BODIES OF DUST & STONE

Tuscaloosa's overtaken by mist and I'm planning out an independent study in paleontology. Come next semester, I'll be sending all my free time in the Museum of Natural History and the paleolab. I met with the director this morning and spent an hour barely breathing, examining the bones of ancient whales, prehistoric birds, mythic creatures and monsters of the deep. As it were, fossils really upset my allergies. What inhalations, exhalations, dust-of-lost-time... I just kept thinking: Dinosaurs are tickling the inside of my nose! I'm breathing prehistoria!

David Howard, long-lost Midland ghost and UnFather, has found out about everything. He wants to get in touch with me. What do I say to the man I've wondered after for so many years? Especially since he didn't even know that I thought he was my father? Sorry for the misunderstanding, I hear my stranger's voice say, I wrote a poem about you once and read it before a crowded lecture hall. How foolish.

On a lighter note: I am cat-sitting for my professor while she is in Arizona. The cat's name is Swordfish. I read Oscar Wilde to her. I am always amazed at domesticated animals. Creatures that might have hunted game in a past life now chase red ribbon.

Of course the first thing I did upon entering the director's office was knock over a fossil with my purse. I felt like my life was ending for a brief second. It was a little crab encased in stone. He said, "Don't worry. You'd be hardpressed to break that guy." I thought about making a Bringing Up Baby joke, but decided it unwise. I swear to god I am the clumsiest person in existence. I'm in my head so much I forget I even have a body.

Cait, Sydney, and I made a tent in the living room. We strung bedsheets from a chandelier using simple red string. Scarves and newspaper birds. Slept beneath a sheet of pink and black flowers, someone else's sewing.

I feel less myself than ever.

Oscar Wilde sez: The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

While peering into boxes of basilosaurus vertebra, I pressed my hand to my shirt and felt my own bones just beneath. Skeletons make for such strange architecture. Foreanimals broken up like puzzle pieces, labeled and pinned and inventoried. I love the neatness of it all, lost bodies meticulously dusted. Bones tell you what you are. Bones are noble things. There is something of time in them.