Woke up thinking
I am in a different place, then realized, no, that’s
edebroux.
Watched Bewitched, cleaned the living room a little, dug out an old sweater I never wear (laundry time), then got complimented on it all day.
After the staff meeting in the stockroom, I stayed to fill a cart with Nancy Drew and Harry fucking Potter. Patrick hung around for a while too though he didn’t seem to be doing anything. Came over to me and said, “It’s not polite to compliment a lady when there are other ladies present, so I waited. I just wanted to say that whatever you are doing to your hair, keep doing it, because, um, it’s just the cutest.” Why, Patrick. If I weren’t married.
Dan C. has the flu and if he makes me sick again there will be rotten hell to pay.
Dinner, I took my preemptive anti-sick chicken soup and Skellig and The Great Gatsby to the breakroom. Read three pages of Skellig before Patrick walked through and grabbed The Great Gatsby, sat down next to me and started rambling, overjoyed. I didn’t know it was his favorite author (except for Yeats, he says, but then Yeats is always the exception to anything). He paid $160 for a reproduction of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwritten manuscript, in pencil, with decipherable scratched-out passages. He read to me, page after page – he’d find a good part, start reading, and not want to stop. I wasn’t going to stop him.
I watched his hands. My hands have cuts and bruises from books – his just have cuts, but more of them – he works in magazines. Long thin red lines all over his hands. No covers to keep him from hundreds of paper cuts. Does he feel it anymore? I hardly notice when a book makes me bleed. Patrick’s rough and reddened hands held the book carefully, sure not to damage the spine.
“Then he kissed her,” he read. “At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through all he said, even though his appaling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”
Then Joel and Ethan got stuck in the freight elevator! But it was midnight and time to go home so I don’t know what happened.
When I left work it was snowing, one flake at a time.