so if there were a viv or an ollie, couldn’t six billy book cases be carted down the steps and remastered in the garage? and that lovely pink bookcase armorie craft desk could be a writing station? i mean really, couldn’t it? and train tables brought upstairs. upstairs, downstairs. it’s like martha meets hemingway, no? that just makes me giggle.
a thought
“They put some paint on the egg.”
other talismans: one marimekko coffee stained mug, one postca collage from handstampedB, floating in one uprootedbutterflybushspraypaintedwhite tree, one sepia lighthouse photo, one i heart virginia woolf sticker, five swirly sparrow magnets, three repurposed votivo aromatic candle boxes, and one beat up berkeley desk more suitable for writing then one practical clean all purpose dania workspace.
i need these things to write. but i need this, these silver keys tapping, this pre-intercontintenal posting to write my way back towards writing. and i’m not sure where to go. except maybe i need to begin back at the begining, and clip these nails. pause.
so this time i filed. no clippers in sight. but it is a different go round this time, no? and that’s it. we’re reinventing the rules. or are we? or is it?
i think i’ve been under the delusion that last go round that i was the same. rather, that we were the same, writing from the same chair. but that’s never been the truth, has it? i mean little w. hid under that gorgeous green (there it is again) wrap while you stealthily slipped in and out of the boys club while o. sat low but protruded in transition wear from week 1 for all the -ciders to see. and then of course there was the sushi party and the tea party. and the novel and the chapters. and the south beach and the ranch. and the fleeting brazilian singing nanny downstairs and the swedish tea drinking nanny across the sea. and the careful peeling off of hollow bunny foil and the quick crinkle and gulp of a cadbury egg. it’s just been different, right? sometimes in shades–20 hour billable days or scandanavian time zones, i mean, here or there it’s the same. or different.
but we paired together to drive that bus. taking turns driving, sometimes one of us has needed to lay down in the back of the bus. sometimes one of us needed to roll down the window and hang our head out like a basset hound. sometimes we needed to surf atop the bus. and oh so many times we needed to direct the bus to back up and then take off. you know, to run that non busser over. and sometimes we just needed the bus not to stop. and i think it’s the stopping and the not stopping that has all this difference welling up in this unnameable terror. like jobbing and filing and birthing. those are all bus stops. and there’s the terror that you won’t want to get back on the bus. or that, more accurately, i’ve just fallen off the bus and you’re driving freehandedly. and i want to drive that bus for you, to hold the refrigerator when you need that glass swept up.
so in the middle of the conversation that just keeps going not quite write m. says (becuase they get it and they dont get it) after i said, well perhaps i should just go check myself in at the hilton and finish except that that once glorious prospect sickens me because that means no red haired o. and i cant write or think or breathe like that any more just as sending w. east while you have (e) doesn’t make sense either. and then he says, because i need you to finish and get a job. and then i lose it again. and he says, c., you’re not listening to me. and i say, yes, you said: “”. and he says, yes, but i said because its not like I need you to finish. and that’s it. i need it, and i’m wrapped around this idea that i need it for sameness or i need it to fedex it to myspace or i need it for him or grandmaL. and well, yes, perhaps i do for those reasons. but they are my reasons. and the crazy thing about having birthdays nearing that invisible nonfertile line is that i’m needing to finish for reasons that are no longer compatible with the original reasons to finish (before i got on the bus and detoured away from myspace in the first place) and that’s ok too. i mean, really, it’s ok because all those other reasons exist outside of the other OC. and that’s the key to the bus, the keeping of the spraypainted branch on the desk, and the egg hunts in the pines. so he says, well, maybe you should hand over what you have to b? and i realized, yes, in this bornagain kind of way. because it’s always been the same but different. and maybe that’s my confession–that secret terror i dont want spoken that if i leave again it makes us more different and then ill never get to be on the bus–never find the doorway back to the other OC. but it isn’t here or there in a dick and jane kind of way but here and there in a seuss kind of way. and this all started different and same enough. over there on that odd combination of wicker and leather across from the mission drinking halfcaff–two writers, two soon to be mothers, two collectors of script and twine and well, flotsam. one tall blond. one short brunette. one mompair.
To (e) or not to (e)…that is the question.
I believe a girl should have options. In naming, in being, in life. Because one day she may need to trade in those contacts and her pair of “all-the-rage” but never really fit her long-legs well anyhow Guess? jeans for a pair of horned-rimmed spectacles and a thrift-store sweater-set (ala librarian chic). So if I had it my way, you’d be Estella. Or rather (e)stella (which ee cummings and Gertrude Stein would like very much, thank you). Estélla Story Mulholland, with an accent on the second e. And we’d call you Stella, and La La and Stelli and Stelly Bean and excepting your birth certificate, which only the folks at the airport security check point read, no one would even know about the (e). Silent and parenthetical it could hide on the document, dormant, until twelve or thirteen or twenty-three years from now, when needing an alias, a trip to France, a reinvention of your tomboyish surfing self, you could, if you desire, call attention to that (e). You could print it out in straight lines in front of that curvaceous “S” and become Esteé, or Estelle, or in sharp contrast to your brother, East. And you could live for five years, or ten, with that bold E, coming out of its parentheticals, and then, later, when you’ve worn it out and settled down some, when land a job as Editor-in-Chief of French Vogue, or landed on the moon, you could revert back to the comfort and security of Stella. But I’m advocating the (e) or the E, because really, a girl should have options.
