Turning Feral, Turning Tender

One of my closest friends, a friend whose twisted-hearted ache I recognized almost immediately upon first meeting him seasons ago, is having his birthday today. I wrote an immense message/love letter to an angel, earth-bound, and as I wrote: "wound-gnawed but never corroded." He's one of the few people in life I find myself praying for, wishes both named and unnamed, gardens of luck I hope he finds helpful, if not at least a little pleasant. 

I've been trying to commute back and forth from Klaten to home by train for the first time this weekend, and tomorrow morning on Monday I'll be going back for good for another week before settling home again. Also, for the first time in a while at work, I've been able to be at peace, feeling useful and used up in a good way, feeling I've done what little portion of contribution my little body and brain can manage to do. I'm learning to love encountering people. I'm learning to love how I operate/move/metabolize these experiences, feelings, and moods.

I've been reading books, too, one at a time. I'm a slow-eater, slow-digester, but still easily starved and in constant need of satiation. Right now I'm reading salt slow by Julia Armfield, whose other, more recent work Our Wives Under The Sea I happened to find and devour first, and loved, and yearned more of, so here I am with its sibling. It's playful, throbbing with rage, full of femininity/girlhood/womanhood, bloodful of metamorphosis of being/coming-of-age. Some of the things I've saved up from it:

I've grown to appreciate meals, especially home-cooked, home-eaten ones. I've also grown to love the liquids/beverages I drink associated with home, family, sisters. I feel like I'm not drinking enough water lately, instead filling myself with Milo chocolate as often as I can, organs shrinked from homesickness. 

I have a presentation to edit/prepare/rehearse/mostly overthink, family members to hug, a stomachache to tend (again, homesickness is imprinted in me, all over), but overall just an ordinary night before another ordinary week will unfold. I'll be home again in a week. I'll hold on to my shrinkage, brown with chocolate, motion-sick from all the train-riding. I'll be back soon.