among the torn silks of phrase

music: much more than that, sharon van etten
mood: and nothing but

"everyplace has its own energy; tension. here (halifax, nova scotia), it arguably arises from the fact its on a coast, an edge. this is a borderland
between
land and sea, which is not just a geographic reality but a
psychological reality too - a state of
being
in between (sometimes stuck, other times secure)."

*

when i sat down to draw you a memory map of my city (such an ownership after all these few years...) the intersections blurred into a tangled lattice of hows & whys & each and every ignorant instance of a when. i sat there puzzled with the september-raw pencil, the blank page (there have been so many blank pages, flat & lazily, expectantly waiting), unable to attempt such a delicate cartography. do you want my memory-places or my remembrance of the measurements? and how can i describe the geography of such an amalgamation? such a distance?


and the truth is there were some things i never meant to give away. now i am standing before the refrigerator hum of creativity, with the aluminum foil folded around the grilled fiddleheads & the cheese made by your art-student husband (how 'the shape of jazz to come' and the sound of listening drifts in from the front room turntable) i discover the leftover pieces all my own. objects that i know instantly and so well: a photograph of the peony-tree from the house where i grew up, some of the delft blue tiles a. & i so carefully portioned out like a game of (as the german sea captain announced at last night's party) 'x-s & o-s.' that was almost a hundred years ago. there are two glass ladybugs, paired together on the corner of a postcard and finally, a mosaic from firenze in the shape of a heart. these were the things that i never meant to give away but in the mishmash of migration, of time & streets travelled, they have ended here; on your refrigerator somewhere north of north street and west from the place where i live. i think of telling you this -- of demanding, or begging the recollection of these small monuments but i do not. i am relieved, here in the weathering, to finally have such tangible & fierce signs of loss.

75% apricot, 25% plum.

there is a growing & shared sense that h. has correctly identified as the beginnings of ambivalence. we are learning the business of adulthood, which consists mostly of understanding ourselves as arbitrary self-creatures, done school & feeling profoundly untethered (we are all, in our ways, seeking out reasons for persistence or departure). the periphery suddenly sharply in focus; our actions & decisions becoming the calibrated measure of our own self-worth & wellbeing. importance.

the definition of home: a place where you have settled (a person, object, thought, architecture or melange of these things) already the taste of your tongue. so easily explained; anything it is possible to classify & can be (is willing to be) named. it is also the generous plenty of an interlocking pattern by escher, cold open leaves in the teapot, wet clay. muscle memory. the equidistant simplicity living in the gesture of return.