glass and hearts

I am in the middle of revising a story I wrote some time ago, about a dancer who has a glass leg (I thought that this was a terribly clever idea when I came up with it, but some time later I realized I took a hint from Anderson's "The Snow Queen" -- "Some people even got a little piece of mirror in their heart, and then it was quite dreadful. The heart would turn into a lump of ice.").

In any case, I'm trying to say, in a way that makes sense to someone who is not a dancer, how silenced you feel when your body (which is your voice and your brain all at once) abandons you. And then there's all the usual wondering about stories... Do the levers and strings all pull on the right parts? When I look at a story for too long, it starts to blur into a Rube Goldberg machine, with all these clanking, whirring, shiny parts that I want, so badly, to strike a match at the end and ignite a fuse to explode some sort of empathy in an unsuspecting head. But sometimes things don't quite line up and I end up with damp and disappointment...

***
I've always liked the idea of Valentine's Day. The idea of one day, even among all the ridiculous candy and fluffy cards and pink, frilly pieces of junk, that is devoted to love -- unabashed romantic, make room in the cramped space of your life for another soul, kind of love -- is sort of fantastic. I've never understood why I should feel sad for not having a valentine when it's so wonderfully incredible that anyone bothers to celebrate it at all.

My friend, Kat, says it smartly here.

***
It's late. All that morning wisdom that I hear about in Russian fairytales seems much too far off. I think it's time to put the story to bed for the night.