restless since morning, hard to focus... except for a few moments in the shade to watch a brown-throated sunbird on the red button ginger, attending to each stem. the stems are tight, shiningly budded, ready to erupt into flower. the bird with his iridescent yellow breast takes his time, like he's a curious doctor in a quiet ward on a quiet day.

all day there was a strong wind keeping things cool... in the morning I went to the open air cafe to write, got caught up instead with the hard wind and sun, the feeling from another land that one must take things inside before the storm comes. but it was just wind, no clouds, the raintrees waving to their reflections in the glass-topped tables, bright blue sky behind them...

I took my own teabag to the cafe and asked for hot water. tall young japanese guy at the counter, new. helpless supplicant to the words - 'hot water only. hot water' - like a toddler, trying it out, half-smiling but absorbed in the feel. I knew he had never said that exact phrase before.

then at the library, the old lean librarian, combover, fastidious but so much calmer than when he started two years ago, when every anomaly was a source of panic. he looks for a way to tell me in English that I can take a reserve book out for more than two hours now, can 'go back', 'can now till tomorrow, even go back one till tomorrow.' this is clear, it's okay...

I sit here and there with my paper all day and all night and it seems impossible to move blocks of words around like that. that their true legitimate orders are beyond me, and I can only gesture in a kind of wrongness towards what seems so conceptually simple, in some other language unknown but felt.