Yesterday was the strangest day: after meeting M at FT I walked home in the wind and rain, exhausted. Past the falafel place, past the rattling and clanking green line, past the displays of condos on sale in the windows of the real estate office on the corner of - street. It rained so hard yesterday, the wind gusted and blew wet soggy leaves around in the street; bright red and yellow against the pavement. When I got home, it was eerily still and dark inside my place, the white blinds drawn against silvery gray rain, drops of water blurring my windows. My brother called as soon as I got home. He had his appendix taken out on Friday - he drove himself to the hospital in the middle of the night. I found this out when I got a hushed and harried call from my mother at work on Friday. Mom was taking care of my niece while my sister-in-law was in the hospital with my brother. I tried calling his hospital room and got my sister-in-law on the phone - she said my brother was asleep and would call me later. Hence, the phone call on Saturday morning while he was on his way home from the hospital. "Dude, why are you calling me? Get home and get some rest! I wish I wasn't so far away so I could help" I said.
"Aww, I'm okay." And, thankfully, he was. He went to get a hair cut later in the day! I would have been collapsed in bed after something like that but he and I are cut from completely different cloth: I'm dreamy and tend to indolence when not trying to be a 'good Indian girl' (and trust me, whatever your age, you can always strive to be a 'good Indian girl', it's the culture), and he's restless as hell. So, in the unnatural-natural order of things, he got a hair cut after a night in the hospital and I spent the afternoon reading a little, resting from the cold and rain, nursing a case of the sniffles and a sore throat. Reading Villette. What a funny Gothic book to be reading on a funny Gothic day: Charlotte Bronte's Villette:
I dearly liked to think my own thoughts; I had great pleasure in reading a few books, but not many: preferring always those in whose style or sentiment the writer's individual nature was plainly stamped; flagging inevitably over characterless books, however clever and meritorious: perceiving well that, as far as my own mind was concerned, God had limited its powers and its actions - thankful, I trust, for the gift bestowed, but unambitious of higher endowments, not restlessly eager after higher culture.
It's a book, at least partly, about negation and deprivation and fear of Hope, fear of dreams that fail to materialize. It's a book about survival, I think, but then I haven't entirely finished it.
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