It's not a big part of me. But it comes. Today it came at lunch, a perfectly lovely lunch in a perfectly lovely room, a room out of an L.M. Montgomery novel, a sun room, tall wide windows, the trees outside crisping yellow, the lawns wide and green. Men in golf clothes, sweaters and caps, strolling. Everything white, or orange, or yellow. Or England. Fall, fall, fall. In the midst of a perfectly lovely conversation, pineapple on plates, cooling tea, sadness came up in my throat. I swallowed it. I kept it down. It was only a moment. In that moment, it swelled up like a wave.
A wave is how I will think of it. It crests, it gets bigger, and then it goes down. I return to the conversation. I return to my life, which is good. I return to my love, who is good. I return to the city. I listen to salsa music on the drive. I know the way, though I don't understand the words.
This summer it broke my seawall, it rushed into the town of me. I let it.
It is a wave. All waves meet their rocks. All waves go down. I am a rock. It will not go through me. It will not pass through.
I came home and changed into jeans and the most perfect green sweater, a green so pure and soft I have moth-proofed my entire wardrobe out of fear: fancy dresses in garment bags, lavender satchels tucked in the pocket of jackets, moth balls in the folds of sweaters. There are no screens on the windows, so I fear. It is a sweater that makes me feel all right about aging. It makes me feel I will one day be a forty year-old woman who wears soft green sweaters. Who smells of cinnamon, who knows how to cook, who cuts flowers, who has long, thick dark hair with silver fingers. I'll be the woman who walks out to the car. I'll be the woman with a desk at the window. I'll be the woman who waits up. I'll be the woman who wears your ring.
I need a project.
Dr. Blythe, from whom I hid so long that I was writing this, out of fear, out of worry, who now has become my biggest supporter (one week, Dr. Blythe) thinks I should turn these entries into a book. I don't know exactly how to, though I think I want to.
How to order, arrange. I never learned to sew, although I wanted to. I glued skirts together. You could tell by the darkness at the seams, the glue bleeding through.
It was the story of my life, and I don't want it to be. I want it to be just a story.
Would you read that, if it came?
