5 o'clock this morning found me still wide awake after hours of tossing and turning, smoking a cigarette in the dark in the office and contemplating whether or not grieving is truly an action. I don't think that it is deliberate enough to warrant action, yet process seems too forgiving a description. What do you think, strictly on a word usage basis?

I'm a good sleeper. I can fall asleep within seconds of deciding to. I can sleep for ten hours straight, without waking up once...six days a week.The first summer that I moved to New York, I couldn't sleep. Mike and I would get in bed around 3 and I would try to fall asleep, frustrated with my inability and with Mike's peacefulness. I would get up again around four and sit by myself in the humid living room, smoking cigarettes and watching dawn break over the Chrysler building. After a few weeks, it got to where I couldn't fall asleep until I had seen the greying-pink sky reflected in the scales of that building, until I had asked myself, for the hundredth time, what it was that I had just done with my life.
11:04:17 AM     comment []

Driving north on the 101. It's late, past eleven, and downtown recedes in my rearview. Pablo Honey, for the last three days now. I can't stop needing it. I don't want to stop driving. I want to keep going, pulling against the curves in the freeway, pushing the accelerator hard, so hard for seconds at a time. I want to keep going until I feel alone. Until, miles and miles later, up the coast, my gas light comes on and I finally pull over. Over and under the bright lights of a gas station in a place I've never been, or at least only passed through before, stepping out and pulling down at the skirt I've been wearing all day, my hands shaking from cigarette after cigarette, my mouth so dry. Feeling alone for the first time in months and aware of it as the high heels I've also been wearing all day for no reason at all chink at the pavement around the entwined gas hose.

Grieving is an entirely selfish action.

I made myself come home. I made myself stop playing the same songs over and over. The house is still and unusually humid. The only sounds are the gentle clicking and whirring of my computer, of my fingers on the keyboard, a curl of smoke in my peripheral, the slip of a cube as it melts against quiet vodka.

In my office I have a fish tank. I got it last October and the first fish that I bought were three goldfish (which have now grown to an alarming size) and two white mollies, a male and a female. Other fish have come and gone since but these five have stuck with me. The mollies are pretty, silvery and slender. They swim in tandem, their bodies weaving and brushing back and forth. Tonight when I got home I found that the female mollie had died. I flushed her down the toilet and silently thanked her for making my life more pleasant, as I've done with all the fish that have died.

I can't look at the male, now. All alone, swimming back and forth, residual memories of his mate parting the water before him. The goldfish are picking on him, as though there were something wrong in being alone, as though it were selfish and socially unacceptable. I want to comfort him somehow but he is a fish and I live outside of his world.
12:05:49 AM     comment []