Last night little Julie stepped off the plane like an angel of mercy. With her 12 hours in Nicaragua she has already made me laugh until I spat food all over the dinner table, watched Grey’s Anatomy with me, and generally made me feel not-quite-so-insane. I feel like the vacation part of the schlep may have begun.
I have been sick, lost in depression, and reeling for a lot of the last few weeks, unable to make my hands move over the keyboard no matter how hard I try. I have lost myself in several books. Yesterday, around dusk, I opened my newest. During our 12 hour visit to Costa Rica I traded the collected stories of Márquez for The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It opens with the following poem:
love after love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast n your life.
- Derek Walcott
I wish I had written that. And I feel like I am greeting myself again a little more each day. I feel like I ignored myself for another who knows me by heart. I generally hate poetry (blame the English lit degree) but this one made me cry and I can’t stop reading it.
Anyway. I am going surfing. Shaka bra.
4 Comments
20 November 2007 at 2:52 pm
Down here, we are all (M.E. and I mostly) breathing a sigh of relief. Thank goodness for Julie.
I read that book when I was in El Salvador… I skipped through most of the middle- loved the beginning and the end though. Enjoy Clare, finally.
21 November 2007 at 10:50 pm
Does Mr. Walcott have a remedy for post-drunken-babbling self-loathing? Nah? Okay, I’ll wait it out. I’ll catch up soon.
23 November 2007 at 12:57 am
Happy Thanksgiving to Schlepers and to Little Julie
23 November 2007 at 3:34 pm
g - a good beach, a good book, and a good jules are lifesavers.
denise - i have been sober for too long to have any idea. neveer ask a drunk about drunkeness!
parent - we missed you. there was no turkey. just surfing and fried plantains. it was beautiful. i am thankful for you.
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