paper hearts, serotonin, beaks and eyes and light and light
Now there are robins. They...what do you call a big group of robins? They're multitudes. On the lawns. A big group of them flew right over my head, low, and I could hear/feel the rush and scrape of little wings. Spring will come early to Swannanoa this year. Spring will float in blue and brown and hollow-boned and not at all the type of thing you'd ever think could cover the earth and fill the sky, but she will.
I don't hate Valentine's Day all that much. It's the only time of year I find flowers in the trash and relatives send me candy in the mail. It's just that holidays are things I tend to forget about, so I'm ever surprised at all the long-stemmed roses and the cheap cherry cordials, the sudden surge in general misanthropy and eighteen or twenty year old girls carrying stuffed toy rabbits and bears. I go to work and I do my job which, today, consisted of yelling at people until they took small squares of mint-colored paper out of my hands. I let a boy in my office because I felt bad for him. I feel bad for anybody who gets locked out of anywhere, and I was just sitting there in the light making posters. Poor kid. He has a crush on me, which is annoying, but also I think anyone would have to feel bad for the boys who get crushes on me. This one smells like a turkey sandwich and is a good few inches over six feet tall. Wears a long beige trenchcoat, college-student affectation that looks a bit silly on someone with a pink-cheeked, stubbleless, preposterously young-looking face. (I'm one to talk of silly affectations, though.) It's funny, how hard we try to become other things, how much effort everybody our age puts into self-invention. How we all want to be heroes in different genres of story: princess, detective, vampire, vagabond, criminal, prophet, robot, rebel, superhero, martyr, warrior, tortured artist, glamorous artist, trickster, seducer, boy who never grows up, lost little girl in an odd country.
So that's what I said, and Molly said, Yeah, I think I know exactly what you mean, and I said, I think a lot of people are sad because they have to carry around pieces of all the selves they've ever been or tried to be around inside them for their whole lives and sometimes the pieces are bad, weird, embarrassing ones that pop out without warning at the worst possible times. And Molly said, Well, but it's so beautiful to watch it happen. And to watch people begin to realize that the bad, weird, embarrassing parts of themselves aren't so unlovable after all.
And I said, We're the only animal that makes itself on purpose. I mean, that makes a particular self for itself on purpose.
And my grandmother is in her eighties, old enough to remember the Depression and the second World War and racial segregation and a time before television existed, and when she dreams sometimes she still dreams she's in high school and there's a test she forgot to study for in an unfamiliar room on the other side of the building and she's late for it, running late with eyeliner seams drawn up the backs of her legs so it'll look like she's wearing hose if you don't look too closely.