Last night at sunset the light painted the bellies of the clouds red-gold against a blue blue sky. I remembered the sky was just that color on Rosh Hashana three years ago, when I was walking to the bus stop (full of grief and not-belonging and confusion) and found a shrub with a pomegranate growing on it! I thought it was an ornament, but it was real. I wanted to steal it, but I thought the people who lived in the house would be sad. Later I saw it on the ground. I hope the squirrels enjoyed it.
Today the clouds were big puffy towers, glaring white against a deep blue sky, with rain-grey sections and smeary thunderhead-shaped swooshes around them. You could almost watch them grow, billowing up fatter by the second. They were beautiful, but so big it made my throat close up a little bit.
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Health insurance.
Not getting fat shamed even though I picked a random doctor because I couldn't breathe and needed the first person available. Passionfruit La Croix. I am thinking about community and how we can form community without even knowing each other; when I go to my physical therapy appointment on Thursday, I'm going to have a massive crowd of fabulous fat bitches in my head cheering me on to ever greater heights of fat bitchery (i.e., being willing to accept nothing less than being treated like a human being).
The waxing moon was a faint white sickle in the pale blue evening, then a bold silver curve snugged up against the grey bulk of the moon painted with reflected earthlight, hanging in the deepest darkest blue sky, and finally a huge yellow blade low on the black horizon
Yesterday I went out on the porch, exhausted and squinty after a day inside, and the air was full of golden light. The sun shone through the leaves on the tree next door, painting them electric, glowing, springy yellowgreen, with just a few leaves at the edges starting to turn and glow red, like the inside of a tulip, that red red that hurts to look at and can't possibly be real, and the world was perfectly balanced between spring and autumn.
I was sitting on my bed, and a cold wind blew hard into my window and onto my feet.
I went out and stood on the porch, full dark at an hour that a few months ago would have been just barely golden. I put my palms flat against the wet wooden railing and smelled water everywhere as the rain tapped comfortably in the metal downspout next door and remembered how beautiful the moon was during those oven-hot, smoky summer days. Even the night that I could hardly breathe, when it was the color of blood and I shut the curtains against it because I was scared, because it wasn't fun anymore. We are so tough, and also so fragile, and today I am alive, and there is a blessedly cool wind blowing into my window, full of the smell of water. Today I was standing in an elevator and went "bing" and the sound tasted like holding a small, flattened oval of a brass bell in my mouth.
Fat dance class started again, and my knee hurt a lot. I decided that I love fat dance and my knee enough to go be mean right back to some physical therapists if they are mean to me. I was too cold walking back to my car after fat dance, and it felt luxurious. In an hour and a half, I will be forty years old. It's still real hard to be a person, to be vulnerable, to be scared and angry a lot of the time, to figure out how to care for myself and be part of a community. But I'm proud of all these years I've collected. I did a pretty good job. The air quality has improved a lot, and we can open the windows and turn on the fans. It is cool in the house for the first time since last Friday, maybe. I still have a headache and a scratchy throat from all the forest fire particulates, but I feel like I'm swimming in cool water on a hot day (oh, the Gorge!), and I can breathe. I'll take it.
I am sitting in the living room of my house, and we cannot open the windows because of the smoke, which is awful because it is so hot. And yet for some reason I am feeling safe and content. I just realized that I'm feeling better mostly because we've figured out how to turn on the fan part of the furnace without the heat, and I find the sound of the fan incredibly soothing.
When I was a child, I had terrible nightmares, and terrible insomnia as a result, and I would lay in bed waiting for the fan of the central air to come on. The sound of it soothed me, and I could only go to sleep when it was on. It often cycled off before I could get all the way from waking to sleep, and I would lay there wakeful, waiting for it to come back on. It feels like safety, luxury even, that I get to listen to it all night long. |
AuthorBitter Water
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June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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