I’m not overwhelmed exactly but very scattered. I do things I didn’t mean to, and I don’t do things I really needed to. My follow thru is weird.
I prefer to be more predictable and make more sense. But this is a time of newness and change, for me. I’m going with it.
My memory…is it shoddy because I’m not sleeping enough? Is my brain getting duller? Is grief just making everything harder? I was crying yesterday morning, remembering things my mom called me that no one will ever call me again. Too much loss.
This color shirt, I don’t think I had one ever. I bought it to wear under a blue dress that’s too low cut, but it’s not tight enough and bunches up wrongly.
Ming was chatty. He told me he watched a youtube video about hippies. It was spoofing hippies. We discussed how misogynist hippies are. He seems to think hippies are feminist, or can speak that way at least. I was like, no, there’s a whole contingent of the hicker hippies who are misogynist. I guess there are all kinds.
The video depicted three hippie men living together. I said they were not very successful.
He also watched something about an alligator attack. I was like, why were you watching this? He assured me his nightmares were totally unrelated.
I tend to get sidetracked when I try to sleep, lately. I have a new plan–I just think about what I want to eat the next day, and what I want to wear the next day. Pleasant but not overly exciting. Lately five hours feels like enough.
I had a young friend. They said I don’t need much sleep because I’m older–they knew because we traveled together. I was like, uh, I’m 43. I’m not 83. I have a whole thing with sleep. They saw only a little sliver of it.
Yesterday someone suggested I go for walks and try to tire out my body. I said how the trike ride every morning is good for me, and walking can be ok, but I prefer to dance. I have a reaction to advice and then a second reaction. Then maybe a third.
Lately our rides are about 40 minutes. There are all different ways to enjoy them. The honeysuckle is in bloom here. We pass two huge bushes of it, on our rides. Wow, what a treat. I kind of want to plant some in our garden.
Ming needs a grapevine. Anything seedless–our old one died.
I made a new zine. It’s called shed–it’s a poem about my love for someone, R, and the shed he built.
There was a knock at the door. Ming was undressing, so I answered it.
“I’m going to the store. Do you want anything?” R asked, not looking at me.
“What store?” I asked.
“Walmart,” he said.
“Uh…” I said, looking at the fruit bowl. “Do you need anything from the store?” I yelled to Ming.
“No!” he said.
R was looking at a list he had in his hand. “No, thank you,” I said.
Maybe he thought if he didn’t look at me, my germs couldn’t leap on him. We were definitely not six feet apart. It can be difficult when I love someone so much.
Why do people do the things we do? Even if you got up the guts to ask someone, they might not tell you the truth. They could tell you the surface truth, or the understudy truth, the backup truth, or the plausible untruth. While the real truth remains inside them, shining and secret. Right?
I like poetry because it can tell those secrets. Some secret buried in the obvious. Or hiding somehow, blended in with mundane. Like ET in the closet with those stuffed animals.