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Love Is Real

February 11, 2015 in Cat Lady Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

Whether or not I’m in a relationship, I have become rawther cynical about the possibilities of romantic love–so much so that the other day I gave a mean little shove to two teens with entwined tongues who were blocking a subway door. But Elizabeth Alexander’s New Yorker elegy for her husband doubles as a testimony to what two people can offer each other in the name of clear-hearted intimacy. Of a dream she had a few years after his death, she writes:

I look back. I look back. I can still see him, smiling and waving me on.
It was the two of us walking the road and now he has let my hand go.
I walk. I can always see him. His size does not change as I move forward: like me, he is five feet nine and a half, exactly right. I can still feel the feel of my hand in his hand as I walk. I wake and the room is flooded with pale-yellow light.

This essay is the most beautiful thing I have read in a very long time. It is so beautiful and so lovingly, piercingly true that, though I still think successful marriages are less attainable than Greta Garbo (now), I am once again grateful that they can exist.

A Sometimes Snag of Sola Ladyhood

January 25, 2015 in Cat Lady Matters, Quoth the Raving, Sabboytical

Says Elaine Blair in her review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline:

We come to feel an intimacy with [single lady protagonist] Faye that has nothing to do with disclosure; though we know conspicuously little about her, we share with her the experience of listening to others, and, as we do so, it becomes clear that a certain kind of conversation is missing from Faye’s days and nights. No one speaks to her in the casual shorthand of daily intimacy.

Says I: Comes with the turf, though a Turf of One’s Own is still worth it.

I, an Alarm

January 22, 2015 in Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Language Matters, Quoth the Raving

Ever since I moved my bed next to the window, the first thing I do upon waking is open the curtain. Then, settled against the pillows, I join the sun as she slowly rises, drifting back from the heavens where we’ve both been traveling all night. After decades of living in New York, I’ve become so attuned to my environs that my mood shifts right along with the indigo streaking into violet into rose into orange across the sky. Outside is inside, and on most mornings I find that fact beautiful.

I’ve had a melancholy week. My birthday was a disappointment and that was mostly my fault, which only makes me more melancholy. But each day brings a new sun, and I’m just easy enough to let her magic work on me. Tonight helped, too. I was crowded into a rush-hour subway, ogling a woman’s mermaid afro and fuming over a man standing too close, when I spotted a Poetry In Motion sign that was like another glimpse from my predawn bedroom window. The poem nailed the aloneliness* that develops when you are unwilling to mingle your sourness with others’, and reading it among so many strangers’ private smells and worries made me feel grasped by something better than my past. As did the quiet blue rooms to which I was gliding and which I’d built myself. It was the sweet knowledge I could begin again. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy