things disappear and she lets them go

My new teacher, Martha, said in class yesterday that to hope to fear anything takes us out of the present. It's been very cold for Houston, or rather, I've been feeling cold here because my expectation was that it'd be warmer, and when Martha said this, I was thinking about how I was going to stay warm in my apartment that night, if I would go buy a blanket, or maybe stay somewhere else. These were the two options in my head. Yes, I could have, as I'd done the night before, put on a sweatshirt, a long-sleeved shirt, a hat, a scarf, legwarmers, sweatpants, two pairs of socks, & gotten into bed with the heat blasting, but finding an entirely new mode of keeping warm seemed preferable. In class we were talking about the Tao Te Ching (as translated by Stephen Mitchell, who may be the best translator I've ever come across) without having yet read it. Someone said that space & time don't matter in eternity, but what does?

After eating some pho with my friend D, I went though the night & looked for a blanket. I went first to Goodwill thinking there might be a home-y blanket there, but on the stack of televisions was a crime show where, in a flashback, a now-missing girl was confronting her dad about abuse & I decided that really nothing in Goodwill felt home-y because it had all been discarded then stacked under florescent lights in a white-washed warehouse. Instead I went & bought a blanket in Bed Bath & Beyond. The punctuation of "Bed Bath & Beyond" makes me smile. The full moon was very slow & pressed me a little harder to the earth & I bought a bottle of milk & for a moment I did not fear or hope for anything.