I drop on the bed exhausted, my eyes drooping amidst the pages of the Witch of Portobello.
I bought the book in a wildly beating hearted frenzy of desire, pure lust, the kind that comes to you when you see there is a new book out by your favourite author, and you've never heard of it, and you didn't expect it, but still it's there and there's this ballet dancer with red hair gracefully arched away from you so you see the back of her neck and think, how vulnerable, the back of someone's neck, and you grab the book, press it to that beating heart and make your way to the counter to pay, although it costs RM69 and it's paperback, which means it should have cost less...
And then I wake up with a start, aware of the growing discomfort of a wildly beating heart, that made itself felt through my exhausted sleep, dreamless because no dream could compete with this discomfort...
And I don't want to think about work anymore...
And I wish I was in Australia again to sit down on a slightly battered park bench with Katherine and we do a free write and then we read our raw stuff out to each other and then we write again, read again, write again, read again, talk some more, play a game of Articulate and trounce the boys cos they're geeks and we're writers.
So I root around among the bookshelves because I promised Dhash I would bring a book from my former life that would tell her how to structure a proper business plan, one that we can be proud of. I told her I would bring it in today, but I forgot. And she forgot to remind me.
And then I find it, the book Angel Investing, which also tells you about how to write a business plan. And there are papers stuffed into it, papers which I take out with interest, wondering, wondering, what could have been important enough, or insignificant enough to stuff away and forget about.
There is a card to my cousin from Edelman PR. It has no stamp and now I know these papers are from the year 2000 because she was only with us for five months. In the year 2000.
And I find a bunch of questions I wrote to a telco. Way back when I used to cover telcos. Questions typed out on my PC and then printed on the Atex machine, so I could fax them through. No, it was unthinkable at the time to email them although I had had an email address for three years. Emails were for friends. Not contacts.
I started typing out the questions to show you because I thought they were funny, but then I realised they really weren't. They were dumb.
So let me leave you here, ladies and gentleman with a thought, a single thought, in all these meanderings.
Let go.
9 comments:
no.
rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I don't know ES. Maybe. But isn't it easier to just go with the flow for now?
You could be bounded up in a nutshell and count yourself the queen of infinite space, were it not that you have bad dreams.
easier? yes. but you don't seem happy.
the experience of finding those important yet insignificant, now lost, pieces of anecdote, is priceless
neat post like usual!
and i agree. let go.
Happiness is such a funny thing. I guess I have been roped in and these people are in the process of taming me.
But guess what? No insomnia...
Hello there Lemony Snickett. I love finding bits of my past stuffed away and forgotten, to read, reminisce, remember, judge and then carefully stuff away again.
Let go to give yourself a breather, then get back in there and kick butt. Giving up, giving in may be easier but it won't feed your soul; walk the fine line. And sleep is over-rated; D
When sleep is over-rated, there's always books (which unfortunately sometimes put me to sleep) and LOTR, which always moves me.
I watched the three extended versions yesterday. I would have watched them back to back if it hadn't been for the English Premier League.
I understand your need to see Australia again. When I was in England, the five-year-old granddaughter of my landlord and landlady grew attached to me. And, one fine Sunday, I asked if I could take her for lunch and a day at the park. In America, the sight of a grown man with a little girl obviously not related to him would arouse suspicion. Not England. They're still more innocent, I suppose. I took her for a hamburger and fries. We ate on a park bench, on a hill, overlooking the Victoria Park in Bath. I listened to her happy chipmunk chatter as she ate, and I looked out toward the park, toward the horizon of this beautiful, green country, and for the first time in my life, I felt my soul let go a little.
There is a part of my soul that is there still.
Jenn, I like to run across pieces of the past, too. But it always seems as if it was a different life, maybe someone elses. It's like I've lived my life in separate sequences. And most of the time, it's very easy to 'let go'.
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