21 August 2024
10 am Wednesday
It is 10 am, on the dot. It feels remarkably still in this room. To my right, there is pink. Below me, a warm yellow. To my left, white. Everything in the room is touched by the pink, the pink blanket hanging as a curtain to my right, as the light streams in.
Nothing in the room moves except for me, unless I move it. The toilet paper roll shrinks in circumference, as the trash can fills with crumpled tissues. The fan blades spin, and then they are still. The bedsheets move as I toss and turn in the night. I don’t straighten them in the morning.
I think there is something satisfying about feeling unkempt while I am sick. Then, when I feel physically better, I reorganize the untidiness — I strip my sheets, throw away the snot, cut my hair. It feels satisfying to have the surrounding visuals align with the internal shift in feeling.
My coworkers are messaging on Teams about lord of the rings. I am not particularly into lord of the rings, mostly because I have not actually watched the movies. I wonder how different life would be if I was the type of person who became genuinely immersed in fictional worlds. I wonder which fictional worlds I am immersed in, but maybe I just don’t consider them to be fictional worlds. I say “genuinely” immersed, because, there have been times I have tried to be someone who really cares about a fictional world — like ice hockey — but it feels very different from when someone immediately loves hockey, without deciding to start liking it.
Ice hockey is far less fictional than lord of the rings, if I were to rank them in terms of fictional to less fictional, however I think that is open to interpretation. One fictional / non fictional world I continue to return to is that of the ants at the natural history museum. I can’t help but humanize them. What are they thinking as they traverse the glass bridge above our heads? How does it feel to have our eyes on them? It seems like a bug can tell when I’ve spotted it on the sidewalk— what if all of these ants know they are being watched, but continue to march along anyways? I only just sort of in this moment realized, as I am laying here in this pink and yellow and white light-filled room, listening to Debussy’s Clair de Lune on repeat, that any one ant you see out in the world belongs to an entire world like the one we witnessed behind glass. It makes me feel emotional in a similar sort of way to when we are in the car, and you are driving, and I squeeze your hand, except it is of course different because it is about, well, ants. Any one ant you walk past, any one person you walk past, anyone and anything you walk past, belongs to an entire world. It’s not an unfamiliar concept, however, after seeing the magnitude of the ant colony, and how it was positioned in a way in which we needed to look up above us to fully grasp its scale, it feels different to then picture the imagined one singular ant I could encounter on a sidewalk. Oh what a world that ant belongs to!
Instead of fictional worlds, (I tried to get into d&d as I know you did too), I think of my imagination as being largely rooted in reality, which, I think is a bit counter intuitive for the root word of “imagination” which is “imagine” which means…. oh actually never mind, I googled the word “imagine” and the first result is ‘to form a mental image of concept of’. It indicates nothing about ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’. I form mental images of the quilt on your bed, the orange one. I form mental images of the piece at the Met we stared at with Olivia, the one with many squares on cardboard. I form mental images of Aeon bookstore, and the half-circle seat upon which we sat when making our schedule (funny timing for schedule making). I form mental images of the dreams from which I’ve just awoken. I form mental images of sitting next to you. I form mental images of the way the edges of your lips curl into a smile while you are driving, the sort of smile that reaches your eyes, lifts your eyebrows, and leaves your face frozen like that for many miles. I form mental images of how it feels when our arms are wrapped around each other. That last one feels like an entire world in itself.
Anyways my love, I hope you are sleeping well. It is 10:35 am, and Clair de Lune is five and a half minutes long, meaning that during the duration of this email it has played just over six times. Six point three times. I am going to start imagining new possibilities for how I will construct my half of the teapot.
Yesterday, I wrote this, to myself: I absentmindedly imagine pulling the threads from the pink woven blanket that hangs like a makeshift curtain, dreaming of weaving, dreaming of making I realize, what I would want to make is a blanket, which is exactly what sits before me I think there is something to that
The first time I had covid, Phoebe and I stayed at The Covid Hotel. Our stay began on the 6th of March, in 2022. Phoebe often talks about people who think a lot, I recall her talking about it during our hotel stay. She calls it neither good nor bad, just that some people really think more than others. I feel a little shy around the subject, when she brings it up, for I feel I am on the more think-y end of the spectrum of thinking. But I think (haha) that’s all writing is. For the walls could just be walls, and the ants could just be the ants, and that is all that they will be.
I love you.
SK