Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I have some questions about our perspective, in the way that we were looking for the caldera at Yellowstone only to learn that we couldn't see it because we were standing inside it, and the only way to know where it was turned out to be from above. How there's never a time when we're not in the forest, even if we can only see one tree at a time.

If the economics of our brains require that we're always finding a pattern, maybe the trick is to look for the patterns that come next. The ones that we notice first seem to lead us in the same circles, which is useful, certainly, but not valuable.

More to the point, I suppose, is that I've been thinking about the Cadillac in the Attic again, about saying yes to whatever comes up for the meaning and for the pleasure, and never mind interpreting the runes that my footsteps leave behind. Getting all Emma Bovary, the way that fits best in the fall.

Or I guess, in the way that the inside of my head is always poems even if I'm talking science, feeling like the inside of Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle, which has somehow in the last few years become like an old friend. "During that summer--/Which may never have been at all;/But which has become more real" and "It was a summer of limitless bites/ Of hungers quickly felt /And quickly forgotten/With the next careless gorging."

"The bites are fewer now./ Each one is savored lingeringly, /Swallowed reluctantly."