your majesty’s a pretty nice girl
I have about thirty minutes for lunch to write something about the day, and my progress as a writer. It’s a Monday, the first official Monday of February, and the sun is warming the city. I have the window open and the blinds up. I’m listening to Abbey Road. It’s really lifting my spirits. Because it hasn’t been a particularly easy day.
The only thing that really put me in a good mood today was reading the short story ‘landscape with flat iron’ from the short story collection After the Quake. Sadness permeates this story, and yet somehow I felt so incredibly relieved of my own sadness when I completed it: that moment when Junko buries her face in Miyake’s leather jacket and then falls asleep just before the beach bonfire begins to extinguish. I don’t understand exactly why this story has put me in a place where I feel fit to continue. But it has. And that is the power of literature.
The song “You Never Give Me Your Money” is playing out of the stereo. And the music seems very appropriate for this moment. Suddenly I can write again. I feel motivated to face the future.
Last night I dreamt about a dark chasm. Not only that, but a great conflict, and the chasm itself was the climax of that conflict. It was a conflict among miners, or some other kind of people who worked the land. Rural people of some kind. I couldn’t really say, exactly.
They wore lumberjack clothes and swung axes as weapons at each other. I don’t know how else to describe it. But they held strange fortified positions along this chasm. And every time they swung, they drew blood. But they also threatened a great fall, sending their opponents tumbling down into darkness, pain and eternality, so that it wasn’t the cuts from the axes entirely that perpetuated violence.
And then I woke up in the middle of the night, and I tried holding onto this thought, but all I could really hold onto was the John Lennon song, “Oh Yoko!,” and how he sang, “my love will turn you on,” and how that song perhaps itself was ghostly, haunted, echoing from a lonely and far away place.
Later on this morning, I was happy, I was satisfied being away from the dark corridors of my mind, of the dark corridors of my sleep, but this strange feeling of being haunted didn’t leave me all day long until I was able to finish “landscape with flatiron.” And with these final words the song “Your Majesty,” the final song of Abbey Road finishes, and the needle of the record player returns to its place automatically, with a click.
