When I go to bed at night I write in my journal. The one I don’t post on the internet for strangers to read. I write intelligent observations of war, humanity, love, life, and self interest (which I suppose isn’t so intellectual but alas….). Sometimes I write about war and love and how they are the same. Sometimes I think, on paper, about how the moon is big and/or bright and how the mountains outside my window remind me of home, because they are the mountains I grew up on. I’m never funny. I’m romantic. I don’t laugh. I cry. I like to be alone.
I write in a black moleskin journal and I imagine my grown children reading it after I am dead and buried in the ground. Or perhaps a lover, finding it and curiously opening it while I sleep next to him, reading about when I was young and suffering from a breaking heart, and suddenly he doesn’t know me, or the me that he thought he knew, and he sits in the dark pondering this person that has been revealed to him.
That I might have a lover who ponders at all would make the obscene action of him reading my book a bit less bitter. As it is I have only a lover who snores and if he ponders he has yet to share any of it with me, which is a shame because I would truly appreciate his ponderings, whatever they might be.
Maybe tonight I will write about how I wonder/worry if I will ever have grown children to read my journals (there are many). If I do, have children, will they look like me? Will the have white curly hair and blue eyes? Will they love animals and cry when birds fall out of their nests and die? Will they read books like there is no tomorrow and will they sit at a computer when they are twenty something, hands poised over the keyboard, and contemplate their relationships, or lack of, and why or how they got themselves to this point? Will they listen to my old Modest Mouse albums all day and if I have girls will they write poetry and crave men with dark hair and stubble?
Or maybe I’ll write about how cold the air here is and how it smells like bonfires and wet leaves when I leave the gym late at night. Maybe I’ll consider the possibility that I don’t have a soul mate, or if I do I’ve lost him because I’ve made the wrong decisions in my life, or perhaps that there is no such thing as a “soul mate” anyway. Maybe I’ll write a long poem about how my dry skin feels sticky with sweat when I sleep curled up next to a man and how I secretly enjoy it.
--my skin is wet
it glistens, shining,
responding to loving you
touching you
holding you--
Or something like that.
It seems I am the lover that ponders. How about you?
