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8.29.07

So grateful to be going. So grateful to be doing this work. I’m doing the thing I love most in the world, I said to cousin Darcy as we walked in the late sun to California Street where the chartered bus was waiting. And why should you ever stop? Was her response. Behind us a well dressed group of Scholars chatted and ambled there too. The net of trolley lines across the sky which was colored as abalone in the twilight, as the burgeoning of constellations when I pressed down on my eyes. Knocked out as I rarely am, enough to sleep on planes, I watched the world diagonalize for a stop motion show of seconds. At the Tavern on the Green, myriad mirrored hallways and security personnel.

S and I ate at a diner close to the Orchard Hotel. I was talling him that I don’t need another person to interpret for me and so I am not religious, though spiritual. That’s when he smiled and said he loved getting to know me better. He spoke of the french woman he fell in love with all that time ago. He said the girl who broke his heart in high school is still a dear friend he sees—it never goes away, he said to me. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. At the Asian Art Museum I wandered between jade jewels wondering whether to fight it. The snobby flight attendant guy is backing his way down the aisle knocking his fists together in the universal gesture.