HE SAID, MARIE, MARIE, HOLD ON TIGHT
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
~ The Waste Land, "The Burial of The Dead", Eliot
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
clambake
i haven't written for a long time. i was too occupied being happy. life is what happens to you when you are too busy making other plans, sings john lennon. what does that mean?, i asked one night. it means you have to pay attention to details, he said. he left earlier today for maryland to start med school. so, goodbye, i said to him this afternoon while we cried outside my apartment next to a car packed with blankets, suitcases, his guitar and eukele. i was late for work. is this how it feels like when you talk about 'big old dogs that make you want to throw your arms around and weep'? why are we crying?, he asked. because we are happy, i said. we had just lived 3 months together between new york and new jersey. he saw me through the first significant death, a contract, my first car. the biggest clam bake we made together while getting horribly drunk on empty stomachs, and then in a happy drunk stupor, sauteing cabbage with beer, and dunking a half bottle of yuengling with the baked fish and clams and onions--that night, eating clambake dunked in beer out of the baking tray with his father, all of us digging into nutmeg flavored rice way past midnight, 5 empty bottles of yuengling--was orgasmic. coney island, brooklyn: sitting by the walrus enclosure, to watch a mother walrus nurse a baby walrus for the rest of the afternoon. co-signing an insurance policy on my new kia rio, feeling terribly stressed out at the realisation--and the finality of being legally intertwined. telling my father, after the fact, that i had just bought my first car--second hand, ugly, bought on his credit history--like all freedom. letting off fireworks in the parking lot behind his former middleschool with yim and tom, us screaming as the burnt stubs came raining down on us. the drives between manhattan and jersey, when i would fall asleep in his car. how i skyped my dad during his birthday, and it ended up with my family clustered around my sister's macbook, while he played his eukele with my dad strumming his guitar, all over skype. the many fights about race and environmentalism--which we never resolved. this summer i felt alive. i felt like i loved, not out of fear of loss (like before). i just loved, generously, with certainty. i am leaving for upstate, ithaca, in a week and a half, to start school. last time i would have said, all this movement, can't be good for the heart. now i think, that if you have something to hold on to, all that movement can't be that bad. it's a little expensive and uses up lots of gas, but there is nothing more wonderful than being on the road with a destination.
: 6:41 AM
