cocoon

I feel like I should be molting. I should be a caterpillar, and make myself a cocoon to crawl into, and when I come out, I’ll be a butterfly and know my next place. Looking for a job is getting discouraging, because I don’t even find jobs for which I’m interested in applying. There is a void of interesting jobs. The potential job of two weeks ago is no more – it seems to have disappeared into the ether, maybe the same void that swallowed all the other interesting jobs. I send a follow-up email or two a day, but nothing new appears.

Michigan is gloriously beautiful right now. The new leaves are coming into their rich summer green and rustling in the breeze in the woods behind my parents’ house. I resent the water wasted on the perfect lawns, but the grass glows with a surreal new shade of green-gold as the sun sets. The sky is a perfect blue dome, fading around the edges where it is contaminated by the earth’s touch. I can’t bring myself to spend even an hour of the evenings in the basement to unpack one of the boxes I brought from New York.

Time feels suspended.

The problem with suspending time is that you never know where time will be when the suspension stops. If I’m not careful, months may pass this way, my brother and dad working on the transmission of R’s new/old car in the driveway, my mom weeding the tiny square of a garden, and me reading a book on the front porch before I go for a jog.

Tonight I was jogging steadily (slowly) along, almost to the end, when I heard a repeated buzzing around my head. I am normally the calmest of persons around bees. I am not allergic, although no one likes to get stung even if all the injury they incur is a little itchy red dot on their arm. I read when I was young that bees and wasps only sting when they feel threatened, so as far back as my fourth grade year in a little schoolhouse in Liberia, I turned into a statue when a wasp approached. I remember sitting on the railing of the little house at lunch time, probably eating milk powder plain, because I went through an odd eating-milk-powder-plain stage that year, watching a wasp walk up and down my arm while everyone screamed and I said, “They don’t sting if you don’t move, I read.” After a few long minutes, the wasp flew away and my fun fact was vindicated. Today, however, I started jumping and hopping and flailing. I don’t know why. I think it was worry that it was my sweat that had attracted the bumblebee and I would never avoid getting stung. It followed me for three or four flailings and runnings. I flailed and flailed again, took my hair out of the ponytail and flailed it. And got followed. And even after it stopped following, sans a sting, I still heard it everywhere, in a faraway lawn mower, a car on the distant road, everything. I still thought it was following me.

You should know that after three years of law school, it is nearly impossible to type the word “statue.” Your fingers automatically make it “statute.”