a moment of sushi

There are morning birds outside.

My laptop clock reads four nineteen, and I have to double check my phone to catch up with realtime: one twenty a.m. This isn't Pennsylvania, this is flipping California. This is the city of angels. My body's still working on an East Coast time clock, and somehow, just like stepping into South Carolina, this feels a little bit like snagging a piece of home. Except this time it's less about the people welcoming me and more about the landscape, the ocean, the exploding campus that lost me in its bowels because I couldn't quite figure out the directions to the library and kept making circuits around the university's well-manicured and well-populated lawns.

Someone told me today that it's abnormal to feel that people who hurt me are not to be blamed, are not to be disparaged, are not at fault; that human nature in it's instinctive form is to lash out in response to pain and decide that the person causing the pain is a terrible person. "Especially when it has to do with someone of the opposite gender." But it's how I see it, I said, because someone is not innately at fault for wounding me. Wounding happens, as a result of all kinds of choices, but it's not so much the wounding as it is the intention that is grievous. The person who raised a hand against me with the motive of seeing me suffer is cruel, and I blame that person. The person who didn't feel for me what I felt for him is no more to blame for not feeling than I am for feeling. Yes, it hurts; it's a sorry fact of life, and I wish it weren't so. But Madeleine L'Engle said it so well:

It's a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them—and they simply don't need you. That's all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they'll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you, and it goes on and on—this desperate need—and only once in a rare million do the two same people need each other.

So there are times like that, and conversations like that, and they are unfortunate but more people need to be having them. Because heartbreak is going to keep on happening, and when it does it feels like the death of part of what made you you. But in no world, in no age, is grief over a loss enough to make trashing another person okay. Someone can be good and still break you. Someone can break you and still be kind.
 
We all fail. ...... I think it has to be that way, so we could empathize with each other, and so we wouldn't put absolute and justified faith in fellow humans who would then inadvertently commit the worst betrayal of all by dying...

And then Madeleine again:

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we'd tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

I'm grasping for straws in the dark with that, but perhaps it suggests something of a gilding to the breaking: that the fact that everyone fails, that everyone hurts (and is hurt), that no hand is always gentle...perhaps that means we value all the more, and keep nurturing, the people we love, because love is never a guarantee of being able to live in the expression of it.

Come daylight I'll peel open the quiet with some music and put on a kettle for tea, and after that, perhaps make a trip to the market for one of those shopping sprees that results in a magical whirlwind of cooking and—hopefully—a delicious dinner. These past two nights, late as they've been, have been laden every second with enough conversation and gritty humour and good food to supply material with which to seed five books, and I feel a serious working frenzy coming on, hopefully one that will last into May instead of fizzling upon my return home. But first, the important things, like making the most of the rest of this simultaneously lowkey and accelerated trip, and after that all of these words in my heart can wallow in ink and crawl onto paper.

we whispered yes, there on the intricate
balconies of breath, overlooking
the rest of our lives.