heavy

i'm sitting at my desk in my office corner, sun coming in through the window glaring the screen, listening to track 3 "the kiss" from the hours soundtrack probably for the 876th time. really. i read some several hundred books listening to these same movements over and over again, it became the sound of reading. to me it is the sound of women writing, reading, yes, in this very humanistic pre-feminism virginia woolf collective kind of way. but i'm sitting here enjoying hte diffuse light because again nana has taken the train out and is playing legos and watching sesame street with owen. and she demands that i go upstairs and work. and what i see on my screen is this picture. it's my favorite, right now, its my moment iwth my boy, the one i carry with me in my mind's eye.


and i've put it everywhere i want to work, it seems. because, i think, it's so ephemeral, it reminds me of the beauty of the fleeting moment. my owen always running off screen, and all i can do sometimes is watch and smile. and whenever i can, hold him close, just for a moment and tell him how much i love him before he squiggles and squirms and runs off again. it's a balancing act really, holding him and letting him go. putting on the headphones and taking them off. writing draft after draft of this chapter and playing with glue and stickers.

i'm thinking of all of htis because there is a tremendous well of loss. and pain happening around me. and all i can think to do is find the most beautiful paper i can, the simplest and most honest words and send off all the love i can spare--and send more. and i feel a deep sense of tragedy for the lives that have disappeared, that were too ephemeral. but it doesn't seem enough. nothing can possibly be enough. you cannot replace lives lost, lives that never got to be. it just leaves a heavy. and i mean heavy as in a weight, a blank reminder. and you live with it i think, and you build around it. and you share it sometimes, i think, with the lightness in your life. and as milan kundera reminds us ever so poetically, that too can be unbearable. but for that heavy, i leave, as woolf does in orlando, a great blank. because i think she wouldn't mind the plagiarism.











































































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