Citysummer

They say it’s supposed to go up to 90 degrees today. I can believe it already from the soft heaviness hanging in my room as soon as I pulled back the curtain and let in a little light. A chorus of birds and crickets arousing me with the prememory of cicadas in Georgia.

The Fevingers fly back to the States today to stay one last weekend at the shore house.
They are both twenty-one and now legally married, a ceremony in Paris on the Vernal Equinox, the day I showed Claire and Sasha how to balance an egg on its narrow end.
In two days I will be twenty-two. A week after that is the Fevingers’ marriage celebration in Philadelphia. I’ll be living there for about a week, with my big family in all their uncanny similarities to myself. My mother’s best friend’s son and I will drive south through Appalachia.
And then I will be back to the origin.
But I am not sure if I will be home.

I want to carry home inside of me.

Today will be my last day at work for Dr. Sylvia Brody, a ninety-two year-old psychoanalyst writing her last book about her life’s work studying children. I am her hands for her, and sometimes her language-brain as well. We’re struggling through the concluding chapter together. I’ve worked for her for five months now, and leaving makes a hollow space.

I put on Diptyque Philosikos, my summer perfume, in honor of the forseen heat. The smell recalls me to East Hampton, walking among all those tended flowers, singing Stevie Nicks to myself, driving the children around in the Mercedes Benz. That was a strange time, but a clear one, especially towards the end. I remember standing in the big empty kitchen singing I can see clearly now, the rain is gone… after R took me out for Black Bean Nachos on my way to the train and got hot sauce in his eyes.
I dreamt about him, and about driving a big car whose breaks weren’t working. My nightmares have subsided so much that I have lost some of the terror of what is in me.

Off to Cafe Pick-Me-Up.