I read Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt yesterday and by page eight I was messaging my favorite reading buddy. "Have you ever read any Aimee Bender?" I asked. When she asked me if I recommended her my response was emphatic. Then I admitted that I was on page eight.
But like hearing the first few measures of a great song for the first time, it didn't take long before I felt rhythm and voice slip into the marrow of my bones. Art is beautiful like that. In an instant it can sweep you off your feet, fill you with happiness, and stick with you forever.
I justified my especially early reading recommendation with some version of that feeling. Then I thought about the first time I heard the intro to a song that to this day smears a grin on my face and leads me directly to my dancing shoes.
I wonder, what if you could BE that feeling? You'd jump around all day from place to place, filling people with a contentedness so good they sometimes can't find words for it. I suppose sometimes late at night, you'd long for something deeper. But to be that feeling to be savored, to exist as a thing so pure and reliable. Your only need would be happiness, and it would always come because you could provide it for everyone you touched.
I can't stop thinking about that. And I can't stop listening to The Portland Cello Project's collaboration with Thao called "Tallymarks." Both The Portland Cello Project and Thao are brilliant, I'm sure.
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