Indian Feast

I react to the possibility of joy, it seems, by cooking large quantities of cauliflower curry and stuffing myself with as much as possible.

I’ve been saying to my friend Danielle over the phone: I just need one thing to go right. Then yesterday and today, just after I’d had this big-feeling realization (again) that I need to go back to school to become a therapist—and stop trying to miserably carve myself into another person—the following non-negative things happen: my landlord calls saying he will replace the heater under my freezing old house with a new one twice its size. One of my new poems, part of my second collection (though the first has yet to find a home) is accepted for publication in a great journal. And I have a really nice, possibly imaginary moment with a really French (really married?) bartender at my favorite restaurant. Ah, oui?

This morning, after getting the email about my poem, I decided to keep my daughter home a second day from daycare though her fever was gone, and that we would have a relaxed day.

First, we both mourned the sudden absence of the huge sparkly Christmas tree inside the little "mall" adjacent to my daily coffee shop. Our ritual is to retire to this open indoor space, framed by a few little shops, where I sit on the bizarrely unstable/uncomfortable benches and crunch sugar from the bottom of my iced coffee while she plays, going up and down the mini flights of stairs; touching the ornaments on the now-retired tree; or, sometimes, kneeling to do number 2 in her pullup (“I have to poop” she unselfconsciously announces).

After, we went to Borders, where she made me buy her yet another clear rubber ball with glitter floating inside (this one also has a smart-alecky white cube with writings on it, like fortunes: “in your dreams” and “true dat”), and to Whole Foods (“whole paycheck”), where I assembled the ingredients of what I thought of shimmeringly as an Indian feast. When I’m depressed I don’t cook and just want salt, sugar, and wine to be IV’d into me. So to be gathering the potatoes, tomatoes, lemon, and large goldish cauliflower into plastic bags felt hopeful.

The other morning, following the revelation about returning to school, I had a dream that I wanted to keep while it was going on. I lived in a house with a group of people. The house was beautiful and complex: large, and with an architecturally impressive or interesting design I studied from outside and in, trying to memorize its vivid, real-seeming details. The environment inside was very warm and free in a way unfamiliar to my waking reality, past or present. In this house, I could just be or express anything publicly, in front of the people around me, and feel embraced and self-accepting.