#215

Fragmented. Wanting to write, but the breaks in the process are not cooperating. Scattered. A snow globe, mentions M. Sticky, she says. I say, uninspired. Sometimes, lost.

Her: Your ontology is to write.
Me: I’m not sure what ontology is.

I didn’t say that to her, but I definitely thought it. My classes on psychoanalysis didn’t come in to help me with that one.

The morning started well enough, but slid into a mental mess. A headache follows me around the house, kind of shouting in a way, to drink more water, but all I do is brew more coffee. The dog, his paw is hurt, spending more time sleeping than he ever has. His energy level, low, and me, wondering what I’ll be able to do with him next week when I have to go on a work trip.

M is from Wales. She tells me curse words in Welsh, which I can’t even write down because I don’t know how to spell them — complex. Funny. Today, she wore a black and white checked jacket with a scarf with a black and white skull print. Glasses. Her office, I know it, I can picture the corner she was sitting in. The way the calm grey paint was applied with precision. The small kitchen bar that runs along the far wall. The sofa and her chair. A coffee table. Some paintings on the wall. I fell for her a while ago, but then I let it go. But it comes back. She offers up words like “lovely” and “darling” but in a way that makes me think she just speaks like that because English people speak like that sometimes. But I hope it’s more. She offers up words about my writing, her wanting more. I think of being seen.

I put on Bach, Keyboard Concerto No. 7 in G Minor, BWV 1058. I never knew what BWV meant. I don’t care to know honestly, but I wrote that there, and I still wonder what it means. I used to play the piano. I took lessons for fifteen years. I think that is right. Cycled through two teachers, one who used to pick her nose. Another at a community college who used to sit too close to me while I played because her office had a grand piano in it and not much room for anything else, apart from two adults. It’s in that room that I first learned Beethoven. It’s there that I learned more about how to hold my hands. How to do arpeggios. It’s in that room that I braved some of the most complex pieces I ever learned. A few months back, at my mother’s house, I found the box of music and those pieces, and I wondered if I’d be able to play them again. The hours spent at the keyboard, pounding out the phrases, the notes that were just a little too far away, learning the tricks to bend your fingers where you never thought they would go, and then to play the piece once for a jury or a party, and then, back in the bench, the music went. I actually had a good knack for memorization, but I couldn’t sight-read for shit, which always made me feel like a failure as a musician.

It’s the andante movement of this piece that gets me. It’s a procession. It moves carefully across the page. I lie on the floor, the dog near my head, and listen.