Posted from: Beijing
Everything is strange. I have been wondering if the fact that I don’t like reading mothers’ blogs makes me less of a feminist.
I tried to call you a couple times. I presume you’re not using that phone number anymore. We’re both notoriously and matter-of-factly hard to reach, do you know that?
I found myself tonight down at some bar alone, looking for someone I barely know, not even sure I was in the right place. He said something about “Brown’s”, which conveniently doesn’t exist. I tried the next worst thing.
They’ve tucked some English pub down into the YaBaLu Russian district. It’s a real transplant from out of country, brass railings, opaque green lampshades and the lot. But it has carpet, and that is redeeming.
So no one was there. I opened my jacket in the bathroom though I knew I wasn’t staying, and I realized I was looking for you. And being that you are 6,000 miles away, I zipped that bastard straight back up, wagged my finger at myself in the mirror and hell, I left.
I passed a fruit stand on the way out, and I would have loitered and taken wind-up camera pictures of strawberry stems, but faking endearing eccentricity is easier to do in summer. You get two minutes into the rosy-cheeked freshness of it all before your hands freeze and the Aw-Fuck-It sets in with the frostbite. Dammit, it’s almost March.
You never remember it, but my birthday’s in March, and I want to be someone else this year. Not because I don’t like myself, as much as self-derision is comic gold. It’s more like I could see myself having fun with a different set of skills. I remember Frankensteining our first computer back together in the garage and unearthing my old file of short stories.
“So,” Dad said as I scrolled for an enormously long time, “this is what you were doing when all the other kids were outside.”
They couldn’t go where I went.
School starts up again on Monday, and I bought three notebooks, squared paper for the writing of new characters, and exactly one pen. My criteria for the pen was that it makes doodling on yourself as accessible as possible.
Old habits die hard.
Speaking of which, I will have written this letter in my Yahoo mail client, but I will have my blog entry form open in a new window (Ctrl+N). Guess which IP’s gonna end up with it. I’m such a goddamn coward sometimes.
