les reves en francais

recently I've been dreaming in french. I've been thinking in it too... this morning I made pancakes (a new recipe that was quite delicious, perhaps I'll post it) but as I was moving through the quiet morning kitchen, I found myself thinking my sentences in french.

I'll tell you about the dream.
It concerned the boy I was in love with for a solid two years.
I was walking through the halls of my elementary school- a hundred year old brick building with secrets only children could discover- it had a beautiful library. Circular, with a dome and tall french doors that looked out into a circular patio and courtyard. It was autumn and I was wearing a white dress with a blue ribbon in my hair, like I would have when I was 5, but I was older. It was afternoon and the sun came through the red and yellow leaves and through the french doors to me on my window seat with my book. Boxes and bookshelves were all around me, tall and crowding over me comfortably. I was alone. And I was safe.

Then he came out of nowhere and I jumped up. I told him it was time for me to move on and his eyes turned down at the edges. He told me "Mais, je t'aime maintenent. Comment pouvais-tu ne voir pas?" and he held me. But I didn't look at him. Only at the sun through the window through the leaves and how the whole world was yellow and warm. And then he left.

this song was playing

the long road back

I haven't posted in a while and I'm sorry about that.

My good friend's father died very suddenly and tragically last Thursday and we were all left in shock for a bit. He was a very good man. So getting back to where we were before has been a journey.

You never know when you'll be picked up by fate and deposited somewhere else. It takes so long to get back to what you thought you knew. Sometimes you never really make it back, but you settle somewhere else and that becomes comfortable until you are picked up again.

It makes you think- if you were taken by surprise, where would you wake up the next morning?

If anything could happen? If you could be anywhere?

(Movie from here)

Where would you wake up?

blueberry love

I still remember that summer we met.
It was the time I first found a voice of my own.
You might have had something to do with it, or you might not have.
I'll never know. Do you remember me at all from those blueberry months?
I saw you on stage that first night-
I misheard your name- but you always stood out.

Did you see me? I'd show off in front of you.
Glance over and blush when you only walked by.
If I happened to sit near you by chance, by lucky accident,
I could feel you like electricity through the humid air.
Every part of me was aware of you sitting close enough to reach out and touch.
But I doubt if you ever saw me.

I was so so in love with you that summer we were 12 together.
And every summer after that. Each and every summer.
Did you ever know? I imagined you did and you'd come sweep me off my feet.
You never did, but did you know?

You beat me every bout, but did you ever see my face behind the wire mesh mask? I can still remember how it felt to want to speak with you so bad. Just to want your look. I think I became friends with everyone around you, your sisters, but never you. Funny how that worked out. Now we're the best of friends and miles away. I won't second guess things. I'll just wait until I can tell you. If that's another 5 summers, so be it. I'll be right there with blueberry stains on my knees.

(photos are mine from that summer)

easy as spotting

(photos)

I am sick again unfortunately, but the sickness is preferable to a double period of physics which I would have had today, so I don't hate it with all my heart (just the part that wants to dance)

you know who the dancers are because they may be too sick to go to school, but never too sick to go to class. Now the attempt will be to convince Maman that I do have my priorities straight after all...


Sitting in my bed, my sky is silver like an old man's hair- somber, not sad. The bare trees wait and if I look at the ivy, not the melting snow, I can almost convince myself that it's the end of March and I've made it through the coldest, darkest months.

It's a trick I have to play with my mind- a simple parlour illusion, like spotting a turn in ballet. I hang on to the dregs of autumn for as long as I can look back as the world spins, and then when I can reach no further- release- and snap my head around like an elastic, and there we are in spring.
With this I can trick time.

...it might just work...

dear dorian

I'm in the process of reading A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, have you ever read it? I've taken to carrying it with me wherever I go (a bit silly, no?) but I cannot release it.

I wish I could crawl into the pages of the world he paints
oh Mr. Wilde will you take me away into the labyrinth of your imagination?
We could get lost, you and I, in Basil's garden

and kiss the bees as they slumber past.
We'd never get old because
you would keep me immortal in your mind
and though I should end up jealous of a portrait,
we two could conquer the world with words and flowers.



"Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don't frown. You have. And Beauty is a form of Genius- is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty, It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! . . . Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you."

photos

January 2

January 2

come back come back to the world today- I didn't quite want to, but figured now was as good a time as any...

the tripping piano downstairs will make it a bit easier.
watch the fingers tumble and play back and forth back and forth.
they are confined to such a tiny space but
how many different melodies come from these restrictions?

I brushed up my room today- finally hung those shadowboxes I made a while ago... and fixed the ribbon on the typewriter in the corner. do you like?

photos are mine

you and me

Happy New Years!!

Where did the days go?
They danced away on pretty patterned feet and you and me
we watched them turn into thin pink clouds on the horizon
that day the stars came down.

We've grown older you and I and the pretty spiral shells under the tree
are cracked with cold but in the corner of the sky
is that piece of sparkly stone you gave
me still shining shining shining.




You and me we'll dance through this new year
and the boats way out at sea will slip back to us across the ice
before we sleep so we'll always know.



I know it because you told me I never had to cry.