Connection resurrection
These are the things I’ve left behind: midnight solitary walks under a canopy of stars; slow trips to the market, my only agenda being taste and texture; art (the museums, the words, the way sculpture is larger than the space it inhabits). Every moment has to be practical, a push towards something necessary.
Yesterday, irritated, angry, unable to shake it, I took a bath in the upstairs bathroom. The room is lovely, with curves against angles and an old-fashioned tub. I tossed a soothing, fragrant bath bomb into the wet. I immersed myself in hot water under natural light and remembered other times, the hung-over soaking at my place on E Street in a room yellowed with age, the bathtub small and stained. How my head ached. Maybe it was afternoon or close to evening and I’d been in bed most of the day, recovering from the debauchery. I dunked my head under water and listened to the sound of my blood flowing, proof that I was still there.
I don’t want to look back on those times with nostalgia, those days of lonely drunkenness, of the obvious stares across smoky beer-soaked barrooms and the weekends lost to the hangover and the hair of the dog. That’s not what I want to return to or to resurrect. But I do miss the connection I felt to the world, the way it was alive to me and I was alive, walking under low tree branches, looking at the sky, spending my time picking out the perfect mix of flavors and enjoying it happily, by myself or with another. I saw the stars. I walked under a canopy of night on one-lane roads where the trees reached out and the corn rustled conspiratorially in the breeze and I cared about ideas, too, let my mind run free.
Do the stars still exist? They have taken on the feeling of myth, of childhood story. There I am on a grassy lawn in Lake George, bundled up on a chaise lounge, staring at the sky with my father and his girlfriend. It is late August and we are looking for meteorites, for the streaks of light in the darkness. The sky is heavy with stars and I’m up later than usual, safe and cocooned, with no one looking to me for my reaction. It is pure experience, unfiltered through expectation.
I could take midnight walks in Berkeley, but the fog here obscures the sky most nights. I could take my time shopping, selecting each item I put into the cart for its scent, the way it feels in my hand, but the store is all about the agenda: get in, get out, put away, prepare. I want to spend my time immersed in feeling, in sensation, want to be taken away from the obligations. I want to stand in the gallery to take in the color, the shape, the form, to be impractical and connected and alive.
I don't know how to get back.
From the prompt "The stars."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Lightly edited and in need of expansion. Tired brain. Round Robin burnout. Me, me, me.
Image by Werner Kunz.