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You would have been forty-six this year, and maybe we would have talked of it. Of things like this—aging and whatnot—how they are happening, even to us.
Maybe you would have chosen to dye your hair. Karachi can be a hard place, after all, for human women. Maybe I would have talked you out of it. (Though I know I wouldn’t have wanted to. Everything you wanted, all of us wanted for you.)
I call Akki and ask how she is doing today. We make words with the feelings we have on hand, like pushing Scrabble tiles out onto the board between us. (Except with you it was always Monopoly.)
I don’t tell her how I’ve been thinking, now that enough years have been and gone, that it’s finally happened. That there are now more conversations I wish I could have had with you, than the other kind. That the rest of my life will be this way.
I don’t tell her how when I have nested dreams, one inside the other so that I keep waking up from a dream in which I’m waking up from a dream, they are of you.
Auri said for years—who am I now to know if he says it still—that it wasn’t fair he had to lose both his parents by forty-three. But like so many things he is so wrong about...
Whatever. You knew better than anyone, about things that weren’t fair. You loved it all anyway.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[giovedì 31 maggio 2018 ore 11:03:06] [¶]
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In my 1962 copy of Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on...), from the wondrousness of a bookstore in Madrid called Desperate Literature:
Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein's life long passion.
Impossible not to think of Annie Dillard (If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin...). And from there, Billy Collins (If someone carves swans and animals out of soap, that person loves soap...).
And then, for me maybe because I'm me, Hemingway (All you have to do...); and Didion, on Hemingway (...smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes...), and finally Didion again, on Didion (Grammar is a piano I play by ear...).
Of course I've told you some of this before. I go back to see where, and so I see when: two years ago, to the week.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[martedì 22 maggio 2018 ore 11:03:00] [¶]
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I spent much of the weekend watching waves advance and recede across the kind of rockpools that make you miss David Attenborough. Tracking the appearance and disappearance of an island on the Mediterranean horizon (the Gorgona, no relation though, to Medusa). Reading Woolf on “How Should One Read a Book.”
Ritiro as in retreat. Ritiro as in, I pull (back), again. Ritiro too, as in another pull—of a joint or a pipe, a hookah, a sheesha, some such thing. Another breath. Inhale, again.
This included an afternoon with a wonderfully cool and collected gentleman by the name of Kerner. But like the artist Blub, maybe Kerner is a woman.
An afternoon too, of writing some very many lines of what could have been a poem, if I had not, about three hours into it, hit some cryptically disastrous combination of keys on this damn tablet and caused all those little black letters to effervesce forever into whiteness.
(Also the second sunburn of my life.)
But look, look at what my working title was, for that poem:
Again.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[martedì 08 maggio 2018 ore 18:05:18] [¶]
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