On sitting in a marigold field and the consequences thereof.
A journal entry from June that somehow found itself in October
I’d like to recount a brief visit I made in the winter to an old friend and her castle.
Arms adorned with nothing but a partly-stale, partly-eaten loaf of bread and my plain indiscretion, I stood beneath a gargoyle’s head and imagined myself a knight-errant. I’m sure he imagined it too, my off-with-your-head dress collar pointing a finger beneath my chin and forcing my head upright–the lace of my necktie billowing and churning in the evening wind like a field of fought windmills. I think I buried the crowns of my teeth there on that doorstep, since I don’t know how to satiate myself with the matter-of-fact. I believe that if I offer myself, strong-willed enough, I will be taken up and swallowed whole. I’ve always been like that, and I think I always will be.
My confidante read my future in the dining hall with the same teacup I drank out of when we were fifteen and farcical. She told me I’d draw an army of cards from any given deck, and end up with none in my hand at all if I gazed at them for too long. A sickly sentiment to say that I will hold the sun in my hands and let it become dormant, or that I will sit in a field of marigolds and leave with dirt on my palms. That I will have the dreamer’s dream and the thinker’s thought, and walk away sun-sick, with my head full of flowers instead.
A perversely observant prospect–for I haven’t yet had it in myself to count the uncountable projects stacked tall upon my writing desk, or finish any journal entry with conclusive sensibility.
I called my mother at three the same morning and told her I’d been sitting in a marigold field for nineteen years. She asked me if I was going mad, if I felt quite well. If I had been reading those books again–the ones that make me think like a fool and speak in rhymes–or think in rhymes and speak like a fool, if I’m writing to take myself for what I am. I didn’t know how to tell her that in the passing breath of night and day I earnestly believe that I will find myself awake in dreams, that if I repeat something three times under the sun, with my fingers crossed behind my back, I will find myself cut adrift upon the frozen riverbank, a Lord beneath an oak tree, three hundred and fifty odd years ago.
Like a serpent with its tail locked eye-to-eye between its teeth, winter became spring and I am back at the castle again. Perhaps to cure my ailments with bottles of thick brown ointment, to take my mind and mend it practically, something of that sort. Or, perhaps I am here to simply let the grass softly cradle my head. As if I have been here for years, darning the holes in my stockings, my chest treading water and rising like the dawn. I will let the gargoyles tell me what and who I am when I so decide it–in a fit of passing dreaming, upon another’s doorstep.
By Emmanuelle Kate.