July
It is astonishing how much time one can spend face-down in the grassy quadrangle of a modern university without anyone approaching. This is true of naps and making out, but most especially of crying as if one's heart would break. In unrelated news, unemployment is at 6.8% (higher in the technical sector), and my father has bought a bottle of gin.
Four things are in a line: my book, the record player, the trees on the ridge, and the sun. I have been reading for two weeks. This is my personal drug, one I don't allow during term-- I didn't know my father had a record with a woman singing.
Her voice seeps around my pages like the sun.
In Baltimore when my dad was a mechanic and my mother studied history, starving grad students packed their front porch to drink his gin and tonic. Maybe 'cause it was strong; maybe just to hold something cold and real and watch the bubbles snap.
It occurs to me that I am old enough to make a gin and tonic. This is ritual: so many ice cubes, gin precisely measured, tonic last; but the real test is in the lime-- to run it around the edge of the glass and then squeeze, so translucent sacs splay from the lining. I admire the rind: it is fir-green, not lime-green. I could stop here forever and eat limes.
Next to the window my father is halfway to dancing-- slow sway for the music, and so the record player doesn't skip, and because his sort of dancing needs a partner. I hold my glass and taste grapefruit at the back of my tongue. I read more slowly now.
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