Good Friday

I came home from work late last night.  Good Friday.  That is not why I came home.  I wasn't aware of it, really.  But another Friday night, cooking at eight, drinking the first drink, thinking about another night at home alone.  It is not so bad, and that is what begins to worry me.  I think that and then there is the little panic attack that I may become a recluse--may have already become--right smack in the middle of an otherwise normal existence.

But things go along.  A message from an old friend inviting me to the beach, a call from a woman I work with alone with her children for the evening. I dial my friends in Yosemite.  It had the feeling of a life.  Dinner and a movie.

You get it.  I needn't go on.

The movie was not good.  Worse.  It was an adaptation, Nin's "The Delta of Venus."  But it was a period piece with good cinematography and wardrobe and set design, and though the acting was bad and the script jejune, it made me remember old trips to London and Paris and Barcelona and Cuzco when life was different and we could behave in a other ways.  It was wrong.  It was fun.

The film flickered by.  Desire.  The voice of the film's protagonist as she reads the lines of erotica she writes for an unseen benefactor:

"He stays inside.  He reads, he yearns, he dreams."