Chapter XXXV, where Adele talks about her double's thoughts

She suddenly realized she can't make decisions. She always thought she knew. Kind of like smiley happy people living in their tribes a long time ago, with their questions about life, nature, things, especially the things that had to do with nature and how natural things happen. And finding incredible answers for everything.

1. what is the best ax to kill animals we can eat? - the sharpest one, I'd say
2. if I use this thing here, will it be better than eating with my mouth? - yeah!, and let's call it 'spoon'
3. why the hell water falls from above? - it must be the doing of the god of rain, dude. Let's pray so more rain will come.

Anyway. She really has had to make some pretty tough decisions in her life. There was this drunk woman, a friend's neighbor he had never talked before with, except for the casual 'good morning' in the elevator. She ended up coming to this party we (double was there, I was there, in disguise) were having over my double's friend's. Not really a party and not really a friend. It was just a group of people discussing poetry and it was absolutely boring -and I and my double like poetry, mind you- and he was not just a friend at the time. The woman comes and tells her story: [insert the story you want, as long as it includes the words divorced, middle-aged, lonely and the fact that the only thing she *had* to do was pick up her kids at school and take them to other places, or back home]. She also took drama classes, so she could pretend to be someone else. Her youngest son, by the way, was sleeping back in her apartment (and everybody at the party and my double worried about him having been left alone). We could totally visualize a big L on the woman's forehead. Like this:

(except I didn't really imagine an L that looked like some weird leopard). If we wanted to imagine an even bigger L, all we had to do was try to imagine her naked, all the lose skin, saggy breasts, etc. All these things we shallow women care about. My double made a decision right there that she didn't want to become that woman. Ever. So she decided she didn't want to be a lawyer anymore. And I lived happily ever after. The end. Are you following the story so far?

Now she faces other difficult questions and of course she's being forced to make up her mind. You can see yourself happy in the future. Or at least the chance of being happier. But that means you have to leave your somewhat stable life behind. You:

( ) decide to go on and take the next step towards happiness;

( ) get paralyzed by fear and don't give it a shot, and you can see yourself like that character in some Clint Eastwood's movie, the one where she loves this guy but decides not to run away with him and gets stuck in her life; and when she finally decides to pursue happiness, the guy is dead, it's too late.

At some point this morning, she decided to tick the second option. She went out for cigarettes, crying and thinking and crying and thinking and feeling absolutely sad. And I could do nothing, of course. There was absolutely nothing I could do to help her. I sometimes whisper things in her head, but does she listen to me? Rarely.

After some minutes (more like hours) she came to the conclusion that she couldn't make the same kind of decisions the L-woman would make. And she changed her mind. And now she's scared.

Chapter XXXIV, where Adele thinks about love

I read something the other day. It was some girl's post about love. I think she asked what it was and I just couldn't stop thinking about it because no one dared to answer the question. So I came up with a list of possible definitions.

1. Love is


a cute little dog.
A cute little puppy that lies down on your lap and gets absolutely happy when you get home, even if you were out for lke, 5 minutes, to take out the garbage. That bring his toys to you when you cry and that licks all your face because tears are salty. That plays with a little sock just like a Mutts character. (oh, my little pink sock!). That's love.

2. Love is Paul Auster. Being totally scared sometimes, because things are pretty scary and not like, Booo!, I'm a monster that got out of your closet or hides under your bed. Not a cute fluffly blue little monster or a green one-eyed one. Worse than that. Worse than, say, having sex with a priest and becoming a headless mule. Sometimes life is just a bunch of very scary shit, if you ask me, and you decide you're going to try stuff and jump off a cliff and tadah, love saves you at the last minute. That's beautiful. Too beautiful.

3. Love is giving it another try. Because you can get fucked over by what happens in your life -big time. And then you think 'what the fuck? Why the fuck doesn't anything work out for me?'. Then you spend time mournig, hurting, and thinking 'life is so not fucking fair!', and after that you think 'okay, everything is okay now, or most of it'. Kind of like when you get hurt and have ice cream. Your favorite flavor.

4. Love for a woman or a man, I don't know about that. I think it's a mixture of please come sleep next to me + I love how you smell + take off your clothes right now! + trust (we trust that we won't get disappointed, we do get disappointed, we trust we will get over it somehow) + a lot more. We want so many things from whom we love, we demand so much, and we always want so much more. And if the person we love loves us back, we get it. Because love is giving yourself. I think that is it. Love is wishing for more, hoping; it is wanting more and more. But not always.

What love is

(...), it is impossible for me to look back on those days without feeling a surge of nostalgia for my friends. In some sense, it alters the reality of what I experienced. I had jumped off the edge of a cliff, and then, just as I was about to hit bottom, an extraordinary event took place: I learned that there were people who loved me. To be loved like that makes all the difference. It does not lessen the terror of the fall, but it gives a new perspective on what that terror means. I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That somehting is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, the one thing powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.

Paul Auster, Moon Palace, Faber and Faber, p. 49

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Reading

Chapter XXIII, where Adele confesses

I'm a cheater, I'm not proud to admit. And I'm not referring to this one time I decided to have something with a friend while I was seeing another guy. Okay, I'm being a bit too nice to myself here. I was not just seeing this other guy. We had been in a relationship - that was on and off - for a few years. I knew how my children with him would look like when (I felt then it was a matter of when and not if we had kids). They'd have big curious eyes and long eyelashes and I would look into them for a long time in awe. They would have pretty small hands. They would ask questions about almost everything there is in a child's world and eventually they would start asking questions about things they didn't understand completely. They'd start asking about the rain and why there are clouds and what is wind and one day they would ask about more abstract things, like what is heaven or hell, what's right or wrong, why is it that the little fish in the tank had to die and where they went after I flushed them down the toilet and what's death after all; and then they'd finally ask about god. It was when I realized that they would never be born. I realized I would tell them there's a big thick book full of stories and tales and that they could choose to believe whether they were true or not. Their father would say it was a big book with great stories about the one who created them and would take them to church. There were other things, of course, but I don't think they were worth mentioning. In my defense, I have to say that, when I slept with this friend of mine, my boyfriend and I were really being weird and it was just what it took for us to finally break up and face the fact that we would never be 'on' again. Just 'off'. I never told him anything.

Anyway. I was saying I'm a cheater. And having cheated on a boyfriend a long time ago is not what makes me a cheater. I know how to read tarot cards. Sometimes my friends come over and I give them readings. Tarot reading is not about guessing anything, it's not about being psychic. It's more like reading the horoscopes. You choose some cards, I read their symbols and tell you about your past, present and future, with more or less details. And it's up to you to make the connections. Generally people make good connections and everything makes sense. We're not really able to see the future. We see the future, but we can always change it and if we do something about it. And well, I cheat when I give myself readings. I choose 3 cards. Then I shuffle the cards again. And again. Till I get whatever it is that I want from my future. I guess it makes sense. I like to be in control of things, to know what's going to happen and I like to think that I am responsible for whatever happens to me in the future. So I literally take it in my hands. One, two or 3 cards. As many as I think necessary for me to be happy.

Chapter XXXII, where Adele tells about a night when she needed a hot water bottle

I hate cramps. I really felt like I needed a hot water bottle but instead I told Noelle to come sit next to me to ease my pain. I was reading this book by Paul Auster, where the character is trying to write about a man who goes out to run some errand and almost gets hit by something that falls from a building. He escapes death and thinks it's some kind of sign telling him to walk away from his life and to forget everything about his past and start fresh. Some weird train of thought led me to thinking about *him*, like how it would be if I simply let go of all this. I don't think there would be much to actually be forgotten. There aren't all these memories that would come back to my mind over an over and make me dwell in the past. The memories we share are made of words typed and organized in an e-mail account. Of course there are some pictures, but mostly all we have is just words. We have the memories from one week spent together, memories of things we've actually done together that sort of gets lost in the middle of all these months of words and images. I think there wouldn't be much in the past to forget if we never talked again but there would be the possibility of creating things to be remembered or forgotten like that in the future that then would never have a chance to exist. This is not supposed to mean anything. These are just thoughts. My last cigarettes still taste awful. I don't think I'll finish this pack till tomorrow.

In a way, it's like a book you really like reading and want to get to the end but at the same time you don't want to finish it because you like it so much; so you don't know whether you should read it fast or slow down so the end is a bit further in time. What I meant was the memories are words and if we had to look back, there would be few things to miss, I mean 'real life' things. Like, I don't know, the small things that we always remember about people we miss. The face that he makes when he listens to this or that song, or how he looks in the morning, or how he showers and doesn't have an order to do stuff in the shower, or how he likes spicy food or how he. I don't know.

Chapter XXXI, where Adele (...)

I can't sleep. It's not that late but it's all so quiet. I can't play the piano so I won't get neighbors complaining about the noise. I deleted two chapters of this blog. It felt nice. It felt weird. They were stupid entries that I just wrote so I would write something, but it still was really strange to have the power of making something disappear, something that supposedly was part of my life, as stupid and pointless as it was (and trust me, it was - to the point that you don't even remember what it was all about and will only notice there's something different because there are two chapters missing). As much as those two entries were so absolutely ridiculous - they were really an embarrassment more than proper entries, I didn't like to come and delete them just like this. It's not how it's supposed to happen. We can't just erase things. It's quiet, there's a breeze. I'm sick. I put on a sweater and it makes me hot, I take it off and I shiver. I type and cough. I try to smoke but the cigarettes taste awful. I think it's a good time to quit. I've put out half a dozen cigarettes that I only half smoked. We can't just erase things. And forget. It's a quiet evening and there's this smell on the air that reminds me of nights I had quite a while ago. When I couldn't sleep and couldn't find anything else to do but think and cry and feel miserable. They were truly sad. I was truly sad. I wanted then to forget them and let them just vanish and not remember anymore so they wouldn't hurt so much. I'm glad I didn't and they existed. I'm really, really glad. So I can look back and think, 'oh well, I think I did just fine. Look at me now. I smile. I put my headphones on, listen to a song I don't know the lyrics to and smile again. I'm okay. Actually, I think I'm way better than just okay. I'm like, you know, happy.'

Chapter XXX - where you'll find out that Adele is nerdy

42, according to google and according to Douglas Adam's book (and this is when you stop and think, "Yep, nerdy indeed"), is the answer to life, the universe and everything. I know, I know, it's not a simple answer, but hey!, at least it's something. An answer, it's nice to have answers. I like answers. No, I don't like answers, I love answers. I like making plans and I like to have a plan A, and then a plan B and then a plan C, all the way to Z. I don't like to take risks. I like my life how it is and the things I'm sure of. I like how I know I'll wake up and I'll have coffee and I'll meet the same people and how Noelle will be here and will sniff my face in the morning asking me to feed her. I like how I know where my books are on the shelves and where to find the excerpts I like the most because I've underlined them and have written a little note on the subject. Like: 'love', 'fear', or '!'. Or 'for a rainy afternoon', 'wake up, Adele', 'remember to have a tissue at reach on when you read this again'. I like to know I can reach things. Or that I can reach someone. Not like in some message in machine - 'you've reached me at'- but like in being in bed and reaching out my arm and making sure there's somebody else there and realizing it feels really good that he is there and going back to sleep. After saying goodnight, I always tell him I'll meet him in Buthan in 15 minutes. So, yes, sometimes taking risks and not planning the next step is necessary, because Buthan is far, far away.