Dear July, nine: immersion.

Yesterday, I started the day writing in a coffee shop. While I was working, a table of three sat beside me – a grandmother, a mother and a daughter – and started a conversation amongst themselves about ‘what it would be like to swim in a swimming-pool of hot chocolate’. The grandmother was miming – doing the breaststroke mid-air – saying how she would swim with her mouth open, swimming and swallowing and swimming and swallowing, drinking it all up. ‘Just imagine,’ she said. ‘Imagine swimming in a pool of chocolate...’

Later in the day, after my friend (also a writer) came to meet me, we relocated to the library to work and ended up sitting at a table upstairs that hangs over the librarians’ desk on the ground floor. After an hour or two of ‘pulling teeth’ ideas-wise, I decided to listen to a bit of music to make myself focus and finally (finally) managed to get into a flow with the chapter I was working on. Ideas and words started coming relatively quickly. And then I heard a man’s voice below saying: ‘a lentil soup bath’. I stopped typing and took one earphone out. ‘Would it be lentil? Or tomato and basil?’ The librarians downstairs – three of them – seemed to be involved in one of those bizarre ‘it’s quiet and we’re really bored’ kind of conversations that only seem to happen at work. They were laughing and talking about what it might be like to take a bath in a bowl of soup. ‘Just imagine it...'

Weird.

I don’t know the significance of this. Might be the weather (last week’s no-tights-needed heat has been replaced by probably-a-good-idea-to-wear-tights-and-a-few-vests-and-some-jumpers drizzle. Right now, the idea of swimming in a pool of hot chocolate doesn’t sound like such a bad idea).

♥

Notes.

The music I was listening to included: this and: this. (Current chapter isn't a particularly happy one, thus the wistfulness...)

Today’s poem: Love after Love by Derek Walcott 

Picture by: Hazuki Koike (I found it: here. The artist's website is in Japanese, so I'm not sure whether to link to it because I don't know what it says!)