From 5c8f0e7647123c2081e847484ac965c78de2e568 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Madison Scott-Clary Date: Mon, 13 May 2024 17:55:05 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] update from sparkleup --- writing/post-self/idumea/003.md | 8 ++++++++ 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+) diff --git a/writing/post-self/idumea/003.md b/writing/post-self/idumea/003.md index e62e8604..17fd7257 100644 --- a/writing/post-self/idumea/003.md +++ b/writing/post-self/idumea/003.md @@ -90,6 +90,14 @@ Perhaps she slept, perhaps she dreamed. ----- +The Woman is a professional in napping in a way that I am not. Perhaps it is the felinity in her, or perhaps it is that she is not so easily claimed by such compulsions as I have — graphomania! Hah! — which lead to such fervent activity. Were I a smarter skunk, I might say to myself: "Rye, my dear, perhaps you can write your novels when you are caught in such throes, and spend the months between practicing the fine art of napping!" But I am not a smart skunk. I am a simple beast who is single minded. I am an animal who does one thing and perhaps does it well. I do not know! I am perhaps too simple to disambiguate being doing a thing well and doing a lot of a thing. + +Ah, but perhaps this is why I interpret The Woman at being a professional napper. + +Either way, when she returned home and lay down, she immediately fell into a deep, deep slumber. It was a sleep of no dreams, nor perhaps even rest, but served well as a way to disconnect from contexts innumerable, to step away from the world unpleasant. She slept and slept and slept — and yet, she slept for only twenty minutes. Twenty minutes later, she opened her eyes and looked up to the ceiling, and spent another ten minutes picking out familiar patterns in the drywall texture beneath the paint. They were her familiar constellations. There! The fennec. There! The open hand. There! There! There! The swan and the cat and the light-footed opossum dancing around the maypole. + +And then, at last, she stood up, and as her feet touched the ground she was, yes, whisked away into felinity, and so it was The Woman who was a cat who padded back downstairs, dressed now in billowy slacks and a flowing blouse. She dressed this way because she felt unstable, and knew that chances were better than not that she would wind up a skunk by that evening. + (the tenth stanza lingers in suffering and defines themselves by it, just as the seventh does with therapy)