Today is the most gorgeous day.
I stayed up too late doing small, obsessive things (don't get me started on GoogleLibrary, and my fixation with it), and woke up just early enough to catch my lovely Alia, twelve hours ahead of me on Chinatime, and have a nice skippity skoppity skype with her without even having to leave my bed. Sun streams into my room in the mornings, something that annoyed me into always keeping the shade down in the summer and has coaxed me into always leaving it open now that autumn is upon us and the reality of vitamin D withdrawal is setting in. The sun is a lot brighter in my room because there is no house next to it - but it is also particularly golden and warm out the living room windows, because all the leaves look like this:

Light feeds light, yellow feeds yellow.

Talking to Alia in my bed with sun streaming in the window was almost the same as talking to Alia at breakfast with frozen hair in the St. Paul mornings of our shared past. We talked about being scared and being brave, and low and high self esteem, and she is feeling a little better in China now and is getting out of there soon, which is good for her and puts my mind at ease a little. She said, "I'm not like you - I can't just go out and do things." Which is funny because I don't feel like I can either. Every so often there are these moments where someone close to me sees something in me that I can't fathom. It's like the first time I tried to explain my then-paralytic fear to Andrew, two years ago over a mango-flavored Dominican cigarillo on the teeny wooden balcony of the Goodrich house, and he shook his head in disbelief, "Man, Sarah, you're just such a calm and collected to me that I can't begin to imagine you so freaked out." I thought he was making fun of me, but he wasn't, and Alia meant what she said too - she thinks that I am brave, that I just go out and Do Things, and that is so far from my self-perception that I can only shake my head and laugh, and wish it were so. She also said "If you feel like you're shutting down, you just call me and I'll fix it, ok?" And I know that she will. I count my lucky stars that I have her in my life.

Liz and I wandered down to Allentown to find brunch, and discovered the cornucopia of lovely houses down that end of Norwood, including one that has a little slit in the turret just like the ones that castles keep in ramparts for shooting arrows through. We also saw these roses, somehow still in bloom in the midst of all the brown, red, gold :


and ate French toast stuffed with Greek yogurt, granola, honey, berries, apples, cinnamon, which was the best damn fancy brunch a hungry girl could ask for on such a stellar, crisp, sunbathed day. Especially after her (my) camera succumbs to permanent Lens Error. Woe. And then on the way back, we fell into PriceRite, because I needed cat litter, and blast of all Blasts From the Past, it is laid out exactly like c1000, one of the two grocery stores in the immediate vicinity of my Dutch apartment. The cabbages were in the same place and the freezers were in the same place, the same low shelves, the same plastic bags available for purchase, the same arrangement of brisk cashiers, manning a row of registers stretching the length of the store. So I will be back, if only because nostalgia and grocery stores are an unbeatable combination.

I am reading The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real, Anarchist Whore. I am reading Austerlitz. I am reading Girlbomb. I am reading The Importance of Being Iceland. I am reading every website about phone communication in Europe. I am reading through my months-and-months backstock of unread New Yorkers. I am staring out my window contemplating another walk soon. I am listening to dippy French songs about Corrugation (color me dubious, but that's what GoogleTranslate tells me) and slick Busta Rhymes songs about, well, Busta Rhymes. I am putting together my address book and running back and forth from the attic, beginning the pack and rearrange process. I am thinking about this week last year, when the sky was this same color, the leaves were this same color, and Whitney and I went to Coney Island and Brighton Beach and sat by the sea in bliss, and she was able to forget about school for a minute, and I was able to forget about the way my sense of self had again evaporated on the 6 platform the day before as I was heading Uptown:


This is a good day, month, year. It is good even in the bad, and we would all do well to remember that even the bad is good in retrospect, to learn from.

Two nights ago I had an epic dream of very specific location. The top floor of a breezy, mazed Victorian house, with wood-paneled walls and suspiciously shaped rooms, a dusty burgandy crushed velvet carpet. Dusty wicker furniture, dark green candles stacked on end tables with brass drawer-handles, two or three to a corner. Flames rising and sputtering. Mobiles made of silver fish and black scarves. The sea below us, directly out the windows, floor to ceiling screen filled with holes, easily bent and cut. A long, narrow bathroom two feet wide with one sink and a long, gold-plated mirror above it. Three porcelain toilets in a row on a dais, each with a mosaic seat. I lived in this house with a number of my friends, and there were also ghosts in certain corners of it. Sometimes the ghosts would blow out all the candles but one, congregate in the living room over our heads. In the dream, I felt the chilled concrete brick forming over my chest, the feeling of a spirit entering your space, and we all gripped hands in the living room and stared up. The mobiles began to swirl and the scarves to whip to and fro, but there was no wind that we could feel. The ghosts began to wail. They sounded an awful lot like the tornado sirens in St. Paul, the first Wednesday of every month at 1. We looked up at them and began to say, together but out of sync, Please stop, please stop, please stop, please stop, and eventually they did. We left the house via a dark staircase to a rickety dock to a wooden ship with a giant underbelly. It was lit with the same green candles. Two or three of us dove out through a trap-door in the bottom of the ship and found that though we couldn't breathe underwater, we weren't uncomfortable. The ship was going back to its berth at the house and we dove under and around it in the turquoise water, like dolphins, keeping its pace. As we returned, a friend grabbed my hand and we dove to the left, and I felt a rushing underneath us, a great bulk rushing underneath us. It was a great white whale. Stick your hand under its tail, he said.