Entry 80
Ladybugs, ritualized cleaning, jacaranda, the passage of time, soulmates
Last night I pulled a ladybug from the depths of my bag. It was resting - dead? I thought - on a balled-up napkin I had used earlier in the day and hadn’t found a trash can for. I walked out of Lissie’s house, across the tile floor in my bare feet, and tipped it onto the back stair railing. It moved, not dead. I threw the napkin away.
This morning I had a headache. Dehydration is likely to blame. My cat was curled up against me like he usually is, a pile of impossibly soft paws and whiskers that twitch when he dreams, and I wondered like I usually do what he might be dreaming about. I’d been up late reading Paglia on cats over the phone anyway, so their venerable beauty and darkness and depth had been on my mind all night. I reflected for a moment on my own dreams and thanked my psyche for no longer plaguing me with visions of the loss of my teeth in various troubling and sometimes extremely brutal ways, thanked it for its reassurance; I opened the curtains to LA’s grey, saw that pale sheen light up the mess of my apartment. Exactly where I might be in a few days time is still a mystery. It would be good to clean up a bit either way, I decide, and I pull my Roy Orbison records from the shelf in preparation along with the bundle of sage because all things ought to be ritualized.
Speaking of ritual, it’s been too long since I sat at the Musso’s bar or at the Chateau for lunch with anyone let alone Brittany and Summer, and I was reminded of it because I passed a jacaranda tree in bloom today on Sunset. My windows were down, my sunroof open, my car in need of a wash, and the flash of bright purple flung itself at me along with the recognition that one year approaches, that everything is completely different but I am more or less the same. Less the same as I was, more how I was meant to be. My niece is turning six, I remember; if I tried to surf I might still know how; if I hadn’t been wearing the same dress as Summer at Smoke House that night last spring who knows where we’d be; if Stella hadn’t come to mind like she did out of nowhere in December I might be six months behind myself and I wouldn’t be listening to so much Bob Dylan this afternoon, necessarily; if Lissie hadn’t moved here last year next week I wouldn’t have spent yesterday in Malibu and no ladybugs would have come home with me; if my hair didn’t grow so fast I’d still have real bangs; if I hadn’t started over exactly when I did or wound up driving Mulholland the night I did or written down my dream in a text I still would have found what I’d been looking for in the exact same place because your person is just your person -
There are phases and periods in which living becomes easy, and being yourself is natural, and all things are clearly seen without effort, and creation flows out of you like exhalation, but those periods aren’t endless. They end and start again.