and there it is again...

At Trails this morning, a lone humming bird. There are tables of people, and me, alone at mine, in my glasses and with my journal. I watch it quietly for moments, afraid to breathe. It is greenish and orange and hovers, close to my nose for some time. And then it leaves.

Something is happening, I tell myself. Something is about to happen.

Then I go back to writing and tell myself to snap out of it. Focus on what is real, please, I say to myself. Two hours of yoga. Burmese dinner with my beloved food nerds in Whittier.

Is it okay to spend this much time in your own head and actually be okay with it, okay with yourself? Because most of the time I am in my own head, with my own language. And truthfully, I am pretty okay with it. For a time there were others who maybe spoke this language, I don't know anymore. Maybe I just imagined it, willed it into being. Maybe it was never even real, just a story I invented. I am good at this, inventing stories.

Lately, I feel like that story about the Eskimo woman who was over a hundred. The lone speaker of a language that was about to go extinct. No one cared about the woman dying. Anthropologists cared about the language. There was such sentimentality in the NYT article, about the death of a language. And I am forever a sucker for misplaced sentimentality.

Why am I so unnecessarily dramatic about everything? Everything recedes, gets washed away with the tide. This is just a process. And I need to stop brooding about it.

But it is winter in LA, 65 degrees and sunny. Isn't this at least a reason to smile? And they have even rebuilt the library. I spend my Friday afternoons here, wandering the glass rooms I had only seen from outside in the bright summer light (which is different from the bright winter light here). And there are even some moments where just this is enough, when I ask myself, what, really could be better? I will send you a postcard, and love of course.

And try not to think about how far away real life sometimes feels.