Hi Loners!
The only time I have today is until the rice finishes. I washed it until the water ran clear. I enjoyed the wintry chill of the city tap. I have been making a pumpkin and tofu curry this week that I can’t get enough of, and my brain is at total capacity. I made slices of toast for lunch today that I spread sunflower butter on with blueberries and pumpkin seeds. It sits next to the computer for a few hours before I inhale it.
Once the rice finishes, I’ll read poems from the recent Peach submission period because it’s that time of year again. The day has been long. There’s a knot between my shoulders. I’ve been haunched over things, and I keep telling myself to get a massage, to get a better chair, and yet.
There’s basmati rice in the pot, and my eyes are tired from work and screaming, “bitch, reading is the western world’s Sisyphean burden, please, I welcome the boulder and my demise.” Being able to read hurts. I don’t think I read well anymore. Not. It’s like listening as a skill. Do you ever consider if you read and understand?
Do you hear someone talking, or do you listen to them? Whenever I try to pinpoint the difference for myself, it’s this internal budgeting of time: I slow down, being careful with every word, and let it digest. Typically most interactions go the way of constant scrolling. You’re taking a quarter of it in but never all of it. Do you see the big picture, or is there a byline to summarize and live off? An infographic explains it all.
I’ve been eating a lot of sticky rice recently because I learned a microwave hack from a home-cook on Youtube. If you don’t know, sticky rice typically requires eight or more hours of soaking before you steam it. This hack is invaluable. I do love properly steamed rice, but I also love to make sticky rice in 20 minutes.
A food: It’s the time of year where you make that garlic joke about if there’s enough. This recipe demands more garlic. Any added herbs or vegetables just make the finished product more and more yours. A condiment, a meal. Go forth.
An album: I put this on and cleaned my room. When it finished I had an arm full of warm laundry that I threw on a newly made bed. It felt good.
A movie: I made a list of movies for friends who’d asked me for more media after they saw Parasite. This was at the top of the list for me. I didn’t have a newsletter then, but I have one now, so I’ll say it to you now. The thriller stars Lee Sun-Jae and Steve Yeun, and if the last year wasn’t a cinematic enough class war for you, I encourage you to watch Burning. An absolute masterpiece, and Lee Sun-Jae was in a drama I saw in 2014 and also one of the most exquisite and excruciating pieces of tv I’ve ever seen called Secret Affair. It’s an exceptional production where you navigate class, societal exceptions, and taboos while gapping at the burning attraction between the two actors; you forget that it’s just a melodrama.
I love Walden (1968) because Jonas Mekas read Walden in German and then later in English years later. He is perhaps my masterclass in the mundane, documentary as autobiography as a selfie. I don't know why I love that he went and re-read a book he'd read when younger but maybe because I know it's different. Not just in translation, but we age.
There are books I've read and re-read since I was a kid, and there are books I've gotten blessed to dictionary my way through in other languages. When I was younger, I was in remedial learning classes, and I've been thinking about my learning gaps, the self-taught ruggedness in my intelligence. It's got perforated edges, surely. I am thinking about how I didn't talk much when I was younger, and most people thought I was stupid because they looked at my file. They saw the number of schools, read the background, and met my social worker, who explained the situation. We all had unbranded shoes and wore student uniforms. I spent a lot of time in the library, which was null of the kids who accurately called me five-head. I had this rule that I'd read anything that seemed short. I thought short books were easy books.
I read The Little Prince in the 5th grade, and I read it over and over and over again. I couldn't get over how no adult I knew had read this book. I got to read it in French last summer. I took French on Duolingo and forgot I took Spanish for ten years, and it still counts. I got nervous and sat sounding out the words in my garbled French. My mouth doesn't fit around so many unpronounced vowels. I loved the loneliness in this little book as I sat alone for years eating my lunch.
One day a girl saw me reading Harry Potter, and she said she wanted to be my friend. Her name was Danny. I'll never forget her name because she was the only child who ever called my children's home to talk to me. My social worker and Sister Mary Catherine spoke to the warden, and she said it was okay if I got an hour to talk on the phone. They'd let me into an office, and we'd shout about how cool Harry was and how scared we'd be if we were in the basement of Hogwarts. She asked one time if I had parents and likely I'd have said, "maybe, one day."
I was sitting in my room alone last summer reconnecting to the words I'd read once and thought I'd never been able to read in another language. "It's manual for aging," I remember ranting to the librarian who taught me the Dewey decimal system and let me re-shelve books when I didn't want to go home when the library closed. She fed me books with a soft smile.
I recall reading John Steinbeck's The Pearl, having found it on the floor of a classroom I had detention in when I was 12 years old. I recognized the name because I had read Of Mice & Men not too long before, and it hurt. That kind of sacrifice. I'd seen it before: grossly inexplicable and chaotic human situations in foster care where I wondered if people knew other humans had to make these kinds of choices. From cartoons, I'd heard the phrase "I want to pet the rabbits" and laughed at it watching these older toons from the 60s, but nothing prepared me for the bit I'd chew when I read it. I thought a short book meant easy.
So I remember taking The Pearl and getting this unbearable hope for this family. I am in a cove; I am wet and holding their baby as the book unfolds and the time passes. I don't hear the taunts at school; I don't feel the time when I'm called ugly or shoved out of the way by kids that mattered. All the things we have learned of our society, and we still pretend we didn't institutionalize our caste systems, we didn't feed the hierarchies to our babies. I still am always waiting to feel a hand connect with my shoulder and feel the cold metal of a locker next to my face.
I'm so lost in the book, I recall, that I forget that I'm not cool. I forget I’m waiting for my parents to come back. I’m waiting to have Jordan’s on my feet. I’m lost in the cove, I’m holding a baby that’s still. I am a still-life of a brown, bespectacled nymph who is through being cool for Zeus and hiding in the pages until Artemis takes pity on me and lets me fade into words. I won't be sacrificed to a God that causes the inexplicable, the gross, the humane. I finished The Pearl sitting in the tub with a flashlight mouth ajar like the girl from the Ring when I finished it. I read back then for survival.
As my birthday nears, I wonder about that little girl in the bathtub, the one who sat alone for so long, and I wonder if she'd be sad knowing I don't know if I read half as well as she did.
The rice is done.
Godspeed Loners,
Kx
alone in my room is a once defunct and maybe weekly dispatch from the mundane from a local ficus. kelly is a writer & serial hobbyist. there are two episodes of alone in my room on soundcloud. you can donate to support a hobby or buy soil here.