Sarah's Heart.

Hi! I'm Sarah from Sadie Designs and I am so thrilled to be guest posting on Micaela's blog while she's travelling! Our friendship is born out of having a lot in common, from favourite bands to favourite blogs.  I love Micaela's little corner of the internet and hope that someday we're lucky enough to meet at Shake Shack in NYC and eat veggie burgers and ice cream together.


My heart in...


A picture:

This photo was taken of my boyfriend Jeff and I by a post in Haarlem in the Netherlands. We put the camera there and made several attempts at getting something as awesome as this. This was near the end of one of the bigger trips that we've done together. We'd gotten engaged just a few days earlier and spent much of our time travelling with a couple of our best friends in the world. There are nothing but happy memories wrapped up in this photo for me. I love it and am so looking forward to our wedding this fall.

A poem:

Governors on Sominex

by David Berman

It had been four days of no weather

as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.

They'd closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings

and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.

The evening edition carried the magic death of a child

backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page.

I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantle.

Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them.

***

The moon hung solid over the boarded-up Hobby Shop.

P.K. was in the precinct house, using his one phone call

to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light

by which he traveled into this and that.

And out in the city, out in the wide readership,

his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket

in the woods behind the Marriott,

his younger brother who was missing that part of the brain

that allows you to make out with your pillow.

Poor kid.

It was the light in things that made them last.

***

Tammy called her caseworker from a closed gas station

to relay ideas unaligned with the world we loved.

The tall grass bent in the wind like tachometer needles

and he told her to hang in there, slowly repeating

the number of the Job Info Line.

She hung up and glared at the Killbuck Sweet Shoppe.

The words that had been running through her head,

"employees must wash hands before returning to work,"

kept repeating and the sky looked dead.

***

Hedges formed the long limousine a Tampa sky could die behind.

A sailor stood on the wharf with a clipper ship

reflected on the skin of the bell pepper he held.

He'd had mouthwash at the inn and could still feel

the ice blue carbon pinwheels spinning in his mouth.

There were no new ways to understand the world, 

only new days to set our understandings against.

Through the lanes came virgins in tennis shoes,

their hair shining like videotape,

singing us into a kind of sleep we hadn't tried yet.

Each page was a new chance to understand the last.

And somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid.

A song:

This was a hard one for me to choose, but I knew that my heart in a song would probably have to be Bill Callahan. I was lucky enough to see him live once (and unlucky enough to just miss seeing him live a bunch of other times) and he remains, 100%, my go to guy for any and every mood that strikes. This one's a bit of a heartbreaker, but I really wanted a video of him performing live. He is magical.

A quote:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

-Roberto Bolaño, 2666

This quote changed my life. After I encountered it I began reading long novels and books that I was intimidated by and have never looked back.

An item of clothing:

My favourite clothing-like piece is a leather clutch by Forestbound, but it's not really clothing, per se. So instead I offer a photograph of some fabric that I bought last year. I love sewing and making things and hope someday to make a piece of clothing that I can be really proud of (and actually wear)...these cottons got turned into summer tote bags last year.

A place:

Finally, I think I would love to be that grounded person who would offer a picture of home as the place their heart resides, but mine lives in Vancouver with me as well as all of the other cities that I've called home. Not to mention Portland, Seattle, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Barcelona, and New York. Etc. 

My heart has wanderlust, there's no two ways about it.