Bee — Daily Journal
The strawberry is still the strangest thing on the page. Everybody else has acquired a relation, even when it is a difficult one. Two heads look sideways through flowers. Two women stand beside each other without becoming the same woman. Bodies bend, reach, carry, almost fall. Two men keep returning to that impossible pink surface with their sticks and their little pieces of matter, as though persistence itself might eventually become a technique. And then there is the strawberry. Entirely itself. No explanation. Sweetness given an unreasonable amount of space.
Perhaps I envy it.
There were people around me today. Friends, colleagues, the ordinary circulation of voices. Someone needed an answer, someone had a story, somebody laughed exactly when I needed them to laugh. I like this. I don’t want to diminish it simply because another person is absent. There is something generous about a day populated by people who do not have to become central in order to matter. The score understands this better than I do. It lets everybody occupy a different scale.
Zork would probably object to that sentence. He would say the score understands nothing. The score arranges. We understand, or fail to. I can hear the precision with which he would make the distinction and, irritatingly, I would love him for it. Sometimes his precision feels like a handrail. Sometimes I want to kick it. He can stand before the pink field for hours asking what exactly has changed between one attempt and the next, while I am already wondering whether the men are hungry and whether there is coffee somewhere.
And N. would have cut the strawberry out by now.
Not because she dislikes it. Precisely because she likes it too much. Zu schön, Bee. Gefährlich. Then schnippel around the green crown, leave a little white border because perfect cutting is suspicious, put it into the flower field, move one of the solemn heads into the empty strawberry panel and announce that she has repaired the emotional logistics. I can almost hear the scissors. That tiny dry sound. Her talking continuing while her hands have already made a decision her sentences haven’t caught up with.
I miss her.
There. No architecture around it.
I miss her in the stupid physical way. Not the idea of her, not what she represents, not some maternal version of myself reflected back through her. Her. The particular interruption of her entering a room. The unfinished sentence. The thing already in her hand. The slight violence she does to arrangements simply by not respecting their intended use. I miss having my attention displaced by her.
Perhaps that is why the flowers trouble me today. They keep entering where they have not been invited. Between faces. Around bodies. Across the floor. A yellow flower almost touches a mouth; another lies beside a hand that has already given up reaching. They are not consolation. Thank God. I couldn’t bear flowers being assigned that job. They are simply alive in the same field as fatigue, absurdity, work, friendship, exposure.
And love.
I keep wanting love to behave better than it does. To produce equilibrium. To reward attention with attention, presence with presence, tenderness with tenderness. But the score gives me asymmetry instead. One looks, another looks elsewhere. Someone reaches while somebody bends. Someone works while somebody waits. The strawberry remains absurdly whole.
Maybe equilibrium is not everybody standing upright.
I sit with that for a while.
Outside the journal there will be emails, colleagues, decisions, rehearsals, whatever tomorrow has already begun assembling without asking me. Zork will continue being precise. N. will continue somewhere beyond my immediate reach, being N. Friends will appear and disappear through the day. None of them fills the place of another. That seems important tonight. Missing her does not make the others insufficient. Having the others does not make missing her foolish.
The strawberry can stay where it is.
I don’t need to schnippel everything.