Morse Stop

the afternoon was drizzly and strangely warm for the season. we hopped off the el at the morse stop & skipped over broken eggs that covered the sidewalks. it was an early saturday morning spent with elizabeth, literature, & a cafe that we had earlier enjoyed on hot summer nights while watching sweaty chess players move slowly across the board. it was no longer summer now and the absence of large box fans & sweat caused the environment of ennui to be so much quieter & almost too comfortable. elizabeth pulled out mrs dalloway and i the second sex. i have a notebook that i take everywhere- i have been recording thoughts, quotes, library call numbers, & sketches in it since the summer of 2001. if i flip through this notebook i can watch the progression of my favored mediums- from markers to colored pencils to pink ink and finally to only black ink from pilot gel pens. i sat with elizabeth that saturday recording almost every other sentance beauvoir wrote in her chaper about the young girl. i began drawing arrows to page numbers, circling specific word usages, noting words i did not know, and recording every single thing i was reading and hearing around me. elizabeth occasionally moaned heavily and we would lock eyes, put down our books, and share what we read in our respective feminist literatures. nothing could be more platonically sensual than two girls simultaniously reading beauvoir and woolf.

more than a year has passed since this afternoon but as i leafed through my little book last night and landed on the page from that afternoon, i can distinctly remember everything. the sounds i was hearing, the argument i had resolved earlier that morning, the inspiration that swept over me like a feather light comforter, and the daily agenda for that day- i am throwing a party for molly tonight. being transported to such a specific point in time reminds me just a little bit of where i've been- in retroperspective. i am living in an apartment and have one of my closest friends just next door and marius right across the hall. if i am lucky, marius's amazing girlfriend is visiting and all four of us will eventually find ourselves loitering in the hallway outside our respective doors for possibly hours. thank god for retroperspective- every once in a while i think we all need to thumb through the pages of our last few years to realize how we have gotten to where we are today. (and maybe how we will approach tomorrow)