but the light is so nice in here

Yesterday I was supposed to meet my friends Djinn and Richard in the morning to ride to Golden Gate Park and I could feel myself veering toward staying home, thinking, The light is so nice in here right now.

Staying inside because a slice of sunlight is so inviting, when it is fully possible to go out into full sun, felt very familiar to the sensation I’ve been acutely aware of lately, my apparent preference for my projection of a person over the actual person. The most expensive form of this is when desire leaves no room to experience, say, an actual conversation as it’s happening in real time. Missing the person sitting right in front of me. Anticipatory longing.

Do I need to say I left the shaft of sun to warm my concrete floor and went downstairs to get my bike?

But the sensation made me want to find the following passage from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (occasionally I do read other novels). I skimmed through the book looking for it even as I walked down the stairs to get what, for the sake of economy, the need to move swiftly from one proposition to the next, I earlier called “my” bike, but now, in appreciation for the serial generosity one is often subject to, I will say was actually Richard’s bike. My back tire was flat. And that even “my” bike is actually Zach’s bike, which he is so kindly lending me because “my” bike is in Truro, MA. And that bike is actually Marnie’s, which she so kindly gave me.

Also, I do not endorse reading while walking down the stairs, or while crossing the street, though I have done both within the last two days. Here is the quote. I sustained no injuries finding it:

When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate. Once, while they were still childless, Edmund had found a pocket watch on the shore. the case and the crystal were undamaged, but the works were nearly consumed by rust. He opened the watch and emptied it, and where the face had been he fitted a circle of paper on which he had painted two seahorses. He gave it to her as a pendant, with a chain through it, but she hardly ever wore it because the chain was too short to allow her to look at the seahorses comfortably. She worried that it would be damaged on her belt or in her pocket. For perhaps a week she carried the watch wherever she went, even across the room, and it was not because Edmund had made it for her, or because the painting was less vivid and awkward than his paintings usually were, but because the seahorses themselves were so arch, so antic and heraldic, and armored in the husks of insects. It was the seahorses themselves that she wanted to see as soon as she took her eyes away and that she wanted to see even when she was looking at them.