Fridays

Certain languorous afternoons can seem as if they last an eternity. It seems as though all of your conversations are fragments, pieces of an incomplete puzzle. If I say to someone that my plant does not look well, I’m not even sure if the plant doesn’t look well, or if it looks reasonably well given the circumstances, or whether it is dead, or whether I mean that it lacks sunlight or water, when what I really mean to say is that the plant lacks a certain will to live, that the water and the lights are fine, but it feels strange to tell someone that you blame it on the plant. I’ve been told that only human beings take their own life, but you haven’t seen this plant.

This is not what I meant to say. I meant for this to be about continuity, linearity and change. I meant to tell you about the third side of an isosceles triangle, how beautiful it is that we know that third side. What strange two words those are, to know. What could they possibly mean?

That isn’t what I meant to write either. It is as though I spend my days sitting down to a painting, splashing shades of purple in a corner, as if drawing a sunset or a sunrise, or hills in the distance, but I can never quite tell what I intended, because I have moved on so quickly to the next easel, where my colors have been arrayed for a moment. I’m speaking of stillness.

I am restless by nature, given to fits of intense thinking that leave me wandering through the afternoon light, feeling as if I’m floating past a sea of faces. And I can’t help but think how strange is that there is so much distance between us, these people and I. When I’m writing fiction, my characters are always troubled by all the untold stories of that sea of faces. In life, I realize, I am troubled more by the fact that they don’t know me. This is a gross sort of thought, not surprising, given our own cultural obsession with fame.

I don’t mean to confuse things though I am often confused, which makes it difficult to avoid. I think, or think I think, the construction of thought sometimes confuse me. Like, I can’t think “bee buzzle diggle” because it is nonsense. When I think bee, I think of its slight hum, and a screen porch that it bangs into listlessly, or one of those slow motion camera shots that captures a bee, strangely arachnid looking in close angles, pollinating a flower. What I meant to say is that I want to be known, though this is a kind of impossibility as I always seem on the verge of change, and what I want on a Tuesday morning at nine may not be what I want on Saturday at 3.

Most of this is silly. I meant for this to be  an essay about distraction, about the need for stillness. I’m not a curmudgeon. In fact, I’m an adherent, but as I walked around in the warm air I was jealous of the people sitting on benches, or stone steps, talking with one another in postures suggestive of long and attentive listening. I imagined a bottle of wine to improve the scene, but I left everything else in place, the sun lazy on the steps, trees bending slightly in the slight breeze. Tomorrow morning I’m going to rise early. I’ll wake before everyone and devote myself to silence. But you see, I am so tired that I’ll probably sleep til noon.