Vladimir

by Julia May Jonas

I still like many of the things old men tend to enjoy. Jazz music, folk music, the blues, guitar virtuosity. Long, well-researched histories. Existentialists and muscular writers. Depravity, and funny, violent criminals. Emotional rock ’n’ roll. Meanness. I like folksy stories of city life, or country life, or anecdotes about political history. I like clever jokes, and talking about the mechanics of jokes, and turns of phrase, and card games, and war stories.

I could write more, work on my book, but instead I want to sit and stare at the light as it moves across him.

The no-place-ness and no-time-ness of now. The pulsing presence of this moment between moments.

I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.

To his left, on the wall, backed and hung, were our brochures of the Dostoevsky museum, the Tolstoy museum, and the Turgenev museum from our trip to Russia.

have been trying to balance the important with the truthful.

I remember one thing he said about writing at the time, which enraged me with its cliché. I had asked him, in a pretentious way, I’m sure, if he had any credo about writing—anything he truly lived by. He said, “I only write if I have something to say.”

I knew theoretically that everything was happening all the time and that I only needed to sit and look closely and I would find a story worth telling. I didn’t yet know that many writers find what they want to say in the writing.

I was about to go pull the kayaks into the storage shed when I was struck with an urge I hadn’t felt, not truly, in years. The urge, the want, felt almost orgasmic, like being inches away from someone’s mouth, knowing you are about to kiss them for the first time. It was the real and true urge to write—not the “sit down and make yourself write” feeling, in which you perform a number of tricks to start the words flowing, if they ever do, but the desperate desire to actually grip a pen and watch as ink travels over the page. The actual urge to say something.

If I can’t be a woman who is effortlessly beautiful, I wish I could be one of those women who, gracefully or ungracefully, move through the world unconsciously, with a kind of peace about their physical form.

Nothing is more alluring than a mother-before-she-was-a-mother, an unknowable and irresistible figure.