Slowly, a little earlier every night, it’s getting darker—but not yet, not tonight. It’s still light, and warm outside from what I can tell from the other side of this window. Sitting in an old Fat Freddy’s Drop shirt and ill-fitting leggings, home sick for the second day in a row. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with me, only that I am tired and run down and sore and snurfly, and got lots of ‘you look awful’ comments yesterday at work so I had to cancel yoga and skip my friend’s clothing swap and sleep for twelve hours instead. The sky is blue but the wind is blowing; I’ve got the windows open but I’m glad to be inside, eating a potao-spinach frittata for dinner, listening to the cicadas stop and start and stop their clicking and whizzing: reeee-kkzzzzzz, reeee-kkzzzzz.
All week, thinking about the earthquake, wondering who would tell my family if it were my body pulled from the rubble. Deciding what to wear for Giulia and Filippo’s wedding next weekend, getting ready for my mom’s visit to New Zealand in just eleven days, figuring out whose gigs I will be awake enough to go to this weekend. A sneaky white Siamesish cat pops its head up over the fence that circles my back garden, a huge brown bird crash lands into a tree to gulp down the last of its berries, I don’t know what kind. Ree-kkzzzzzz, ree-kkzzzzz—the cicadas seem to have really stopped for the evening, now, I guess their shift is over. The sun’s still up, having dried all my sheets and pillowcases–I have this superstition about linens and sickness, how even if you’re not contagious everything still somehow retains your germs and need to be washed extra. I have a similar belief—where did I get these?—about baking while sick: that you can somehow bake the sickness right into the cake even if you wash your hands up to the elbow. Somehow, thankfully, cooking savoury things is exempt from this rule, otherwise I would not be eating a delicious frittata right now but would dipping my hundredth ginger nut into my thousandth cup of tea of the day. (I plan to do this anyway, right after I hit Publish on this post).
Today I talked briefly on the phone to my boss and to my mom, and I guess to the lady at the dairy down the road, but otherwise no speaking; my tongue is somehow swollen and my throat’s still a little sore so it’s not very pleasant to talk. I don’t remember the last time I didn’t have plans for a day, the last time I could just lay down on the floor and take a nap with a finger still marking my place in my book. I have been so busy this summer—now that I live so close to town I feel like I should cram as much fun stuff in as possible because it’s not like I’m at Metlink’s mercy anymore. The last couple of months since I got back from Malaysia have been full of shows and parties and dinners and events and I started circus classes and I can almost do a headstand now and last weekend I helped a friend sell IdealCups at the Mt. Vic Festival and I turn thirty-six in sixteen days. My sister and her husband are having a baby in August and so I am going to be back in the States this year at some point. We had our own little earthquake in Wellington Tuesday night, only a 4.5, which scared me much more than it should have, rationally speaking.
It’s like walking through hip deep water at the beach, all of this, everything, all this nothing—easy enough when you go slow and just think about the next step, maybe the next two steps. The hard part is running through it, pushing hard, trying to actually get anywhere in any amount of time. The sun is shining, the summer is slipping away. I put my hands in the water, hip level, to steady me as I take each step, and each step, and each step again.