Question

What happens to the contorted desire for magic (contorted by age and time) if you can't directly meet its gaze?

I was up till 1:00 AM last night, making jams, processing jars. The kitchen is sticky with marmalade and honey. The jars are sealed and sterilized, labeled. In my fridge, or in care packages being handled by the postal service.

If writing is an imagined connection, or any art really, once outside of it, you must train yourself to stop thinking in webs. The effort to gains ratio is skewed here. I can't escape the spiderweb, as much as I've tried. Better to just give into it.

I dreamt that someone who had died came back from the dead. He showed up at the miracle berry party at my house and made a joke about his own death that we all laughed at. It was funny because he wasn't really dead anymore. Then I woke up, and it wasn't funny. Context determines everything.

I dream of death a lot. Endings. A couple of times I dreamt I was pregnant. This wasn't as anxiety-inducing as one might imagine.

I've been spending a lot of time in Mount Washington. I stole a bagful of loquats from someone's tree in their yard. D watched, but wouldn't participate. We all live by our own code of ethics. Mine has emerged as oblique over the years. Like this: sometimes you'll wake up in the morning after the jam has been made, thrown in jars, sealed and labeled and realize that it never really set.

This is how I learned myself.

How many things lie incomplete? Truth requires a kind of painstaking patience. So does art. Or jam. Kumquat marmalade, for example, is a serious bitch to make. You have to slice the kumquats really thin and reserve the seeds to put in a bouquet garni for pectin. And even then, it sometimes ends up tasting sort of cloying.

My sister once said that she comes up with ideas, sees them through in her head, so then she doesn't have to actually live them. I told her I used to do this with relationships.

When jars arrive at an equilibrium, air pressure within and without the same, they make a popping sound. There's something satisfying about this sound. It's a process complete. I wonder if there is a similar popping sound that occurs when your interior life matches your exterior life in some way. Like there is an equal amount of mass on both sides to balance the equation.

It's odd running into a person who doesn't know they were your boyfriend in your head, so many years ago. That you considered the entirety of a relationship with them and then arrived at conclusions about the whole thing yourself, without any necessary consultation on their part. Have you violated them in some way? No need to explain such things.

It's not that I didn't have the vocabulary to explain what happened, or even a lack of understanding of it. Just that, the pop that I wasn't waiting for hadn't occurred and you can't force it. It happens in its own time, and the only thing required of you is patience. And a kind of gentle care for your own creation. Whether it's good or bad or loaded with consequence.