(http://www.athenaeum-hotel.com)
What I am avoiding: getting a haircut, the telephone, poetry, paperwork, cleaning out my office, apartment listings, decisions, salads.
What I am embracing: coffee, curly hair, pink cardigans, documentaries, sleep, fiction, making lists, breaking them.
I am tired of living in a kind of stasis where nothing gets changed or done. I am tired of writing two pages a day and being content with that, of making a day of doing laundry and cooking dinner and cleaning up from dinner –that should not be the sum of a day; that should be only elements in a universe of other things.
I am tired of trucks and garbage, this hot city.
I am dreaming of my porch in Michigan, shady, blue-painted boards, the yellow house. The plum tree was dying and we never got around to the garden, but there were days of watching the sun dye my legs. There were nights of grilled lamb and portobellos and red wine and writing. Mixed tapes drifted out from the kitchen. We went to matinees and Goodwill and drank mojitos with mint from the driveway so sweet they made my teeth ache. A summer passed that way, and I didn’t know at the time what it was, what it would mean.
I once heard a food critic say: the good thing is out there. If you have had it once, you can find it again.
Where is the landscape I have seen in magazines? Where is the life I dreamed had a name? I am trying, I am trying to write you into existence.