Facing east, December

Hospitality

In the youth of the Midwestern autumn, in the sweet-smelling and the golding warmth, I sleep on Nuch's sofa and then on the left side of her bed. She lays a spread to share with me before her afternoon classes. Dried figs and blueberries, coconut milk with molasses...

She is living on the ground floor of an old Victorian, a cool and shaded space where they have tacked two-yard cuts of fabric over their door frames in place of doors. When they open the windows, the house is filled with their drifting.

A postcard from last winter

Déjà vu

San Francisco, December 2011.
Illinois, May 2011.

Another Thanksgiving cemetary

"My sister thinks it's so awful that I sit on the graves when I read here..."  Noel putting some juniper, I think, in her hair  the oldest headstone in the graveyard  accidentally looking like a sour hipster

Thanksgiving was like this

first I hosted


then we drove


there were dear kittens


lovely siblings-of-my-friend


we celebrated in a big house on the prairie


(I wish I'd been thoughtful about this light, sigh)


and then some more in the suburbs
Additionally: hymns / parents / grandparents / slouching / pie crusts / hummus / tea / tea / reading aloud...

You can see my hostfriend Noel's pictures here.

Goodbye, Chicago

I don't love this city, and of course it feels better to leave than to be left, but still it's not simple leaving it.

I'm returning to San Francisco today. My home-city. Maybe for a few months, maybe for forever. I don't know — we'll see.

Happiness and gratitudes

• hospitality

• winter

• that a shower and stepping outside for a few moments makes everything better

• a care package of tangerines

• sleeping on campus during the day sometimes instead of in my room at night

• my new pets, which are two star-shaped foil balloons

• how many options I already have for next year

• "Near Town," by The Amazing Broken Man

• bike rides when I get cabin fever late at night, and the combination of emptiness and dark in the streets

• soccer-field stargazing for too long and my toes going numb

• a feeling of soon-will-have-smashed-something-edness

• emailing with Sui

• long Skypes with my Bostonian contesserate

• pesto/tomato grilled cheese

• soon I'll have my degree

Waiting on a drawbridge with Noel

Designer drugs

"I don't take drugs; I am drugs." – Salvador Dali

Two a.m. showers in the dark are my favorite now. In the dark means, by the light that comes in the bathroom window from the suburban night sky (a hazy pinkish-gray).

As my hair is drying I open an umbrella the color of that sky and pad barefoot out to the middle of the backyard lawn. From above, no one would be able to see me.

A thin November rain throughout the night, so I keep my windows open to the cold for the sake of its sound on the remaining leaves. (Are the yellow ones always the last to fall? Plastering the pavement, striking in the streetlights...)

I smell like incense.

October weekend

Two roses

You see?

Knotty shoulders

In the Loop. Sometimes you just have to put your bags down and find a nice patch of pavement to do some shoulderstands on.

Not long now

Wicker Park again. I made a friend this year who lives there, a little bit odd of a story beginning with a set-up by our mutual matchmaker friend, and I don't know if we now will stay friends, though it would be nice. It's hard to tell with people in general, whether to stay in touch or not. Even best friends can be forgotten, even acquaintances can be kept in touch with, if the circumstances and intentions are right.

(Flatness is a strange thing): In Chicago, you can look down a street until it meets its vanishing point.

70 degrees, September wind, a sweet dry smell on the air

So beautiful that for a day I lived under a tree, its whole shade for myself and my backpacked belongings. I smiled my way into my old dorm to do laundry on their non-coin-op machines, and while I was waiting for my clothes to dry I took a picture of the rest of my objects. It is a really beautiful thing to be carrying everything you need, plus some, on your person.

Sunroom

Peach & Plum & the end of a day

Central Illinois. A botanical garden for the cornfield-dwellers.

We were both rather worn out that weekend. We spent a lot of time in the car and asleep. But it was nice to share each other's company, and it was nice for me not to feel like I had to act happier and more energetic than I was feeling. This surprised me — that it can still be good to share time and space with friends even apart from fun and good moods and laughter, etc... I'm not articulating well, but you know what I mean? Anyway, it is.

Retrospect in fragments