supposed to be writing (#38)

... it's like

i feel like my grandmother, with a tissue crumpling and uncrumpled in my hand. except my gesture will be to wipe the shine of a lip gloss from my lips to leave a stain

my grandmother was proud, was taller than me, wore fur coats, wore glamour, held herself up straighter than me. i think she went blonde. and on me, the coat will sweep the ground

when she felt for the bits of tissue held in her bumpy hand, her big knuckles kept oversized rings in place, “don’t crack your fingers.” when she smoothed over the wrinkles of the tissue or the napkin or the wooden table, she never said she would use the tissue to dab at the corners of her mouth, her mouth gone dry from the years of trying to be heard above the clamor of everything else

i loved the blue and the green of her veins, pronounced and vital like vitality, the blue of her eyes when she laughed and the laughter was caught in the napkin. it’s like the blue of her kitchen wall, the blue of the dining room ceiling. it’s like the blue of my sandals and then some socks, now a hair tie, once a nail polish. it’s like the sea where it’s deep, it’s like the sky when it’s dark. it’s like the birds who hop mid-air from one level to the next between their adjoining bird houses. it’s like sneezing into a dandelion only to shake the blossoms from the tree nearby, their pink having fallen like snowdrops, like feathers, in a circle around the yard. it’s like being shown how the shape of a building resembles the shape of the tree, and you wonder and you can’t tell and you want to know which came first

it’s like sinking into the foam pit at a gymnastics theme party when you are seven. it’s like knowing there is an end to the jam in the jar but you can’t feel the bottom. it’s like capers, or cucumbers, or limes, or swimming in a deep pool or a small pond. it’s like stepping on a fish at the muddy bottom of a pond in indiana, or maybe it really was just a rock. it’s like the way things are now, like the way things could have been. it makes it hard to breathe

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📚 read

• “listening,” roland barthes

• steps to an ecology of mind, gregory bateson

• camera lucida, barthes

• before the coffee gets cold, toshikazu kawaguchi

• undrowned: black feminist lessons from marine animals, alexis pauline gumbs

🎥 saw

• dune (the first one)

• les glaneurs et la glaneuse, agnès varda

• visages, villages, agnès varda

💿 heard

• simulation swarm, big thief

• andromeda, weyes blood

• ratata, skrillex, missy elliot, mr. oizo

• raindrops, goldlink, flo milli

• our mother the mountain, townes van zandt

• alaska, maggie rogers

• tiny desk concert, khruangbin

🛸 did 🛸

• figured out how to add a (free) section to this newsletter! “supposed to take five mins” will be taking full - er effect this month : i’m going to try to really hold myself to writing daily until the practice takes root. so please only subscribe if you want sporadically timed but approximately daily posts from me, and please take a look whenever you feel like it otherwise.