when october ends
Quiet day: curled up against the wall in cotton pjs with cherry print listening to Antony and the Johnsons and the River Waltz. My mother on the phone to my grandmother in the other room; I can hear her talk about me in a smooth stream of Shanghainese. It stops raining for a moment this afternoon and I crank open the window for a sliver of fresh air. Otherwise the day is dense and breathless and slippery grey like mullosc shell walls. I slip in and out of sleep, printed pages and emails to N, drinking mugs of hot water and lemon. For lunch I ate the leftover orange and cracked pepper duck pate on toast from Friday's makeshift picnic, when R, B and I feast on Italian bread, persian fetta, pate and beetroot dip in the Domain. Exams are fast approaching but still too distant to interrupt the calm solitude of a rained-in Sunday.
After a 3am phonecall from B last night, I slept fitfully, but not much worse than the slew of recent nights and bizarre dreams. My dreams lately have been carved strangely between futile anxiety about the future and life in a suit and a 9 to 5 job, and the movies I've been watching lately. Hollywood Hong Kong and I dreamt of roast piglets and surgurically retached arms; Versus and City of God and I dreamt in technicolour of zombies, guns, and drug money, six hundred dollars an hour work and tax fraud; Serenity only heightened the visuals of cannibals and resurrected corpses, and interspersed gun duels with bullet trains, sleepless days, red lips, black eyes and starched linen; and after The Motorcycle Diaries, I saw myself standing by the side of a road covered in snow, holding an open briefcase and waiting, waiting, for the corpse of a bird to fall in. The wintry roadside trees swayed to Mozart's Requiem and the sea would creep closer and closer to my stockinged feet.
Meaning eludes me but my October has been cleanly cleaved into halves. The first curdled with assignments and a hellish mid-semester period; the second under an umbrella of psychadelic dreams fueling pre-dawn writing sessions, hatching out the skeleton of Le Cirque which now opens in a night market haggling over birthdays for unborn babies.