Poem: Solitaire

Closing my eyes
sipping my coffee
beauty and loveliness wait for me
memories seep
into my dreams
as I relax with warmth and caffeine

Sometimes I'm glad
that my body is mad
so that calm comes where others find jitters
for to cradle a cup
sip so warmth fills me up
makes the solace and sweetness much better

I'm thinking of him
Again, yes, again
For my life as it is is my lot
This solitary time
Solidarity mine
With my self who once was but is not

Here is quiet
Here, peace
With my company me.

Random things I've learned from MFU fanfic in the last month or so

There was a massacre in Kiev at a place called Babi Yar in 1941, and continuing violence there until the end of Nazi occupation. The end of Nazi occupation involved an attempt to cut supplies of food to Kiev, considered a "surplus population", and divert them to the German army.

There's a place in London called Belgravia. Fancy that.

The Beatles were originally The Quarrymen and played something called skiffle.

Russians take their tea with jam instead of sugar.

There were strong similarities between the cattle ranching practices of Australia in the fifties and South Africa in the sixties.

The Soviet name for WWII was The Great Patriotic War.

Lots of little fragments of Russian, mostly swearwords or endearments. Also Russian naming conventions.

Arpeggios are chords with the notes played separately and in sequence. (My musical training was primarily vocal, remember, and details like this slipped through.)

The French don't allow other countries to control their own nuclear weapons if they're on French soil...? I'd like to read up on what this was referring to.

Considerably more about Greenwich Village than I ever knew before.

The investigations into so-called sexual deviants (meaning mostly homosexuals and women who had sex that didn't lead to marriage) by HUAC were called the Lavender Scare.

The KGB was centered in a building called the Lubyanka in Moscow.

*****
I'll add more if I think of them

Musing... meeting the Muse

Contentment, if it can be restless, describes my state tonight. Alone in this quiet house, except for the cat I again allowed illicit entry. In the cold and the rain, knowing that she keeps clean and that her fur matches the color of the carpet, I can't resist breaking my father's unreasonable rule.

It's quiet and yet, without companionship, I do not feel alone or even without discourse. I've spent too much of my life without anyone to talk to for the lack of human contact to be sufficient on its own for loneliness. There is comfort in the company of my own thoughts, which in the absence of human voices take on something of the patterns of companionable storytelling. I hear my voice internally, telling me stories about what I think, rather than speeding through the thoughts as they are needed. I smile as I imagine jokes, I get as impatient when a word eludes me as if there were someone to hear my inaccurate fumbling.

It is as if I grow aware of the committee nature of the brain, and the part that listens stands next to the part that talks. They hold discourse of a sort, one reasoning and rationalizing and twisting thoughts with language, while the other smiles and scowls and makes itself understood with no words of its own. There is a sort of communion there, like the way I avoid vocally interrupting my father when he's holding forth on his own abilities, like the way Dan and I didn't disrupt the Cross Country banquet with our jokes, like the way Jeff told others my thoughts when I was too distraught to shape them myself. Some conversation is being held, half of it wordlessly. Just because that half is as much me as my linguistic self does not change the sense that there are two present, who know one another as well as themselves. Who are, in some sense, friends and companions.

It seems pitiful, mad or vain when I look at it from a standard perspective. A woman without others, starting to talk to herself. But when I think of those few months when I didn't need words to share my simpler thoughts with Daniel, I wonder how that incomplete and now lost discourse is any better than this. My most precious moments with others, as beautiful as their lines and limits are, have been a poor, grainy copy of this strange self-communion of the writing process, in which half of me speaks and the other half silently critiques.