Snowstruck

Sometimes it falls fast
Gravity sucks it into immediate accumulation
It is perpendicular to everywhere you're supposed to be
A strobing curtain over necessities
You see them only in prettified flashes

But when it falls slowly
Skimming the seamless levels of wet air
It traces a path to the inevitable ground
Just so.

I can look up to it
From the cozy, cold bed of its ancestors
Wondering if this flake
This perfect Chosen One
From the farthest reaches of my assisted eyesight
Will be lucky and light
Unacquired by the clumps
Who would commandeer its particular pattern

Will make its way to the fine fuzz of my cheek
Hover
Through my longest inhale of winter
Warming itself in the bedazzlement of my smile.

La vague des passions.

I was about to write in my journal tonight, and then I thought about writing a letter to one of my penpals, and then I realized that I wanted to post something on the internet. My hesitation in all of this was that I had nothing to say. I have scattered thoughts - my nephew's voice, the side of my mother's face, the tiny Dr. Seussical island on sunny Jamaica Pond, all of which are incredibly sad and beautiful to me. Sometimes my lonely humanity consumes me, and I can't breathe, and I can't move my back.

Last night, Don Draper said that his heart was going to explode. He said that he'd spent his life as a father trying to feel the love he should have for his kids. And then the time he actually felt it, he felt like his heart was going to explode. And I wonder why? Because heart exploding is what fatherly love feels like to him? Or because that was the perceived effect of finally embodying this long-awaited state? Or would the explosion have been a reaction to what he finally felt, and is that somehow related to all the time he spent not feeling it? Either way, Don Draper is a complicated man, with a lot of feelings, with art in his lens and an isolating attachment to his melancholy. He keeps wanting it to connect him to people, but it ultimately renders him incapable of giving love, because he prioritizes his psychological mysteries over the real-time needs of people around him.

And sometimes I feel like Don Draper. When I have nowhere to be and time to see my thoughts, they seem like stratus clouds: vague, incomplete, flat, persistently hovering but empty. I actually don't know much about the weather, so I googled "Stratus clouds" after I typed that, and here is the definition from "Web Weather for Kids":

"Stratus clouds are uniform grayish clouds that often cover the entire sky. They resemble fog that does not reach the ground. Usually no precipitation falls from stratus clouds, but sometimes they may drizzle. When a thick fog "lifts," the resulting clouds are low stratus."
  
What a fucking metaphor. Everything about that definition is what I feel in my chest tonight. And as a yogi, I know that I could practice releasing my attachment to this complex sadness, look for neutral ground that is neither happy nor sad, but at peace. Or I could think back to my midwestern Catholic upbringing, where idle hands make the devil's work, so of course I am depressed by my inactivity, because nobody should rightly be able to sit with himself for longer than a minute. Or as a singer, I could make a joyful noise and express myself until I feel better. But I wanted to write. Because I had to reinforce the idea within me that I am an artist, and that whatever I'm feeling is somehow the making of literary beauty.

Once I figure out what it is that I had to say. Maybe I have said it now.

Biding My Time

I rode the train from Harvard Square to Jamaica Plain last night. Saturday night, alone, headed home. I knew there was nobody waiting for me, and I was coming from nobody, but for the next 45 minutes, I would be part of a small community, united in public transit. I chatted with a friendly acquaintance in the station, engaged in an quick flirtation between stops, and bobbed my head to a street performer's amplified harmonica.

I have lately spent many nights in this way, free from rehearsals and social obligations, and not always by choice. There is a new loneliness in my life as a single woman. Unlike the loneliness that creeps into relationships, this feeling bears a certain humility, or humiliation - I'm not yet sure which. I see my own judgment in peoples' eyes, asking me who is absent from my side and why I haven't got plans on a Saturday night.

I'm not indignant alone; I'm quiet and simple, and sometimes I feel shame. And although I identify as a third grader waiting in vain for a team captain to call me to play - left out and publicly dismissed, I know that I am more like a transfer student with nowhere to sit at lunch, mostly unnoticed and privately alienated, sad that the others don't know my light, sad that it has to be wasted between me and my lunch.

Yet I find myself unable to open up. I can't abide the tiny injustice of being misunderstood, mistreated, missed. For now, this feels right - anonymity and a table for one.

No. 1

He's wearing a navy baseball cap low over his face, a white Hanes tee beneath his black zip-up hoodie, light stone wash jeans, and black asics. I can hardly see his face because he hunches over a crossword in a puzzler book. He lifts his heel to secure the book when he writes an answer. He puts it back down when he thinks.

(This is the first installment of the PNP series.)

Boys and Girls

A Saturday night on public transportation is like a holding room for the club. I watched a group of four guys and a group of four girls in the station. The girls wore heels and bite-sized dresses, over which they folded their curls and arms to keep from freezing. One girl kept her right arm outstretched to find a better angle for her unceasing attempts at self-portraits of the group. The boys wore polos and passed around an Aquafina bottle filled with orange liquid. The girls eventually gave up on her arm-span and had one of the boys take the picture. It seemed that they were perfect together.

Only it turned out that they weren't together. Once we sat on the train, I saw that they were total strangers, except of course that their social lives had molded them to fit very well together. The conversation was dull and disconnected, and representatives of each group pretended to get to know the other while cracking camouflaged inside jokes to their counterparts.

"You guys all got nice shoes," said the boys.
"Thanks," said the girls. "Where are you guys going?"
"Where are you guys going?" Three boys mysteriously chuckled. Another round of orange liquid.
"We asked you first." The girls cackle.

It's like tennis, but funnier.

As I left South Station, I had a hard time discerning all the signs for the different train and bus lines. What I wanted was the exit, but I ended up activating an alarm trying to go backwards through the turnstile just in time for the boys to notice.

"Woah, wrong way!" said the loud one.
"Yeah, how embarrassing."
"You are the biggest loser - goodbye," he said, in a drunk and slightly boggled reality-TV reference. I decided not to engage. We all stepped onto the gargantuan escalator. Near the top, the loud boy had a sudden change of heart.
"I'm sorry," he said to me, feigning remorse. "I didn't mean to call you a loser. You're not the biggest loser." This was all part of the boys and girls game. His role was to throw insults at me through a charming smile until I simply couldn't resist any longer. But I don't like to play that game.
"No, I know," I replied.
"Oooh, so... Wait, are you saying I'm the biggest loser?"
"No." I replied, and our paths diverged toward our respective Saturday nights.

Wisdom from the Street

While this advice wasn't given directly to me, it is too good not to post. A homeless man told my friend Dahlia this last week at a train station:

"That train's not gonna come when you want it to, but it'll be right on time."

You're Too Kind

Life Alive

My little sister and I ate in the basement of a crunchy hippie restaurant last month. There was a woman eying us from across the room. Emily thought she was a psychic, and judging by her hanging shawls and stack of cards, I thought so too. She wore a headpiece with draping gold discs, something between a crown and a hat, like an African princess. It was a distracting thing to have in one's peripheral vision, and eventually I decided to ask her what she was about.

"Goddess card readings," she answered. "It's really fun - we just see what card you draw and talk about what it might mean for your life. I've been doing this for many years, and everyone gets just the right card." With two sisters in the middle of life crises, she had hit the jackpot.

She handed us the stack of cards. We both drew from the middle of the deck.
Emily uncovered Aphrodite, the goddess of Love.
For me, Oshun, goddess of Sensuality.
Two sisters, sixty possibilities, and this is what we get.
"Amazing that two sisters should draw this pair!" she remarked. "So... tell me what you think it means."

We were both silent. We didn't care what we thought; we wanted her to tell us. - Everything. I would have let her make all of my big decisions right then and there. But instead, she talked of self-love and hot baths and fresh-cut flowers. But the reading still produced my answers. It just happened to be that I already knew them.

Origami

I watched a girl about my age take a piece of patterned red paper out of her bag. It was the same size as a gum wrapper, but much denser. She began folding it, in half one way, then another, flipping and turning it in a entrancing rhythm of fold, crease, fold, crease. She knew the pattern well, so much that her field of attention picked up my staring.

"What are you making?" I asked, caught.
"A crane. If you make a thousand, you get a wish."
"Oh yeah, I think I've heard of that! How many do you have?"
"I think four hundred now."
"Have you been going a while?"
"About five months," she said, as she shaped the beak of the paper creature. "Do you want this one?"

Obviously I did. I thanked her profusely and examined it before tucking it in the pocket of my raincoat. It's beautiful, with the paper's bold colors intertwining along its creases, which are impeccable despite the nonchalance of the maker. I wondered about her 1000-crane wish as she walked up the stairs, her head tilted slightly to the left.

Profiles of Normal People in the Present Tense Explained

It occurred to me that many of the people I feature on my blog are eccentric. While eccentricity will always be the key to my heart, I'd like to share some accounts of people who are not so bold - people who blend in. This series will be called Profiles of Normal People in the Present Tense. Stay tuned!