tasteful triumphs

and with that said, a noted letter:

july 24 2:47pm -

things have been better than prior. miami is more and more a nice getaway for me. i wish i were writing more - and by that i mean, the june story i was writing seems to be at a standstill. i am sure once i am tucked back in my hole in manhattan, i will be able to resume it. but part of me does feel indifferent to the story or maybe, rather the stories' characters. i guess that is when fictitious autobiography makes the transformation into fiction (a less controlled attachment). tonight i am going for drinks with someone i met on my birthday. he seems profound... and older. who knows. i shall see. hopefully the spark is still in me. my room has been nothing but less things and candles aflame, always. very soothing. very romantic. all my kisses have been soft. every time i go out i live in the moment and fewer things exist. these are all achievements... for me at least. cannot wait to hear more of your stories. be assertive. intimidation is beauty. i have been wearing your ring always. i love you.

there were a few subtle shifts i wished would take place while away from manhattan. most all of me - though probably not entirely rational - did not want to return until i let myself go, felt a bit lighter and could breathe out more consistently. all of these hopes seem like vague ideas, i suppose, but they were important to me - are important to me - and perhaps, they are the small tribulations i struggle with. i know things are not easy, but maybe all interiors and exteriors are easy, and it is nothing but the willpower of our mind that builds them into extremities that seem out of our control and at times, can chip away out our heart - making us feel fragile and weaker. or maybe it is just the opposite. maybe "things" are easier than we imagine, and we do not believe it to be so because we do not think it can/to be. how much of our life is dictated by our self-decided reasons? i believe most of it is all mental - sickness, energy, capacity. but still, i do not deny thinking that this too does not make it any easier. who cares to be troubled by these thoughts though? the best choice is to get on with it and just go, spend your time with moments that will be most memorable for you. i know that much of my day time is spent finding a place of perspective and writing from a point. as a result, i spend more time with faces during the night and all in all, although i feel like my mind is available for a relationship - i see that i cannot and at this point (for the last year) have not wanted to be physically present to the extent most relationships require. in mind i can be, but in body i do not want to be stolen from the work i am at the time consumed by and more concentrated on (quite selfishly or quite personally). this may be an excuse? a fear? or just the simple situation that in a few months i will be applying to graduate school for writing - and it has not been until this summer that i have actually taken a workshop and craft course - and have much, much much i need to work on, write out and strengthen. the rest will follow and the low points will be remembered for being slip ups, but their pain will not be able to felt in the future. (life does melt together, making you into one being composed of multitudes). everything will move on, and i will be nostalgic that the time did not take longer or be sensed more slowly.

the above letter of fragments does contain a dose of my recent triumphs though - successes that i strove to experience more frequently since my being here. a friend sent me a message an hour before my turning twenty-one saying, "you're going to feel different at midnight...i promise you." at first, i may have felt like the idea was overstated and promised to be the case when anyone turned twenty one but it did not take much time before i felt like she had been right - in some hidden corner, there was much depth within the idea of experiencing a difference. (and presently, more than i can remember, i feel something new - that is all i can say - as if my will went out of me, as if i had a stubbornness and it was melting -eudora welty). ever since middle school i have promised every holiday (birthdays included) that i would begin taking baths. in my first piece of writing, i wrote this (and for this i know, the idleness of a bath always meant something larger to me).

I spent hours in the bathtub fictionalizing my current existence for a novel I was writing at the time. Everyone thought it was autobiographical; I just thought I existed somewhere in all I created, you just had to find me. Did you know that if you submerge your whole body beneath a steady bath, as if you were drowning, you can hear your heartbeat inside of you? I have never felt so close to myself.

but i never took them. i never even really tried to let myself just be still in the hope of guaranteeing calmness. but since my twenty first birthday, i have now taken almost a handful of baths. add a few drops of oil and i promise, your skin will never feel smoother. yesterday was the warmest bath i have ever taken in my life. my skin initially being bitten by pain and then having grown adjusted, descending down until i could see the reflection of all that laid on the top surface of the bath. (i believe, a woman feels most womanly if a bath is shorter than her body, allowing a foot to dangle off the left shoulder of the tub). mint shampoo massaged into my hair and washed out by the strongest cool of running water. the busy crackling of bubbles, like rice krispies cereal in a bowl of milk. these are all easy sensations you can rely on. laying there languid, i thought about the prior day (in the hospital parking lot - it was to my surprise, i was visiting a family friend's just born baby boy. the entire drive over, i had some idea that we were visiting my dad's sick client). i remembered myself outside the delivery room window, as an unexpected guest, and becoming overwhelmed by this baby i had not known had been born. his skin, flushed, almost like a bruise and with the fullest set of hair compared to any newborn in sight. i just kept staring with trembling eyes, trying so very hard not to cry over a life that was brand new. "what is his name?" the nurse mouthed - once, twice, three times - no one was answering, so i said with my hand against the glass, "dylan. his name is dylan." and she held him up, just as seen in films and in imagination, but with more casualty as if for her, the raising of a baby to the glass was something she had seen and done hundreds of times before. last night at dinner, a woman reached over asking me, "is your sister this engaging?" i laughed, trying to make light of a compliment i had by no means expected, saying oh, do you mean by my rings? raising my wedding finger in the air. "no, i mean it. you are so easy to speak to. a real lady." all at once, it came to me, how similar these three moments were and how entirely special. the bath because i had always expected myself to take them and now i finally was following through with a small gesture. the baby at the hospital because i had in no way expected myself to be there and to feel so taken with sudden emotion, as if my heart was being unglued and lifted. and the woman's comment because for what feels like multiple impossible months, i hoped for my social confidence and self to come back to life but have feared the solitude would prevent it from being the case. life has to be lived for the small slices that you can taste.