the sixteenth {or "N is for Neville who died of ennui"}
9:07 am, Friday, Jun. 16, 2006

I'm sitting here, at work, 9:07 in the morning, and I can feel it. It runs through me from left shoulder to right shoulder like a steel rod. That's where it sits right now, this feeling. Sadness? Loneliness? I'm not sure what to call it. It fell across me like a blanket or a fog and now it has hardened to a thick bar that my body is suspended from like an old coat on a hanger. As I drove in to work this morning I passed one of those run-off ponds or displacement ponds or whatever those strange little man-made congregations of water where people plan to build up offices or shopping malls and things are called. I investigated one time and knew about them and what they were called and what they were for but now it's gone from me.

But, yes, this water. I saw it and I thought of the feeling that had invaded me this morning like some foreign thing and imagined it sitting like an anvil at the bottom of that little pond. I thought of the water trying to change it, trying to take it and make it something different, and I thought of that anvil sitting there unchanged forever until the water evaporated and leaves fell and the world changed but still that anvil would sit.

Before that, when I walked the handful of steps from my back door to my car, I opened my cell phone and checked the date. I couldn't remember if it was a Thursday or a Friday. It said it was the 16th so I recited that little poem about how many days are in a month and decided there were fifteen days left in the month. That still didn't tell me what day it was.

Before that, in my robe after my shower but before I forced myself to get up and get dressed, I was reading. In the book a man is riding a bicycle across the country. When I couldn't put off getting ready for work any more I closed my book and thought about how bad it was that the place I left off meant that this guy who had been pretty happy throughout the book despite a lot of things was now at a really low point. It seemed to be a very bad thing that I had to leave him sitting feeling down and alone in a tent in the cold, especially considering how very like that I felt myself.

Pulling out of my driveway I thought about the way I'd been listening to the same Neutral Milk Hotel cd I'd had for years in the car all week despite the new cds I had stacked neatly by my computer. They were good cds and I liked all of them but this week felt like the beginning of a routine that might last for years. A routine where I would listen to the eight plus minutes of "Oh Comely" and sing it, too, mostly. A routine where I would then skip back to the first track and sing that as well.

Driving to work with that anvil sitting inside me, filling every space inside my skin, I focused on another song and tried to ignore the anvil. I sang "she is all you could need. She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires" and then I noticed that a mimosa growing by the highway was blooming. Now, there are not many plants that I care about. Wisteria, sometimes, when it blooms flowers like clusters of grapes, that's one. And mimosas. And when mimosas bloom those little pink pom-poms, even after those pink blooms turn to brown little messes that cling to things and seem like tiny fingers of rot, even then I love mimosas. And seeing those pink blooms reaching out at the edge of the highway did something to me. My eyes were full all of the sudden. I was surprised by this, very surprised. I blinked again and again and tried to sing with the next song but my voice sounded funny and wavery in a way my voice never does so I stopped.