It’s 1:38 on a Saturday night, I suppose we’ll say Sunday morning, and I’m not by myself half asleep on my living room couch, nor am I being lulled to a fitful rest by the wind whaling on the walls of my hallway bedroom. I’m happily — elatedly, triumphantly — on a couch in a New Brunswick living room, not alone but with six, seven other real, live humans. We’re laughing, we’re drinking, the whole room smells of melon hookah tobacco and every now and then we all fall silent to quote Mean Girls, since it won the bidding war of best films to watch at this particular time.
Not like a puzzle, because it was complete before, but maybe like a new drink, like a new squeeze of citrus in an already delicious cocktail, I fit into a new niche, complete with a cat and a dog. Nothing like one perfect lifelong friendship to pull two worlds together.
So on only the second major holiday I’ve ever spent away from my family, I deem the company, cooking and cocktails a fantastic success.
As these small groups filter through my every day — the potluck we had on Thursday that gave us stomachaches maybe from spinach balls but mostly from laughter, the comfort in nostalgia and well-constructed jokes with people intelligent enough to stay in college for years — I pick out bits and pieces and I begin to analyze, I question. I look into myself for the first time not for one-uppers, not for the miserable passive-aggressive questions that will make people aware of ME, but for the ability to see others as people rather than just fragments of things I like or dislike. This is making no sense, but I’m trying to silence myself more. To listen rather than anticipate.
That was a weird and sort of backwards digression.
I’ve been reading “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and I still can’t believe I hadn’t earlier. I read and reread this passage on my lunch break:
“These are real creatures with real organs leading real lives, one by one. I can’t pretend they’re not there. If I have life, sense, energy, will, so does a rotifer.“
It’s all fairly simple stuff. Water bugs, sunrises, snapping turtles. Writers can see things in ways others can’t. Annie Dillard can see things the way no one else in the world does — in words. Every page is a new epiphany. I’m returning this to the library and buying myself a copy to write all up in.
I feel good. The soul needs nourishing every now and then, and I’m pretty full.
