It’s a jungle here, my whole body is sticky, anything that touches — hand and arm, leg and tablecloth — makes a shhhlpp sound when they come apart, and sweat drips down my back even when I’m not moving. We’re in for several days of haze and humidity, though there have been a few cracks of thunder and I’m praying it finally rains. The high water content of the air lends a silvery, shimmering quality to the drone of the cicadas.
My big excursion to town and the beach was three days ago, and it was glorious, seven hours laying in the sun and bathing in that resplendent water, but I will be back in the hills for a while. I have quite a lot to do, actually, now that the philosophy is in place to do some of what I said I was going to do. My walking days are over, my taxi days are over, but it’s only three weeks until I will, in all likelihood, leave for Palermo. If I need to go to town sometime before I leave, I’ll just get a ride both ways with my neighbor.
In the heat, I find myself laying with my guitar, like a sleeping ragazzo, plucking away, humming a tune, writing songs. If I write one every day, I’ll have a collection of one-minute songs to bring into the studio, which is nice, which I can name Sicily. I brought the guitar along in the hopes that I would do something, anything, except that I didn’t imagine the magic element would be my defenselessness against the humidity. And I shouldn’t even be telling you this, because I have a habit of not finishing what I start. I suppose this is an attempt at accountability.
On this night last year I was the last one to arrive at my birthday dinner on the Upper East Side. My brother was sitting across from his latest girlfriend, and a then-acquaintance recently returned from a sojourn in Central Asia was sitting across from my empty seat.
Themes have a habit of annual return, I’ve learned over the years of recording my life. It could be any day of the year, it could be any idea, or person, or problem, but whatever comes into being will be back like clockwork 365 days later, or 730 days later, or 1,095 days later, or a hundred years later, in some form.
All of the latent pathos casting such a long shadow that night only revealed itself as a sudden pressure to iron out my life’s problems as fast as humanly possible before they caused me to fumble and lose hold of this precious new creature. I failed miserably, of course, and it all exploded like bird shot. I walked blindly into having something to lose, straight out of my no-man’s land where an old world and an old way of being had died, stumbling like a foot soldier who doesn’t know what rules apply or what language to speak in this new country that he helped bring into existence.
But now I am somewhere peaceful where I can remember what peace is like, where everything is neutral. And I shouldn’t excoriate myself for having ended up here on the anniversary of that first glimpse across the table, shyly fumbling with my purse, knowing in that moment I had nowhere left to hide.
Living, but only knowing what I was not, having no idea how to communicate what I am, never expecting that I could be received with understanding, or knowing how to receive another, such a way of living can’t bear the weight of love. I knew it a year ago, but not what to do about it. If this was the only way that I could look at the matter squarely and figure out what to do, by following my vision to this island, then I have risen to the moment after all and did not shirk from my duty to him, or to life.
As I’ve already written, turning 34 begins a new phase of belonging to the world, not to where you have come from. Surprisingly, this new reality is actually present, in a lullaby, a phone call, and a shaky faith based on the scantest evidence that good will come.
Now it’s time to go to lunch at Giro’s house. Paranoid about whether I am fit to be inside a house with other people when my circumstances are so rudimentary, I scrub myself head to foot in the shower, check my clothes repeatedly for mustiness, and dab on perfume.
A birthday translation of Tsvetaeva from my sweet friend, who is in Normandy waiting for her fiance to come home from his night shift at the bottle factory:
August - asters
August - stars
August - clusters
Grapes and rowan
Rusty - august!
Full and kind
Held like apple
By a child
Emperor’s name right from the start
As a hand print on the heart
August! Tardy roses, kisses too
Lighting bolts with showers of stars
August!
It rains fallen stars
Август — астры,
Август — звёзды,
Август — грозди
Винограда и рябины
Ржавой — август!
Полновесным, благосклонным
Яблоком своим имперским,
Как дитя, играешь, август.
Как ладонью, гладишь сердце
Именем своим имперским:
Август! — Сердце!
Месяц поздних поцелуев,
Поздних роз и молний поздних!
Ливней звёздных —
Август! — Месяц
Ливней звёздных!
Wow! That’s beautiful. Happy birthday🤩
We share the same birthday! Happy birthday to you and me. Auguri.