It’s a small rise on a large mountain, and I slide down and around, skiing to the middle of the whiteness where there are hardly any people, the wide white middle, where I spy an invisible trail. I don’t want anyone to say: Stop it, little girl. I keep hitting for a while, getting a last good one in, and then I adjust my mitten and the pole strap, bend my knees, and push off. People are looking, as at a grocery store if there’s been a spill. She holds her arm up so she won’t be hurt. Get up, get up, get up, Sara. The world is vast and ornamental and also small, winnowed down to the point of contact where my pole hits her back, not doing enough damage through the parka, hence moving up to the head and shoulders. I hit her on the shoulders and back after she has fallen on the ski slope. But at least I’ll have swallowed the house, I thought, cackling in the bedroom. I could hear, like a faded dream, my family speaking in the living room. My eyes stung and I could no longer see the lines of the beams. What was this like, I asked myself, feeling, at least, analytical. I was splayed on my back (can’t lie on your stomach after eating a house). I lay right down on the bed, as if I’d been shot. Before I knew it, I had swallowed the entire house. Still and all it didn’t seem like enough, and last night the ennui finally overcame me. I would say most of my paintings are of trees without leaves. In my regular life, when not felled by ennui, I paint pictures of trees in various attitudes, almost like the stages of life-not the historical ascension stages, from creepy ape to upright fifties man, but the personal path: ball of baby, spry youth, productive citizen, laughable old person with cane, grim-reaper invisibility. I furrow my brow at these things-in slight, but recoverable, disarray. It’s a surprising shadow, ennui is, or a cockroach in a Snickers wrapper, or the end of the play when everyone takes off their costumes. I had been filled with ennui all week, it was drenching, and all I could do was walk around, taking furtive looks at things, being alone with myself and my ennui.
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