I don’t sleep so by the time the morning comes, it is not often I am up and feeling rested before my daughter begins her sweet songs. Usually I am skittering around, hauling myself up out of bed furrowed, trying to step out from the water of sleep. Wood, and salt, and the past, curled endlessly around my ankles. My husband is the one who makes breakfast and takes her to school after I’ve helped to get her dressed and out the door, it is an arrangement we have come to in the last few months of parenting. If I can get to the desk just before 8:30 am, I usually have some success with the writing.
But this morning I am up, having heard my daughter stir first at 5:30 then again at 6 am and then nothing. I am up with enough time to pour two cups of coffee and hear the wild green parrots cross the yard, making me smile, the heat already here but not too bad yet, a few clouds in the sky making me rubberneck on the drive to school. I make pancakes and slice peaches, plate them and put the peaches in a bowl, which I end up eating, no complaints, my favorite fruit.
When my daughter calls out in the middle of the night her bed is full of bugs she tells me, or a bee is floating around her feet. I don’t know where the fear of bugs has come from, but the other day my husband sent me a picture of a tiny mosquito squashed and bloody in his hand saying this is what is biting us. Yesterday after playing in her splash pool, my daughter and I move around a brown spider, trying to get it’s legs dry. And I can never remember what is poisonous, hiking down our favorite trail in the Angeles forest, surrounded by poison oak. In Washington my husband asks is this poisonous and I say no that’s blackberry. The vines crawling all over the rose bushes.
I am depressed, in case one couldn’t tell. I don’t know how one couldn’t be. Watching tanks roll through my city, through the farmlands that I drive out to, where I have watched the men and women bent over the fields picking strawberries, how sweet the smell can be. It is hideous. I am working on a poem about first love that has no end, and a coming of age movie that wants to feel like summer. The taste of sunscreen and grass, the sh-sh-sh of a sprinkler on a field. Wet concrete drying in the sun.
Last night I tried something different before sleep. I put the phone down and I turned the television on. I began watching Lena Dunham’s Too Much. And there is a moment where I caught my breathe. Where suddenly all the back and forth of awkward romcom lands into something quite different, something quite deep, something where you suddenly discover the artist of this piece of work is a master. Dunham gave us a shot where we just sit. One person with headphones on, the other without, and she does nothing but let us watch. Will Sharpe is a revelation. Sometimes I think the tell of a great director is how good their actors are. And all of Dunham’s actors are good. I woke up early with the sense that I had found something that wasn’t just a distraction but a reminder of all the different ways cinema can be.
I remember watching Tiny Furniture for the first time, my ex-boyfriend had written that he had hated it, but I had watched it after just returning home from college, a drop-out, and in my childhood bed, in my childhood room, and thinking whatever the problem might be with this filmmaker, she sure knew how to cut into something deep. Deeper than one knew. She knew how to shoot sex, sex that was raw and demeaning, and that one character desperately was trying to find an answer in, that this was a filmmaker who was trying to make meaning out of all of it, and of course, I love that.