CYBER DIARY is a bi-weekly publication of digital diary entries.
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This week’s Cyber Diary is a short story that I wrote in one sitting after a dream that left me both sad and filled with more clarity.
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In a dream Vanda dreamt of a marvelous construction.
Her husband—Luce—was renovating the bathroom of their apartment which was new to them but not new to existence. The apartment had stood already for centuries. It was a wonderful apartment, with an invisible piano in the living room and joyful, liquid air. They had become aware of the place before they moved in; both of them, simultaneously, received vague and powerful sensations that pushed them to pack up in the middle of the night and arrive there.
Here, they would live safe as one. This apartment, in particular, had survived freezing rain, wild purple tempests, and a hot endless drought that had once plunged the whole world of the street into a useless spell of insomnia. It had survived harsh conversation and bad news. It had survived the death of a reverie and the decay of a chemical romance. It had even survived the one summer that the bleach-white magnolias had grown as tall as trees and as strong as iron, and in which every inhabitant of the street was forced inside their homes where they remained for nine eternal months, enriching themselves in solitude.
Vanda was unsure if she could speak of time in such simple terms here, “centuries,” “months,” “weeks,” “days,” because it was a dream and in dreams time was always revealing its eternal, immutable face to her and making a fool of her other life, the one broken up into digestible stages, the one in which today was Tuesday and it was noon and she had lived twenty-seven years in a straight orderly line and had been married to Luce for two. In the dream, Vanda and Luce arrived from nowhere but were glowing with the mutual sense of having been everywhere together and still having everywhere to go.
Now they lived in this apartment on the Spanish-looking street where the tall, yellow apartment buildings repeated all the way down until the spot where the street disappeared out of view off the whimsical edge of the dream.
Bursts of plants and flowers hung off of the terraces.
Laundry air-dried, citrus and domestic. Fruits on trees, succulent.
The clean spring air vibrated with serenity and pungent perfume. Vanda, in their modest and kind kitchen, knew that she was loved. As soon as she appeared to herself, became aware of herself in the dream, she knew of her sagging breasts and thinning black hair, her teeth that were slightly dull and ugly from smoking, her peeling nail varnish, her irredeemably imperfect face, but she knew another simple and more buoyant truth: I am loved.
Luce was somewhere else in the apartment, thinking about her. Not in a clear conscious way. His thorough subterranean knowledge of her presence in their apartment, and in the web of his life, orchestrated his movements and gullied inside of him a paradisal place as strong and radiant as Italian opera.
It was a strenuous, life-draining project that he undertook privately, but not secretly—only personally, with religious devotion, pursuing nothing but the final transmission of her pleasure to his form: he patiently anticipated the joy that he trusted would come to grip Vanda’s face in that inevitable moment, after many long days or years or centuries, that he opened the now-shut bathroom door to her and said, “Look, my love. For you.” And she would ask how much it cost, but he would not know. He paid the merchant with love, which even when spent was never lost. And Vanda would see the green-blue tile of the walls and floors and think of hot swampy jungles in Malaysia, the mist reminiscent of Greek bathhouses, exotic waterfalls, she would die of joy at the regal lion-foot tub, her body would sing romance, romance, romance. They’d fill it with soap bubbles and talks of childhood and live pink flamingos that Luce had imported through a connection in Tanzania, and the dense spider plants hanging from the ceiling would throw diamonds of shadows all over the place, history and present all melting into one, the marble countertops white and pure and glittering like sex in the impossible almost fantastical largeness of the bathroom which had once been four walls and a bathtub and a toilet.
Luce was accumulating the repetitions of her smile in the worn beaded satchel of his soul as if they were expensive silver coins that he could use to get somewhere. For everyone else in the world, Vanda’s smiles were as idiotic and clueless as the cherubs. They betrayed her seemingly solitary nature, revealing a deep eagerness to please them at her own expense. For Luce, Vanda’s pleasure was both more opulent and necessary than money. If she smiled too often with strangers when she did not feel like it, it was only because both her mother and her father had been Pisces. This is all to say—Her satisfaction was the most real thing.
He did not submit to her directly, nor did he cower away from her more tempestuous moods. He existed within himself below and through his love for her. And Luce also knew he was loved. He knew very well his own tendency towards coldness, bad words spoken to her in the mirror would keep him up at night. He cried her tears. In the mirror he saw his balding head and he admitted to his weakness with worldly convictions, but he knew another, more salvific truth: To make the best decisions for himself, all he had to do was feel into her stream of life and get the answer. To find meaning in his work, he had to work for her. He knew that he was loved. And Vanda asked for none of it. He only had to know her, and the inspiration to act in this way just flew into his head like mystical apparitions. He lived in her direction. He chose only once. The rest was a river of yes. Even his nos were yeses to other, stronger things.
Where was she now? Somewhere in the apartment, thinking of him.
She ran her hand across the spine of a thick book and she tried to read the title but she couldn’t make it out. She could never read with perfect clarity in dreams.
Their bookshelf was grand, made of dark wooden shelves that spanned the entire side wall of the living room, almost exactly the same as their living room in the waking world but the air was more liquid and warm here.
Although Vanda couldn’t read the titles, she knew that their collection was ancient, lovely, and cosmopolitan. History, literature, classical art, philosophy, sciences of antiquity. Books on the Greek island of Samos, Jungian psychology, ancient astrology and divination, the Yavanajataka and the Kama Sutra, tragic Russian romances and contemporary erotica. And she knew as she wandered around the room that a lot of love had been made in here: it clung, still, on the air. The wooden floorboards gleamed with it. Love not only in the carnal sense but in all the senses beyond that, too. Vanda knew that she and Luce made love with their thoughts here. Their essences knew each other well. They discussed the novels they had read that week or month, they discussed the weather and how it affected their moods. On rainy days, Luce was particularly somber, but those days always gave Vanda a delicious sense of relief.
They made love in the form of nocturnal conversations, they traveled together in the secret sticky sweetness of mind, and the baby born out of these long nights was a closeness, an impossible and irreplaceable closeness that became a fixture of their life together in that Spanish town apartment.
Even as they spent hours in different rooms, even on days where they had no words, where anger created blocks between their bodies, where their brains were exhausted, where their libidos were yawning and purring with laziness, their closeness grew bigger and more solid, fumbling around in the kitchen cupboard, messing around in the drawer of Vanda’s pearly ornate vanity. It drew on their wall. It ate their apple butter. It jumped on their four-poster bed and filled their home with a magical euphony, a blessed and transcendent heart-music.
Other conversations between them sometimes went like this.
“What are you thinking?” One would say.
“That the mind is sometimes traffic and sometimes countryside.”
“Where are you now?”
“I followed my noise into the city. I found it all to be chaos. I didn’t build the structures. I’m in a back alley now where it’s dark and peaceful. I don’t resonate with anything other than this quiet corner.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
He kept the image of her smiling face in his mind when he was tired, thirsty, hungry. Her culpability, her tendency to assume herself wrong—it moved him.
He did not tell her this, but she could feel this, she could feel his knowing her and it oriented her. His senses poured onto her. They searched for the proof of her body in the apartment. She felt herself in his thoughts just as he felt himself in hers. In the dwindling hours of the afternoon, Vanda would sit on the terrace that hung off of their kitchen with the French doors wide open. She would sit in her hanging garden of dahlias and tulips and while she read fiction about widows to sharpen her Italian, she was aware of his energy as if it were a physical third thing.
Whenever he had the brief chance to be anywhere, he would be with her.
If he was not with her, he was for her. What he did autonomously also enriched her because he had long made her a part of himself. The same was true of her behalf. She took remote and silent trips into her own voracious insides to find more material with which to inspire him. She did not know she was doing this but this is what she did. They went without sex for a few nights and mornings but it was without failure. Resentment never appeared.
Vanda knew that he was doing hard, mysterious things and in the dream, she prepared his lunches, a variety of tea sandwiches and fresh black espresso, salmon and cucumber with whipped dill butter, Genoa salami and green olives, thick sliced ham and English mustard.
Over lunch, they would sit and talk about everything like two baby twins, and there was no such thing as a stupid question. If a dark cloud so much as rolled over Vanda’s face, Luce was interested in knowing how it got there. He did not share Vanda’s tendency for arbitrary shifts of mood but they did not anger or frighten him. In many ways she was grander and more alive than he was, and in many ways he was stronger than she.
He was not upset by this condition: he committed to giving her the strength to do. She, by miraculous occurrence, gave him the strength to be.
That was the thing about dream-Luce: he knew his wife.
He quietly admired her lust for simple, beautiful objects and eloquent whispered phrases, he recognized the depth within her simplicity and the profundity of her silences. He knew how far she could travel without leaving her chair. At times he wanted to go with her but it also gave him great satisfaction to take care of things in the realm where they were taking place.
When, in the middle of a dinner party conversation, Vanda would lose the attention of their guests’ with her disorganized and diffused way of speaking, with speech that doubted itself, and with stories that never arrived to their punchline, Luce recognized that if Vanda was at times uneloquent and erratic, it was only because she had just arrived on the scene.
While her body was indeed seated there on the black wood of the kitchen chair, and while her knife was making a glittering slice through the garlic lemon and rosemary chicken roast, and while her laughs escaped her at socially acceptable intervals, she had only just been floating in the secret foamy depths of the group’s energetic realities. Hiding out in those mystical layers, Vanda understood without being told that Concetta was suffering a heartbreak of betrayal, that Gushvin had left Concetta for a fox-like secretary named Muna after committing himself to a mistake born out of passion, that Armond had abandoned his heroic hopes of youth exactly thirteen hours ago while watching cable news, and that Dione was wondering if it would cause suspicion to refill her glass of Bordeaux for the fourth time in under thirty minutes.
Luce would make a point to pick up the words that Vanda clumsily dropped and translate her sentiments to the group in more human phrases, even if he did not really trust them to understand where Vanda had been speaking from.
Later or yesterday or tomorrow or years before or maybe in the moment right after, he would kiss on Vanda’s pineal gland and say, “Beautiful mind, my love,” and he really meant it. And closeness, their shared effort, would laugh somewhere in the apartment but only they, Vanda and Luce, would hear that noise.
In the end, that is why he supported like a solid stone all of her passing fascinations. Vanda was known to be impulsive when it came to what could catch her interest. She would often spend hours scouring for the perfect object, its perfection being measured by its capacity to communicate something about herself that she did not know how to externalize in words or in actions.
Luce noticed the invisible string that connected the new Spanish coffee set, the rare imported Guatemalan espresso beans, the vintage glass chessboard, the Arabic body oils and French perfumes, the kohl from Egypt that darkened her brilliant eyes, paints and easel boards and pastels, the cotton pajama sets and lingerie and satin robes that came from Rue Jeanne-Pierre, the sweet pistachio and rum pastries that arrived wrapped in brown paper and red ribbon every Sunday morning from beyond the ending of the dream, the stack of expensive leather bound journals in red, green, black, brown that were full of unintellectual pages like: To do – wash laundry — name feelings — bake bread — watch sky. All of these things she felt drawn to possessing not only because she was interesting, but because she was deeply afraid not to be so.
And Luce felt an intense, nauseous compassion for his wife who looked for definition of herself in a whimsical attachment to her objects which were symbols of meaning that meant everything to her, and everything to Luce, who understood her, but to everyone else seemed frivolous, pretentious, distractive…
He had been distant while busy with this renovation project.
Without realizing, he compensated by hugging her extra tight, throwing her on the bed in a fit of ancient laughter, giving her his waterfall. He felt guilty. Vanda did not think at all that Luce was required to compensate for this particular distance. She had sensed their closeness playing in the corridors and she had never once felt lonely. This was the dream. While it could have been a thousand years or only one radiant moment, Luce was leading Vanda towards the finished bathroom for the magical reveal when Vanda, in her other world, awoke in her bedroom alone.
Still pregnant with the amorous closeness of the dream and flying high within herself from so many accumulated instances of having been thought about, her mind went instantly to Luce. She was burning with a girlish desire to kiss him, touch him, talk with him for hours. She looked to his side of the bed. Empty. The clock read 1:29pm. It was lunch time. Vanda had been so tired one hour ago. Luce had left the house at some point and Vanda suddenly understood from the quiet emptiness in her heart that he had not kissed her forehead, or watched lovingly her sleeping form, before leaving.
When he arrived home, exactly three hours later, she learned that he had been out at the coffee bar with his friend Oscar. Her mind filled itself with thoughts of coffee and powdered sweet things. His mind wasn’t clear to her. His eyes were busy, his mind was far away traversing back-roads within himself that she did not know. “Why didn’t you invite me?” You were sleeping. “I…miss you.” I’ve been gone only a few hours. What do you mean? She shook her head, and then, unsure of really how to communicate her own sudden knowledge of what love meant to her, said, “I had a dream. You were in it. You were renovating the bathroom for me.” Luce made a face and sucked his teeth, already preparing for departure into another room, another world, where he had things to do, people to call, tomorrows to prepare for. “I do not want to go into that head of yours,” he said, and then he was gone, the air in the room was clear and forever and terrifying. There was no closeness making music in his absence.
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LOVELIST
Occhi by Zucchero. This wonderful song I listened to a million times while helping my boyfriend prepare a carbonara in the kitchen. Setting the table, stopping here and there to dance.
I Know You by Faye Webster. I love this song because it feels like being a teenager in the sense that the conveyance of emotion is simple and clear and vivid. But it is wiser in its sadness and it is strong and it feels like me.
I woke up at 7:30am the other day — pretty rare. We were driving on M’s bike through a neighboring town and witnessed nature in motion. Divine.
Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path by James Hollis. I’m not finished this book yet, I’m about 3/4 of the way through, but it already seems like the kind of book I’ll have to pick up many times throughout my life.
Volver directed by Pedro Almodóvar. I watched for Penelope Cruz, but my heart died for this film. I love love loved it. And the architecture, my god, so many subtle suggestions…I’ll talk more about that another time.
Made my heart ache, so gorgeous! ❤️🩹 I love how you capture intimacy
This was absolutely beautiful and so so rich!!