Not being able to put the damn book down, I stretched it out the best I could these past few weeks. In the coffee shop, 3 or 4 pages, and then a pause. My body muddled with an odd emptiness, a sadness, none of which are the right words.
I believe I have been fortifying myself in her character, Dalva’s, that is. Her hardness and her loneliness, her grace and age. These past months I have been in solitude, more often than not. A relative term, when you live in a Montana “city” of course, but still standing. Unplugging myself from old realities and willfully set adrift. Ebbing, the waters have pushed me now back to shore. I finished the book just now and shall return it to the library promptly. I think.
Short of descriptions of her long and tight legs, little is actually said about Dalva’s “troubling beauty.” There is a cover on the book, I wonder whom illustrated, that alludes to her dark, stoic, stunning features. Twice I have been told I look like this, and I wonder to my own face at forty-five. My own notions of love and need and destiny.
I wonder what my grandmother has thought of the book, and I urge myself now to write her a letter while this is all still fresh. Few people my age read, it seems. Likely most are still bogged down in some sort of schooling, ingesting texts with predetermined conclusions and itching not to say the wrong thing at the round table. Suppose I can sit and complain and let the sun wash my face, or begin a book club.
One step at a time.
Idleness is a plague unique to the modern world, as far as science will count anyway. Surely other periods perhaps; when the printing press put many scribes out of work, or when humans became pigs in Rome. But today it is even less intended. Bitter is the fool who questions the world and forges a path his own.
I am sure I will write more, but writing after reading, and reading text so great. I may as well join the airport fiction list.
Grateful, lonely, altogether strange, continue pace one step at a time.
recent 