Indiana has a certain yellowness in the fall.  I’ve never seen an autumn so muted, although I’ve only lived in two places for this time of year.  I remember how much I hated Indiana, the flatness, the feeling of insecurity you get from endless straight lines and expanses of land and sky and the lack of any differences to keep you from floating away.  What I wanted was mountains and hills, to break up all the solid lines and keep me grounded and prevent me from blowing far far away into the matte scenery.

But in Indiana there is no claustrophobia.  Everything is open to you and honest; it has nothing to hide and therefore has no need for lies.  So very linear, and safer than I originally thought.

It’s a shy place too.  The yellowness.  The autumns of my past are rich with intensity, with expensive reds and oranges giving away their green for free.  There’s an excitement on the stage of the hills; the colours dance where I come from.  Gracefully, beautifully; elegant but without a hint of snobbishness or spoiled, put-on airs.

In Indiana, the land is afraid to stick out.  Even the sky covers itself with a thin grey muslin, so that even on its bluest fall days, you are aware that the hue is holding back.  Nothing dances.  The trees huddle together in their little yellowed cliques and would never dream of performing.  Everything is the same, the straight roads, the flat corn and soybean fields, the stretched, veiled sky.

And like the wallflower at the party who is afraid of a too-pretty dress or too shy to say anything but “hello,” Indiana grows on you.  Maybe it goes no deeper and has nothing to hide, but you begin to love it–maybe because of that.

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Somehow talking about love–whatever it is–fits in here.

It is so nice to find someone who loves nearly the same way I do.  With an edge of fear you attempt to hide in every step.  With a desire to make the other happy, a desire that is dangerously strong and causes you to lose yourself in the fear and the trying and the focus on what SOMEONE ELSE WANTS.  I see this in him and hear my own words coming out of his mouth, unbidden, and I think my god I UNDERSTAND you, I know who you are!  You are so much of me in that different little shell of yours.

And this is why I am here with my tattooed, beer-loving, swear-like-a-sailor, solid little man.  Because we may be so different in our lives and our thoughts and our pasts and our families, but there is a familiarity of feeling there, of the emotion under all of that.  Serious or not, full of future or not, I am here with him, because somehow he makes everything simpler for me.  Somehow, with our similarities deep inside, we are balancing.

I’m too old now; he loves better than I do.  I remember how that used to feel.  Full and sharp: a pang of love in the heart. 

I can’t give much of myself anymore, and he knows this and sticks around anyway.  I keep a tight fist on myself and my independence–always have–and he knows this, and instead of trying to pry open my fingers or force me to open them myself (while he waits), he slips sweetness into the other hand and says talk to me baby if you’re sad talk to me I’ll take care of you.  I expect nothing from the future of these things anymore, and he knows this and says we’re happy now let’s keep doing what we’re doing.
We may be crazy, I say, trying to love like this.
It may be a lunatic you’re looking for, he says.
I don’t know what love is anymore, I say, I don’t know if I can do it.
That’s ok, he says.
I do know you make me smile and feel better, I say.
Maybe that’s love, he says.

I can’t say I melted
but I got lost a little
in your warmth
(still am, a little)
in the taste of your
minutes-ago cigarettes
rum and cokes
in the way you
bit my lip
sucked out all the slippery words
I’d been tripping over all evening
worrying, like I always do.
you don’t have to love me,
you said. I’m not asking you to;
just be with me right now.

And I was.
(still am)

I realize now that what I would’ve been waiting for was for you to grow older.

Goodbye, I say.  You be you and I’ll be me.  These things are beautiful.

Mel: [disappointed] Aw, who did tomatoes today?
Sharla: Uh, Mike did, I think.
Mel: I could tell it wasn’t you. I love your tomatoes.

What an awful day I had until this tiny compliment.  Not that the day was suddenly cheery, but less awful.

I am a simple girl.

I like writing on things. It doesn’t matter if they are made of paper, wood, metal, or skin.  It adds a value, a breath that wasn’t there before. 

A big, black beetle landed on my bedside lamp the other night, not that far from where I was reading.  I didn’t kill him or shoo him away because he is just as ugly and interesting as I am.

I didn’t sleep on the plane from Detroit to Amsterdam.  The flight was eight hours and through the night; everyone else around me had pulled out their tissue-like plane pillows and thin plane blankets and left the plane, unconscious.  The girl beside me lay down, taking up three seats as she curled around herself, a snake, smoke.  I was awake.  I alone was awake, sitting rigidly in the soft glow of in-flight movie screens yet to be turned off.

For some reason, I was thinking half in French. Ceci, c’est tout. C’est tout et mon couer est fatigué. Tout est temporaire et je peux le sentir, j’ai pensé.  I thought this like I have thought it so many times before, except this time, on a plane miles above the ocean, taking me to exciting things I was not excited about, I felt it more profusely than any other time in recent memory.  When you realize your mortality, when you realize your fragility, insignificance, and your habit of lying to yourself about such things, the world around you changes.  Ah ha!  See, there it is again!  The world, of course, does not change, though you like to tell yourself that it does.  It is you.

When you realize your mortality, your world shrinks and grows.  You shrink and grow.  I am losing the feeling as I type, so I must now throw in the metaphor before I lose it all completely: you feel the world the way a fish-eye lens must feel its images.  Pinched and stretched, all at the same time, knowing full well that it is not quite to scale.  And really, quite more interesting that way.

So I didn’t sleep.  When I tried, I only managed to blacken my tissue-pillow with my damp understanding.

(The train of thought begins to trail away.  Track away?)

Sometimes I feel just so young.  I look back at things I was thinking/doing/saying even 2, 3 years ago, and I think: I’ve grown so much since then.  Soon I’ll be looking this moment in the same way.  It’s been the same thing for all of us, individually and as a whole species.

Sometimes I feel just so dissatisfied.  I look at what I’ve done, what I’m doing and I think: it’s not enough.  No world, life, or creation is ever enough.  And I also think: GOOD!  This keeps me from giving up!  It keeps the fire and thunder inside, keeps the explosions from ever stopping.  Hello world, I will never be completely satisfied with you or myself, and I accept this and, in this, am satisfied.

Who can create when he has nothing to express?  Who can be anything when he has never been nothing, has never realized that he is no one?

circumlocution 

[sur-kuhm-loh-kyoo-shuhn] –noun

———–

“I say goodbye because he … you know apple tree?  There is bud, flower, little green apple, then big red apple?  Yes.  I say goodbye because he was little green apple.”

– my Czech friend Marcela before I taught her “immature.”

I almost wish I hadn’t taught her the word.  Her original expression implies so much more potential. 

I am wondering about the future, thinking about the past.  I am laughing and crying and feeling and being good.  I’ve found a person I only started to discover a while ago, but somehow lost.  Here I am and although I am sometimes broken, I am good and I am me.  I have remembered that my windows are wide and set in strong walls, and that houses normally fall if you try to lean them against rootless trees.

I don’t physically run very often, but I use other muscles quite excessively.