Friday, 12.08:
Just finished watching Marjorie Prime. Taylor had watched it on his day off and we started it together last night. Strong performances, gorgeous music, and an intriguing, layered story line about time, love, doubt, forgiveness, and memory. Some moments were particularly difficult for me to watch, but the spirit of the film carries forgiveness and one needs to be reminded, doesn’t one?
He’s home from the job he hates, disappointed in those he mistook for friends, and has gone to bed early in this winter dark, having burned me with the assertion that even our marriage isn’t enough to offset his sorrow because what will he do when I go? Oh, time: the wave that chases me will overtake us both.
Saturday, 12.09:
[from an email to E:]
My writing this past month has consisted mainly of digging through boxes of old journal notes–snippets on scratch pads, lines dashed on the margins of receipts, and an occasional bound notebook with dated entries from various years (I pick up whatever’s at hand to write on in the moment). I’m transcribing all this into my journals on the laptop and excerpting some into my blog, which no one reads, which (knowing no one reads it) has allowed me the freedom to post more than I thought I’d be willing to say, all in an attempt to acknowledge time’s impress and to get the fuck busy with saying whatever it is I need to say.
Memory is so slippery: things I had absolutely forgotten come slamming back when I read what I wrote about them years ago. Maybe this forgetting has been a kind of self-protection? I don’t know. My greatest challenge in my marriage is that Taylor absolutely lacks optimism about our human fate, whereas I choose joy each morning. Maybe his perspective is more true? And I’d rather live under self-deception? So much rottenness in our nation. I just ache. I want to spit it out; it feels like the very air is poisoned. So I’m digging back, finding language and memories and a few potential poems. Holding my husband and hoping that love alone will heal him.
Reads in the Trees 