marche funèbre [eowyn's diary]

[Eowyn Stockbridge]

there's a world outside your broken borders

[Eowyn Stockbridge]

Sometime in December, twenty ten.
iPod: Come On Forest Fire burn the Disco Down by Rae Spoon

Oh, so I'm crazy. After a weekend of lying in bed, eating raw carrots and fingernails (mine) I think it's safe to say. When I sleep (if I sleep?) the cats lay on my pillow so I won't kick them.

I'm crazy. I took a job at one of the worst parts of my childhood. Before Hammel my bedroom was painted red and purple and my kitchen table was painted with suns and moons and snow lions, and I would go to summer camp in Colorado and Canada. My mum put pictures of nudes on the wall that the other mothers always thought she should take down because I wasn't old enough for that kind of thing. At Hammel my room was white and the cafeteria was loud and blinding and they didn't have spanakopita and spanakopita is my favourite.

While I was in school my parents went to Thailand for two months. If I were a normal child they would have taken me with them, but I wasn't normal, I was dangerous.

Before I decided to teach here I had dreams of being a bookbinder or a taxidermist or opening a café. Now all I have are hobbies. A desk in my bedroom where I make notebooks, a basement that smells like embalming fluid (I'm so lucky to have cats that catch the mice down there and don't always eat them) and a kitchen that gets more love than the rest of my house- and that's saying something because I don't really eat. I'm stupid and crazy.

Is it too late to quit my job and run away to Geneva or Stockholm or Toulouse to start a business?

[Eowyn Stockbridge]

Sometime after last time, still December, still twenty ten.
iPod: Symphony no. 4 in A Major (third movement) as performed by the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra

I know more dead languages than other people. Not only do they reveal fascinating things about our own modern languages, I'm prepared in case of sudden time travel.

I had an ice cream sandwich for the first time today. I thought it was ice cream between two slices of bread which doesn't sound very good but it's not. I want another.

[Eowyn Stockbridge]

flashback: July 27, 2008
sound system: Tom Waits album on repeat, played very loudly.

It was blazing outside, some sort of heat wave. Eowyn was in the kitchen baking bread in her very small 'at home' shorts and a nice white shirt that sort of wrapped around half a dozen times. Like every time she made French bread, she spoke French, almost loud enough to overpower Tom Waits' gruff laments.

Though most of what she said was nonsense, it was obvious Eowyn had an excellent command of the french language.

It was also obvious that she had become fluent in French through questionable means.

"Oh, Tom!" As she pummeled her dough into baguette shapes, made deft slices with what looked like an antique straight razor. She appeared much more at home in the kitchen than she did anywhere else, not even projecting a single illusion. It was glorious, and her baguette was always good. She had set aside some cheap hooch just for one of these loaves, a proper romantic evening to herself.

There was a knock on the door. Couldn't people keep to themselves?

Eowyn smacked the flour off on her apron, and, holding her razor, headed to the door. Through the peephole she saw a man a few years older than she, hair prematurely graying, dark circles around his eyes. She opened the door, welcomed him through the threshold. With her interior decorating, razor in hand, hair piled lopsidedly on top of her head, she knew what this looked like.

"Listen," he said, "You have not shut your music off for eighteen hours. It's one in the morning. I really need some sleep, I have work in the morning."

Eowyn opened her mouth, closed it, and gazed at him coolly. Something somewhat clever had just occurred to him.

"Well, it's this," she said in her usual serious, quiet tone, "Or the sound of my raucous lovemaking."

It was the first joke she could ever remember making.

And it had gotten her laid.