Toast
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So I listened to him (what were my options?) and tried to stay disciplined and wrote like crazy. I went for long walks and took in the crumbling, textile warehouse on State Street with the fractured windows; the abandoned construction site across from Rite-Aid on Church Street where a new community college was supposed to be built two years ago; and the relatively sleazy Center Grill, where someone always seemed to be getting arrested or shot. When I returned to the apartment and sat at my desk, I thought I’d write about the razed earth and urban blight.
But I didn’t. I wrote about things tinged with a little life and lightness. One afternoon, that textile warehouse with the shattered windows looked nothing short of brilliant. The feeble late-winter sun, the grey and purple dusk, the pinkish-white dawn, everything was so clear and singular. At one point I thought perhaps I was manic but when I broke my vow of silence and spoke with Dr. Laney on the phone, he said, “You know, it’s really okay – feeling good sometimes means you’re actually feeling good.”
“I feel very alive, very sensory-aware,” I told him.
“I’m sorry to tell you this but write me all about it. Describe what you’re feeling in a letter. I’m having a hard time understanding you.”
“Great,” I said and hung up. Then I walked into my room and sat at the computer. I described the three birch trees out in the courtyard – how they were all I had in terms of life back there save for a few bushes that wouldn’t blossom for another few months. But out the bedroom window where I sat at the keyboard, all I saw was the left side, the naked branches of one of the birch trees. For the past fifteen months or so, there’d been an ugly, beige Wal-Mart plastic bag stuck on the upper level of it. It bothered me – I wanted to get a ladder and rip it down. I wanted to call the landlord and complain. It made the tree look awful and depressing and weak, clinging up there like a cancer.
Then last summer I watched the trees explode with greenery and lushness and life and for a while you couldn’t see the bag. I thought it was gone, kaput. Then in the late autumn when the leaves fell, the bag reappeared, waiting for me. It seemed to be wedged in there solidly. It really pissed me off. And it stuck around no matter what. Very fucking aggravating. Anyway, last week I came home from another doctor’s visit, feeling defeated, and saw five multi-colored trash bags stuck on my birch tree.
It was thrilling. The night before there’d been a huge, gusting wind storm and animals had gotten into the trash so the whole courtyard was messy and filled with empty milk containers and tampon boxes, cookie wrappers and shredded bags.
The birch reminded me of an Easter basket, a bargain basement Christmas tree! It was a collection of sky blue, raspberry, neon yellow, candy apple reds! All these ripped and torn pieces of plastic. They were all up there blowing and moving with the beige Wal-Mart bag. All of these trash bags working together to make my birch shift and shine and bloom like lilies on the side of a mountain.