Hello, beautiful.
How's Turkey? I don't have a good imaginative handle on it. I imagine dusty streets, and smooth-skinned men with black goatees tending canopied market stalls full of colourful tiles and relics and rugs. How far off am I? Many miles, I expect.
I can imagine your Mum with more confidence, and I like imagining her. I can imagine she makes the place her own more readily there than in Korea. I don't know why I think that. What is it like for you, to meet her in this different context? Does it change the mode of your relating, at all?
Will you give her my love and tell her I went and bought a mandolin after reading her beautiful letter?
I wonder, too, whether you will manage to resist the gorgeous temptation of all those carpets... I hope and suspect that you won't! Mum couldn't, and although the whole thing was a bit of a hassle, she takes pleasure in the rightness, romance and memory of those long, blood-red runners in the hall, each day. I believe she even showed them off to you, when you first met - is that right?
I would love to see Turkey, some day. I hope you are loving it. It really makes me happy to think of you there. There, and all these places you've been writing about. I feel calmer thinking of you wandering strange towns - with your boy, in your hats, with your supplies of unintelligible foreign packets - than I do when I think of you safe in your office in a shirt and tie.... Hmmm. Yes, sounds just like a reflection of my biases, doesn't it? But I feel it, too. Does this visit make you want to travel for longer in Europe? Rent a house somewhere exotic for a few months, write and play and take photos and drink wine in the sun with eccentric locals, take weekend trips to new countries, hire bikes, boats, cars... Hmmmm.... For THAT sort of adventure you need a lover. ;)
Time is running out, now, isn't it? It seems to have passed very quickly... Since your emails started coming through, that is! You mentioned a photo you sent of the view of the sea from the plane, is that right? It didn't come through, for some reason. I look forward to seeing it, when you come home.
It's a blue, blue day, today, chilly but sunny. I walked Frannie's dog with my aunt, this afternoon, and there was a rainbow. Rainbows will never again appear without our thinking of Frannie, now. That's quite a nice thought to have.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing you. But a part of me is sorry at the prospect of ending our second email correspondence. I like us in writing. I like us in person, too - more, mostly - except that in person we seem always to be barrelling towards some dénouement, never still, rarely able to exist as ourselves in the given moment. Ironically, in writing, traveling different courses at our different paces and under different skies, the 'us' of us is still. Alive, but refreshingly not kicking!
Perhaps this is our secret. We are destined to be lovers across town, lovers across the globe....
.... Well, bollocks to that, I say.
Jessie and I have just finished watching an episode of Boston Legal on DVD. I always begin by wondering why I bother with this crass show, and in the space of one episode am caught in its quirky, clever and unexpectedly humane spell again.
And, oh, we ate well, tonight, too. A new invention (born of the usual proverbial parent): Quinotto! Which is what risotto becomes when it comes time to add the arborio rice and Moss opens the pantry to find only quinoa!
Could have been a disaster, so the gods must take some credit on account of their mercy. But I followed a hunch that it would work, and used my instincts (fine-tuned as they are) as to the pace of the cooking and the receptiveness of the grain. Mmmmm-mm. It was seriously good, the onions caramelised themselves in the process, my half-half of red and white grains combined with a beetroot-heavy stock gave it a wonderful hue, and then I topped it with my trademark shiitakes and buttery spinach and - yessiree - goats' cheese.
Can you tell I'm trying to lure you back from Istanbul?
Tomorrow I have the day open for studio time. I really need to use it well. I have some slowly escalating jitters, doubts about the collection, and time is running short, again... But these are the times when I am most purposeful, most assured that the space I inhabit on the planet is not wasted on me, even when I'm struggling. It's a struggle born of longing, an intuition of some glorious possibility; a struggle towards, and not away.
That said, a less lofty longing that also compels me is the thought of a well-earned rest. I still don't feel I've earned it, but if the show is to come together by its scheduled date, well, by golly, I will have earned it by then!
Added to this are the peculiar and unexpected pressures this year has brought with it. The longing for rest was sown earlier and far deeper than usual, this time, and the promise of time to simply be, to find some kind of equilibrium again, is wonderful.
So, with that I'll bid you goodnight, reach my hand up through the chill air to the light switch, wriggle deeper into my doona and wrap myself around my fading heat pack. Miss you.
Moss
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