but you can't tell a story
Slowly, I begin to realize that I'm sick. I mean, with the flu or something. I'm completely incapable of smelling anything or breathing through my nose, and I feel hot and prickly and light-headed the way fevers make a person feel hot and prickly and light-headed. (I have a slight headache, too, but I very often have a slight headache.) This usually happens in my first month or two back at school, when everyone's summer germs are meeting and mixing and doing the tango. Bugs get passed around like joints for a little while. Everybody spends some time sick.
It's still irritating. It's hard to concentrate on the mating and nesting habits of the red-cockaded woodpecker when I feel like my nose is full of Jell-O and my head is full of static.
Yesterday was September 11th and I didn't mark that anniversary. Partly I forgot to do it, partly I wouldn't have known what to do, and partly I'm made uncomfortable, in a way that I find difficult to express or even to completely understand myself, by the...the way we talk about and remember and mourn some tragedies for years and decades after and forget about others almost immediately. I don't know. I pulled weeds and I hauled tarps at an old slave cemetery, and there were white grave markers like crooked teeth. (Their residents died free, and were most likely buried in real coffins, not wicker baskets.) I read the names on the stones, the fading names of Charley Johnston, Olive Patton, another Patton whose first name wasn't quite legible. More that I can't remember. I wish I were better with names. It wasn't a grassy field of a graveyard; it was wild and overgrown and I came away scratched by briars and with so many thorns and burrs and little clinging plantparts stuck to my stockings that I looked like a porcupine. The sky was so heavy with clouds--- you know, when they hang down in folds and swathes of gray and you feel like you're standing under a canopy of soft cloth? Anyway, after about two and a half hours, they finally dropped all the rain they were holding in. It fell down and down and down, indefatigable and loud. We went back to the bus early, and I stayed in my room with back issues of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet for the rest of the afternoon.
That was yesterday, but the days have been oddly stretched out lately and it could have happened longer ago. It feels as though it did. I spoke with a boy who was called Blue, and I tried to guess his other name, the name his parents had given him, until he finally got bored of the game and just told me. (It wasn't Rumpelstiltskin.) I spoke with a man who was called Joe, and he liked to use words like "milieu," but only with that exaggerated finger-quotemarks gesture accompanying them. There was a beautiful girl called Luna with feathers in her hair and a yellow dress who asked to take a photograph of me, and I let her, and I complimented her on the feathers, and we commiserated over not really knowing how to sew but wanting very much to learn someday. Ella and I might go to the kava bar together. Our mothers have the same malady and we both used to stand up and scream in the middle of third grade classes when the world seemed like too much to bear. We both need stepstools to reach the higher kitchen shelves. I said I didn't really believe in astrology, as credulous as I can be in other areas, and she said that was because I'm a Gemini. I'm interacting with people. They get drunk and shout below my window. They play guitars outside my building at two in the morning. They throw apples to each other over my head. Humanity abounds.
Here are seven songs for this week:
1. Fake Empire, The National
2. A King and a Queen, Okkervil River
3. Army Dreamers, Kate Bush
4. Oh Bondage! Up Yours!, The X-Ray Spex
5. Up The Wolves, The Mountain Goats
6. The River, Samantha Crain
7. You've Done It Again, Virginia, The National