“He says the feeling you got from it was like the sun coming up in your head.”
The other day, B became interested in the link between suggest and its etymological cousins: gestation, digest, ingest. He looked up the root, gest, found that it comes from the Latin meaning “carry” or “bear.” That’s pleasing, he said, they’re often pleasing, the roots of things. I keep thinking now of a gesture as bearing meaning, digestion as carrying something twice, and somehow suggest has become sug-gest, where sug has linked itself to sugar so closely in my brain that I keep thinking of it as sugar carrying, so suggest has transformed in my strange mind into something bearing sweetness. The days have been sweet and sunny lately, but I feel still sluggish and slow, as if my body is stuck in molasses. The feeling you got from it was like the sun coming up in your head. In an effort to unstick myself from sluggish, in an effort to bear some sweetness into life, an incomplete list of things that have made me feel like the sun was coming up in my head.
The smell of coffee in B’s apartment when he has begun working and I am still half asleep in his bed.
Running down a road in Vermont during a writers’ conference I could hardly believe I’d gotten a scholarship to and being stopped for directions by a couple in their 50s driving a red sports car. They were hoping to find Robert Frost’s cabin and I couldn’t help them, but I shielded my eyes against the sun and wished them luck, internally thanked them for the fact that Frost’s lines had found their way back into my head. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches, I thought with every footfall of the rest of my run.
Drinking a caipirinha in a sweaty, crowded bar under the Williamsburg Bridge after receiving a phone call that I’d gotten into an MFA program in Arizona. The whole world felt like it was opening up. I did it! I yelled to my friends over the drums. I went dancing and was kissed up against the corrugated metal of a storefront by a friend and sat later in my kitchen while he slept in my bed and cried because I was so happy. It is that moment, maybe, more than anything else, that was the sun: me, alone in my underwear, crying in joy.
Seeing my brother’s face in the San Francisco airport after traveling all day in a sludge of Xanax panic and airport food.
Turning up into a full bow pose in a 95 degree yoga studio one afternoon. The swell in my chest that pushed out through my heart as I was curved and upside down. The trust in my body to hold me up.
A vanilla soft serve ice cream cone dipped in sprinkles from Byrne Dairy in Hamilton, New York.
The first time I printed out my novel and realized it was a whole novel, more than two hundred pages. That shocking feeling of having accomplished something.
Watching the sun set over Madrid from Parque del Oeste, watching the light turn pink then dark blue over an Egyptian temple brought stone by stone to Spain and listening to bongos someone was playing and feeling the deadly July heat dissipate with the sun.
Turning on the café lights on the porch for the first time and watching the whole house light up as if in contained flame.
Dancing in my living room with my best friends, a blinking party light and a disco ball with a green spotlight shining on it, songs we all love playing. Among us, A spinning like a crystal with the sun shot right through her, rainbow in every direction, every color edged in velvet.
A late night walk through the jungle in Costa Rica, stopping on the path while the man I was with picked up a tapacamino bird who was sitting like a fat little marshmallow on the dirt. He pulled his wing out so all of the feathers showed and let me touch them. The quickness of the bird’s heart, the knowledge we would put him down in a moment, the rest of the walk through the forest over a swinging bridge, his flashlight illuminating the dark in sweeping motions.
My friend saying to us on a street corner, even the gas station is beautiful at night, and that being true at the moment.
Candles and candles and more candles lit on every table in our house, every night. The way any evening is made sacred when tall pillars of white wax are lit.
Rolling over in the mornings to see B’s face against the gray sheets, thinking, oh the sweetness has held for one more day, the sweetness of my life has carried through to morning.
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