Building a fire, I was building a small fire and was asked to proof-read, honest opinion, some prose that this guy had written. Are you sure, ok, but you're not going to like what I have to say. This confessional writing of my ironic ex-boyfriend, it's just so-so.
Reading it while walking across the irrigated fields was, however, an exciting challenge. "Do you know your fields have flooded?" I asked the mild-mannered caretaker. My little old car is parked way back there, can I leave it for awhile? I found the backyard with all the stray cats that I could cut through to get to the other side which was important because I'm to keep moving.
In the meantime, the lady of the house invited me inside to look at the rooms available for rent. Two-story Victorian house, rambling, country. I gathered a small pile of dry grass, some old driftwood I broke into pieces, see how easy, the materials are all right here, while he, the looming breathing romantic dark fellow, watched. "I'm going to show you how to build a fire," it's all in the layering, and we kissed. There is more than one kind of fire, more than one way to keep moving ahead.
Showering, scrubbing my body with kosher salt mixed with honey and grapefruit oil, I think about lists of answers and no questions, lists of questions with no answers, and floating unattached. Thinking of how my dog was my connection to the world through my animal instinct: my Toto who pulled the curtain back, and how now it's the river. How cell phone & digital cameras have helped people indulge in narcissism and take hundreds of self-portraits, how the self-portrait is a stand-in for relationships? Instead of action pointed out it's action pointed in. "If I take enough pictures of myself I must be real." The culture of self, simulacrum. As if it's enough, a friendship that's comprised of sexual inneundo and self-aggrandization, virtual, clean.
I'm thinking of the gap between this and that I will not name, the yearning rope-swing, the crossing-over a big terrain of marsh and mystery. The desire I feel in my body is real, my body is real I guess. I had to throw out the flowers; that rotting-flower smell. Flashes of grocery shopping in the proletariat outskirts of Prague, which I loved more than the romantic Mala Stranya anyway, the bakery with the apricot pastry, the tram line and newspapers. I remember bottle rockets over the canal in Cheb, men in hats made of newspaper, a ferris wheel of tin swans. I remember dancing alone and it was wonderful. Those long train tracks, fog, coins. Bells are ringing in the air around my head, I love bells almost more than anything.
