appetite

i ate seven hundred and fifty five of them today... in handfuls.

sometimes i eat macaroni and cheese in that fashion almost swallowing without chewing, and i chide myself... for one should chew. i've been trying to chew more lately, but somewhere along the path i started a habit of inhaling, like a jet engine inlet... more of a rush to fill an area of low pressure within me.

sometimes it sweeps in bugs and pebbles... at the worst, small children and mammals.

today there was apparently quite an area of low pressure, because i inhaled seven hundred and fifty five pages... two books...

in one sitting... well, not one sitting exactly.

i got up a few times to pee and once i had to leave the house for 20 minutes to walk down the street, since i'm out of food, but then i was back to the inhaling.

which books? i thought you might ask... over christmas my revered and beautifully amazing cousin elijah presented me with the dark materials trilogy by phillip pullman. i read the golden compass on the flight over the pacific, but then i hadn't yet touched the second book until this morning... when i awoke, turned on the lamp, and reached for it next to my bed without even adjusting the pillow.

i constantly hunger for a good series, and i'm always a little sad when i come to the end. i wish perhaps that i had chewed a little more.

but it isn't really a conscious choice, is it? because once the images start flowing in your mind and the words blur off the page into faces and landscape, the story itself choses the pace.

here is a photo that i took on the flight from frankfurt to L.A.

i share it because it is of the ice floes east of greenland, north of the arctic circle. the sun is on the horizon at noon because we are so far north. i had wondered if the route would take us north of the sun. i sat by the window and watched in wonder for hours as we drove from the sun until it fell to the horizion and seemingly grappled with the earth with every color in it's power to regain it's footing... which it did, slowly and surely.

a four hour sunset followed by a four hour sunrise.

it reminded me of the landscape of the book, in the beginning, in the north. in the land of Iorek Byrnison and beautiful lights.

it's no wonder i couldn't slow to chew.