flame, a thing of dark imaginings

When he returns she is standing at the bookshelves, head on one side, reading titles. He puts on music: the Mozart clarinet quintet.

Wine, music: a ritual that men and women play out with each other. Nothing wrong with rituals, they were invented to ease the awkward passages. But the girl he has brought home is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage. No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again as teacher and pupil. Is he prepared for that?

-- J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

An erring spirit from another hurled;

A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped

By choice the perils he by chance escaped.

-- Byron

you've been away

and you have been in my thoughts, i think about you every day, i fantasise about you, and hold imaginary conversations with you, i look forward to hearing from you soon, and seeing you, and giving you a hug like that night, closing my eyes and finding my way up the trail of your neck to your face and taking in your scent that has stayed in me since then, and how i love the wine bars of melbourne that would intoxicate me to this extent to write these things in the middle of the night.

beautiful

been thinking about getting one for a few years now. still thinking.

seconds

It's your eyes, I said, and I could say no more. That moment, that atmosphere, suspended on itself. Charged. Electric. I could've leaned over - just leaned over. But that space opened like a gulf. It became precipice and brink, vortex, and void. And it would've been a great, great fall. From reason to desire, an impossible crossing, from universe to universe. Instead I let our silence fall. I remained where I was, leaned back, hesitant, desiring, scared. Almost, just almost. The moment passed. The moment was over.

M.

___

Nose, lips, pressed into the horizontal of neck. An undulating parallel, merged, made invisible, replaced by scent, softness, and six seconds of youth, fleeting, made indivisible.

E.

like what i did today

You're in my mind everywhere I go it's as though that night never ended and we never said goodbye.

___

Been a long time since I last read a new novel. Been re-reading the novels that I'd read long ago, have grown to love, and would never tire of - Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Passion, As a Friend, Giovanni's Room - novels that have become my talisman and map, novels that I would always want to have around me, to comfort and accompany when I'm lonely, lost, loved, unloved, unwell, dying, dead.

___

Bought two books today. One's an anthology of short stories written about and around a local bookshop that has over the years become a Melbourne institution, and the other's a novel.

And here, smelling of shampoo, entrusted to Peter's care, is the last-born, the most ardently and wrenchingly loved; the object of the Taylor's grandest hopes and darkest fears. The child who might still do something remarkable and might, still, be lost - to drugs, to his own unsettled mind, to the sorrow and uncertainty that seems always present, ready to drag down even the world's most promising children.

-- Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

Cunningham writes beautifully, and has a delicious rhythm. And I like the fact that all these novels somehow has a tender thread connecting them across space and time.

___

And it's been a long time since I last wrote a diary-like entry. Like what I did today.

summer leaves

Rum, coke, lime, crushed ice. 'It's a summer drink,' he said.

I took a sip and looked out of the window, into the street. I could see nothing else. 'Brings me back to when I was nineteen,' I said.

'I love summer. I live for summer,' he said, without at all a care, so free, as if summer was already here, as if it was always here.

Youth, I thought, if only it never left. How sweet and beautiful summer would be.

Morning

This morning, just before I opened my eyes, just before the first light, just at the tip my consciousness, it was your face I saw again, smiling and nodding just like that evening. It was at that moment that I was aware of myself, and that I was only alone, and you were just a figment, flame, and filament, and yet that lit up across time and world and made a pyre of my placid, peaceful life. How I long for the day before yesterday.

You are so beautiful

There you were, your lit-up face, one Thursday afternoon I have almost forgotten, a few weeks ago now, but for you, your cream, milk-soft, lit-up face, blurring at the edges of my eyes, I dared not look at you.

And then one night you came. You sat next to me. We drank the wine on the table. We talked for seven hours. I couldn't stop looking at you. It was all dark. There was only one light.

JM

you are so beautiful you make me cry.

bookshop happy

I was in a bookshop earlier, and just then I realised how happy I was to be in a bookshop, and I remembered those carefree days of reading, reading on days that never ended and nights that went on forever.