metaphors raze i always end up back at this house. i never lived here, but it's the castle gone to seed that haunts half my dreams, give or take a few. i carry a snapped rubber_band with me everywhere i go. curl it around my index finger. let it sting my skin when it unwinds and fancies itself a small-scale whip. she smiles. asks if any of that's got something to do with her. i tell her i don't know what the action signifies. the meaning won't come clear until i'm alone at the dining room table and there's nothing to gnaw on but my own ossified mind. 240320 ... epitome of incomprehensibility In "pianos," raze quoted a good one from Tori_Amos. It reminded me how I laughed out loud last week at a proofreading project. Not because the text had a funny mistake, but because of the metaphor. My cousin Julia is writing a handbook for teachers, and she had something to this effect: "Think of the curriculum document like a sports bra, not a corset. Or like boxers, not a jockstrap." Underwear: the perfect metaphor for something being or not being flexible. 240522 ... ovenbird "When you are away, you are nevertheless present for me. This presence is multiform: it consists of countless images, passages, meanings, things known, landmarks, yet the whole remains marked by your absence, in that it is diffuse. It is as if your person becomes a place, your contours horizons. I live in you then like living in a country. You are everywhere. Yet in that country I can never meet you face to face." –John Berger from And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos When it comes to metaphors for missing someone, this is one of the most powerful I've encountered. And maybe this is why I rarely feel like I'm home. I'm almost always traveling inside countries made of absence, always looking for faces I will not find, and waiting to meet the ones I miss in some third place, a country outside of ourselves that we can both travel to, where we make ourselves visible in our totality. That is home. Dreams sometimes act as a proxy for this third place, but not today, and that is another kind of loss. 260309 what's it to you? who go blather from