Melty Melty

“I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.”
― John Masefield

“My mother, sleeping.
Curled up like a spring fern
although she’s almost a century.

She’s dreaming, however.
I can tell by the way she’s frowning,
and her strong breathing.

Maybe she’s making her way
down one more white river,
or walking across the ice.

There are no more adventures for her
in the upper air, in this room
with her bed and the family pictures.

Let’s go out and fight the storm,
she used to say. So maybe
she’s fighting it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Dearly: Poems

“For breakfast I eat convenience store bread, for lunch I eat convenience store rice balls with something from the hot-food cabinet, and after work I’m often so tired I just buy something from the store and take it home for dinner. I drink about half the bottle of water while I’m at work, then put it in my ecobag and take it home with me to finish at night. When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? ... Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America