It's been dark in the mornings this week. It looks like it would be raining. Yesterday, still in bed, I heard the water of John's shower and saw black tree trunks and shaking wet leaves on the backs of my own eyelids.

On days like this, when I can't justify the darkness of the blinds to the quietness of the inevitable sunshine, I grow fitful and restless. I pick at books like a child would pick at a scab. What's that? What's going on? It's starting to bleed... Cover it up, ignore it, do something else.

For a few moments earlier, I was reading Moon Tide, bought at something like 50 or 70 per cent off in hardcover from a bookstore downtown that's going out of business (no matter how I look at it, not a happy purchase--like taking flowers off a grave, then realizing they were fake anyway). It's not the fault of the book, of course, and I feel like I should nourish it, caress it, apologize to my new ward, rescued from certain doom: by me. And it wasn't the only one. (I haven't read the others yet either. They're stacked up on my coffee table, at attention, waiting for direction.)

I think I read three pages. Last night I read an entire chapter of Seeking Rapture, which I found to be both enthralling, because Kathryn Harrison writes like she's twisting a poem around her finger, and too adult, too boring for me to want to touch it again this morning. But an entire chapter, nonetheless. Moon Tide didn't seem to have much of a chance, pitted against my desire to open my mouth wide under a rainshower (complete with thunder, please) and my confusion as to why "sunshine" has an automatic positive connotation. How do I say "sunshine" and make it mean "relentless"? Dawn Clifton Tripp, whose book bled a little on me this morning, I've decided, had no other choice but to write books. And stacks of them. She went to Harvard! Her name--just look at it! She has Lucille Clifton and Valerie Tripp right there in her name. Dawn. Relentless. Searing the horizon. Dawn. No, I can't do it with "dawn," either.

It was happening in Massachusetts, what little I read, and the descriptions really did remind me of New England. Sometimes I forget that all my memories of New England are wrapped up in one vacation. It seems like an expanse of time. Boston! Maine! They stand out so differently than European countries that bleed into each other in my mind, probably because I saw them when I was in such desperate need of just one more hour of sleep.

My most vivid memory is the mosquitoes. Large, imposing, greedy bugs. My neck would itch and I would absent-mindedly scratch, bursting their bodies and finding blood on my fingertips and under my nails. Disgusting.

I remember a pool in Canada. I only know it wasn't raining because I am in the pool, looking out at my aunt, swatting at mosquitoes and looking like a Scottish dancer. But somehow I remember it with rain hovering somewhere in the background.

Maybe it rained the next day.

Labels: books.

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