March 1st, 2014

Oh how I have loved. I breathe these words to myself in the nearing March twilight from my second floor bedroom, a bird cage of a bedroom, and the words sort of hang above me. There is
almost the choke of sob and sting of tears, but nothing comes of it. I am nearly done with the
mourning. Nearly done in the way that a woman is nearly done giving birth when the contractions begin. Nearly done in the sense that I am approaching the hardest and deepest work. I prepare
my muscles by breathing deeply into long yoga positions, suspended in transition above the mat.
In that porch, on those days when you took the practice LSATs and I wrote my Master's thesis
we had wine as the warmth rose from the pavement and curled my hair and made your skin
sweat. I looked out into the sky, the ever blue sky, hanging low over roof tops and I felt the ache
of longing. I wanted to tell you this, but I didn't know if you were part of it. So I was silent, but
I counted the clouds, listened to you scratch answers on paper, and wondered when life would
actually begin. It has begun now, these few years later, in various ways, but I suspect it will really begin when the you I am talking to is no longer you. Between all the grey shadows on my wall there is one that is colored: the thick plastic of the medicine bottle paints the wall gently.

                                     __________________________________

I am often confronted with my complete lack of useful and worldly knowledge at the moment when my melancholy is at its height and I am in the throws of the drama in my head. Tonight it came to me by way of Egyptian seeds. I don't know what Egyptian Seeds are, except that they look like sunflower seeds, and that's when the trouble began. Am I, I said in my mind,
silencing all the sad and lovelorn thoughts that had held office to that point, supposed to eat the whole thing? I did, but it seemed more difficult than it should, and so I googled it. The answers
were not exact, and more searches than I expected referenced the Arab Spring. I, chewing thoughtfully, came upon a search result that read: Europe's E.Coli Outbreak Linked to Egyptian Seeds. That's when I gasped and inhaled a piece of the shell that I wasn't sure if I was or was not supposed to eat. And that's when I coughed so hard that all the pneumonia (and by pneumonia I mean the mucus that had become cement in my lungs so that when I breathed I felt a heaviness fighting me and when I walked my body inclined towards the floor from the weight of it) came out of me like an exorcism. And that is how a tiny seed broke up some rather boring and worn out thoughts and the congestion sitting in my lungs like a spoiled cat on the back of the couch.