the meat and the matrix

The rain comes and goes. My desk lamp flickers in and out every once in a while, incandescent flirtation. I have an empty coffee cup, a crumpled paper snowflake, a green pen, and the impossibility of summarizing Luce Irigaray, all looking up at me from the half-shadowed desk. Perhaps I will pop popcorn for dinner. Perhaps I will drink water into clarity.

Everything is a mystery.

I called my mom tonight, and she listened to me talk about how disoriented I feel recently, how exhausted, how quickly the world seems to speed by as I spend hours and hours of each day tucked between books' covers. I am pulled taut by the irony of spending all this time in my reading and studying and thoughts, ignoring my skin muscles tendons blood bones until my eyes twitch and my thumbs ache with holding pages open and my stomach growls for attention -- ironic because I'm studying, in part, the problems of separating out our bodies from our minds and our souls.

The cicadas are insistent. The air is cooling off. The sky is fading.

Let us find the beauty in seraphed printed alphabets and the scent of thin-pressed paper pulp and glue, yes, and let us find beauty in still life photographs posted on the rich blogland (as I so often do, and remember to breathe), but let us also find beauty in making eye contact with a stranger on the sidewalk, and let us find beauty in the minuscule trapezoids on the backs of our own hands, the jut of a collarbone, the rough of a heel. J had me feel S's glossy brown arm in church this morning, to note the smoothness of her skin: let us find beauty in the moments where we touch one another.

Little boys bounce a ball in the dusky courtyard. Somewhere a song has ended.