12/30/05

She was tall, willowy, with a woolen cloche hat perched over her thin face. Wisps of thin black gossamer hung behind her ears. I smiled as I took her small hand, not only in greeting but at how much of myself I saw mirrored in her thin, black-clad figure. She reminded me of some long-limbed swamp bird, lightly stepping long-legged in a dry marsh of manuscripts and old coats.

With a glance at her room-- thrown together as if Pollock had used telephones and fraying slippers and parched books as his media-- I couldn't help but grin. "It's my creative philosophy-- my aesthetic energy has to go somewhere, you know," she chattered with a flutter of her disproportionately little fingers (I slipped my own tiny hands back into their pockets, knowing all too well the pleasing clutter of my own room.)

I pulled out my violin, she sat down at her charming white upright, and the two of us slid softly into the second movement of the Mendelssohn. And, I swear, I can't remember the last time I've felt music that way. My nervous melody and her steadily flowing accompaniment, the way they fit was indescribable. Think of the way the feathers on a dove slip together, how every vein and line merges, opening and weaving in a perfect white arc-- that's how it felt. Immaculate, divine. Silk, satin.

And it didn't stop with the end of the piece-- immediately the two of us launched into an impassioned talk on depth and breadth and aesthetics of, well, everything. We'd finished each other's lyrical phrases, and now we were finishing each other's sentences. When was the last time I've talked to anyone like that? When did I ever feel as if I could talk poetry and metaphor and passion with someone-- anyone-- without an awkward stare or a painful silence? When-- I can't even remember when!

She's absolutely enchanting-- a long-haired art major turned pianist turned divorcee-- and simply talking with her was enthralling, but what really got to me was the fact that I felt. I felt, I felt, I was feeling. God, how long has it been since I've been able to put pen to paper and actually feel it? My writing has been complete nonsense for the past several months. I've been uninspired, jaded, tired, overwhelmed with senselessness. My artwork's been terrible. My music's never swung with the beating of my heart. I'd forgotten how to breathe, to find divinity in stanzas and commas, to simply feel the breadth of art and the life in art and the art in life.
Cynicism only gets you so far-- to think that I could actually enjoy it, that I could criticize and harass and get any sort of satisfaction from it makes me ill. Fault begets beauty, flaw begets perfection. I can't understand how I've lived like this for so long.

Everything feels so right now. Everything feels.