The Floors Could be Metaphors...

The best way I can describe where I’m living now is an intriguing hybrid between a construction site, an artists’ colony and a Jewish temple. My landlord is at least sixty, bald with a perpetually sweat soaked ruff of grey hair. He talks incessantly, about conspiracy theories, plans, beliefs, and keeping Kosher.

The house is massive, but still somehow homey. Musical instruments rattle and jangle in every corner; gongs thrash into a deafening roar any time of day or night.
More than anything the flooring fascinates me. The living room is honey colored wood that bleeds into the master bedroom, shiny and normal under the grime of indifference. Huge grey stones in a greenish mortar cover the floor in the dining room that opens into a huge office, lined with floor to ceiling windows. Dozens of cords from printers, computers, TVs and other blinking beeping office gadgets spiral across the grey stony floor.

The kitchen has linoleum, cream colored with spirals of brown, like a shepherdess’s hair, or a conservative paisley. There is another kitchen downstairs, but it has tiles instead of the lacy creamy linoleum. The constant building and digging for elaborate raised beds and steep steps outside cuts into red clay dirt, dirt like I saw once on a sleek race track in Kentucky. Here its deep clods, red and orange ground into the tan tiles in ever layered boot prints. This tile, under the orange and red treads marches into a bathroom, and down a hall ending sharply, as if shaking off the marching feet on its blank tan face.

At the end of this hall the room opens again with chip filled cement holding the room together. The room is tall window and a yellow too lovely to be mustard and too experienced to be buttercup. The floor sits there grey and stern, defying the cheerful red rug that smoothes its face, but confident that it is needed to keep the yellow and the windows from flying away.

My room is off this big room. The grey floor is comforting here, and a yarny red rug sits snuggly against its surface, sharing the load.

I already know I will be lonely here. My little bed, too short and flat reminds me. The grey of the floor reminds me. And my one lone window, long and dear the ceiling reminds me. But the rug hushes the floor. And a bright afghan and my nanny’s old feather pillow soften the bed. Pictures climb the walls beside posters that tell of memories and occasions still colorful. Books lean against each other on the yawning shelf, full of more to say and do.

An old woman lives beside the kitchen. Her husband lives there too, but he slips around like a shadow with many whispered thanks and welcomes almost drowned out by his wife’s breathing machines and the smell she drags with her. So far she watches CNN and eats canned peaches. She tells me I’m big, like I don’t already know. I want to tell her she smells like piss, but she must know, and she might do something dangerous with her yards of blue oxygen cord.

I’m sharing bathroom with a man for the first time in almost five years. I washed his towels today, and he was grateful. He has bottles of scent and lotion lining the countertop. He is a waiter, and he irons the same white shirt each morning. He tells me of his childhood in Romania, and offers me watermelon and Mexican beer. He has a little boy who beat me at checkers without saying a single word, then sat on the sofa, wrapped in a huge black and white checked blanket, staring out at me from behind round glasses.

Upstairs in one of the rooms with shining blonde wood a contractor lives. He grew up in San Francisco, and he comes home from working all day and walks through without his shirt, sawdust in his hair, and sticking to a pink scar on his side. I will ask him about it someday. I drove him downtown this evening, to meet a woman for a blind date. He drank two glasses of wine first, but he was still nervous and jumpy. He told me he was too old to be doing this kind of thing.

Everyone in the house is at least fifty years old. They have traveled been in love and seen things that the universe hasn’t yet led me too. They have all already told me I remind them of where they were once.

When I was unpacking I found my UTC course book. It made me think what I have been again, I should be picking my classes, running all over campus to see how much time I need to get from class to class, I should be tracking down the best book deals, and seeing which of my friends will be in classes with me so we can share the same book. I should be fighting with my boss over my changing schedule, and picking the perfect back to school outfit. This was going to be the best year, the best one yet. When I went to the writing lab I would sing in as “Hana Colvin, Major, Engl 2nd, Senior”. Instead I ‘m hearing about lives. His, hers, theirs, yours. I’m writing and reading, pretending to learn another language. I’m trying figure out where to do my Pilates, I’m catching lightening busy for the silent little boy with round glasses. I’m embroidering and watching pointless TV, I’m going on interviews for jobs I’m never called back to, and I’m polishing my resume like a diamond. And, I’m writing again. First draft by hand, at my favorite coffee house that is this city to me, writing it down in a notebook that I bought the other day, even though I already have dozens. I needed a clean, clear one, empty of Shakespeare notes or class schedules.

For a year I will be a bohemian. A learner, a transcendentalist, a dreamer, a horizon expander. And I will do this in my new home that has many floors.

stress

I could fill this space with all that is bothering/stressing/pressing me down.

but I refrain.































its still here though. in that spot.

yrs,
Hana

Bathmophobia

Falling up stairs
As easy as falling down
And there I sit, bruises blooming
Except its spring, and blooms are lovely
Not like these dark marks of clumsiness
And I want to take an elevator, I want winged shoes
I want never ever again to fall up stairs, while my heart sinks
And people point and laugh, and I pick up books. Or people sympathize.
So I runrunrun to class, and dodge and fumble and put one foot in the place of another.
Falling up stairs. Falling down. Bruises unlike the yellow of daffodils. Today anyhow.

Walking in Circles

My dear boyfriend and I have been walking in circles lately. This circle has gone around the fact that we are so busy there is really no way to give the most exciting and real love I have ever felt a chance. If this love is really all that, then it will still be there in time, that is what the circle eventually closed on. So we are going to take some time, and hopefully come back to this with some truth, love and hope in our hearts.

I miss him. But I miss him all the time anyway. And life goes, as it always does, inexorably on.

I hope I am always his Hanababy.


coming to you from a sad spot, but still with love
Hana

Untitled

I time so many things in my days. When to be to class, when to eat some lunch, when to take a break and hurryhurryhurry back to my computer as the last seconds drain from a moment that feels stolen but really belongs to me. Each phone call ticks away in a second that I will never experience again. It seems lately I wonder about each of those seconds, imagine doing something fantastic or unusual in them. Or doing what I ought, finishing a paper, closing my eyes to everything and finding the next bit of move on power to come to me in a dream like a biblical gathering of strange and necessary proportions.
Everything seems couched in biblical lately, I am so relieved to almost be done with Milton!!!!

time for more hurryhurryhurry.
love
Hana

...........

I fail.
I suck.
I try.
But I fail
and suck
and say the wrong thing
and think the wrong thing
and imagine the wrong people
doing the wrong thing to me.
And it imagines smoothly.
And it imagines nicely.
And it doesn't suck.
But still.
I fail.
I try.
But I fail.

I give up. Leave out. Pack up. Regress. Hide. Say farewell. And go back to work.

(cycle repeating cycle repeating cycle repeating.....)

HG

First Day

So yesterday was my first day at Convergys actually taking phone calls. It was at once better and worse than I thought it would be. I blanked so horribly on the first few calls, accidentally deleted one families programming....so forth and so on. I felt like I was treading water. But after our first break when I went back to my cubicle I felt a little more sure, confident. I had piles of notes I had taken in class, and instead of asking for help I started looking through them quickly. Calls went better, I sold a lot of programming, activated several accounts, helped an adorable little old lady program her remote...all kinds of good stuff. Oh, and I sold my first porn hahahah, the playboy channel. Interesting.

So I think it went well. I only got four hours of sleep last night because I did homework till two and then got up at six to finish some more up, but I think I can do this. Luckily I have spring break all next week, it will be a nice buffer. AND my awesome boyfriend is coming down tomorrow, and there will be a nap in his arms (the best place ever to sleep) so its all good, great, gravy and golden!
See you on the flip side,
love as always,
Hana Grace