Trust fall

August '25

“To feel like yourself again.” Deluge yesterday. Rushing down the shaft from the apartment’s bathroom window, today, a break in the heat—damp, autumnal end to July, I’m wearing my yellow suede jacket and started reading The Desires of Mothers to Please Others In Letters. Last night [X] talked about a guy she knew or knew of who spent all of his free time in therapy—so he lived a double, second life which obscured his real life—the talked-of, abstract inscription of time. Too much joy and hard laughter to write? I’m continuing this—after being interrupted (scriptura interruptus?) last time, only a sentence-and-a-half in—on August 7th. The bender encroaches, hungry tide, indeed cyclical. I gallivant with artists, hardly sleep, feel capable of appreciating human beauty again, blurred touch, [X]’s sandy blonde hair pasted against her forehead, her freckles and wide mouth across from me at [X’s] —[X]’s slightly gapped teeth, hard jaw, arm in mine during the pilgrimage from his studio in Chelsea to the comedy club in the East Village, bellowing at the stage, steady rain home—then [X] the gallerist calling me a dilletante (my word, but essentially the point) and digging both thumbs into my hips, us throwing our heads back in laughter, it all so temporary and fleeting as a crisp evening in August, but enough to close one’s eyes and fall back into. Do I feel more myself? Sure—but not the one I was last year, only having sustained some sentiment, a manic charge and feverish curiosity from the person I became in March. A handful of flood, its pages cracked open on my lap, Faulkner’s soft rotting love, love, which I cannot call what it is.

==

Fallkill. Resigned or reserved—designed or deserved? His eyes, perched birds, would not look my way as we sat in the grass leaning back on our hands. To be one among many, undistinguished, unreceived. He unjammed my fingers from the gap in the slats: how young and unrelenting I am. Cortelyou ended with an address belonging to the house empty and non-precipitating. A neighbor gestures towards tomorrow’s hysterectomy. Without historicity. “It felt like a death.” A remote relationship continues banal, pocketed. Cannot circumvent the thrashing dancers: no lateral move.

Walking, talk of the walking novel. Present process, no future-speak, there is no manifestation; things are what they are. “Everyone should be on Ozempic,” someone had said, “it makes you stop wanting anything.” What is life without desire? To be just fine not running around impaling yourself on other people? We can hardly take each other seriously—well, him and I, not we—the other, not each other—this is the grammar of separateness, of gapping, othering, rebuffing—of role-play, the dream of another wishing they were the other meanwhile I wish for the role wishing for the role of taking over. A relationship like cantilevered suffering—yet who doesn’t want to get spooned on just any old Tuesday? Secret told in confidence: let me be your confidant, this once. Obligation—expectation—denialism—fantasy. How [X] told me he made himself sick eating pig’s blood in Lisbon, threw up all over the steps of the five-star hotel—the outcome ruins the story, you should have known better, everyone says. The flagellating lyric artistry of no trajectory. Diplomacy and anarchy. The blond anarchic curl, sun-bleached more than I could be. The interior and exterior separated only by a semi-permeable membrane. A defeatist and a nihilist walk into the bar. Like the descending motion one hallucinates in a drought.

Dreamt of [X] last night: West Village loft party I’ve snuck into, he approaches me from across the room, leaving a kitchen island full of canapes, to ask if I want to know why he really didn’t want me. “Why, [X]?” Well, he found all of my college records and noticed I didn’t do enough extracurriculars, wasn’t in any clubs, was never a leader. What the fuck do you mean, I wailed, then woke up laughing. Perhaps a reflection of my “quiz” results from [X], then [X]. “I thought you knew more about X,” not living up to their standards as film hoe or art hoe they’ve projected onto me by refusing to volley back their constant name-drops. Yet I love the art “scene” only because I have no real stake in it.

==

False autumn, damp and windy, passersby in sweaters, “a sense of fatigue.” It’s funny to carry around these descriptions that men have tacked on to me. How invasive, probing they are—behind closed doors researching me, rather than letting me unfold more gradually before them. Am I really so mysterious and compelling, me with my heavy-lidded, pouty, vocal-fried fatigue? Am I just blank or opaque? Are they trying to catch me in some kind of lie? I’m running on so little I can hardly concentrate on something like this: it was oysters, liquor, and you know what else for dinner last night. Piles of dust and ash on my bedroom floor appear inexplicably. I feel swaddled by Brooklyn: its patina, its kind strangers.

Last weekend, [X] and [X] in town from Los Angeles, jamming keys up our nostrils and taking cabs everywhere. [X]’d kissed me, dry-mouthed and meaningless, in his apartment with its view of landmark buildings and sheeny lobby that smells like chlorine, having done line after line of subpar coke off of a Crate & Barrel dinner plate cut with [X]’s health insurance card. Quite an unromantic environment for what was, I guess, a bubbling-over of four years’ worth of, what was, yes, in the end, some kind of tension. It was as physically gentle, tip of his finger between my lips, a delicate touch of the jaw, as it was psychologically jarring. Not necessarily the idea of the action but it being made to actually occur in time. Days later, it was just that: spur of the moment, and like [X], making clear there’s someone else he’d rather have, some other big, better, vaguely unavailable thing, and that’s just as well. Under the street lamp I felt I could have dissolved him or anyone with my eyes, wide-open. Down to bone. I’m familiar now with the position of the unwanted, but it felt unfair for someone who knows me that way to put me there against my own will and judgment through a series of sloppy actions. Our conversation sounded like we shared a notion to save it—our friendship—but somewhat removed now, I can see that it’s all already-over. He doesn’t actually care, so neither can I, and that’s it: looped and self-resolving. Afford the lady a little bitterness. Look, the more fractured the agonies, the more easily I can bear them. After clinging with both hands to the edges of my bathroom sink on Saturday night thinking I’d really like to stick something straight through my chest, fill that empty cavity, bleed out all over somebody—anybody’s—front stoop or whatever it took approximately three or four days for life to feel beautiful again or at least worth living—that’s all, comical—but it is brutal, takes so much from me, the self-convincing and the proceeding with each day’s activities and not letting myself be alone if I can help it and not letting a crack show because I couldn’t bear to be shown that mixture of false concern and flightiness healthy people reserve for the breaking-down. I’m waiting for something to be over, some shift with summer’s end, the spinning skiff on the flooded river that in one arbitrary turn could re-enter my grasp.