Another time
I’ve been writing a lot, elsewhere. I mean to start with this excuse like you are looking for one. I mean to say this as a way of explaining why you haven’t heard from me in a while. It is not because I stopped writing. It is because I am writing elsewhere.
I also mean to tell you that I’ve been writing to other people, like you might put up a fight, even though I actually know you wouldn’t. I mean to tell you I still think around the clock, but I can think with other people.
I’ve been trying to quit smoking since August. I mean I have been trying to quit smoking since 2021, after I resumed, after I quit, after I started smoking in high school. But I took it really seriously as of August. That’s when I first made an appointment to see a smoking cessation specialist. I’ve talked about her briefly here before. She’s the one who told me to inundate myself with nicotine lozenges. Guess what. It worked. I have only had one cigarette in the last month.
A rabbit revisited me after a twelve year sojourn. Her lunar new year is around the corner. The rabbit was the first zodiac my husband and I got to celebrate together. He took me to Julien on 1st Avenue for lapin à la créme. I thought that was funny. Eating our mascot. Twelve years after seeing my path written in the leaves, I found a book that changed my life, in the front display of a bookstore where I’d gone looking for “Sleepless Night.” The Hardwick book, I ordered online instead.
I woke up with a cold after playing a show in the Icebox. How funny. The feeling in my face has taken me back a few decades, perhaps 24, 28 years back. I’m now in high school, college. I went to college. How about that. I see colors with the eyes that chose them in the 1990s, in 2021, in 1984. In a memory of traveling through parts of California where nobody looked like me. I was curious about how people were made attractive to each other. What makes you attractive to people.
I have a child now who believes my kisses heal his boo-boos. How long will that last.
We cannot let little Anne feel lonely.
I wonder if you would be as impressed with my feelings as I am by the color of leaves, the sound of an embarrassed canopy of trees waiting for time to stop. I keep waiting for time to stop and bump into rabbits on the way.
