Morning Pages Thursday August 24th 2023

For days we have had a rat in the house. The cat and I first heard it under the dining room that serves as the playroom. A big thud and a scuttle, and we both looked at each other. The sun setting behind us. The cat’s eyes gone wide.

There was evidence of a break in by the TV that my husband keeps saying needs to go in my office and by the front door. We put a trap out, baited with peanut butter, humane. We catch nothing.

After the storm passes we seal up the side of the house. A few of the boards coming loose all around, the baby finally sleeping through the night but now I am up listening to the thump and bump and scratch along the bedroom wall. Imagining it slithering and skittering and entering her room. The way I had thought when we first moved in, early morning, almost 6 months pregnant just catching a tail out of the corner of my eye that there was a snake in the bathroom. The cat almost good for nothing, the rats off the Arroyo the size of her, she spends the night at my feet. Only waking to yowl at 5:30 am with the baby crowing All! Done! into the dark morning. All! Done! she continues to say all day, no longer just reserved for the end of meals, or too long museum trips, or her bath, we try to figure it out. All done with what? We ask. All done being awake? All done carrying her own body around? But all done also sounds like again! So I try to teach her otra vez. Dreaming always of the Spanish island. The oranges, the anchovies, the sea so warm. My husband falling back to sleep while I stay up reading about a shooting, about radioactive water being poured into the Pacific, about owls.

I think about the poet, desert born and handsome, and how quickly he had written me three years ago and now not at all. After I say I have come up for air, after I say the last three years found me falling in and out of love, found me falling back again, saying I have birthed the most brilliant little girl. Saying I’ve been at my desk again and I am thinking about the next movie. His wife my savior.

Sorry. I find myself saying to my husband. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. The Pasadena Parrots already gossiping in the walnut tree. Making breakfast for my daughter. The rat we are afraid stuck in the wall.

And when people ask about my next movie all I want to say is it is night. It is summer.

Realizing this morning that all I wanted was to just take a shower.