December 31, 2013

Two excellent days at the studio, whose temperature seemed to normalize while the world’s did not.

Last night there was an odd moment which mixed dream with reality, Circe climbed onto my chest, and went into an ecstasy of face rubbing, hers on mine. I usually prevent this, but I was mostly asleep, and it seemed something she needed to do. It was a mixture of pain and pleasure, for she kneaded my neck with claws that she never learned fully to contract, and sometimes it was quite stinging, though it seems to have left no marks. Each time she rubbed her face on mine, a picture would appear in a little frame, as though she were conveying to me some sort of hidden wisdom, of past lives, or of things a regular cat could not possibly know. That part was beautiful. Prophetic, even.

Last Day, and I’m not in a very nostalgic mood. When I thought of things that happened, I first found Stephen’s refusal to meet me in Dublin, a blow so gratuitous against a relationship so lighthearted and, I thought, pure, that one cannot quite get past it. There must be some meaning there that I have not yet internalized. But I think also of candlelight at the Apothecary, the crying of the muezzin from the minarets of Byzantium, the windy slope of Troy, my Lincoln uttering from the stage, the secret lives of my flowers in the garden. . . . much has been well. Levels of friendship seem to have gone up, levels of anxiety to have gone down. We’ll see. Amy has rounded up a gang to celebrate at Avenue M tonight. It’s not yet daylight. 2013 may have an adventure in it yet.

Last-day passing into evening. 2012 was one of the bad years of my life in spirit. 2013 was much better. I maintain that my sadness is specific and material. I know it, generally, to be a response to affliction from the outside, and that being said, I’m grateful when there’s less of it. I do everything I can to have an upright life. Sometimes it works. It worked fairly well this past twelve months. One prays for strength. One prays for attentiveness, so that when one loses the path, one knows.

Strange comfort from something that happened in the kitchen this morning. At the bottom of a tea pot were patches of mold. Now, nothing had been in the pot but tea, the next thing to water, and yet the little creatures had found something to live on. I took the resourcefulness, the determination to heart. It was a shame to bleach them out, maybe, but I knew, leaving them a film of cold nothing, they would rise again.