I woke up to the sound of my alarm. I didn't want to get up. There was no time to think about being alone or the other lovely self-pitying stuff. The struggle was to get out of bed and turn off that alarm. Then, setting the other alarm to snooze, I allowed myself five minutes to settle in my bed, sitting up, convincing myself that I was meditating. Breathing.
Then that all too familiar sound would change my plans a little. The sound of cautious tires grinding fresh snow into icy mud. I got out of bed, thinking I had 15 minutes to get out of the house, but that sound was disconcerting. I looked out and saw that the streets were covered in snow.
At least it wasn't snowing.
But I had to shovel the snow. I would spend the day thinking about someone slipping, falling, and then suing me. The joy of owning property in the country where owning property was the Dream.
By the time I was standing behind the window of the little station, my sidewalk had been shoveled, my plan changed. I missed the 7:30 train, and unbeknownst to me, I would miss the one I was waiting for. But it didn't matter; I looked out the train tracks. A man wearing those furry hats with flaps over the ears was also looking out to the tracks. Was he looking into an imagined future where the train would arrive, late, but arrive? (And it never did arrive.) Or was he, like me, looking at the snow.
When I left the house after shoveling I thought I saw one or two flakes. Now I saw many big flakes falling, very carefree, not in a hurry at all. And I imagined myself being one of them. Coming from high up, making, what, a ten-minute journey down to earth. I would be born without a reason, just part of some consequences of laws of physics regarding atmospheric behaviors. I would see fog at first and eventually, once I had passed through the womb of Mother Cloud, I would see land below. I would see my siblings, all born of the same mother, from the same womb. We weren't in a hurry, but we also knew where our destiny would be, and we could see it, too. Our journeys would differ slightly, the paths slightly crossing, but most likely, not. And I wouldn't feel lonely because I would be just a snow flake. And I would grow some bit more, depending on the trail I took. I could get lighter, or denser. It wouldn't depend on me. I wouldn't have to worry. I was just a snowflake.
The snow became thicker. The flakes became smaller. The individual flakes didn't get smaller, just that the white curtain before me were made of increasingly denser flakes. It seemed that they were in a greater hurry, as if reflecting the anxiety in me and my compatriots of this little station, who were waiting for a train that was now seven minutes late. Between my eyes and the first building before me, was an ether that was becoming saturated with the white flakes. And as if each flake was a word, each gust a thought that whipped them into sentences, my mind started to wander with this ether in its midst.
I thought about the movie I saw with my tango buddy Saturday night. That one that, among other events of the weekend, reminded me of the power and simplicity of love (this, I am aware, sounds rather cheesy, but, oh well), the one by Bellini. I was impressed also by the ideas the movie expounded about poetry. In an early scene where the main character was lecturing about poetry to his class, he said something like, be picky about the words, think over and over again what better word you can use, because it's pickiness that lends beauty to your work.
I write poems, too. I recently have been writing poems more than once a day, while usually it's once or twice a month. As I have mentioned in one blog entry, if I write often it's likely because something is crazy in my romantic life. Although it's often something unpleasant, there have been times that I wrote a lot because I was excited about someone. Or even, a few times, when I fell so (temporarily) in love with a tango dance I had to write it down, a few times. But now, I write, partly, because I think there's something beautiful about writing poems. It's another exploration to a beauty, it's another flower I can plant in my garden. It's a challenge to find the right words, the right flow of words, but it's a discipline with many rewards. In the movie, the main character, in responding to his daughter's inquiry on why he had become a poet, said that he wanted since he was a child to be able to make others feel how he felt. I make that a goal with photography: to make others see what I see. I am not here to inspire, to impress, I am here to make you see what I saw, make you feel, how I felt. I am not even close to that goal, but now I want to make a similar goal with writing, especially poetry.
To be sure, at least at this stage, I still need inspiration to write a poem. The difference is that once I get the inspiration, I will try to be "pickier" about my words, more demanding about what I want to say, precisely, explore precisely how I feel. Nonetheless, I still need the inspiration, and so, I guess, it is still true that the frequency of my poem writing still reflects some turmoil in my personal life.
Now I don't even see the snowflakes anymore. They are too small and flying down too quickly. They are in a real hurry to join the thickening white blanket engulfing me and this train I didn't expect to take. It's the one after the one we were waiting for. That one never came, but a different one came and took us to the main station where we found the one I am sitting in now. That "rescue" train didn't intend on rescuing us. I wasn't sure why it even came because I had never seen it before. Things happen. They just do. I try to make sense out of them, and sometimes when I succeed I feel better, but feeling better or not, things continued to happen. I try making sense out of things usually in stress.
I can't let go of things.
Can I let go of New Haven? Last night I was looking through, briefly, rental advertisements in the two New York neighborhoods I have become interested in. I thought about the practica tonight in my own little city. I thought about the three ladies I like dancing with. I thought, wow, there are only three, and one never goes to this one, one is still finicky about her mood of dancing, and another I wish I could dance with but, well, dramas of life divide us from even speaking. Dramas, too many, present or old, in this little city. But they make it neither easier or harder for me to let go of this city. The snow, neither, as it also happens in New York. Drama will follow me to New York because the pot of soil that makes the plant of drama is me.
Understanding love doesn't help me very much in letting go. Letting go of people that I no longer talk to. I still think about people I have long let go, and I wonder why I still care. A friend of mine lives by herself with a whole houseful of cats. They keep her company. I've seen some of them. They are a character. She told me she doesn't usually feel lonely because there's always so much to do in the house. She's suffered a lot, with a marriage, with its man that abused her and her children to no ends. And although that was in the past, the legacy of marriage, I imagine, accompanies you to eternity, if you're not too careful. I wonder if she has let things go. What things? Things that she hadn't let go.
I can't let things go. But I have to.
Once I leave my little city of nearly nine years, I wonder what I will retain and how much I will leave behind. In thinking about the people I've had to let go but not completely in my mind, I wonder what the connection is that has still not been severed. It's not about them being good people, or at least good people to me. Perhaps it's about something they have given me that I haven't stored away in a black box, cutting my ties from it, and letting it wander in the foggy river of memories. Perhaps it's because I wish things hadn't ended that way, that we could have at least had some cordial connection. These people were more connected to me than are my family, in the ways that I thought mattered: intellectually, romantically, in terms of spending time, discussing, or not needing discussion. But in the end, they left me, or I left them, I don't know. In the end, families don't. And friends, even those I forget to talk to or who forget to talk to me, are always somehow connected to me. But those who have been put on a boat, or went on a boat that disappeared into that fog, they still leave me with a sadness that no snowflake would have the misfortune to taste. What did they leave with them? A connection to me I never understood? Or just false hopes I had put on their shoulders and that they had already jettisoned it into that bottomless river?
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