two velvet books in a silver box.
So I was at home on a Sunday night sitting on a wooden chair at the dining table mind roaming over Donnie Darko and wondering if everyone was that screwed up on the inside and if we all had an imaginary large six-foot tall bunny friend called Frank who’s actually a boy with a gunshot wound where his right eye should be, when I noticed a box.
An incongruous middle-sized Daniel Hechter box, shiny silver soft-board the way some boxes from companies are, you know, companies who gift people with silver mini metal aeroplanes as paperweights and you end up giving those paperweights away because, really: who wants to use aeroplane paperweights when you can use pencilcases and other random useful objects with other purposes than just being a plain ol’ paperweight?
I lifted the clasp and opened the box without much thought and secretly hoping there was money inside or some djinn that would promise me three wishes or eternal life or happiness, things like that, but I suppose I wouldn’t wish for those though everyone in stories seems to want eternal life or to marry a prince and that’s quite silly. I mean, look at Kate Mid. Bound to a fate in the public spotlight on the arm of a man, solely because of that man.
It’s silly, to me.
The box was lined with blue velvet and inscribed with Daniel Hecter, Paris on the underside of the cover in elegant silver script. There were two books inside the box. Poetry books. A red one bound in velvet with beautiful silver daisies twining their way up the left side of the front with the words love: a celebration adorning the plain cover. Below it was a pale blue book, similarly bound in velvet with the words love: a keepsake with what looked like a sprig of silver roses underlining the words.
Both books seemed like a leftover relic from another time where time moved slower and people spoke in fancy long sentences and said “how do you do?” and wore flowered bonnets and hoop skirts and lacy white dresses with blue sation sashes… Essentially, I lost the plot there and took some time to gaze longingly at nothingness imagining people dancing around the maypole.
I opened both books. They were filled with poems, e.e cummings and Ogden Nash and Robert Graves whispering words that people borrowed for lack of their own talent with the eloquent stories of love. I tumbled headfirst into the poems, feeling strangely at peace with the world as Shakespeare’s gentle writing- shall i compare thee to a summer’s day? thou art more lovely and more temperate- filled my head like ether to dull the pain.
“I will bring you flowers
every morning for your breakfast
and you will kiss me
with flowers in your mouth
and you will bring me flowers
every morning when you wake
and look at me with flowers in your eyes.”
- Heather Holden, ‘Summer Poem’.
I liked writing this.
Sigh.