Jun 04, 2006 19:00
There's the one about going to Bonnaroo. Dedham, Massachusetts to Manchester, Tennessee. She looked it up on Mapquest and it said the trip by car would take seventeen hours, and that's seventeen horus of sexual tension to write about, plus an extended weekend of flirtation on which to expound. But Maria never really got down to business on that. It was cold for June in Shrewsbury, and that gave her one more excuse to not write about it, that fifty degree weather in Massachusetts isn't particularly inspiring if you want to write about ninety-degree weather in Tennessee. That being stoned alone in suburban New England doesn't get you in a mindset for writing about a music festival in the boonies of the South.
It's on the to-do list, though. It's already a vignette in her journal.
Then there's the one about Tom and the one about Darren, and those never made it out of her journal either. Sordid tales of sex, expensive cologne, and vicarious self-pity, waiting for the right anecdote that will make them all cohesive. And there -- THERE -- is how she deals.
She's shown Doug a couple vignettes; he rolls his eyes and smiles and kisses her, and makes a joke, then she makes a joke, and then they laugh.
Maria thinks about destiny a lot these days, more often than she used to. She thinks about how she used to have imaginary friends, and how they would all come and be especially entertaining when she visited her grandmother's place. They'd play with tennis balls and the motor scooter the houseboy kept in the garage. She thinks about how she developed an early love for books, for stories and words and -- more importantly -- symbols. It was Maria, and not her parents, who would tell herself stories in her head at night to lull herself to sleep because in her family she was the best English-speaker, and she was already beginning to forget her mother-tongue. She ponders these things now, things that taught her the value of the intangible and the unseen, back when the arrogance of youth made her think they were all she had.
She explained her theory to Doug once that it was he who taught her how to love, and lonely ghosts that help her with its upkeep. Maria escapes to phantasm instead of other people's arms. "And that's how we keep our patina--"
"Patina?" said Doug.
Maria said, "Our veneer--"
"It's not just a patina," said Doug, because they can read each other's minds sometimes. "It's not just a veneer. I'd be disappointed otherwise."
As she types on her laptop, the cat perches on the windowsill, fat and lazy and possibly bored, staring at gray skies. They are both waiting for something, she thinks. The cat for her original owner and she for someone else to turn the page, and at least some admonishments of 'silly girl, silly girl...'.
Strains of melancholy find their way into her writing in the summer, but more probable is that they have always been there.
Maria's roommates call her for dinner. She closes the document, picks up the cat, who meows, and hugs it to her chest. She turns off the light as she leaves the room.