jolie laide: February 2009

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

2.08.2009

This place will teach you everything you need to know about gray. Not the acidic gray of a Michigan winter. Not the narrowing gray of a Manhattan rain storm. This is expansive, widening, merging sky and water and rocky shoreline, blurring and fusing edges. It looks like the forgotten corner of a Whistler painting, the hazy images in a silvering mirror, a vista that lets you know you should be paying attention but does not care if you do.

That phone call wasn't returned. That email went dead in my in-box. It's because I don't know how to respond, don't know how to swim through my day and come out with any one piece that applies what I have learned with what I am seeing. People here will show their beautiful cloak, whirl around and let you get close to its dancing fringe, but will not let you touch it. I lose patience with the displays of grace or affluence or wellness or whatever currency is held inside the mouth set just so.

I miss my writing. I miss my own voice. Mostly I miss gathering stories instead of miles.