oh, that's right. this is here.

What I am doing is lamenting the cold. North Carolina has spoiled me. This weather would be practically balmy by the standards of central Pennsylvania, but I am grouchy because I can no longer walk around barefoot all the time without fear of losing my toes.

What I am doing is writing an essay about synesthesia. (Or synaesthesia. Why do I like it so much more with the a?) To get myself in the mood, and to postpone cracking open the serious neurological research, I reread Jeffery Ford's short story, The Empire of Ice Cream. It is this wonderful, muted piece of magical realism about loneliness, and art, and friendship, and betrayal, and gifts that isolate, and sacrificing crucial parts of one's identity for the sake of acceptance and understanding, and whether that kind of sacrifice ought to be seen as tragic or as necessary or as something of both-- as seen through the lives of its synaesthetic main characters. Beautifully written, and a lot more complicated than it initially seems. Unfortunately, it hits very, very close to home for me, touches on a lot of my secret fears and anxieties (even ones that are connected to deeper things than the fact that I unfailingly taste something like sweet milk in my mouth when I walk barefoot across a cool, smooth surface), and I've learned that it's an absolutely terrible idea to read it if I'm already somewhat angsty on a particular day. To do so is only a recipe for tears, inertia, overwrought guilt, and bad haiku.

What I am doing is waiting to be brave.

What I am doing is thinking about how player pianos are never as good, how everything looks different on the other side of the camera, how I love bright colors but black and white makes the world seem so much sadder, so much more mysterious, so much more like it is crumbling away, but that the apocalypse will, at least, be a stately and elegant one.

What I am doing is breathing November, and letting it infiltrate my blood. I don't know. This is how I feel when everything begins to turn gray and brown and it gets dark early. Though, if there aren't too many clouds, the early darkness means that I can see the stars for longer, and they are very clear here. I watched part of the Leonid shower, and I wished on what I saw even though I don't really believe that wishing does anything but make your chest feel full of birds, but it would have been as good to simply stare up at the constellations, how they've shifted since June.

I should talk more. I should type more. I should say things. I should think about them first so they'll come out the way they should, the way I imagine having them enter the world, perfect and pointed as arrows. I should climb more trees. I shouldn't stop singing just because someone else walked into the room. Next time some blue-haired, steel-toed-booted, nineteen-year-old hardass starts in about how humans should all just fuckin' kill ourselves, how we're everything that's wrong with the planet, how pretty soon there's bound to be a big die-off because our current population is not sustainable in the long term, Malthusian catastrophe blah blah blah, but it'll be exicting and cleansing and tasteless joke about offering free razor blades to depressed students, I should stand up and take him to task for being a callow idiot with no sense of his own privilege, and also maybe throw in something about how I think misanthropy of that caliber is generally cowardly and small-minded. I should do that instead of just looking away and shutting my eyes and shaking my head very slowly and slightly.

yellow

I remembered that the root was called yellowdock, or yellow dock. I don't know if it's properly one word, or two. The tea looks like piss, but smells kind of earthy and good. Not being able to procure any molasses, I drank it straight. Bitter, yes. Dirt and smoke and unripe fruit. It wasn't terrible, though, once I got used to it. I can't claim to like the taste, but when it's hot, it isn't so noticeable, and bitter is how you know it's good for you, Diana said. I'm going to take it for a few days and see if I feel more ironic. I mean, unanemic. I mean, any different in my veins and arteries, in my heart. Whatever.

* * * * * *

And I love bonfires more than most things, even the way their smoke and ash blows towards me and stings my eyes. I will sit around them and listen to other people prattle for a lot longer than I normally would, just watching the yellow and orange flames flicker and stretch themselves and sway, the logs crumbling slowly as they grow skinnier and more charred. Other people's conversations can be really interesting, but an awful lot of them seem to involve complaining about or making fun of people who aren't present, and sometimes that gets wearing and sad. And it's one of those spheres where I feel like I'm missing this big piece of Norms and Values Protocol, like pages 51 through 73 in my How To Be An Ordinary Human manual were replaced with random sections from a Japanese comic book and grainy photographs of spider monkeys as the result of a metaphysical printing error. I don't understand why refusing to drink alcohol automatically makes someone boring and unfun, or how to tell the difference between people who are Really Weird, For Real, But In A Cool Way, You Know and people who are only Pretending To Be Really Quirky, And, Like, Doing All This Weird Shit, But It's Just To Get Attention And Make Everyone Think They're Interesting and people who are simply Creepy, or Insane, or Freaks (pejorative), or Freaks (admiring). In the second category, I'm not sure I'd consider smoking a pipe ostentatiously eccentric, especially not at the hippie/geek/angry anarchist/ragamuffin/rummage sale reject/punk/oddball-filled college I attend. But apparently, I don't understand these things. Still, I love bonfires more than most things, stretching my hands out till they become silhouettes against the glow and the talk and laughter of the other girls fills the dark like fireflies emerging from the throat of a sleeping bird.