exhausted

The fact that my brain made it home the same time as my body is a testament to chocolate and copy-and-paste.

I'm quite well, really, but

my current mood is:

want.

pointed

Just now I got a splinter in my heel when I kicked the wall

and

an invitation to my parents' farewell party.

tender

I have been looking at pictures of a wrecked van and imagining my uncle being pulled free. Wondering what would have happened if he'd been in the sky instead. My heart is full. Already this weekend it has been full in three ways. Maybe four, if you count the painfully happy sound of the violin my brother and I heard yesterday.

The hood of this sweater has been up all day. Even when I wasn't outside in the rain. I spent three hours in my car. I didn't go anywhere, not really. I left in search of food, found some, and then didn't leave the parking lot. I curled up in the seat and rested my chin on my arms and my arms on the edge of the window and watched the rain add up in the puddles. I listened to NPR and counted rests.

I wasn't home yet when my phone rang and I pulled into the parking lot of a bank and held Egypt to my ear and really wanted to start by asking the hard questions, like and how did you know? It reminded me of why, and why not. And made me wish I had the means to buy plane tickets whenever I want to go halfway around the globe to see for myself.

10 ¢

I have a perpetual extra dime issue when I'm scrounging for change to hit up the vending machine for a diet coke. I think it's mostly bad math, but maybe there's a part of me that expects the worst. I am over prepared. Me?!
One evening when I was 18 my roommate and I made the two floor journey to the vending machines three times and it wasn't until the third that we had enough change. But that was because of a hole in a pocket the first time and slippery fingers the second.

I'm wading through sand at work today. I have been working! Working hard! But I feel like from the outside you wouldn't be able to tell. There's still so much left to finish! I am working as I type this (I swear!) and drinking diet coke and spinning the leftover dime. I AM WORKING. I am on page 57 of 66.
I should tell you that I was thanked on an acknowledgments page of a recently published master's thesis. By name! Me! Never mind the fact that I never actually personally helped the author. My coworkers did. Their names were listed, too.

I feel a little like an amputee. My best friend deleted her facebook account. Have I been talking to myself all these years?
Sometimes mass purging scares me. I knew someone once who would acquire acquire acquire for months and then would all of a sudden give it all away. Clothes, books, equipment. She'd be down to cardboard and empty hangers. Then she'd start all over.

I bet I could figure out which things I could live without.

heron

The shade of my shirt is identical to that of my eyes. The reason I am late returning from lunch is that I spent a full five minutes studying the two in the staff bathroom mirror upstairs and pondering the significance of being able to so nail down the color of my irises. The answer is I'm proud, and I feel hemmed in (oh, pun!)--in the sense that well, now I feel that I have definite edges. Now I am within bounds.

dropping segues

I am waiting. I am writing checks and avoiding vowels and I'm waiting.

I'm fighting my constant compulsion to stick in a fulcrum and see which side sags, my perpetual desire to always balance a bad with a good.

For example, TODAY WAS A WASTE BECAUSE OF THE WAY I FELT AND ACTED. But no, of course it wasn't, because of a 1946 edition of Ladies Home Journal and dark chocolate and clever coworkers and an hour on the phone with my mom and dark, leafy night air. Today is never a waste. I noticed patterns! I am still getting to know me, it's true--after all these years. Ah, a new key to that one door in my head, you clever, intemperate girl.

The wind was at my back this afternoon. Thank god--that's how I made it home!

I'm soft today. Day three of derailing (that's where I hit the limit and come back up for air). And by soft I also mean, do you know that football sometimes makes me cry?? And the thought that I've disappointed my brother? And thinking of how I'll miss that kickass closet I painted in five or six colors when I was 15? And Beatles songs? My word.

getting better all the time

I need to learn to step on the toes that need stepping on before a month passes and it takes a crisis to realign. Thank god for crises.

I need to stand in the shower and laugh and cry because the water takes away both and I'm so glad. It is so good.

I need to breathe deep into my lungs and relive that feeling I had last night--whole. And close. And warm. And desperate.

I need to have more of the evenings of burgers and beer and ice cream and walking, sort of, in the right direction until it gets shrill and hilarious and my heart is already full before I let it get even fuller after the doorbell rings.

I need to keep saying yes when it comes to trial runs and taco salad and jojoba oil and beaded earrings. Because how lucky am I?? How lucky. How blessed.

I need... to brush my teeth and brush my hair and laugh along with the rest of the table when it comes up that the muscles in my back are almost completely devoid of tension. I know why that is.

forgiven

I get way more second chances than I deserve.

the universe delivers!

Ah, finally—here it is! An email from a colleague who used to work here and a year ago left to head the ILL department at a college thirty miles away that says this: 'Thanks, April! You rock!!' I told you I'm easy. That will work. Mood pointing back up above sea level.

the reason why:

unknown.

Maybe something to do with the way as I biked to work this morning the air smelled just like a fall hike on this one hill near my parents' house and I almost cried--really--because when my parents move in a month and a half I'll be losing things like that hill.
It's stupid. Stop caring.

Perhaps it's because I was lagging behind this morning and didn't get coffee made at home. There's a Starbucks in my building. I hated myself for standing in line.
It's stupid. It's once.

It could be something else, too, something personal. Seven years of personal. And am feeling like an ass as it starts to seep through the holes under my toes.
NOT STUPID. IT STINGS.

I am a mess of moody illogic. Stand back and watch me pretend otherwise!

please

Universe, I'm just going to put this out there: I need something from you this morning. It doesn't have to be big--my signature move is a complete 180 brought on by the smallest bit of good--but GOD, I need something. Today is not great and I am not great, and until something lands on my lap (another signature move--letting it) I will be wallowing. So I'm asking you, world, give me a hug or a slap or a quick jolt of caffeine or all three.

Saturday

I am feeling accomplished. Silly, because I'm not. Not today. I had a list of things to do, errands to run, stories to set straight. Uncheck, uncheck, uncheck. Sometimes I wake up on a Saturday and even before I get out of bed I've decided I will burrow in deep to this day. So there was none of the cleaning and none of the gathering and self-betterment. Today was more about all the different positions in which I can use my laptop from my bed without it overheating. And it was about leaving all the windows wide open to catch the change in the air and sipping coffee three hours too late in front of a brightly patterned football game on tv. And loving the voice over the phone and the ones that bleed through these walls. It was about yarn, and untying knots and setting the pattern aside because I've memorized it, and it was about minor chords on the piano keys and the sweet, resigned feeling that I'll never really understand how they work. And today was about possessive pronouns and the movie Up and having the center of my chest melt and drain down into my stomach, and it was about sibling-love (so much!) and plans for tomorrow, which will be less of a day to burrow down and more of a day to take a running leap.

9.11

That morning I was skipping class to hang out in the band room. I used to pretend it was legit by calling it a 'lesson' but I was never there to learn. Maybe I had my oboe with me, maybe I didn't. Maybe I was goofing off on one of the pianos in the back room. What I do remember is that the previous spring on the annual chorus trip to NYC my friend Amanda and I had bought matching gray t-shirts with 'New York City' embroidered on them and by chance we'd both worn the shirts that day--September 11th, 2001. An hour earlier when we'd noticed that we matched, we'd laughed about great minds thinking alike, joked about it feeling like a day for a city. When our principal's voice--even grimmer that day than it usually was--came over the loudspeaker I remember looking down at the writing on my shirt and thinking 'Shit. Amanda and I broke the city.' I just wanted to go home.

It might sound like I am again, but I'm not.

The core of my right foot is sore. Too much for six miles, I don't know. When I'm in the moment I always think, if I did one, I can do two. If I do two, I can do six. There are always things in my ears to goad me on.
I was ravenous this morning. It threw off the rest of my day. Even up to the part when I kept insisting 'I really am a nice person!' even though we both knew that, eh, some days I'm not. I was shooting. And we both know that today I was actually quite selfish. The stacks of books, I took it personally. And the empty wallet. And the hard, unforgiving surfaces I kept careening off of.
I can feel so untethered sometimes--I try to hide it, keep it off of my face, but I don't know. I think I'm much more transparent than I imagine. I was lucky tonight to have had an anchor reach out and grab onto me to keep me from drifting much further to the side. Isn't this so opposite, and so wonderful, when the anchor chases the boat?
(Whenever I use the word 'lucky' I am reminded of the way I felt last Thanksgiving, and how I learned to substitute in the word 'blessed,' and why that feeling faded by Christmas.)
(And then I think of miscarriages, of broken hearts, of that dream that just drifted away into the wind like smoke. Damnit.)

On my way home there's a stop sign I always ignore, but tonight it brought me to a full stop.

I am not complaining.

I walked this morning through thick gray rain with an umbrella that leaked on the tip of my nose.

THIS IS SO GOOD, AND

I found the perfect hole in the fabric of today to slip through. Wait, no, that comes across as escape. What I mean is, I found the way to turn this evening into a warm fleece blanket. Just now I made myself a cup of coffee, liberally doused with hazelnut creamer (I have a reason to want to stay awake) and drank it outside on a wooden chair under the full moon. I was out long enough to watch the moon drift into the edge and through the branches of our neighbor's tree. The gray cat joined me. He doesn't DO laps, but tonight he deigned to settle on mine. We listened to the cicadas and the crickets and the hum of life from the college campus two blocks away, and I thought: aha, I've discovered myself. Aha, this is the best day.

THIS IS SO GOOD, but

Yesterday I found myself dripping with symbolism and oily silver glitter.

beat beat beat

Sometimes I just love a highway, regardless of the reason I'm on it.

beat beat beat

and grass under my bare feet.

I've started to disobey again. I mean, my fingers have found their way back between my teeth. I mean, I said, I would sit on the porch with a book of poetry, and I have not.

The occasional slump in my shoulders, if you notice, is that I have lost-am losing the sense of Home... I can read so much into a silent stare. Tell me you're just tired. Again.

That, and you might catch me feeling incomplete between now and December because my bass is gone.

I'm going to start walking again next week. Rather than replace gear shift cables, or fight through the challenge (the HILLS, have mercy!), I'm going to deny that there is a problem until a solution lands on my lap (sometimes it does!).

Anyway, I have been falling into rhythms that I think I always knew were there, and am smiling with one side of my mouth even when I'm alone. It's my favorite time of year, I can shake my hair and tap my feet and be blessed. I can offer out my hands, and someone is there to take them.