Things are barely awake outside, because although it's 8:39am and the sun is supposedly somewhere, this Northern Hemisphere is reminding me that we cannot ever decide how much dark, how much light, and when I look into the distance, anything beyond half a mile is lost in a uniform, grey nothing.
The past couple of weeks have brought along with them a fair amount of strangeness—the first-and-last-time kind of strangeness, the kind that you know won't be keeping you any longer than it has to, or the strangeness that, if left alone for even half a minute too long, might cease to feel strange at all. I cannot say precisely where this strangeness was gathered, cannot point-to, and an observer on the outside probably wouldn't notice anything overly different when comparing the last handful of days to the ones that preceded them, but increasingly I found myself looking at familiar-across-years landscapes, or at everyday objects, or at people playing out their lives as if scripted, and finding them all looking ever so slightly misshapen, as if everyone else had taken one small step to the left and neglected to tell me of the change.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The galleys of Eating the Sun are now out and about, out to booksellers and media and, well, people. This fact has contributed in a significant way to the growing and unavoidable sense of both thrill and terror I feel in the context of its publication. Below are five chapter headings from the book, to provide you with slightly more of an idea as to what it contains.
(The lettering for these chapter headings take a disproportionately long time, and I am already looking forward to having to repeat the process for all of the foreign translations*.)
*There are already four of these.
ANOTHER EXTRACT, FROM A LECTURE THAT I DID NOT GIVE:
What you cannot do is wait, for him, for her, for them. Waiting for the right time is like waiting for the moon to fall out of view. Perhaps you’ve been eating sentences instead of speaking them, maybe you haven’t been drinking enough water. I know that you’re afraid, of what people will say, of what they will do, of your own limitations and the fact that tomorrow will likely feel shorter than today. But you can lean into it all, and you can start to see your breathing in and out as the only measurement you need—you already know what time it is.
(Previous extract can be found in the 88th Sometimes Newsletter.)
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
These drawings of the night as a human-like figure by David Álvarez. (I could pretend that I fell in love equally, but it was for the last of these four that I fell the most.)
Enough now, enough.
The end.
Copyright © 2018 Ella Frances Sanders, All rights reserved.