#flisa

[normannphotography]

Deep into the Flisa forest by Bjørn Normann jr. Via Flickr: Can't see the forest for the trees. This is the Flisa Vestsidevegen view.

[gretchenofsweden]

Tack @alexandrajardvall för fantastiska dagar i #Flisa (på/i Flisa Mart'n)

[brambled]

lately, of note: 

MV & i booked a belated honeymoon for june. staying in my aunt & uncle’s apartment in paris while they’re visiting my uncle’s family in portugal. we’ll fly into berlin a few days prior to spend some time in my beloved deutschland. on our way home, we have an overnight layover in vienna, which we’ll use to fulfill my sappy ass dream of recreating before sunrise. 

to help fund this, i’ve picked up a second job as an afternoon teacher at a children’s learning center. it is not my calling, but i’m grateful to be doing something new.

i’ve quit smoking & started running. i don’t predict a perfect record for either but i feel uncharacteristically pragmatic about both. it feels good to be in pain. it feels good to breathe. 

once i’m done teaching (university) for the semester, i think i’m going to go to morning mass at the little cathedral down the street. mostly i’m writing this here as a reminder to myself. 

[brambled]

I held no solidarity with rodents in kid’s movies as a child because of the night terrors where mice ran all over my paralyzed body

Nevertheless, it seemed over-the-top, the (human) villains’ motif of shooting at vermin with double-barreled shotguns

I turned away from the television, full of contempt for their folly

[brambled]

Today as I walked the bridge across the river a hawk flew directly before me ​He landed on a branch above the riverbed and we watched each other for a spell

[brambled]

Dreamt that I discovered a government secret. The Dustbowl turned most of the Midwest and Great Plains into a crater. The Dept. of Agriculture filled it with water, and rebuilt the land on top of this ocean. On maps the land was divided according to the currents, like subterranean counties. The largest current was named YOU ARE LIVING ON HETEROSEXUAL LAND.

I woke up to a different dystopia, one without the candor of maps.

[brambled]

For me the hardest part about marriage is that it interrupts my imagined realities. With enough time alone I can establish an equilibrium between all my narratives and projections, my constructed selves and my idle dreams. It is very, very lonely there but I have control and reinvention revs my fickle heart. But now I have this other human and I’m not even going to say shit like “he sees me for who I really am”… It’s more like he sees me, imperfectly but invariably, day in and day out, amorphous animation that bears the sweet weight of his own imaginings, for better or for worse et cetera. Anyway I’m trying not to get into the truthfulness of perception but I do think he sees my consistency, the stuff I am largely made of (for better or for worse et cetera!), which is thicker batter than whatever I churn out of my manic self-revolutions. But that’s the catch, then, isn’t it. No gossamer’s spun with a witness.

[brambled]

December

My grandfather fell very ill, so I wrapped up my semester early and got on a plane to Arizona, where my family had congregated at my aunt and uncle’s to say goodbye. When I was alone with him, I told him he was forgiven. He had done nothing to me to warrant anger or pain, but he had asked for forgiveness all his life. I wanted this clear, should he be able to hear anything through his dementia and morphine. We wept, of course, but the vigil was made more sacred by our laughter. When my grandmother told us about the guy she courted before my grandfather and this guy’s long, spindly fingers, my brother said, Better make it quick, Grandma: we don’t want the last thing Grandpa hears to be about another man’s hands. We ate off paper plates sitting around him and sometimes I would think, This is absurd, to be eating store-bought potato salad while listening to his death rattle, but I didn’t feel sad or empty for it, just appreciative and a little sleepy. Life is so many juxtapositions. The last night, we moved a mattress next to his so that my grandmother could sleep by him one final time. I was in and out of sleep on the couch, listening to the metronome of his rasping breaths, and I was awake when they stopped. My aunt wailed and my husband, confused in the dark and thinking I had really lost my shit, rubbed her back. After those first minutes following his departure, however, we rejoiced. In the true morning, I laid by the pool in my family’s back yard and squinted at the brightness of all those primary colors: blue water, blue sky, orange oranges and yellow lemons in their trees. The world was emptier without him, but fuller, too, somehow, for having contained him.