xenium: (by Katherine Squier) I can’t figure...

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

(by Katherine Squier)

I can’t figure out if it was a good day; I can’t figure out how I’m feeling. Let’s try to order the pieces together. Home and in bed too late, and then not being able to sleep for no good reason, but with The Food Programme playing for hours, actually, and I have another post half-formed in my mind about how glad I am I downloaded the BBC iPlayer, but that’s for another time. Feeling a bit ill; up, but didn’t go out in the morning, and it’s funny how reading something I last read for class in the fall of 2009, I seem to have underlined simply all the wrong things. I suppose that means I’ve learned something since then. A strange afternoon into evening at the pub. I adore my BA seminar and staying there with them for hours was great, but three beers and picking at other people’s fries is not a substitute for dinner, and neither is two ciders and most of a bag of popcorn at 11 PM, even at an event as lovely as fairy tales. This is where I say, it’s Fourth Year, it’s Fine, and later on I regret making this so public, and not even couching it in nice language. It’s only that I have lots of feelings about things and an exhausting phone conversation and I’m too tired right now to write in my journal.

My mother sent me two packages and in one was a whole lot of things from Economy Candy, including Chupa Chups, which remind me of her tennis friend from when I was very young. She was from Argentina I think, her name was Susan as well and she had a gorgeous pool in her backyard and a tin of Chupa Chups which I loved and I couldn’t read the script on the wrapper and I thought it said Chypa Chyps. The package also had an eyeglass screwdriver which I don’t understand because I don’t wear glasses. The larger package had an embroidery kit and, in a bag, the quilt she’s been promising me for years, the one I pieced together in middle school when I got new jeans and we cut up the old ones for denim squares—back pockets included—for the quilt. She finally promised me over the summer, we finally agreed on the deadline of Halloween, and yet here it is on Valentine’s Day. In one corner it has a handwritten tag: Blue Jeans, for Susan love Mom, Brooklyn 2012, and underneath that, another tag, clearly a crafter’s joke, which simply says in block letters, THIS TOOK FOREVER. When I took it out of the bag and saw that tag and realized that it smelled like lavender, my mother’s favorite—there are lavender sachets in those denim back pockets because of course there are—I started just crying all over the place, and you know how you don’t even realize sometimes how hard things are until that moment, the one when you finally step back?