April showers indeed give way to the sun. I’ve turned thirty this week, closing out my twenties with a paean to piano, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Opus—as well, with a hearty nod to my love of omakase, an always rare celebratory delight, c/o Tim. A meditative two hours were spent in a darkened room, watching long takes of a master at his instrument; wondering, too, how went the cut scenes of his expert performance. Iron and Wine released Light Verse yesterday, a gift like none other, and I’m seated between the beanbags in our daylit apartment in the city I love most of all, playing arty music for Tim’s basil plant. It climbs its way up toward calm blue without thought of sorrow or failure, or blasted indecision; there are no vaguenesses here to be found. Only the soaring, the stretching sunward, the daily trek of standing tall. Posing.
To speak of vagueness is to think of vagues, the French for waves, and the book The Waves by Virginia Woolf that I read assiduously at the barstools of my local boba shop for seminar, annotating my copy beyond legibility before donating it, as it was too marked up to resell. I break out classic writing primers, On Writing by Stephen King and The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, reassuring myself that I can do it. As I wholeheartedly believed I could when I was 21, living in this selfsame city, raising my hand proudly. Does anyone care, does anyone see this text wrangling kind of labor as work? I doubt anyone did then, nor do they still as much as I’d like to imagine now. (“I’m not writing a novel”—a classmate had heaped on the sarcasm when I set down copies of my first short nonfiction story to be read.) I hope that, if it is said that photography helps people to see, these verbal images can sing their contours, brightly.
We are almost completely moved in. There are a few straggler pieces of furniture we’ve yet to acquire, and a rug, and the exploding closet needs some attending to, but otherwise the place is beginning to feel much like home. Solace, safe, a haven. Sanctuary, ours to share. Already the kitchen is outfitted with a bar cart serving exclusively coffee and tea. I wonder if there is much to say about turning thirty that can be said outside of the letter I sent to myself via FutureMe 6 months ago, that Tim and I read together in soft sentimentality. I’ve just seen a squirrel run its way down the hill in bouncing movements. An older woman, with hair like Sakamoto’s silvery mushroom moonlight crop, walked the steep incline with headphones in; was she listening to piano compositions? The kind of piano improvisation, entertainment of the highest calibre, that makes you believe you can play music like a genius, too. Kerouac: “You’re a Genius all the time.” Back to my old beatitudes. Back to the drafting board, inking, typing.
There’s a new emotion sitting in my chest, some hopeful thing. Warm, rising, risen. All the time, then, writing comes, in vagues, in waves. With one’s work falling into vogue, if can be hoped, in its own time; and deeper still the fall into love.
Danielle Shi 