It is just the feeling of everything being rationed.
But I haven’t any coupons and I don’t even know what’s going on in the war. I can’t get letters out to them or them to me and all I can see are the rations. Which aren’t enough.
Maybe I am a philosopher.
Maybe I am a very old woman who woke up too late and missed the train.
Yes, maybe.
Old women do not like trains and the unmannerly young men who do not give up seats.
Old women like to sleep in, but not, because they are afraid of sleeping because they know one day it will be too much sleep, only sleep, only and ever sleep.
But maybe that is waking up, no?
Old women and trains and seashores for some reason there are a lot of seashores in there right now. In my head. Like sand through a sifter like flour for dough.
Rations.
It is backwards, sort of. The old woman sees the seashore and remembers sifting flour. For cakes, for cakes for her friends who died (or woke up) and for a lover she had and for a lover she lost.
She lost a lot of things.
Kerchiefs and a ring, maybe.
(She gave it away and forgot, really.)
(Maybe. probably.)
To some small person with baby teeth.
Who doesn’t know a ring from a seashell and doesn’t know about going to hell or going to the shore for holidays and working late to pay for rent to pay for rings for lovers who sift flour to make and bake you things.
It lost the ring with its baby teeth. They fell out in the sea.
So did she, I think.
She fell into the sea.
Or just asleep.
Asleep into the sea
without her rings and things.
The sea was in her kitchen sink where she sank to tears some years ago. More than some, a sum of at least twenty years, more, I can’t say for sure, but sinking to tears with fears of flour and rations and days and counting the ways she would fall (into the sea) someday.
She forgets that she started talking in third person and is no longer certain of who the old woman is, who wears the kerchiefs, who loses the ring.
Trains are old like the women who miss them.
Like the wars to which they lose their lovers and their rations of flour and of time to say “I love you.”
Wars create songs and tattoos and lovers with rings.