sometimes mistaken but connected anyway

I barely remember this, but when I was younger I would sometimes pile sliced strawberries in a bowl, spoon sugar over the top of them, pour in a medium amount of cold milk, and eat them for a snack.

and that's what I had for breakfast this morning. early.

later I had a second breakfast (yes, really) of cereal with frozen blueberries. that's a much more common occurrence these days. (I never use fresh blueberries fast enough, so I freeze them. added to breakfast cereal, they are perfect. they collect a thin layer of frozen milk around them which I love even though it sounds kind of odd now that I type it out here.)

what else?

one week into July.

it already feels like this vast, empty, sun-baked summer is going by too fast.

it feels like the basics of the following paragraphs were excised months and months ago from some other blogpost. was it this one about love? or this one about familiarity? that seems like the likeliest bet. it wasn't this one about light and illusion, but I was happy to reread that one anyway during my search.

*

comparison usually starts with connection, for me. a similarity strikes my brain like an embroidery needle. it pulls through me and darts back out into space toward the next thing, sewing little scraps of thoughts loosely together like a hurried, festive bunting.

and these are a handful of things I have connected and compared in this way. perhaps shallowly, for now. stories I heard that my flitting brain once just tossed together in a box with some kind of shared label.

Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran is a book about mothers. it's about journeys where your body moves through space, across land, among others, and about journeys where you stay home but you transform because your world transforms and everything is wildly, newly drastic and potent and even painful.

for some reason I thought of this podcast episode from The Sporkful, "Feasting in War Zone" in connection with Lucky Boy. now I also think of the play Anonymous, which my brother-in-law wrote his thesis about a while back. journeys. circumstances that transform us.

my old blogpost draft also had a note and a link to another podcast episode, "To My Heart," which I heard when it was rebroadcast on The Heart. the series is called Love Me.  this episode is set in Guantanamo Bay.

the resonance I track among all these stories may not be there for anyone else. it might have changed for me too, by now.

*

from the dates on these episodes and the fact that goodreads tells me I read Lucky Boy in 2018, I'm now certain that these paragraphs couldn't have come from any of the old posts I thought they might have been abortively written for.

I guess they were written for this post, their very own July 2020 blogpost, after all.