No.157

July didn’t announce itself but instead crept up quietly at the end of a sun-filled string of days, and perhaps I’m simply imagining that the light is already leaving the sky earlier than before—it might be the cloud cover and the lack of moon, I say to you as we turn our paperback pages, hardback pages, as the streetlamps flicker on outside. It rains in the cities, it rains in the countrysides, and the news headlines continue to mash me up like those potatoes we ate the other week.

There are socks I wanted to have mended months ago, there are trousers that I would like to hem before leaving on Thursday, there are ricecakes that have gone stale in the cupboard, there is a small watermelon that we’ll take in the car when we go, there is a packet of bran flakes in the kitchen because I can’t get excited about breakfast anymore, there was an envelope in the post yesterday from Missouri, there is a cold mug of pink tea on the shelf next to me because out of sight out of mind, there is reason to believe that everything will be fine.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

A small series from 2015 by possibly-Melbourne-based Tessa Chong. These were painted from images taken while on a trip to Japan, and I think I fell in love with them because of what they seem to say about observing, and about being observed.

They also caused me to wonder whether, in some unknown number of months, the world will once again be entirely filled with sights and sightseers like these, but wonder too whether the relationships that people have with places or how they move through places will change—will it all mean more now? I think, really, that for some people the past year and a half has been a reckoning and a world-ripped-apart and a never-the-same-again, and for others it has simply been viewed as a large inconvenience.

Ah, days like this, thoughts like these.

"And what will you do today, I wonder,

to my heart?"

— Mary Oliver, from Devotions: The Selected Poems; “The Softest of Mornings”

The end.