I cleared my table before my aunt came, so there’s space around the laptop and as I was looking at the new black (not yet named) laptop on the wood I remembered a poem I wrote when I was seventeen.
I don’t need much
Only simple things, such
As you, and me,
And the sun, and the sea
And a white rose in a Chinese vase next to the typewriter.
I don’t need a lot,
I don’t need a yacht.
Just water, and bread,
And a room, and bed,
And a white rose in a Chinese vase next to the typewriter.
The “you” was aspirational at that point, but everything else was real and specific. I remember typing that poem on the typewriter and loving the long long non-rhyming repeating last line.
The thing that strikes me most about that now is how incredibly bound to time it is. There are people now older than I was when I wrote that who have only seen typewriters in museums. The rose died, and then I broke that Chinese vase (it was little and grey and stone and a very beautiful shape) but there are roses every year and I have lots of vases. Roses and vases are always with us, and serving the same purposes, but typewriters have gone with the dodo… and yet what I meant the typewriter to stand for remains, and it was the laptop on the wood of the tabletop that reminded me.
