August 21 — My living room is melting. Taking tiny sips from a cloudy glass of Pastis, I let the condensation drip onto my bare thighs. Cherry stems and wooden toothpicks litter the dirty wooden floors, proof of my current rodent-like fixation with gnawing. It’s afternoon. These days, it’s always afternoon.
Venturing outside, I become a perfumed, skittish creature. I spend entire commutes avoiding eye contact with strangers and holding onto my hangnails for dear life. Sometimes I look up and the sky is obliterated with a heavy, drained blue. I keep expecting the heavens to open, to wash away the sidewalk stench and the heat that becomes unbearable whenever I’m standing still. Nothing happens, and eventually the temperature breaks. Renegade drops from second-floor air conditioners scatter over my hair. There are entire stretches of merciful days. Improbable sweetness in looking out over the river on the train to Astoria, where the beakish points of skyscrapers suckle the color of nectar. The season feels both expansive and frenetic. I watch my friends move from coast to coast, watch them quit their jobs, watch them write novels, watch them lose the ones they love, watch them throw their heads back in laughter. Commonplace miracles, all in such short intervals of time.
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Some days I am fraught. With what, I’m not sure. I change clothes eight times in a row in spite of having nowhere to be. When my throat begins to feel taut, I ask Carmine if we can go outside to smoke a cigarette. Our block looks ashen, somehow abbreviated in this grey hour. We walk to the corner, to the fenced-off church where the only attendees are a group of bony cats. I crouch on a brick ledge while he stands over me.
I’m stuck in place.
I feel like I have no stable ground.
We’re so lucky, you and I, everything we have—
—yet somehow nothing is ever enough.
We share a look that is equal parts desperate and resigned. We’ve been in a relationship for two and a half years and even six hours apart feels like agony. Our codependency is not romantic, but it has yet to do me any harm. Our mirrored disaffection always soothes me, anyhow.
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I struggle to answer many of the questions my therapist poses to me, especially the ones like: Why not? Why can’t you ___? I know she wants me to explain whatever senseless logic I’ve built up behind my avoidant behaviors, but all I can offer is a grimace. I make a ball with my hands over my chest and tug at it. The fear is just very tightly-knotted.
She tells me how Nietzsche once argued that you can gauge a man’s relationship to time by the way he builds a sand castle. The Apollonian man builds elaborate sandcastles, throwing himself into his activity as if his creations would last forever, oblivious of the incoming tide that will inevitably demolish his productions and always heartbroken once it happens. The Dionysian man sees the inevitability of the leveling tide, and therefore builds no castles. He watches life pass him by, sitting at the sidelines, cynical. Then, the tragic man—aware of the tide, he builds his sandcastles nevertheless. The inevitable limitations of reality do not compromise the passion with which he makes his castles. She tags me as the Dionysian, of course.
I get discouraged when I feel like I can’t have things both ways, even the small stuff. I’ve been feeling exasperated when people harp on my age and how little I know of 90s trivia, but take offense when a stranger on the train tells me I seem older than 23. I silently grumble when a large family chooses to sit next to me on the ferry when there are plenty of open seats elsewhere, but feel wounded when someone on the train immediately switches seats after I sit down next to them.
Talking with a poet on the stone steps of the borough hall, I self-consciously wonder why it seems I always speak in extremes when I don’t necessarily think in them. I believe in moral grey areas and open-ended approaches, but I love hyperbole, too: how arresting an image is when light and dark are pushed to their limits, how much easier it is to get my point across. But I then realize that I’m organizing my own flaws a little too neatly. We fall silent and acknowledge how nice the sun is at this hour, shockingly mellow. I look down and notice a pen has exploded black ink all over my hand.
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A friend texts me that she’s had this excited feeling in her stomach for days now, she can’t get rid of it: that something is about to happen. It’s a good feeling but it’s uncertain.
One night I let some overdue desolation wash over me. Hours pass and tears make a wet itch against my pillowcase, bubble up in the creases of my ears. I can’t get over the idea that I might be untethered forever. That I will keep tumbling along in life, unable to hold purchase on anything real—destined to be thrown away by employers and close friends and other things I care about. I can’t figure out how to be enough. I worry that I do not deserve a constant. That this is both out of my control and also my fault, my mythic fatal flaw. My poor subordinate heart. Me of little faith.
I keep telling myself that this feeling, cast in a different light, might look like boundless freedom. How stupid it seems to translate uncertainty into finality. How cute my blind floundering will seem to me once I’m older. How romantic this will all seem if I ever figure anything out, or at least if I become the type of woman who can pay her rent on time. My feral, incantatory I’m young, I’m young, I’m young. I try to lose myself in distraction. Day by day, directing sudden bursts of energy to spontaneous impulse, forsaking the comfort of routine as it forsakes me.
Bernadette Mayer, shooting an entire roll of film each day of July 1971 and cobbling together diary entries in run-ons in an “emotional science experiment” she called MEMORY:
what can a diary be not a reconstruction, something put in, use the time, pass it, stain it, pass it, it’s stained, it’s magnified, it sticks in my mind—
Nearly finished with the battered pocket notebook I’ve been keeping since last May, I decide to swap it for one of the many standard-sized Moleskines gifted to me over the years, sitting blank on a high-up bookshelf. I realize that I’ve avoided these because they feel less private, or as if they would make the gravelly deposits from my brain feel more burdensome to tote around all day. Yet I’m surprised by how quickly I fill up the pages with a slightly larger scrawl. Not so scary after all.
I too try and assemble these illegible, warm moments. I try to curb my murderous thoughts towards time. Use it, pass it, stain it, pass it. My mercurial New York summer. Dark cherries, diner coffee, plumes of flies, sunlight strobing in the shade, six packs of beer toted up the stairs as alms. A festival on Governors’ Island, a concert in the park, a kayak on Minerva Lake. Three rooftop parties in a row, blisters and insect bites roving around on my ankles, unable to get myself to leave just for the pleasure of being out of my own head. The smell of campfire and chlorine lingers in my hair for days. I don’t want to let go of them, the senses that do tether me. They could be signposts for a life. Who knows.
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i would kill to be able to write like you. always look forward to reading these since i found your page
This was beautiful