I read a great story in The Cincinnati Review today by Brock Clarke, while trying to decide on a form for my short story submission to a contest. Finally I’ve begun to make time for reading. We are picking up a bookshelf today to set up in the living room, an accompaniment to the closet shelves housing the rest of my collection. And I thought about how I once asked my mother for one hundred dollars to buy myself a box of books for the summer, in early high school. That booklist, which I curated from Goodreads research, may have changed the direction of my life forever. I remember certain titles better than others—the Ishiguro, of course; The Pillowman; Kavalier & Clay—though the main thread that kept them together was the idea of selecting books and plays I otherwise wouldn’t encounter in a classroom setting, or at the public library. So then, I’ve spent the morning shuttling between memories, the kitchen table, and the beanbags in the living room, by the window that juts out just slightly. It occurred to me only now to raise the curtain and to let in a degree of light.
Earlier by the kitchen table I had opened the window wide, as though to lean out of it, while playing a friend’s playlist. Now I listen to Air’s Le voyage dans la lune at a circumscribed loudness, conscious of the open windows. The dreamy, atmospheric music of space voyages is like a time capsule to my old apartment up on Panoramic, when I lived a stone’s throw from the Fire Trails. I read once that writers will do anything for solitude, and then they will do their best to dig themselves out. (Upon a closer inspection, the quote was by DeLillo: “A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.”) It appears my initial understanding of it was careless; I suppose squandering solitude is a little different from regaining company. I spend all of my time wanting to make time to read, such that I can write.
It is all very much echoing the summer I spent indoors, writing from the couches of my house. Is that this house, is that the house on Panoramic, is that the house that my mother once belonged to, is that the house where I lived in the back patio and between the steps leading out back, behind the green clovers? Which house was it, and for whom? They all seem so much the same in my mind’s eye, though I remember distinctly writing a pandemic newsletter once about the different bedrooms I had lived in, photographs and all. I will sit here in this window for all I know, and drink more peach sparkling waters, and hack away at my reading list. Today I wrote three pages longhand for my first morning pages, in an old notebook. A record.
Danielle Shi 