The cake is in the oven. I told my friend yesterday that I don’t care about writing about food anymore and she said, all of a sudden? I said no, not all of a sudden. But the cake is in the oven and it smells nice. The window is open in the kitchen.
I bought the blood oranges at a supermarket called Big Y. In aisle 5 just now, an elderly woman was complaining to the cashier that her doctor sent her prescription somewhere mysterious. The cashier said, aren’t people sometimes just so… and she replied, yes exactly. And the cashier said, I am only seventeen, but I have found that sometimes issues build up and up and up until… and the woman replied, yes maybe it’s that.
This is a special cake because it is for my friend Liel. A few weeks ago Liel was in my kitchen, it was nighttime. Ava was sitting on a stool talking about what happened that day, how Ava went to a friend’s house and made a phenomenal, unusual, astounding salad using pickled mango hidden in the back of this friend’s fridge. Oh I left that pickled mango in their fridge, said Liel, I’m so glad you used it. I remember laughing and laughing and asking, when you were a little, did you know that being an adult would be like this? Going to each other’s homes, being neighbors?
Like this! My friends who live on a street that’s named after a nut walk a quarter mile to my avenue that’s named after a president. And there’s a predicament where all the houses in my neighborhood have an overabundance of root vegetables like parsnips and carrots, we try to give the surpluses to one another. Hot pink feathers fall off my hot pink feather boa and I place them in bouquets of tulips and daffodils. I text my friend in the kitchen that I’m feeling sad and my friend gets into my bed and talks until I laugh. The way my friend’s mouth moves, close up, is so beautiful. I keep a diary and I begin every entry with dear diary, but I only write about the people I’ve seen and the things we did. Everything is very do-do do-do do sometimes.
The cake is an upside down blood orange olive oil cake. I can smell the olive oil warming the house. I made this cake because I asked Alexis, what cake do you think? And Alexis said, with citrus? It was simple. I plan to melt chocolate and write Liel’s name in cursive somehow across the top. I don’t know if it will work out, but it doesn’t matter at all whether it looks good or not.
I told my friend that I’m not interested in food, but I’ve been interested in the wind. This is because I’ve been thinking, for a year now I’ve been thinking, about what it means to have a preoccupied heart. There’s this shared daydream among us all that the heart is not just this bumping thumping thing inside, but something like a home that can be open or closed. And it is a goal, for those of us who still have the energy, to have an open heart. Like it’s good for the heart to be open, that way, well, I don’t know the exact consequences.
For the heart to be open, it must be like a home. Homes have occupancy permits, beams, window frames, property taxes, gutters, shutters, doors. If the heart is open, people can come in. They can drink a glass of water and leave it half full on the table. And even when they leave the cup there and leave your life, they stay in your heart, and the grief is really something.
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I’m sick in bed which is why I have the time to write this. I’m in and out of sleep, sweaty and cold with a fever. Every spring, my mom used to say it was the wind that made me sick. Like my insides were all strewn about, tornadoed, my brain tossed into my toes and vice versa, I’d have to spend a few days vomiting and readjusting to the new location of everything inside me. Now the wind is swirling around the outside of my room, but not antagonistically, for I have decided we are one and the same.
It used to be that I wanted to have an open heart. If my heart was open, that implied a form that could be opened. For example, a home with a door. So I thought, for a long time I thought, unlock the door. But one day I was joking around with Hannah, maybe we were talking about property, and I said, I don’t want my heart to be a home at all. I’d like it to be the wind itself. Hannah’s hair in the wind is just beautiful.
I took a real nap just now and my fever broke. Nino called. I walked outside into the wind and mud and ice and sun. Squatting down, looking into a purple crocus, I explained to them that I just don’t want to be preoccupied. I would not like my heart to be preoccupied. I would not like my heart to be occupied. I saw the first bee of the year inside that crocus.
Daniella and I were out to dinner a few weeks ago when they told me that the arabic word Hawa means something like both wind and love. They told me this after I told them that when I’m out with a friend and the wind cuts us, I say, ah the wind. The wind! Even if it gets unbearably under our clothes, noticing it and welcoming it includes us in its joke.
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I started a new job sorting books that would otherwise be recycled. One of the first books I picked up was called World of Wind by Slater Brown. I was advised that due to the tattered cover and it’s old age, the book was pretty worthless. This assessment amused me, and I went on a quest to make the book meaningful.
There are multiple ways a book can acquire meaning or value. The first is that you can hide a large amount of money between its pages, which I immediately did. I used a fifty dollar check made out to New York State transit authority as a bookmark, that I kept on forgetting to mail.
Another way a book can become meaningful is when you read it.
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Maybe an open heart is more like an open book.
Martha’s in bed with a migraine. I put on my softest voice to read to them about wind. I tell them about a wind called the Foehn. It blows warmly into Switzerland with air compressed by skirting around the Alps. I hear Martha fall asleep. I warned them that this book would be boring. This is one of those moments in time that I hope to never forget. Vomit bucket and a bowl of plain white rice to my left.
Yesterday there was wind in Manhattan. Wind came off the Hudson River and blew against all the poodles in Tribeca. My friend licked their pointer finger and held it up high.
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Kristine just came over and told me a story about a pinwheel, and jokes the cashier told at the corner store in Florence. The punchline of each is Sir Cumference, Sir Prise, Sir Rendipity. Kristine would have to come over and tell the story in full again, I’m doing a very bad job. We sat in my kitchen and I showed her the book about the wind. She asked if I would read from it while she blew the pinwheel into motion with a straw, on stage, it would be music. A few nights later we got on stage, I read this poem by Shelley, it goes:
Who can see the wind?
Neither you nor I
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by
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Anna came over. She made herself comfortable on the floor of my room and rested her head on the side of my bed. I asked her the night before if she would like her heart to be more like a home or more like the wind. Her answer was perfect, it was right in between. And I realized I would like my heart to not be home-like because I would like to stop holding onto who is inside my heart but no longer in my life. And then I realized, actually, that I would like who is in my heart but no longer in my life to just be in my life, and stay there. But there’s nothing I can do about that. Even if I wish that my heart was structure-less, and uninhabitable, that doesn’t change the fact that it is what it is. It is a home. It is filled with everyone I have ever loved. The windows are open because it is spring. And the wind, ahhh the wind, comes in.
This is just lovely. Thank you for sending it out to the world on this spring breeze.
So beautiful! Thank you