The slight intensity of the night’s rain kept me long enough from my last walk that I instead fell asleep before the surreal sounds and movements of some odd cartoons Maeve had wanted to show me. One scene displayed the immediate guilt and grief of a young hunter after shooting a bird. Fallen to the ground, bloodied, the bird laughs and cajoles his assassin to finish the job of killing him. The odd laughter this elicited from my throat is one of the last memories I have before the long pause of sleep. Along with an incantation from Hawthorne: “Pleasant is the rainy night within doors”
I woke up the next morning, heavy yet refreshed, to the distant voice of a woman whose second husband, and only true love, worked himself to death during his last project before his self-scheduled retirement. This was one of Maeve’s ‘believe-it-or-not’ podcasts that collect and distribute long, detailed first person accounts of extreme experiences. I have found the best reply as the receiver of this kind of somber story this early in the day is gentle mockery, bruited out in a lampooning lilt, until it mists the morning mirror and saves you from the too sharp image of your own hygiene. But in response to my morning mumbles, I got nothing but the empty outline of a sigh that wasn’t there.
The old girl knows all my moves.
In my defense, a slow and slovenly nature should be allowed some patience. I looked up through the kitchen window and saw a sky washed with dim variants of gray. It was as if the future was sleeping and no one was trying to wake it up.
After a time cooped up in the apartment the imagination withers and without imagination, depression sets in. Looking out the window can also help shake loose a fastening gloom, but if, like myself at the present, you reside in a studio with glass brick at eye level instead of transparencies, its best to simply get yourself donned appropriately and out into the weather as quickly as possible, leaving the cave before the meander.
By the time of my arrival at the second studio on the South Branch, I thought of taking a stab at a pastiche in order to round out my thoughts into something useful and perhaps to surface the emotions that often stay under the water.
Perhaps it was just for amusement or to fill up a portfolio, but I began work on a blog of travels, ones that mingled freely between the real, the truly experienced, the overheard, the simply read about or spectated. And though my attitude began as a mix of pluck and frivolity, I kept hearing the tale of the woman whose husband worked himself to an anxious death, told in that hollow voice.
It remained in my head like yesterday’s soft rains.