Five AM Post.
Oct. 8th, 2004 06:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormWell, it's six now, but I've been sort of hanging out since five. The boy's in bed sick, sleeping, and I've wandered out to the livingroom where the computer nestles against the kitchen wall. Across the room a wide window opens on Broadway, where the rain is falling in a very gentle cold veil. Cars whoosh by, kicking up spray in that silvery high-pitched static that water offers when presented with quick-moving tires, and the streetlights are a dull orange on the curtains.
It's a beautiful night; clean, like clear rainy nights are here in the fall. If I went outside I could smell leaves, warm, and decay, sharp.
My thoughts are turning to Chia again often. I miss my characters; I miss my baby Mreen, I miss Mythrae's boisterous presence, I miss Ashkalia's dark brooding neediness, I miss Suhaylah's desperate good sense, I miss Yanarie's crumbling presence of mind, I miss my clearsighted Maddie. I miss other people's characters, too, and I want to know what story has swept them up while I'm away.
Do you think that you were dreaming?
asks the song, and it answers itself:
Sometimes I don't know...
Somewhere out in America, starting to change/Can you tell me one thing you remember about me...?
Life is such a progression of change, and change is loss, and that is the way of things. It's interesting... no, it's not interesting, it's compelling and frightening to watch the self turn, and turn, and turn through the years, to lose yourself and find another self just a little different, and a little different again, like a series of very quick photographs taken of a runner who's a little further ahead in each one, and in a very different place at the end.
Do you know, it's when I'm happy that I miss my past the most? When I'm upset, when I'm just bearing things, then I push through and I'm immensely satisfied with my life, because it's working. But when it works without thought on my part, when it's singing along and carrying me rather than needing me to carry it, then I think of all the wonderful places in it and I miss them. I always need something to brood about, I suppose.
A quick spate of cars passes, and then an ambulence, outdoors.
I like words, do you know? I haven't been using them enough. I miss the progression of them, one word to another like inevitability across a page, and it draws you through a trail of thought...
It's the season of Thanksgiving now. This is the weekend of Thanks-Giving, here in Canada, which traditionally means an old remnant of a ceremony which centres around eating lots of a large bird. It's salmon season, when fish beat themselves to death on rocks as they jump up through the water and, battered and with chunks of flesh hanging off them, they spawn and die in the streams. Five hundred years ago, bears and eagles would come and pull them out of the water, still close to the line between life and death, and drop them at the edges of streams. They'd rot there, and their essence would sink into the ground, filtering up into the trees in rings that had the taint of the ocean to them so they could, five hundred years later, be measured. They also seeped into the other growing things and, over the long rainy winter, back into the streams with sodden trickles of water. We call this fish fertiliser today, packaged and made in huge bone-breaking vats with things harvested from nets; it was death as an act of giving, of thanksgiving, of something to be thankful for. Here on the west coast the salmon are a very potent symbol, even for city-dwellers. The cycle embodied is, at least in part, so clear and so stark, and humans love starkness at the back of things.
If you live on the west coast, you should go see the salmon spawn. In Suicide Creek, where I've gone before, they come up even into the drainage ditches at the side of the road. We don't see dead things that aren't packaged so often anymore, and we very seldom smell them. We see things dying, ripped into bits and with trailing flesh, even less. From a distance it seems very frightening and wrong, but it is such a holy experience. Like cherry-blossom time, I have no other word for it but holy. The Passion of the Salmon? Oh, goodness, I feel as though I should say something on that but it's beyond me. Human need for suffering?
There is a human need for peace, too. I'm peaceful tonight, wearily, warily peaceful. My mouth tastes like other people's kisses and empty sleep, my toes are cold, and I am listenign to music and to the rain outside. It's such a quiet sound, a gentle pattering, but only when the cars don't mask it.
I don't know where I'll go from here. I do know it will be somewhere different. I am resigned and committed to the inevitability of my life. I am thankful for the shape of it. I am grateful for the people in it.
I will think about how to give thanks in a way with meaning, this year.
It's a beautiful night; clean, like clear rainy nights are here in the fall. If I went outside I could smell leaves, warm, and decay, sharp.
My thoughts are turning to Chia again often. I miss my characters; I miss my baby Mreen, I miss Mythrae's boisterous presence, I miss Ashkalia's dark brooding neediness, I miss Suhaylah's desperate good sense, I miss Yanarie's crumbling presence of mind, I miss my clearsighted Maddie. I miss other people's characters, too, and I want to know what story has swept them up while I'm away.
Do you think that you were dreaming?
asks the song, and it answers itself:
Sometimes I don't know...
Somewhere out in America, starting to change/Can you tell me one thing you remember about me...?
Life is such a progression of change, and change is loss, and that is the way of things. It's interesting... no, it's not interesting, it's compelling and frightening to watch the self turn, and turn, and turn through the years, to lose yourself and find another self just a little different, and a little different again, like a series of very quick photographs taken of a runner who's a little further ahead in each one, and in a very different place at the end.
Do you know, it's when I'm happy that I miss my past the most? When I'm upset, when I'm just bearing things, then I push through and I'm immensely satisfied with my life, because it's working. But when it works without thought on my part, when it's singing along and carrying me rather than needing me to carry it, then I think of all the wonderful places in it and I miss them. I always need something to brood about, I suppose.
A quick spate of cars passes, and then an ambulence, outdoors.
I like words, do you know? I haven't been using them enough. I miss the progression of them, one word to another like inevitability across a page, and it draws you through a trail of thought...
It's the season of Thanksgiving now. This is the weekend of Thanks-Giving, here in Canada, which traditionally means an old remnant of a ceremony which centres around eating lots of a large bird. It's salmon season, when fish beat themselves to death on rocks as they jump up through the water and, battered and with chunks of flesh hanging off them, they spawn and die in the streams. Five hundred years ago, bears and eagles would come and pull them out of the water, still close to the line between life and death, and drop them at the edges of streams. They'd rot there, and their essence would sink into the ground, filtering up into the trees in rings that had the taint of the ocean to them so they could, five hundred years later, be measured. They also seeped into the other growing things and, over the long rainy winter, back into the streams with sodden trickles of water. We call this fish fertiliser today, packaged and made in huge bone-breaking vats with things harvested from nets; it was death as an act of giving, of thanksgiving, of something to be thankful for. Here on the west coast the salmon are a very potent symbol, even for city-dwellers. The cycle embodied is, at least in part, so clear and so stark, and humans love starkness at the back of things.
If you live on the west coast, you should go see the salmon spawn. In Suicide Creek, where I've gone before, they come up even into the drainage ditches at the side of the road. We don't see dead things that aren't packaged so often anymore, and we very seldom smell them. We see things dying, ripped into bits and with trailing flesh, even less. From a distance it seems very frightening and wrong, but it is such a holy experience. Like cherry-blossom time, I have no other word for it but holy. The Passion of the Salmon? Oh, goodness, I feel as though I should say something on that but it's beyond me. Human need for suffering?
There is a human need for peace, too. I'm peaceful tonight, wearily, warily peaceful. My mouth tastes like other people's kisses and empty sleep, my toes are cold, and I am listenign to music and to the rain outside. It's such a quiet sound, a gentle pattering, but only when the cars don't mask it.
I don't know where I'll go from here. I do know it will be somewhere different. I am resigned and committed to the inevitability of my life. I am thankful for the shape of it. I am grateful for the people in it.
I will think about how to give thanks in a way with meaning, this year.
