On Being in the Club
We bought plants from Home Depot, but didn’t read the instructions, or didn’t consider the windows of our apartment, and the frond burnt, and the lily burnt, and the fig in the pot is now by the bay window.
Outside, the daffodils yawn for Wordsworth, and a bumblebee erases 10 words on the page of the book I’ve stopped reading to watch it. She rubs the pollen off her antenna, so she can smell and see and feel the buds and flowers asking for help to reproduce. What a wingwoman!
I went to the club with sunglasses. I ducked for the lasers and rose with the fog. I liked the songs that sang like jungle. The guy who took Alana’s room and lived in it for three months, before Tom moved in (with the piano and hanging plants that would drip water and sometimes fall), had Prada sunglasses. One night the guy left to go to the club, then came back a second later, for the Prada sunglasses. At the time, I thought this was funny.
Today, I see it as serious. What are my Prada sunglasses? Where is my club?
The volume of life astounds me. How events pile and pile. We move through time and are made of what made us, but the memories of the making are not always there. Another way to say this: I am me, but I don’t know why. There is so much to consider, and not enough ways to set things straight, and writing is one, beads of words on a string stretching into the future.
The Buddhists would nudge me toward awareness, which I can’t help but be. Aware in whatever capacity, through sight, smell, touch, taste, sound, thought. Awareness like a smooth stone skipping on an ocean heaving. It is, if you’re into it, the one true everlasting always there and never tarnished thing.
The other fact I know is this: I want to, every day, be like the bee above the words. Working so the world can love itself and bloom.