coetzee, again.

in rittenhouse square park with coetzee's elizabeth costello in my lap. i started one of those interior monologues (they seem to happen frequently, these days). my friend had gone off somewhere, to return at some time "soon," but what is soon when you don't have a watch, or phone, or ipod, or mechanical device that appropriately tells you what time it is, or how much of it has gone by? i do not use the word accurate because what is accurate? everything is askew.

how could i possibly believed i ever understood anything i read as a teenager by milan kundera?

so my head began to scramble words and phrases and criticisms like a blender on pulse, able to catch a snapshot but it changes with each need to see a different texture, a taste, added or reduced. too quick to snatch away any sort of recognizable belief or cohesive sentence, leave it too long and maybe it will melt (or the unfortunate congeal). it all stemmed from thinking about that charming, brightly eyed british engineer passing through my town of 3000, sometimes 4,000 (it fluctuates depending on the season, with that last grand changing identities on a weekly, daily, even hourly basis), but always less than where i am now. it was an environment i could handle, meeting, drinking, acquainting, flirting. and now i'm flung back in the world of many, of too many. here, i will not find the british engineer, nor the tico anthropologist, nor the ex-pat tour guide or baker or bartender. there was nowhere to hide, to make up an identity. there are too many people here, proclaimed in talk, not the act, and the easiest for me to acquaint are the old news, the floaters. i'm in a world of anon.

so this is growing up, finding my way. maybe i took the "finding my way" thing too literally, because i'm geographically waying away from the midatlantic. i see the cranks of the old cycles turning and i lose my footing.

i will learn to hold my ground, there.
i will learn to pull, not push, there.
better than ever before, there.
i will be precise, then. and there.

and precision is connected to accuracy, not time.