The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

-Robert Haas

mi amores espanoles

cuando yo estudio en Espana en el proximo ano yo espero que conozque un hombre tan guapo como Fernando Torres y Gael

Betsey Johnson holiday socks kicking off the season of seasons

i am geisha

can't remember how to play hanafuda
it is hard forgetting and forgetting
and no longer knowing how to play any instrument that i could have maybe known
oh yes it is so tiring here