i think about us and our drifting poetries often- i am because we are. it's not necessarily the words written on paper, but it is how we live- the way we all swim indoors & the water that splashes up against our windows. That's why we will never feel as lovely in the outside world- you see the way everyone walks and runs like zombies-it's almost apocalyptic. sometimes this city is just dry air & a concrete street. but inside 1234 we are all swimmers and floaters. water slips through our fingers and holds us up like ships. graceful strength is the most beautiful kind and nothing embodies it quite like the buoyant bubbles that come up and burst from our blurred voices. there is something to be said about soft hands in winter, peppermint, a gray coat in everytime and anyplace & patience when people have no idea what it means to live for their shadow. you can at least laugh at it. stand atop a steeple and percuss a tune on my hips with twigs. i think someday & maybe soon, my heart will beat with that rhythm. i could be one of those people in a constant state of spiritual remembrance- some sufi/salinger aromatic thrill. we know no one could pick out phonies quite like HC and that's why i was terrified to meet him. thank god, he's just a character in a book i read once.

today was the earliest i've woken up since my boston days, i hated it, but i just had to stretch. it was a stretch of a lake shore street and there WERE smoky billowed clouds hanging over these perfect waves made glassy with slushed ice and such. the leafless trees were distractingly beautiful. & you know my rubber wheels tend to drift as it is with such an aloof captainesse behind the wheel, but my car and i, well all of us, drift in exaggerated ways when there are brittle winter trees innervating the city's brain. i love, love, love how the branches curve like dancers and how their legend is so much granderrr- don't you feel it sometimes? the skeletal environment can be so charming & honestly so worthy of your attention- a public accordion would have been a particular kind of transportation for this morning and i couldn't help but hope to ride in one & to find my mom living in the orchestra village; in these last couple of days, i'm sure it's where she belongs - after all, when she quit playing the guitar as a 14 year old is precisely when she planted her seeds of paradise lost.

andalusian ceramics & turkish hammered metalware are the only things i want to surround me tomorrow and i definitively do not want to pick up scattered books from the street while cars honk at me- what an urban myth and a real disaster. i've felt very heavy these past couple of days with all the things I have to carry in circles- 60 history-years and his classical guitar are especially weighted & vacant in their own ways. luckily, in a graceful chance, just as i was starting to feel blurry and tedious- this man with a perfect fedora and the most perfect beard was rapping & echoing in the city underground something about escaping to yourself. ack, exactly.

when it rains- it pours.
from one girl to another, be very cautious of this weather forecast.
bring your umbrella, prepare for flash floods and overwhelmed bodies.
try to save the new rain in old jars and somehow keep the supply for a drier- or lonelier day.
also, listen to the banjo and follow the snare drums.
tomorrow i'll sign up to stretch my tired body in a hot room & hum that tune.

clouds and umbrellas really aren't that different: clouds sing lullabies to owls & umbrellas are paperweights for people. i know it seems unrelated, really- i do, but children, canaries and cartographers have convinced me otherwise. of course, other wise women have settled for much less, but i can't give up the ghost of whimsy tendencies. i have to say it's the most colorful haunting. my sister and i are going on a wild hunt for olive pits in an old city in gaza. my parents left the pits as children in soils they were told to say goodbye to & the names they burned on wooden doors are romantically exhausting trails left behind. it is their legacy. how small is that? regardless, isn't there such a magnetism there for us- girls who live to love our family and find , tell, save, bury, and set secrets free?


sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

I'm trying to read this book and it's such a marvel(l)ous one, even you know it is. We've read it so many times. But, my eyes are so tired and the words look too beautiful. I kept seeing them and now I can't stop looking at them. Each letter reminds me of a curve or angle in this city from the skylines, streets or roofs. I think it happens enough, but she probably would say its happened 2 or 3 too many times. My memory is so foggy. I'm not quite sure what is mine or how much I've given up or gained. 2 is my favorite even number and of course we live with 3's everyday, but it is the weirdest kind of pressure to endure and I feel it specifically on this one bone in the middle of my chest. It feels lighter when I float in the dead sea. I live in this city with certain people by the lake in a delicate house and there are certain beautiful things that only they can see. Especially in light of my little sister who is so innocent but not at all naive, I can't help but see transparent scales and feel fleetingly balanced. JD Salinger has started to live in a nook in the nape of my neck. Though he is brilliantly cloudy, he is the kind of gentleman who wears a hat and an overcoat too often- I would say. & When Franny wrote back to Lane, she did so in illustrated sorts of ways. I totally love her to pieces.

& then there is everything else & no one else and that is the most magnetic place for a girl to find herself. boots feel heavy on the first day of winter, but curls like snails shells do not. i am flying south for winter and even when it does make me nervous to walk alongside a war, i know its necessary. somewhere in the aftermath is a house that could have been an olive-y home had the history not fallen in the pieces it did. thanks for the best advice, though/ i feel wildly strong. "keep your eyes open, the room will spin less. sit still and listen to what's going on around you, you have to stay present. don't cross your legs. if you do, you won't feel as much and even though it kind of hurts, it's better to feel it, it means you're awake and you're ok." i gave blood weeks ago and the nurse kept repeating these lines. in a way, it was clinical, but in a 3:02 AM space, it is more like prose.

sincerely,

expatriette in tunis.