A STORY I FORGOT TO TELL

I read this poem this evening and it hit me.

Prayer
by Marie Howe

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

—

It hit me because it felt like something I was writing in my head TO THIS BLOG. Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important calls for my attention. But is it? IS IT MORE IMPORTANT? How come I don’t speak with you every day? How come I don’t write? How come I am saying how come instead of why? When did how come become a synonym for why in common speech? Shall I google that for me?

I shall! And look! Merriam Webster delivers! A whole page about how come instead of why, and how it denotes a more casual and relaxed tone.

Part of it is definitely that I don’t want to sit at a computer in the evenings when I’ve already been sitting at a computer all day and aggravate my pinched nerve, which so far, since vacation, is mostly dormant, only tingling now and then. It’s like having spidey sense but only about the incorrect way I’m sitting. I make a shitty superhero.

I seem to be doing the same thing with my art every month project…waiting until the last minute, procrastinating until the 30 or 31 dates are looming. I THINK ABOUT YOU ALL THE TIME. Can’t you feel me thinking? Isn’t YOUR spidey-sense tingling or is yours as useless as mine?

Anyway. It’s nearly Halloween, how crazy is that? I am dressing up tomorrow for a work thing. My whole team is dressing up, and since it was MY costume idea I can’t bail. It’s easy-peasy though, which is the best kind of costume, in my book. And then I’m dressing up again on Friday for an AIC event (adult halloween social). The kids are going with me but I haven’t been able to convince Anders to go. He’s being anti-social, but I understand. I would be, too, if I didn’t feel a sense of obligation to go to some events besides meetings and bookgroup and lunches. The kids have a costume idea which is ALSO easy-peasy, so I’m happy.

Tomorrow I have to go, after work, to the grocery store and get ingredients for the appetizer I’m bringing, plus bake cookies. I will be going to the grocery store with blue hair, most likely, as the Halloween costume for the work event involves blue hair and I have blue hair spray.

And we have two big pumpkins to carve, and I don’t know when we will do it. Martin isn’t home Saturday at all, and he might be gone part of the day Sunday. I don’t know about Karin. So, we might need to carve the pumpkins tomorrow, too, or Friday after the AIC party. The village trick-or-treating is actually going to take place on Monday, which is actually Halloween, and apparently years of trying to convince our Swedish neighbors that Halloween is ACTUALLY ON October 31 has worked, because it was Swedes who answered all the questions on FB about when the trick-or-treating was going to happen with “Monday because it’s Halloween” and they stood fast even when people complained and wanted to have it on the weekend, and I didn’t write a thing! It worked! World domination is within my grasp!

As long as the world doesn’t care that my hair will be blue.

Mood: silly
Music: Remi Wolf—Buzz Me In