She Isn't There, Corp.

[womanshapedfigure]

IFYKYK

[womanshapedfigure]

Bought at the garage sales:

Inflatable sleeping pad for truck bed

Deep cake pan

Little metal bowl

Shoe brush

Bench vises (2)

Worktable for chopsaw

Box of canning jars (12)

Stand-up freezer

Several free rod holders for boat

Halogen jobsite lights (2)

Pendleton wool blanket with note: “Made out of OUR sheep’s wool”

[womanshapedfigure]

Created a small tragedy for myself. Dealing with it like: should I grieve over this? Should I allow myself to I feel sick at myself for allowing this to happen? I keep anticipating that sickness, like -- I know I should feel guilty (and be angry at myself for feeling guilty.) I know I should feel at fault (and counsel myself that it wasn’t my fault, or if it is, that I’ll learn from it.) But all I can really feel is that the life I’ve created for myself here is so magnificent and splendid and vital and full of its own opportunity. All I can really focus on is that -- just like the opportunity I lost -- I dreamed of this happening for years and years. I laid in the dark and imagined what it would look like. Sound like. Smell like. And now that it’s here, it’s even greater than -- by such a large margin -- than I ever imagined. Why should I mourn any path that would’ve meant giving this up?

[madatmost]

tally lake, 2007

[womanshapedfigure]

Playing piano with him. Reading old books to find pieces to teach. Shocked by this prelude. Shocked. Now I hear it everywhere I go.

[womanshapedfigure]

[womanshapedfigure]

Three other things I have to remember:

- On Highway 90, north of the Badlands, east or west of Wall, a little green valley with the first real trees in two hundred miles. A road sign next to a farmhouse: EVEN HERE. “I always loved that Poussin painting,” he says, “you know, like in Blood Meridian? Et in Arcadia ego ...” How did he know?

- The last day driving. Waking up at a rest stop in the mountains outside Ellensburg. Him putting on his blues while we head west. Just before our last gas stop in Easton, him saying: “Do you know this one? I know you love this one ...” Putting on Elizabeth Cotten. The song no one else would think of. The song I heard every time we ever drove through the mountains when we were young. The most beautiful and heartwrenching version of it ever. How did he know?

- Going a year and a half without him. Having to reckon, at last, with the rest of a life without: what it would look like. What it would feel like. Living with my failure -- and my grief -- every day. For the rest of my life. Then in August, after moving out of the city: starting to get an idea about a funny kind of ceremonial valediction. Buying a cheap little bolt-action .22, being responsible for it, taking it out to the timber lands to learn to be a better shot. Redoing the furniture, working on the trigger, making a sling. Alone. By myself. Everything about it would be so painful and so wrong. But also just. By November, knowing I was obligated to it. Reading about bolt-actions I could get for nothing. Dreaming of a funny old Sears & Roebuck catalog rifle, to match the Sears house we saw in Texas years ago.

Getting his call in December.

Never telling him about my plan. Having no reason to. Until: 

Unpacking his things at the little house. Suddenly, as if he forgot about it -- “Oh! And here’s yours.” Pulling the case out of a sheet: a funny little 1940s Sears Ranger .22. Rebuilt. Polished to a gleam.

How did he know?

[womanshapedfigure]

Skirting the Badlands, through to

Sturgis, SD

Buffalo, Wyoming (Elev. 4,646′)

Stealing a shower from the Buffalo KOA, late at night. The temperature drop surprised us: we didn’t know we were so high! In the morning, 10″ of snow. We have to dig out the bed of the truck before we leave.

Sheridan, Wyoming

I love how the high plains air feels like velvet: dry, rare, and warm at 34 F. I love the way the Bighorn Mountains look from town. I love how different the bluebird snow is from my mountains. I love how sharp and magnetic this version of his beauty is. Men, especially, are fascinated by him. The way I can watch them catch sight of an opportunity to talk to him: in the farm store, at the rest stop, when we stop in the parking lot to retie the load in the back of the truck.

Butte, Montana

Stopping at a laundromat under a beautiful SRO to wash camp-dirty clothes. How everyone drops what they’re doing to watch him when he comes in. I leave to get breakfast, come back. When I leave again with the water bottles, the man with a child’s face stops me at the door: “I gave your boyfriend 75 cents for a soda. Pay it forward!”

[womanshapedfigure]

In Washington Plates

[womanshapedfigure]

Dave Lives

[amen69fashion]

[womanshapedfigure]

Went out drinking with my mother for New Year’s – the first time ever. She told me all she wants for 2020 is a wetsuit so she can go out in the icy seawater of the fjord in front of her little retirement house. So beautiful – I could want that, too. What I didn’t tell her: I think what I might really want in 2020, secretly, and against what maybe is even best for that wish itself, is a ring.

[womanshapedfigure]

Got my one wish

[womanshapedfigure]

[womanshapedfigure]

Finally rewatching Fuller’s Hannibal. One of the most loving and expansive and extraordinary adaptations of any work, ever. What could even compare?

When I was really young I took books everywhere. I read everywhere. Mostly to avoid doing anything but reading. Lots of paperback trade fiction, like: Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, Grisham. But Thomas Harris maybe my very favorite. Red Dragon and Hannibal I read easily ten times each. I remember clearly that one of the first websites I ever looked at in my entire life was an annotated close reading of Hannibal, which I can’t find now.

There are some scenes from these novels that I have thought about every year of my life since I was 10. I almost know them by heart.

My whole life. I remember watching the last season of the show week-by-week, when it was airing, in the summer of 2015, when I was alone in Germany for the first time. Catching some train from the Hauptbahnhof at 5:40 AM going south. Going to Italy. Finding an empty carriage and laying down on the bench seat. Watching on my little phone.

What Will tells Hannibal in Episode 4 isn’t from the text of either novel. It’s what Thomas Harris wrote, about himself, in the introduction to Red Dragon in 2000. This same text is where he talks about recognizing “the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.” Now I live in a little house that looks out over the sea. 

[womanshapedfigure]

Playing this over and over again, measures 5–36. Petrarch, born on the 20th of July.

In my version of the sheet music, only the Italian and German versions of the sonnet are shown. Should any edition include an English translation, it would have to be Wyatt's:

"I find no peace, and all my war is done / I fear and hope ..."

"And nought I have, and all the world I season."

Seasoning the world. Making a choice between hoping, and believing.

[womanshapedfigure]

[womanshapedfigure]

Dushko Petrovich writing in n+1.

The traumatized archivist in her garden of cucumbers. Fashion, Tumblr, everything, is all about this.

The past being so safe -- because it’s set. The future being so violent -- BECAUSE it is consequential. Paralyzed because we don’t yet understand how to protect ourselves from consequence. Ferrante: “Only if I knew could I recover and survive.”

[womanshapedfigure]