Denial & Love Affairs

First and foremost, an update:

I’ve been diagnosed with menopause.

If you happened to read my previous post “No Answers - Guillotine” you would have been thoroughly informed of my current health predicament.

This has given me pause to reflect.

If uh… anyone has recently been afflicted by my over-the-top, dramatic, crying, emotional outbursts over the past three months or so, I am very sorry, ashamed and a bit embarrassed. I'm trying not to beat myself up about it. I knew I wasn't acting like my typical self but I kept thinking it was some other medical mystery. "I couldn't be in menopause, I'm only 39!" Denial is a funny thing, ain't it?

Although what I said is honest and true, it is possible that some of my words and actions were disrespectful, without tact and may have caused confusion.

I apologize. Please forgive me.

I think I was in shock for a few days, sitting in another kind of grief yet again, alone in my home yet again, trying to process. Denial, then a day of pity sobbing, then acceptance. I need to approach this with curiosity instead of nose-diving into the waters of fear and despair. What can I learn from this? What is the universe trying to teach me? Everything is a learning lesson. I've had so many over the past five years, I should have a masters in 'life' by now but I feel like I'm just beginning.

PSA: Please be gentle with the women in your life if they are between the ages of 35-55. This is rough.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

I’m having an affair. My husband caught me red handed, in our bed this past Saturday night with my hands around a…

...book.

Gotcha!

We were across the street on our way to try out a new restaurant. I felt it in the air, the magnetic pull towards the store. I jabbed my finger into the air dramatically, in the exact direction of the store and declared, “we have to go in there after lunch!” He nodded in his stoic way, an agreeable man. If it excites me, he never says no. If it makes me happy, he buys it for me. A very agreeable man.

We both enjoy funky recycled/new art and antique stores. Junk Girls, in downtown San Luis Obispo, California is a must. It’s located next to a record/music store, which is next to a used bookstore. A triple threat to our wallets.

The women running the store felt like old friends. Though the meeting was brief, and we will likely never meet again, they had an impact.

As I do, when I am finding a book, I let it call to me. This particular moment in finding the book was so kismet, a meet cute and cosmically perfect. They find me, not unlike when a stray cat or curious dog comes to me for some love. I try to let people find me as well, allowing the relationship to unfold naturally. Or perhaps, maybe we find each other? If not for a moment in time, or for longer, it has to mean something, right?

"From which stars have we fallen to meet each other here?" -Nietzsche

He found antique maps of California and Ireland.

And I found her. She has captured my heart, entirely.

She is a gorgeous bright emerald green with diminished gold paint at the top of the pages, bound by glue and string for over one hundred and twenty-five years. An art deco-esque iris on the spine, and a beautiful illustration of a German garden on the cover. Classic and alluring. Stained pages from water damage and time, decomposing wood that emits the nostalgic smell of old books. The outer edges darkened, crusted and flaking. Holding history in your hands, being present with it in this moment and stepping into the past, you can almost believe in time travel. It's pure magic.

Her name? The Solitary Summer by Elizabeth Von Arnim.

My heart was bewitched upon reading the first page, I felt it lift and soar while reading the words that I have been longing to read. I had to possess her.

It ends at a meagre 190 pages, and I am savoring every moment, reading it slowly. Rereading passages so that it melts into my marrow. This book belongs to me in the way the air belongs to my lungs, blood to my heart. It evokes a fundamental intelligence from history that feels like a story that's been passed down by elders. It’s close to indescribable, I’ll do my best.

The prose is exquisite, it reads like a love poem to gardens, trees, flowers, books, the humdrum of every day life. The page long run-on sentences are no surprise for that era, and I just love it. At times it is satirical in nature, when describing other humans and their obnoxious ways. Whimsical in the way she describes the absolute necessity for solitude in nature. The fact that she name drops Jane Austen and Walt Whitman as inspirations is astoundingly glorious. The bravery in which she speaks about how women are treated, even in those days is blowing my damn mind. I audibly gasp, giggle and guffaw, her wit is acute. A natural comedienne.

How do I describe the feeling of connecting with someone who is dead? I mean, dead dead. Long gone. We feel the same, over a hundred years later. I've always felt out of time, like I don't belong in this century. I've been called an old soul on so many occasions I couldn't possibly count them all. If reincarnation is a thing, I think the late 19th century was where I lived my best life.

Oh, my sweet and beating heart, I have fallen in love.

You know that feeling of when you are first falling in love? Your eyes widen, your heart warms and swells, your ribs ache, constrained as you breathe shallowly, your focus is laser sharp, forgetting to blink trying to take it all in, your hand flutters to your chest in order to contain the expansion of your soul.

"Find what you love and let it kill you." -Bukowski

That’s the feeling I get while I’m reading this book. If I’m perfectly clear and honest, which I always am, I don’t have any other way to be but brutal about it, to the point where I get into trouble, yikes.

I have never felt this way before while reading a book. And oh, I have read many! It is simply the most magnificent, resplendent and enchanting book I’ve read. She understands me completely. Silly, melancholic, brave, brash but demure and a whole lot of whimsy.

Book after book over the past few months I have had to DNF (for those folks that are not into the bookstagram scene, that is: “Did Not Finish.”) or SFL (“Saved For Later.” I just made that one up, feel free to use it.) They just weren't speaking to what I need right now.

I’ve found what I’ve been looking for and now I'm on a mission. I went to several antique stores this week and found more books from the late 19^th century to early 20^th century.

"Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." - Kafka

I must have the originals or at least second print. I don’t want to read books digitally or remastered or reprinted. I must have the ones that have been held by a hundred or more yearning hands. Books that have moved their readers to live a more meaningful life. I want to smell the withering, grease stained and rotting pages. I want to feel the weight of the books bearing down into the most intimate places of my spirit.

Whew! That’s quite enough about my love affairs with century old novels.

In other news:

A kitten fell asleep in my hands. Death could have taken me then and I would have been fine with it.

My novel When She Breaks is now in four bookstores and counting! I am selling it at a holiday boutique in downtown SLO, and I will be slinging books and signing them in person at a vendor event in early December, in a barn (where I belong).

My 40^th birthday is ‘round the corner. I'm ready for it! I've earned this age.

I bought myself a birthday present, a used Canon Rebel DSLR. I didn't realize how much I had missed my digital camera until I heard the shutter release. I'm off to the woods, beach and gardens to find myself again.

I'm painting, drawing, puzzling and writing now that my brain is being charged by hormone replacement therapy and medications. It's still difficult and I am exhausted but I am noticing a small improvement.

I did end up watching Pride & Prejudice (Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen versions of Mr. Darcy), Emma, Persuasion, Sense & Sensibility and also Far From The Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy). Next up is Northanger Abbey, Bleak House (Charles Dickens) and North & South (Elizabeth Gaskell) I will take any and all period piece suggestions. Do not, under any circumstance recommend Bridgerton, thanks.

I’m feeling closer and closer to the woman I have been waiting for, even if the road is bumpy and has some massive potholes.

Maybe that woman is already here? Maybe I have been looking at her this entire time while obsessing over self-help books? What if I have arrived? There’s always room for improvement, but can’t I just enjoy who I am right now and hope for the best?! I think I shall.

I love this era I am entering into, even if times are scary, alarming and disastrous, I won’t waste a moment of joy.

Yeehaw! Now go read banned books and stay curious!

Man, when you haven't painted in years, it's like you are starting over from scratch. I'm practicing and having fun while relearning.

Page 58-59 of The Solitary Summer

“It was wonderfully quiet, and the nightingale on the hornbeam had everything to itself as I sat motionless watching that glow in the east burning redder; wonderfully quiet, and so wonderfully beautiful because one associates day-light with people, and voices, and bustle, and hurryings to and fro, and the dreariness of working to feed our bodies, and feeding our bodies that we may be able to work and feed them again; but here was the world wide awake and yet only for me, all the fresh pure air only for me, all the fragranced breathed only by me, not a living soul hearing the nightingale but me, the sun in a few moments coming up to warm only me, and nowhere a single hard word being spoken, or a single selfish act being done, nowhere anything that could tarnish the blessed purity of the world as God has given it us. If one believes in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. The doors shut, and the lights go out, and the sharpest tongue is silent, and all of us, scolder and scolded, happy and unhappy, master and slave, judge and culprit, are children again, tired, and hushed, and helpless, and forgiven. And see the blessedness of sleep, that sends us back for a space to our early innocence. Are not our first impulses on waking always good?”