Hello my love, beautiful summery afternoon here, your chambermaid has knocked off for the day. I wasn't intending major housework, but then thought I should take advantage of warm temperatures and clean the baths & wash the kitchen floor, wet chores that I vastly prefer to do in the nude or, as today, wearing only panties. A second workout of sorts, after my first with rubber bands & weights. So now I'm feeling sated and self-satisfied and with what feels like a well-deserved glass of icefilled wine, and the house is the spiffier for it. I'm glad too that I didn't let it go for too long, that starts to weigh on me, oppressively. So at the moment I have a very pleasant sense of bearable lightness of being, with the house clean, and little touches of sprucings - new flower pot in the aerie, fresh curtains in my bedroom. It's the little things, sometimes, isn't it? Truly.

And now the windows are open, the light honeyed, and I'm freshly showered in my pink minotaur tee, spritzed with Miss Dior - how I enjoy wearing it - a sensory treat in itself. I love everything about it, the fragrance, light, complex, green, absolutely not cloying. I like the tiny cut glass bottle through which the pale elixir gleams. I'm so glad I've managed to recover (like lost files) aspects of myself so long-buried - my hair longer now, clipped up in a haphazard twist; my body slimmed; MiMi recharging after a glorious time with you. Even my writing - I'm so glad I write now. I had always wanted to be a writer - well here I am, in a way - finally, even if my output is a bit category-defying and unconventional. No matter.

I have a friend who as a side effect of medication that is of critical necessity for his wellbeing, finds that he has to sleep many, many hours at night, at least ten or twelve, which is frustrating to him, but he's resigning himself to it. He's very creative, and I wrote to him that I thought that perhaps without his even knowing it, in his sleep all sorts of necessary repairs and dreams are going on - that in fact, allow him to be all that more creative and productive and clear in his imaginings in his waking life. And - I don't know that it's because I wrote that to him - but I recently received a message from him, and he seems to have reached the same conclusion, and is at peace with himself with it.

I've found myself thinking about my own experience. I relate to him, though I'm not on any medication. But I too tend to need what seems to be more sleep than most people, which I too have found frustrating. But I function much much better when I have all the sleep that I feel I wish. And maybe I'm doing dreamwork too, mostly unconsciously, sometimes consciously - when I remember them I record my dreams. Also, this line of thought is tied up for me with these awful feelings of disconnectedness and with what I thought of as "homesickness" day after day, for many years, when I worked in various jobs, usually in tall office buildings. I don't think skyscrapers per se had anything to do with it - although I remember one day looking up Sixth Avenue in midtown, with this feeling of alienation - so this is what it looks like, this crazy world we're in - this is why they won't let me work from home - so that they can keep building these towers that I'm required to spend my days in (nights too sometimes). I always enjoyed working, in the sense of keeping my mind occupied, hands busy, engaging, being productive, making a difference somehow (if even only to a boss whom I liked)... but I vastly preferred to engage in all those things from the comforts of home, in my own space, without this terrible sense of unremediable self-bifurcation and exile.

But some of that feeling, too, was perhaps tied up in my not really being in very close touch with essential aspects of myself, that I hadn't properly heeded and nurtured, had in fact, quite inadvertently - in well-intentioned unconscious wrongheadedness, reinforced relentlessly by all sorts of cultural expectations having to do with success and industry - buried. I'm in a fortunate situation now, I suppose, in that there's more of a convergence or coming to fore of creative aspects of myself. My mother was ambidextrous - could write with either her left or right hand with apparent equal facility, though she favored her right. I remember her mentioning once the cruelty of trying to turn a "leftie" into a "rightie." I've always been very righthanded, and yet on another, more metaphorical level, I relate to that anecdote. That I was more creative than I knew - or I use that word "creative" as a label for, I don't know, an intuitive associative relating to the world, etc. - but that in fact as though I had been in that way "left handed" I didn't really feel allowed to go that way - in a pretty systematic way, because - well I don't know. There are, after all, successful writers & artists & poets even in our cutthroat competitive culture - but I guess success is measured by aspects of that culture - publication, marketing, "best sellers," prizes, etc.

I don't know, honey (sail away with me). As successful and productive as I've been in earlier adult years in my life, I always felt that it was all a little harder than I could naturally cope with - and that much of it wasn't me. After college I found myself of necessity of course plunged into the world of looking for gainful employment, which had - as I fairly soon discovered - virtually nothing to do with the nature of the many many years of education I'd received. I found a nine-to-five job, temping at first, then solidly employed as a paralegal, and I always hated it, the routine, the office, the duties that even if I found them engaging - were very apart from my concerns. But I know that not everyone feels the same as me - a good thing!! I remember mentioning my great feeling of disconnect from going to an office to - a woman in an office, not even one I was working in (I don't remember the circumstances). And that woman couldn't relate to me at all - because she said that she loved nothing better than to get up in the morning with the prospect of going to the office for the day. (Wow, talk about Venus and Mars. Neither of us could relate to the other.) And I had one boss who I really, really liked, loved working under him, or being on his team - and even with that I had always this part of me forever held back in reserve - and he knew it, and I think he was sensitive to it, and maybe it was even a reason why he liked me, that intelligence & complexity. He memorably said to me - and he was, as far as I could tell, a very very happy man - that when he woke up in the morning he would jump with excitement into his slippers and look forward with great anticipation to the coming day in his office. (He was such a nice guy! I think he told me this on Thanksgiving Day, of all days, when for some reason (of professional duty, we were on a big case at the time) I stopped by Maiden Lane and his office on the 19th floor - and there he was!).

I don't have any big ringing conclusion to this post. Just that I don't feel this sense of great personal splitting anymore, though my way of life clearly has its own set of issues that will only attenuate most likely over time - but I won't go there tonight. Let me just be for now, the way things are going. I am doing some necessary work, even if it doesn't look like much to many puritanical others - and this is how it's done, I think, you start from where you are.

All my love, mon amour, you too, voyager on the sea.

***
this post needs tweaking - but I'm fading
and there's a wonderful rainstorm now
rain pattering outside the open windows
I've gone about the house & turned on lamps
turned on the porch light
many kisses, darling
I'm always thinking of you
and I'll see you later, in the wee hours