Like sediment, and all the bubbles float to the top

( I ).

Jun 23, 2024

A dear friend, who was also my neighbor, gifted me a bookmark last year. I didn’t realize this for a while, but it seems that I use it for my favorite books. I read more than one book at a time, and her bookmark is how I inadvertently learn of my inner preferences. It’s hard to know what you like most when everything is concurrent and intertwined. I drink hot coffee from my parents’ dark blue mugs. It is so hot today, and we lost our internet for several hours. When we lost it, I experienced a relief inside my chest that I didn't know existed. I don’t know if a day can be so hot as to stop the internet, but maybe that’s what happened. I saw a dear friend I knew from Prague yesterday, on the road near my parent’s house. She and her boyfriend drove by me three times in their car, and then yelled my name from the window. At that point I still didn’t know who it was, or what was happening. She got out of the car, and I felt my body melt, and I was someone old—by which I mean I was hugging someone from another timeline who knew an older version of me, which was actually a younger version of me, depending on how you look at it. We hadn’t seen one another in something like ten years. I couldn’t stop smiling for a while after that. There is a hummingbird that visits my mother’s garden, the family has decided she is like a fairy. If I sit still for long enough the hummingbird visits me too. I close my eyes when she’s by my shoulder because I’m afraid of her beak. At the side of the road, after all the hugging, my friend asks me if I have the same number. My mind sifts through which number she might have had, which has to be long gone by now. She gives me hers, and I tell her I don’t have one, not since I retired the Japanese one I’d had since 2017. The next day—today—I went to put her number in my phone, and I don’t know why, but it made me feel warm to see that her number was the same—that it was already there, and that it always had been. We have plans to meet tomorrow before she and her boyfriend go back to New York. In New Hampshire, they swim, and they live away from New York on purpose. But after this week, they’ll return to New York on purpose. Maybe I thought not having a phone number meant I was unreachable. But actually because of the internet I’m very reachable. Maybe I want a phone number instead. When my grandmother died, and my family had to sort through her things, they asked me what I wanted to keep. It’s an uncomfortable cross when we lose someone, that after losing them we sort through their belongings. Privacy allegedly alters in death, and we belong to the objects in their house, and yet we don’t. I was in Japan, and far away when I was asked what I wanted, and the first thing I thought of was the yellow beach towel, and the yellow phone. These were the things I could see from far away. I wore the yellow towel to the beach the other day, and it’s so big I can drape it over my head and my body at the same time; only my face peeks out, and my shins, and maybe my knees. The yellow phone isn’t plugged into the wall. It’s in my room, but it has one of those dials that are circular, like you really have to pay attention to each number—like how sometimes an object holds an entire place inside it. If you get one number wrong, you have to hang up and start all over with the numbers and their half-moon paths, otherwise you end up connecting to a different place you didn’t mean to—a place you don’t even know. When I first got home, I dialed my grandmother’s phone number from my parents’ landline, a number I still have memorized—the beeps still sound the same. I hung up before it rang, actually it might have rang but I don’t remember now. And these are things we write about with underlying heaviness, or rather, there is the heaviness in a cup, like sediment, and all the bubbles float to the top, no less deserving of weight though they are lighter, lighter than light, so light they can float, look up and see a different future.