some kind of record
i cut my thumb at the beginning of december. in the kitchen, i think, on a cheap plastic wine corker. it has become one of those unimportant life events that stick around, trying to take on some significance. first i found that jeremy, in his apartment across town, had cut his own thumb at nearly the same moment. then i noticed the mark on my cupboard drawer.
It's the blood stain from the day i cut my thumb, before i realized and bandaged myself with paper towel. I've left it there, almost 4 weeks old now, and cleaning it has become one of those things I somehow can't make myself do. The stain has become a kind of record, to remind myself of the event and that time is passing.
I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desertIn September I quit my job, packed all of my possessions into boxes, took them and my cat across the country, and a few days later Jeremy and I left the USA behind for Argentina. Neither of us had done this before, moved away, foreigners with no solid plan, or direction, or timetable. At the end of December, now almost three months in, we're starting to feel... unglued.
You're living for nothing now,
I hope you're keeping
some kind of record.
-L. Cohen
In the rhythm of regular jobs, for both of us, the alarm clock signaled the comforting cascade of daily routine: shower-dress-breakfast-subway, work-lunch-work, subway-home. Here my alarm goes off and... and what? We are constructing our own lives, with little more than rough outlines of schedules (teaching English, attending protests, etc) and without the structure of a school or a family. I find myself wondering, for the first time, what 'housewives' do, really, when the kids are in school, or how rich kids without jobs spend their days.
Without a structure, our response has been to try to explain, to categorize, to record. My alarm wakes me to a world with a different set of stars, different songbirds and weeds and bugs, with foreign voices outside my window. I spend days trying to understand the voices and marvelling at the stars, and trying to convey that sense of wonder.
I cut my finger last New Year's, too, but then a handful of old friends were there to help (Jeremy, Anna, Tiana), and it was in my own apartment, with my own familiar American Band-Aids and Neosporin. Someday we will be back in a world where the everyday events happen in a context we understand: where routine reigns again, where encounters in the street or in the supermarket make sense. Until then we're keeping a record.
previously there was Christmas explosions
afterwards you have Out with the old
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