Till I can feel you uncompromised, till I can feel you

To celebrate our eighth anniversary, rushthatspeaks and I returned to SRV. It is the only Venetian-style bacaro in Boston; three years makes a tradition and once again its nine-course tasting menu, the Arsenale, did not disappoint us.

The polpette remain the world's best bar snacks, bite-sized pork-and-beef meatballs in a marinara sauce so rich and sturdy it could be served solo; the squid-ink-black crostini topped with salt-sweet tufts of baccalà may be my favorite preparation of salt cod. The soft-boiled quail eggs with white anchovies and a toasted crunch of garlic and capers were liquidly, pungently oceanic and I had never thought of deep-frying green olives like pickles, but if you do it with bits of sausage in the crisp-spiked batter and a dip of montasio cheese I'm in. The salad of young arugula with caramelized fennel, grapefruit, and harissa dressing should have been all kinds of conflicting hot and cold flavors and instead it was warming and refreshing at once; nothing in it was bitter. Neither of us had heard of the dish called eggs in purgatory, but it resembled shakshuka with more farro and more chile verde studded with tiny cherry tomatoes and could not be eaten without recourse to spoons, which the waitstaff thoughtfully provided along with za'atar-dusted flatbread to mop up every last thick silky drop; the brined chicken with dabs of sausage under a kind of sweet red pepper salsa should have been an anticlimax, but there were no survivors. We knew from previous years that SRV shines at pasta, but the strozzapreti with shiso and sweet corn and especially the agnolotti with prosciutto and long-stemmed cauliflower were still standouts, each a different angle of conversation-stopping creamy umamibomb. For dessert we were brought small, dense, concentrated-summer squares of apricot torta with sour cherry gelato, but we added a goat's milk panna cotta with cocoa nibs and kiwi sorbetto—because how could we not—and it was frankly ridiculous. We had cocktails to start and digestifs to finish; the Innocents Abroad and a glass of Amaro di Angostura shaken with lime for Rush, the Colomba (smoky-salty, caramelized grapefruit and mezcal) and a glass of Braulio (just the right side of patent medicine) for me. We wrote very appreciative things on the bill.

And we did not go to the sea afterward, because it was raining balls; I had brought an umbrella and we still got soaked walking from the parking lot to the restaurant and from the restaurant to the parking lot and it showed no signs of stopping as we drove home. We went back to Rush's place and watched Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012) because it was streaming on Netflix and it was both seasonally and meteorologically appropriate. It has the sea in it; the sea in several places I've been, even, although not in 1965 with "the region's most destructive meteorological event of the second half of the twentieth century" bearing down on two runaway twelve-year-olds in love. It is a perfect YA novel of a movie. I loved it as much as I did when it was in theaters. Someday I'll write about it properly. Some movies I love so much, I can't find a way into talking about them: all I want to do is enumerate the things I love.

Rush gave me Mary Gaitskill's Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays (2017), which I am looking forward to reading for Gaitskill's review of Secretary (2002) alone. I gave them an IOU for the Criterion release of David Byrne's True Stories (1986). They drove me home after the movie because it was, and currently is, still raining balls.

It was a good anniversary.

And my empire cries that he has a temper and now he has a headache

It's not that I have nothing to say about 9/11. I just don't know if I can say it better than I did for the tenth anniversary: it was stolen grief. I hoped the country would get better about it. I do not think it did. Heroism and mourning alike were fed into a machine of self-perpetuating symbolism and it grinds coarser and less historically every year. I feel the same way about the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013—it had to become a myth of strength and retribution so fast, there was no time for being in pain, in any kind of loss. Boston Strong. I remember people dazed and shocked and half-fantasizing and glued to the contradictory news. There was no righteous towering wave of holy justice. There was a perversion: to acknowledge the loss was to have your consent taken for the war it excused, which a whole generation now has never lived without. I am still not sure those dead have ever been properly mourned and therefore, as ghosts, ever properly laid. I have begun to think that no ghosts are ever laid in this country. I don't think it knows how to make itself vulnerable enough to hear its dead, much less give them what they need.

So I spent most of my day working and made dinner for myself and the cats in the evening and ran to the library to return a badly overdue DVD. I saw that Keith Collins who was Derek Jarman's muse and helpmate has died at an equally unreasonable age and I am not happy. (Nothing had better happen to Tilda Swinton.) I watched Gabrielle Tesfaye's The Water Will Carry Us Home (2018), a gorgeous six-and-a-half-minute live-action and cut-paper-animated short film of the Middle Passage and the orishas of the deep sea. I played the Kilcid Band's ferociously catchy "The Good Get Gone" about twenty times in a row. I was trapped at my desk by the absolute trust of a sleeping Autolycus who wakes up just enough to make a heart-catching noise between a snuffle and a purr and then rolls over farther against your lap and goes back to sleep. (It is not possible to displace a cat that comfortable. Tough luck. You just live at your desk now.) In other words, I am having an ordinary day, and on some level I feel I should not be, but I do not want to be part of the machine. The night after the manhunt that followed the marathon bombing, I dreamed of Adresteia. I think she's still here, and her father has come to stay.