The Year of Magical Thinking

Every day I am in Treasure Beach my mood improves. Maybe it's because I am spending large amounts of time hanging out with Liz and Giuliano. Maybe it's because I can sit on the veranda of Shaki Home and watch the sky and listen to the sea all day long and never tire of the view or the sound. Whatever the reasons, I feel comfortable here not like at home where I felt like a black sign screaming, WIDOW!, was pasted on my forehead, weighing me down both physically and mentally. Nothing like putting on flip-flops and having my toenails painted a bright turquoise blue to lift the spirits.

I just finished reading Joan Didion's amazing book, "The Year of Magical Thinking". I don't think I could have finished it anywhere else. I didn't want to read it right after Steve died. Too scary, iI thought, but the possibility, even the necessity, of reading the book was always in the back of my mind, almost like a moral imperative. Finally I opened it and read a few chapters right before I left for Jamaica. I imagined that sitting outside with the book in my lap, the sun shining on my face, the sound of the waves pulsing in the background would make it less painful to read. I guess that was my my own little bit of magical thinking. Yes, it was painful but no it wasn't overwhelminly depressing. In a weird way it was almost exhilarating. Above all it was absolutely true. I think it will take me weeks, maybe months, to process this book. I keep wanting to go back, underline more sentences, mark more passages. I don't want to forget any of the details. I want to follow Joan Didion step by step all the way along the path she painstakingly, obsessively describes. Because she did it and she survived. Not only survived but worked and worked to remember it and write it all down. A guidebook to the underworld.