everything bloomed, suddenly
I've turned V into a thief. Yesterday, he went to the post office and came back with a handful of lilacs. I stole my first ones this week from a bush that overhangs the lane behind our house. I tucked scissors into my back pocket and wore sunglasses, and even though I left my apartment feeling extreme nonchalance, I came home with a stomach ache. V claims it's legal to take trimmings that overhang public land - he learned this while reading Omnivore's Dilemma, which has also made him very concerned about eggs - but I still felt like I'd committed a crime, although isn't the real crime growing lilacs in your yard and refusing to share them? The woman across the street from us has four bushes, and I feel alternately wild with rage and incredibly grateful.
Anyway, now we have one bloom on our coffee table in the handmade vase I found at a thrift store outside of Philly with Audrey (I think?) and two more in an old jam jar on my bedside table. I used to buy lilacs on Flatbush when I lived in Brooklyn, and now I can just pluck them on the street, which is the best endorsement for Toronto over New York that I think I've mustered yet. I like the way they feel cupped in my hands, soft and brim-full. The smell is always just on this side of artificial, medicinal on a first take, but wilts into something darker than you'd imagine, a burnt caramel, maybe. There was a lilac bush in Catherine's yard and when it bloomed we'd haul the pieces of her Playmobile dollhouse outside to set it all up again under the bushes, the 4-level Victorian transformed into a kind of protean Woodstock, grandfather clocks and clawfoot tubs incongruous among the grasses, blustered under the lilacs blooms, uncomfortable but magical, like the photos of abandoned asylums, ivy muscling through the cracks of an ornate mantle and birds roosting in bedpans. I don't remember doing much more with Playmobile beyond setting it up and tearing it down, the structures always far more compelling than the people who lived in them.
Spring is issuing weakly in this city and we're traveling too much to notice, but this morning I woke up and felt utterly at odds with the work I had laid out in front of me. The thing about #freelancelyfe is you can't blame anyone but yourself for your to-do list: I can't very well say "I don't want to do that" when it's something I had to fight tooth and nail to be given the chance to do. But all the words feel bleak and aimless in a way they didn't used to, which perhaps means I've actually found it, some semblance of a "career" as a freelance writer. And now that I've wrangled all the pieces into place, I hate the way it looks. I want to tear it down and start fresh. This wasn't meant to be a metaphor until it became one. I'm writing towards something, here. Feel free to subscribe if you want to follow along.
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recent hungers
- this week's "member of one direction to whom i'd like you to pay attention" is niall, and this performance of 'slow hands,' a song i absolutely hated on first listen - where was niall? where was my soft irish hot toddie? - until i listened to it without thinking about niall, and then i realized it was v much a jam. he hasn't quite learned what to do with his body yet, bless.
- i bought these pants in paris and they are perfect. if you see me in the next few months, i can promise you they will also make an appearance.
- emily nussbaum claims S3 of 'the leftovers' is the best thing on TV. i remember everyone talking shit about it when it first came out? am i wrong? either way, the first season is super dour but S2 is off to a rollicking start.
- kate atkinson's case histories was my travel bud in germany and made for very good company. i also read my first tana french a few months back and now realize i only didn't like mysteries because i didn't like men who wrote mysteries and their hard-boiled hard-drinking hard-loving detectives. women write those too, just with more credibility and between-the-lines eye rolls.