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In the end I went into an almost empty café where I tried to sit down at a window table, but the chairs felt as though they were trying to shake me off.
know, of course, that it is just me: that I have lost my way. There is no missing element. There is no newly discovered strain of emptiness. I simply cannot find any reason for making my way through the streets.
There seems to be something wrong with the mechanism that my motion is supposed to trigger.
said I was sure that through careful listening you could solve any problem that might arise. If you really listened. The great questions in life. Everything. And if you couldn’t find it in people’s conversations you could try listening to birdsong.
That nothing will change until we realize this and abandon our misguided approach to the world’s newest individuals.
But seasons? She saw them more as psychological phenomena. Memory concentrates. Accepted stereotypes.
#416
Love
I am gaining on the year. I find places that remind me of January. Of the month of January as I know it.
Lovely. Forcing seasons
That my seasons book is my manual, my traveling companion, my guide. That what I am building is my future.
I put the pieces together, little fragments of season and I write it all down in my manual: the ingredients of the seasons.
I see myself having to create my own summers, that I am working my way toward a template, a pattern by which to live.
There’s a clock on the bedside table, an old clock radio, the radio is broken, but the clock works and the numbers are illuminated.
But I also put other people in danger. I drag them out of their eighteenth of November. Out of their routine. I risk killing someone. I don’t imagine that the world will repair itself, that if I lead people off course they will simply wake up again the next morning.
You follow the stream of people wishing for summer and the farther south you go the more people there are on the beach, on the promenades. More people and fewer clothes.
The room is full of detail and I notice all of it.
What do I want with seasons when I have come to a halt in a warm and golden eternity?
If time is a container then it can be emptied, and if I am not careful I will soon start to see traces of myself all over town: things being used up, empty shelves, the tracks of a plundering monster, a beast on the prowl, the bloody trail of a predator.
I don’t want to be a monster. I walk a fine line, I tread carefully through the world, I leave as small a trail as I can. I try to get through the days without stepping too heavily. Stepping lightly. A monster playing at being a butterfly.
