Gratitudes + things that are making me happy

• Rain and Thunder over breakfast

• frozen yogurt and nineties movies with my little sister

• the smell of salt in the air

• the sea-horizon at dusk

• long brisk walks

• rinsing my hair with tea tree oil after swimming

• doing a monthly version of this exercise

• getting paid for housesitting

• Oscar Wilde

• Excellent Twitter conversations/interactions (I'm @tangerineteeth)

Sui glow

Sui wearing so much red that she throws off red light.

To keep warm through the night

What a language it is, the laughter of women,
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

- Lisel Mueller

I can't tell you what it meant to be breathless with laughter with my princess-haired friend without telling you that twenty minutes before she was speaking of her dear friend whose boyfriend is regularly beating her up, and how she suspects they are going to get engaged soon.

I can't tell you about joy, about one of the songs we sang along to, in between cracking up at how the bass made my parents' minivan rattle — far from home, all alone/but we're so happy — without saying also that I wore my throat raw sobbing to the empty space of the car on my way home. (What can/could I do? What is there to do?...)

No, the weight of the laughter that I share with my friends is some function of this litany of pain. The assaults, the abuse, the depression and eating disorders, the scars literal and figurative, all these grievances that I find so uniformly distributed among the women I love. It's not incongruous that we laugh. And it's this honesty that allows it. It is possible to really laugh because we trust each other, and that includes not having to pretend we do not know all these reasons not to laugh.

Despite all this, all these things that so often come with being a woman in this society, we still have laughter. We do. And it is not escape, denial, or forgetting, but the taste of the bitter with the sweet, sweeter for its being so dearly bought. It is the insolence of being joyful with open eyes — and it is our honor, to speak so bold a language. Our fire that we are burning through the night.

Breakfast with my sister and my niece

Some time ago, in their old house.

Gratitudes + things that are making me happy

• big big mugs for tea

• eucalyptus trees

• Australian plans

• niece, aged twenty months, calling my name when she doesn't know where I am

• taking pictures of her this and yesterday evening with one of my plastic cameras

• rosary-based prayers; prayer beads in general

• staying up late reading the Hunger Games trilogy on my brother-in-law's Kindle

• my big sister's new house, especially when the afternoon light comes in

• ice cream trucks

• having a journal with lined pages again

• feeling peaceful

• mockingbirds, and how they make my mom happy