I Have a Yellow Desk
From the Yellow Desk — Mo, Actually
I was slurping ramen — the spicy-good kind, from the hole-in-the-wall place I visit with the devotion most people reserve for religion — Mexican Coke in hand, watching the door. Students. Retirees. A family with a stroller that took up most of the entrance. All of them moving through, carrying on, living their particular version of life in the way that comes most naturally to them.
And I sat there with all of this stuff inside me.
Not a crisis. Not a revelation. Just the quiet, slightly absurd recognition that I had accumulated — over forty-something years of reading and watching and thinking and living — an entire interior world that might never see the light of day if I kept waiting for the right moment to let it out.
So I stopped waiting.
The Yellow Cycle is what happens when a woman who has always known she could write finally decides that knowing is no longer enough. It’s for the women I see everywhere — at the ramen place, at the school gate, in the meeting room, in the mirror — who are more interesting than the culture currently has the attention span to notice. Who have taste, and opinions, and a sense of humor that has only sharpened with use. Who would like, for once, to be spoken to as the adults that life has made them.
We’ll talk about art and bodies and money and work and the people we love. We’ll talk about the things nobody puts on a greeting card. And we will laugh — properly, uproariously, the kind of laugh that startles the table next to you. And apologizes to none.
Yellow for verve. Cycle because it’s never just one thing, and neither are we.
I have a lot to say. I’m glad you’re here.
Pour something.
-Mo