such earthly delights #1
a list of things that made me smile or joy without apology
I quit drinking a year in June. I’ve been sober before but not like this. Can’t explain the difference but somehow raw dogging catastrophe hit different lately.
The tick-tock of my Hello Kitty clock is so loud that Emily asks if I’ve got a clock while on speakerphone in my bedroom.
I am reading a poem Aeon wrote about me and I am writing a poem about Aeon and everyone knows my kink is to write poems about my friends and here’s another one.
Mabuhay is my favorite greeting, maybe just after hola and of course hello. I learned it’s meaning after falling deeply in crush with a Filipino cosplayer who lived in Vancouver. We’d become friends on livejournal and the casual fast transaction of our personal information on the proto-overshare internet was easy. I spent hours reading books at the library on the Phillipines and cuisines that soon I realized living in the DMV I had access to. Mabuhay! I remember typing slowly into AIM and sounding out each letter and being giddy with the knowledge of its meaning— a greeting not unlike aloha or namaste or shalom. Hello in English is never goodbye and while if emphatic enough, it can ring like a hug or feel like the edge of a sword to your throat. It doesn't encompass the colored paraphrase of hope, intention, of prosperity of life in one word necessarily but it’s primitive. I can hear the echo of the call to the ferryman or the time where man learned he could summon and beckon his fate with more than just the gesture of hands and body but he could sing it closer. Hello, don’t miss me, hello, I am waiting and in all these expressions there’s earnest hope you’ll be okay. While it’s debated the origin, ever since I studied cognates in Ms. Monroe’s Spanish 101 class in the 7th grade, I’ve assumed that hola was this struggle between an newly emerging Saxon language and another remnant of the Moors impressing upon the tongue of the Northwestern European tongue. Ojalá, I can still recall the definition in the book, an antiquated Mozarabic expression of exclamation from Spain meaning God willing or Inshallah or secularly and so Englishly, hopefully. I came here to say greet you and I couldn’t help but think of the other ways for me to wish you peace, life, prosperity or abundance — Hello, I call to the ferryman on the river, Mabuhay to wish you life and Hola because if God will it, I hope you’ll come back to me.
Watch a duck cruise down a creek and I follow it for a length and until I couldn’t see it anymore.
I justify my recent candle obsession with the fact that I’m a fire sign and I need to see a flame to feel alive. I knew I was in the throes of a nervous breakdown because admitting such New Age whimsy gave me comfort. Not too long after my obsession began, I order battery powered candles to be safe and to baby proof my cozy ambitions before I get too girl, interrupted and set my house on fire.
My neighbor talks softly on the phone walking around the yard of our building and her little cat follows her like a dog. It’s raining softly and the cat trots through a puddle to keep up with her owner.
After I get my genetic testing for hereditary ovarian and breast cancer done and make an appointment for my mammogram I take myself on a walk not too unlike you would a stubborn dog who needs to go relieve itself. Each step I take is so hesitant but then I notice how different the lake looks than normal. I get closer and closer and realize all the lily pads had emerged. I couldn’t believe my eyes staring at the beautiful blooming water lilies that cluttered the surface of the water. I kept saying to myself I’ve always wanted to see this, I can’t believe I get to see this, wow, how lucky, I can’t believe.
As I’m driving off from poetry club I see Gloria walking and I wave and her bleached curls bounce in the wind as she waves.
I am watching that episode of Fresh Prince where his dad comes back. No matter how many times I’ve seen it since it first aired I always cry. I can’t help it and I remember before as a kid I used to cry because I felt his pain but now I cry because I love that Uncle Phil is there to embrace him and that chosen family embrace and reparent us as much as the choices we make everyday to aid in our healing.
After months in bed and when I wasn’t in bed, I was zombie-ing through life and work, I woke one day and spent two days cleaning. I felt possessed. I went to the market and bought new soil and I repotted my plants and gave home to new plants I’d water propagated and left. It was a mess. I trimmed back my emotional support vine monstera and showered my elephant ears plant in the tub. I wiped each of its big, fluffy leaves carefully. Eventually I showered off the dirt and went to sleep under the shade of my monstera Mishima whose leaves lean over the futon. It felt as if it was kissing my forehead goodnight.
My mom texts me from her studio and asks if I would name a painting. It’s vibrant as always, greens, reds, yellows and I type back that I’d called it Kaleiscope Abelia. It’s a plant. Look at it. It’s so similar. She agrees.
Last month I went to go flyering for an upcoming show and got the opportunity to spend time with my friend Connor. When I first met him we were working at the grocery store and in the big-small of city living, he would go on to marry someone I’d known from the early aughts of my life. We spent four hours walking the streets of Baltimore putting up flyers Aeon helped me print earlier that morning at the Kinkos on Charles St. It’s not actually a Kinkos anymore because that doesn’t exist but I’m aging in that way where I can’t remember which apex predator or scavenger survived the corporate battle of fittest. I had such a good time flyering and chatting and catching up that when we stopped at Greedy Reads I bought a candle souvenir. It’s burning right now.
Sitting in the back of Farrah’s truck outside of the library after Hanif’s reading listening to crickets and talking shit to the wind like we are seventeen again and there’s no where to go but we aren’t going home.
My socks have tiny lions chasing strawberries on them.
I go to a Turkish restaurant called Cazbar in Columbia with Paul and his mother. I’m excited to meet his mom and I can’t believe how similar they look. Each time they both smile at me it’s like I’m seeing them from a time traveler’s rear view mirror from two distances in past and future. A bellydancer comes out and gives a beautiful and exhilarating hour long performance and it’s dazzling to watch her spin and shimmy and I’m in awe when she’s confidently dancing with a kilij— a single-edged, curved sword or scimitar that was used in the Middle East and western Asia. I find myself thinking of her as I find myself longing for the surgeon’s knife as a familiar pain radiates in my side. I am on the blade’s edge of salvation and damnation.
Reading The Phantom Tollboth to kids and remembering how I fell in love with reading when I was their age. I recall finding a book called Lion At Large by Richard Parker and I read it on a bean bag. A circus animal becomes a boy’s best friend and mine too.
Singing along to Mitski’s “Nobody” in the car with Aeon, turning onto MLK.
Dana picks up the camera I’ve been holding all night which is actually Al’s and turning it on me and says smile. I realize it’s been a long time since anyone took my picture— maybe not since Farrah’s wedding but then I realize that a amber like resin began oozing from my skin sometime last Fall and left me in a suspended in melancholy. I couldn’t remember the last time I left my house to be seen and I know there had to be a time but I couldn’t remember and so I cherished the memory. I put the picture she took on my fridge and wrote “not a great day but it was okay and that was good enough.”
Albert, Caitlin and I are laughing at an episode of Sex & The City. We’d just come back from a brisk walk and then feasted on Ethiopian food delivered to their door from Dukem. So full, we are watching as Carrie tries to figure out what’s her date’s damage and he shyly shakes off his shirt from his shoulder and reveals a Tweety tattoo. I laugh so hard that it feels like I huffed glue and I can feel my brain separating and Albert’s wheezing.
I am teaching Toddler how to tie his shoes and we make bunny ears and then we loop and now there’s a bunny nose and it’s how I do it. I can’t say it’s right or makes sense but it reminds me of when I taught him how to use his zipper. The train is going into the tunnel and when you hear the click, choo-choo.
Billie’s walking toward me in her little crocs and she stops every few steps to touch grass, concrete, flowers or to just sit down. It takes her fifteen minutes to get down the block. I can’t stop smiling at her.
I tell the twins that whenever they’re sad, scared, or frustrated that if they need me, I’ll hold their hand. I hold their hand a lot. I am sitting in traffic and I don’t realize I’m all fiddlesticks and flaming marshmallows on a stick and groaning. Toddler says, if you’re frustrated you can hold my hand when we get to the red-light. I do.
I didn’t realize the only experience nicer than receiving flowers is sending flowers to someone.
Seared radicchio and fennel bulb in sesame oil.
I buy a 61 key piano from a girl off Marketplace.
Honeysuckles after rain.
Re-reading The Hobbit in bed with a cup of hot cocoa.
Diptyque’s Eau Duelle.
Stroopwafels crumbled into vanilla yogurt with cherries.
Hello & Godspeed,
Kx