frost – Livesay Writing

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

There’s a market in Asheville that sells arts and crafts. It’s on a streetcorner beside a big old building that houses an indoor mall. The stalls are bright-colored and both times I visited they smelled like incense. Now that the city’s burning up it’s oil for weekend go-getters, I’m sure the stalls are selling more; vacationers are the kind of people who need to bring things home with them. But the way I remember, it, the market was lonely.

I once watched a movie about a Japanese woman who’d gone to give humanitarian aid to Afghanistan during the early years of the American war. When she came home, she was shunned by her family, scoffed at by the townsmen, and had trouble finding a job. I had to read the liner to figure out why they were so harsh with her. The notes said it had something to do with a prejudice against external involvement, particularly related to war. I don’t know if this is true. But I liked my first viewing a bit better, where a woman comes home to bleak streets the color of squid ink, and where anyone who passes pulls their baseball cap down around the eyes.

I like drifting back to the lonely spaces; the frost-choked feeling of somewhere too forgotten to grow, too proud to putter out completely.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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…so too, her glazed ceramics and her macramé are interchangeable with those executed by her women friends in the area, who take courses at the Mill Brook Valley Arts Co-op and whose houses are gradually filling with their creations, like ships gradually sinking beneath the weight of ever-more cargo.
Joyce Carol Oates, Jack of Spades

Hi.

Coffee: Colombian, Starbucks Brand (grocery store bought, a gift)

Woke up with a crick in my neck. I took two ibuprofen but it stuck around. Now I’ve got this itinerant friend, nag-nag-nagging me at home, at lunch, at work. It’s nice to have company, but he’s a little overbearing.

I went to the apartment office after work. I’m expecting a package, it hadn’t come. The managers were meeting in a huddle around a corner desk. They were talking whispers, hushed when I came in. The walls were done in fake spider webs and somebody had managed to string a few purple lights. Smiling on the ceiling was a plastic ghost. In the midst of such a scene, I can only assume the managers were conducting a seance. I guess our new neighbors will slip right through the thin walls.

A neighborhood kid came by to borrow a key fob for the gym. She was in a sweatshirt. It was chilly, already getting dark. I thought to myself: “I guess it’s Autumn.” There’s a special kind of wonder to the back half of the year. All the biggest holidays. It’s a cold, dark time to be an adult, but the best time to be a kid. When you’re ten years young and half my size, you’re still getting tingles as you look for what’s behind every corner. Then you grow up and see that it’s only dead grass and hoarfrost.

But the grass looks good when it dies, and frost gets your lover’s lips pink. Seasons change and change you with them.

Currently Reading: Autumn, Ali Smith; Cherry, Nico Walker

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“Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed.” – Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

Tag: frost

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