.

When I couldn’t make the zoom with her (what’s left of her, because as we all pretty much know, you normally go in pieces) my sister asked where I was, and I said the lake, and she said ‘no one could have predicted this, it’s ok,’ which is progress for both of us, that we could inhabit that lie and let each other go in it.

Nini was already in the hospital when I left.

I don’t often get this way anymore, but when it comes to death, the spoiled addict in me rises up out of my life like my recovery has only ever been a cocoon, and she goes, “haven’t I done enough?”

I don’t want to see what’s left of my grandmother.

I told my sister, “Tell her I love her, and tell her thank you.”

She said, “Will do.”

It’s the next day, now. I’m not sure if she’s still alive. We don’t really get cell service here.

I owed her something. She made fudge when I was little, though. How can you ever make that up to someone?

I could’ve tried.

I wouldn’t have succeeded.

Maybe I’ll make fudge for someone, someday.

If I’m lucky.

7/5/23

“Your dad seems sad and confused,” my stepmother told me.

“We’ve been expecting this for a long time, She lived a long, good life with Papa,” my dad told me on the phone.

Here, the lake is still, but never quite. The mist comes and it’s hard to tell what’s sky until a wind shifts and suddenly half the sky ripples.

I didn’t cry until I talked to my dad. I don’t think I would’ve cried if I couldn’t. Partners and children and strangers alike hold some of our capacity for tears, but our parents hold the key, the most of it, and he’s who I have left.

I am jealous of those with sane and living parents, but then I’m not. If everyone involved is lucky, I know what’s coming.

The lake ripples. The mist breaks as morning sun lazily cuts through, dispersing only what lies in its wake in a dazzling ripple.

I hear my daughter up on the porch with my husband. Last night there were fireworks and s’mores, and her face held a glee I am incapable of receiving within myself, and I was fine with that. When I was putting her to bed she said, “I’m gonna dream I’m a firework!”

“Whoa,” I said, “sounds like a good dream.”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m gonna be a pink and green one. And my friends are gonna shoot me, shoot me way up high in the sky! Then I’ll explode, and everyone will eat s’mores and cheer, and then I’ll… disappear.”

I paused. Did not cry.

“That sounds beautiful,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, half snored.

I sat with her for a long time after she went to sleep.

Now it is morning, and she has not yet exploded. It’s the last day we’re here. The lake is all ripples, and the wind is soft, and smells like moss. The sun like a smooth stone, exactly me-shaped, all over my shoulders.

It’s the last day we’re here.

“Time to go back to our terrible life,” my husband says. He gets like this sometimes. I try not to let it kill me. He gets like this, sometimes, he gets like this.