Self-reporting

It is almost 1 am, and it has been months, literally, since I have found myself in this very position, with this very real desire to spew forth onto the virtual page. Earlier today I wrote some of my personal concerns in another place, a private place that I don't share with anyone. I often wonder if I shouldn't leave a paper trail with passwords and pages for some shred of post-mortem posterity, clues for a detective trained in the art of hermeneutics to reassemble upon my untimely demise. I mean, I am not planning an untimely demise, or even a timely one, but there I go worrying about my immaculate body of work and not about pragmatic, concrete necessities, like, for example, getting a life-insurance policy.

But then, perhaps, I avoid such things for the very reason, tinged with magical thinking, that if I avail myself of the necessary precautionary apparatuses, then I will somehow be summoning my own destruction. In any case, Nico and I just watched a movie which made me feel my mothering skills are laudable, even if my child is so far away that I can only video-chat with her, and not reach out and smell her skin.

I am reading myself and feeling guilty, because I just want to curl up in bed with her and have a warm snuggle in the morning. Nico has been fabulous company since I have been back from Mexico, I'll admit that, and we have been keeping each other happy and healthy, but our friendship has boundaries that don't include early morning nuzzling (and thank goodness!).

It has been weeks, months maybe. I have gone to Mexico, for a wild week of pedestrian glory. I have never walked the city quite so foolishly (in high heels over cobbled-stones) nor so aimlessly, but I got to see a few museums that I had wanted to, several films at the Cineteca, and an adaptation into theater of Ingmar Bergman's Persona which, as it turns out, I had already put on my Netflix queu, at number 45 of 97. Who knew.

Santa Barbara has been lonely without Kik, and without my baby. Kik flew in from Costa Rica for a few days, and that was, if nothing else, adventurous. That was after Jenny spent July 4th weekend with me, and then I spent another 4 days down in Santa Ana with her. I never would have imagined that I would go to the O.C. to escape poor air quality but the raging Gap fire in Goleta spewed massive quantities of ash for several days and I have as yet still not given my car a proper washing. At David's the other day, I did a hose down, but I saw, after the ash dried on my Cobalt blue Honda, that there were big swirls of pallid dust where my hands had managed to remove the ash more fully.

There was a baby shower up on Figueroa Mountain for Erin and Bo, a birth, that I did not witness, of Cheyla and Nico's baby, several lunches and dinners and films with friends. And yet I feel this odd emptiness. It is a different sort of emptiness than I am accustomed to, not so much an aching one, but an evident one, nonetheless. I have begun teaching again, and while I dread reading and grading compositions on principle, I do very much enjoy being back in front of a classroom. I feel it does wonders for my productivity, but then I might just be back into this self-deception charade, one never knows.

So what happens now?

I go to bed, alone. I get up in the morning and go to the gym again, I eat the prescribed 5 times per day. I am taking certain control of my life, of the things that I can control, that is, and I am letting go of some others. I don't even feel sad about that. It will have to do for now, because it is all I am capable of. So Nico has gone to his room, and I am here in the darkness, tonight we didn't listen to 80's song on YouTube, or TV series from our mutual yet distant childhoods. He's leaving for Italy next Tuesday, and that's when I am really going to be alone. But not for long, I hope.