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possibly-meaningless · 6 years ago

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Dailies - Home from home

23.07.19

It’s technically morning, with the fans snoring like pirates in hammocks, or alternatively white rattlesnakes, and the water outside taking it’s turn to blow unevenly on my singular body which cannot sleep. Someone is fading in new lights at the window, just fast enough to get your attention. New Haven, picking an outfit. Not for us, mind you. Never for us. For logics unknown and in no need of explaining, for no sake at all, but certainly decided.

24.07.19

You walk out into the morning which is like drinking from a stream., putrescence consistent, insect karaoke, packed lunch of sandwich and plumb. Your career is waiting in the howling tunnel, but for now you are walking errands and eating sunscreen. Answer your own question, if no one else can, buy what you want for breakfast. I’d rather a life than your kind of efficiency, the grind of a waiter scraping your own.

Je suis complètement larguée, perdue, levée d’ancre, un petit rafiot qui traverse la rue dix fois pour en retrouver un grand, vide, rudimentaire, à peine construit, alors que la nuit grésille et présente des étoiles. Il n’y a pas de maison en mer, et quand vient la fatigue, les seules certitudes qu’il y a ne sont pas reposantes.

25.07.19

It was one of those moments you know can exist, where you receive a long and genuine moment of practical kindness from a cook vinyl collector whose girlfriend sold you plates and glasses, who knew New Haven so pretty well and drove to your street without a GPS, and helped you pick up a table and chairs, and when you listened to music to remantle the table you found your apartment beautiful, and when you left you talked to someone fixing something big and funny in the grass with tape, and walked past the smell of fresh pizza. And if you pay attention you’ll notice your gait is wider, your shoulders back, that loud cars are listening to music they like, and that the power poles sing just as well as cicadas.

26.07.19

Blasted be this bus– bad day I suppose. Learn from mistakes only. I’m torn between a headache and a dedication to being Buddha-like, to mourning the unlikely refund, the upcoming exhaustion on the Uber, Lis’ exhaustion at her work. I chose to be here, yes. And I will make of it what I can. There is no reason not to be, once I have cradled my little suffering, to coo like the toddler in the yellow dress and earrings, you are traveling, you are traveling, your time is never wasted.

It’s as if I cannot be on this Jersey Turnpike at any time but at eye-hitting sunset. As if the world will not allow it. Perhaps it was the first loving thought I had for this place that assigned me to it, and that I am now the sole designated lover of the gold cutouts on the Passaic river, this residence of cars where mere accumulation forms our departing products in the dust. If so, I am to see it as itself, not as a shallow safari of white and red metal birds, not as a child’s toy-strewn floor, the working hand on a veiny body. I am to see it strange billboards and all, a land bent to utility, understanding of its own gas-fumed complexity, tarmaced and bolted, where flatness is walls, having picked me.

27.07.19

Auntland is just so damn well written. And Lis is working god knows where but always impressing me. My friends are beautiful in a way that simply means I love them. She stops in the antique store where I do not, tells the Roman coins to me. How does one organize a store like this, where paintings are stacked, unnamed, painted wood and cursed carved jade? What went on in a Mayan mind, in this unpolished mosaic mirror? We should buy a castle together. We don’t recognize the Manson murders. We eat cumquats from the branch, and figure out how we are gods. I paint, and Eli knows government secrets. The buses are socialist free. Ten meters of crying DiCaprio, whose girlfriends are never over 25. I decide who lives or dies, who gets to take the scooter home. What a delightful Chekov’s gun, what a connection of inanities. And with the would-be limes that glued circles into my palm so that I must fill them with wisteria fuzz, we took to the painted wood and wrote: OAI. And in the Georgetown chalk dust of the building we found nothing exciting at all but sent off our exploring nonetheless, we took the eraser and wrote: OAI.

28.07.19

We buy plums, small and mottled, skin the best, and get them in a plastic bag. We joke about the poem, freezer plums, while the heat gets at my shoulders you touch, use your neck to protect me. The juice flecks our elbows with purple paillettes, and the lace at my breast. I’m intrigued that you like me, intrigued if you like me. A line of sweat rolls down your back from your bra and another from of the fold of my butt. I say, not to you, “see what I meant about fruit?” with the slit of the plum open at my thumb and use my tongue to finish the fleshy pit.

29.07.19

É, T, ohielleu. Je m’appelais comme ça avant. Maintenant il y a à ma place quelqu’un de très bien, mais de complètement différent, en chemises rayées, les yeux fermés au soleil, riant ou riante selon le jour, montant une étagère seul(e) et repensant à ce que moi j’ai senti en me disant ayant sept ou huit ans. Ça me va. Cette person ferme les yeux et voit une photo qui n’existe pas, d’un balcon espagnole en sépia. Elle s’amuse à habiter n’importe comment, et aime beaucoup, tout court, d’une manière que je ne pouvais imaginer que par le biais de moi même. Elle pose toujours des questions, ça c’est bien. Elle pleure d’autres choses que de désespoir. Elle a fait la paix avec elle même, et sait que tellement d’autres trucs vont venir lui foutre dans la gueule. Celle dont elle a le plus peur de voir en colère c’est moi.

30.07.19

The dump outside my apartment seems to be getting fuller every time I go home. Every day, I encounter a new insect. I think « I’ll come back for this later, and if it’s gone, then it’s gone » almost as if I’m thinking it was meant to go. The world has been trying to make me believe in predestination. My bottle of Gamsol spills in my suitcase, but it pools entirely into the dustpan at the bottom. When I lift it up, it spills, but only into the suitcase cover. And it cleans the spray paint off my hands. The ruins of cardboard valleys smell, that is the clearest reminder. They enter a state of being trash and immediately start to smell. I reach into the dumpster for what I need— magpie mind, magpie means. This is the sink I will be drinking in for the next year, and the stove doesn’t work. I walk the cupboards into the house like Easter Island heads.

31.07.19

Warm and sticky, legs and teeth, rain or percussion, swipe and reloading. Misspell a dinosaur. Cool yourself down, cold brownies in the fridge, muggy but just muggy, not hot, waiting for imaginary clothing, talking about drawing clothing, think of opening the window to the wet air, stay pinned by your laptop like by an at-home cat. Film over your teeth, laugh track in a song, chattering gutter, TV-show noises, waiting to go to a task, ignoring the pressing one, pick up your phone, write down a number, stand up, be light headed, sugar nourished.

Skill number one: drink water when you are drunk. Ceaselessly gulp, breathe like a bull into your glass. Why drink, when you are embarrassing enough sober. Blind men would find you bottomlessly stupid. Find the time to find this funny. Laugh about what matters. Think about going dry. See yourself stumble, again and again and again, off the walls, into bed, into formless conclusions.

01.08.19

Something not quite like a headache leaning against the side of my head. It’s the screens, I know that, and maybe the lack of sleep that I intent to maintain, and the beer today after the last night’s Old Fashioned, the earbuds I stole from a lost and found just parsing sound through my ears. My phone screen is sick now too, necrotic pixels growing only when you check, like the pea plant on the windowsill. A vision clouding while I continue to smile, not to sound morbid, of course.

02.08.19

If your body has decided you are going to cry, and no amount or quality of your usual thinking is going to save this (remember, this is also matter of luck and means) find yourself a comfortable place or places to do it. Jaywalk and scowl at the cars, ask the sun for cancer-freckles, worry your music with volume, drop yourself from finger-height like a pill into a glass— any form of cutting off will do. Don’t actually hurt yourself. Learn to recognize the good habits from the bad, the healthy from the fucked, palpate your own side, train yourself to make the right decision.

03.08.19

This place is one big noxious noise and I am not using it to its full effect. I am the one white Bollywood dancer who goes on the dance floor to think. I do this during sex too. My thoughts take monster forms on the dance floor, legged, entering. I dance like a writing, like a thinking, like unlocking the heart of an encyclopedia: Americans dance on their heels, and I would stomp if I wanted to be masculine. Eye contact changes everything, not only for you, especially for others. Look at the two women grinding— couldn’t that be you? Would you know how to give yourself properly to that hand? Would you squirm? Would you fear? You’ve stopped asking if you seem awkward or brave. The question has been eradicated. You’re working out of line, and doing nothing at all. You are looking at the halo lights and watching your carrousel mind melt in a black plastic shape where you’ve decided to put yourself for nothing. Couldn’t you do more? White woman you are, cleavage-key, dancing sexy for the Hindu gods? What a waste.

04.08.19

The sea reminds us the strongest, because every ripple is a mountain where one crest is the sand and another is the sky, because a half of you is pushing through jade hip by hip, because you are driftwood-sun-dried and the water takes your breath in weight or in drowning lap. We are reminded when we sit on rock, and the wind and heat does the all of us, when our bodies are just another thing for the world to be on, when the being there is just being at all, smelling seagull fallings (fish, shit) while the ocean talks to itself.

05.08.19

We dolly our furniture in dark processions, clack and bonking from pavanent to pavement, sweating evenly. Once again a ferry, this time two-manned, this time jolly, stopping traffic like spirits on the street, chatting shotgun through the tower of trays, legs, drawers, scraping wrists and ankles, puzzling at our load on a corner then off again. Simone can’t tell if she pisses Matan off. In living with strangers she doesn’t mind being bossy. Dish towels are clean and not for cleaning. She refutes claims of her dirtiness. I find she is someone who is very sensitive to gender roles. Abby Adult says adult beds are not in corners. I climb up the walls to give myself a red canopy. Stash and steal and crowd and clutter, Howl’s bed, magpie’s mind, treasure box. Let me live somewhere I can get lost.

06.08.19

I am folding myself into this house like into a blanket, filling every corner with some hand-sized glee. The moving and choosing fires off the part of my brain that is a mouse pushing levers, saving grains, planning for later, living like cooking, by habit and precaution. Cameron had nothing in their room. These are two sides extreme, both beautiful, both in their own flavor correct. My choice is to be fret-tired and worn in a moment; rather than lacking or scavenging later, bumped and familiar with frustration or money-spending. I like the bartering, the cooking with nothing, the piling and stringing things up. “Your DIY aesthetic” says Matan, strange and insightful again. Birds will make a nest to see it torn down the next year.

07.08.19

The storm like me back it seems. I talk about her incessantly, of when the kites fly low and remind me of the sea, of the way the sky presses on the city and makes you notice it, doing what you’re doing but doing it with your eyes on a corner between roofs were you see her scheming the rain, first drizzle then pour. And I make my ferry way, pressing my umbrella between my fingers and phone, braced and ready for the trick to fall, eager in the waiting like happy prey. And when you do start love, you have humor: you growl somewhere to the side-ear and fall just on the chorus of Don’t Let Me Down while I join in and soften just as it stops. You have me laughing clamorous and soaked and clear.

08.08.19

I dream that I am Theo, lost and boyish and cut-off from everything and especially myself expect girls and history and whatever excites the mind to marvel. Let me read again, now that I am slightly weak, now that my mind is playing tricks on me again, listlessly making me believe I am worth no one’s time. I want something to sparkle for me or damnit I will go and find it. I will go to a play tomorrow and I will be in New York and I will read on the train. By God I will be good at this if nothing else.

09.08.19

“Pay attention” says Ethan, “to how your body feels.” Is your phone less reactive, or is it the cover screen? The chord, the block, or the device? I stand evenly on both feet in the line at UPS. I return every eye that meets me, insistently— look at me, I am looking too. Pay attention. My face feels gathered like a half-raised first. My step clacks, my back is straight, I am no floater, Theo. Where is my benevolence? Why must it depend on, vaguely, if Adrian is sleeping with Lis, if Holly cancelled on me, how my body decides to wake up? Who am I being so cool for, so impenetrable, when I have said so often that I refuse to defend myself against people?

10.08.19

C’est drôle comme rapidement je me remets à aimer. Il faut aller trouver ces choses: la pièce de théâtre indépendante et un peu étrange, l’établissement au nom russe, la tartine un peu brûlée. Florence me pose les questions comme il faut: non pas, comment vas tu faire (qui est une bonne question, mais pas la première) mais que vas tu faire. Je sais déjà ce qui me fait frémir. Tout ça je le sais. Il s’agit d’être radical. De savoir être radical. De choisir. D’aller chercher. Savoir rester heureux est vraiment un art— étrange d’ailleurs, vu que le monde a tellement à donner pour être heureux.

The AC in the train starts up again. There’s a helpfulness in the air today, like the summer doesn’t want to end, is sunny, and sea-like, glowing and streaked with clouds. But the movies are closed until September, and I don’t understand it. The coast has put on its best, I can tell, but doesn’t dare ask me to stay and I am ignoring it— going home. Never have I felt so invited to roam little Connecticut alone. But I am going back to my duties, sad-no smiling to the sun, as if I am an adult who truly must. How symbolically heart-ending if I were to sit inside today! I’ll go, no I will. I’ll take Natalie or no one but I will. You cultivate what you want to be, Caleb said it, we all agree— nothing has so clearly been that occasion for a good habit.

11.08.19

And we didn’t go to the beach in the end— we will, because we have a car now, but we have not yet. Instead we took the car to Lowe’s and the storage unit, and made a copy of the keys. I sat in the back seat with the sea in my hand like a toy I’d been told to be quiet with. Trent slid his hand over the wheel and he and Natalie held arms over the front seat like parents, in a way signaling to one another they’ve just felt affectionate, but must for now keep it seemly for the children. I take Natalie in, big eyes on her for long moments. Bare-chested Trent eating strawberries over a chair makes me stare. I want a moment with Nat alone (walking to the car, at home while errands are run by Trent and her mom) to raise the back of my hand up and point to my finger: the ring? As if to ask: how are you? How much of who you are with me can I still expect to see? And then, no matter the response, to say: alright, I’m glad.

12.08.19

The walk to work is always interesting. I face the sun both ways, cross like an accomplished idiot, stride as if to prove to the summer session students, and the tourists, and the construction workers, that this place is mine. The air is carpeted with the hum of HVAC and wired with cicadas, cool and rustling near the graveyard and parking-lot hot near the Whale. A painter camouflages a new building into the sky and an old man coughs on the steps of his house, wearing all red. New Haven calls for climate emergency, and for gun lessons, and for a twin pack of cigarettes (and of course, to Tax Yale). I am only a certain amount of native here.

13.08.19

Last night called for rain which came and stood, grey boots in the window at my awakening. Thanks to it now I am under the burbling skylight, wedged into the service stairs like a young délinquant, barefoot, sandal-tanned and flecked with black with but only waiting for my flats to dry. Donna Tartt narrates over me in alliterative phrases stuck there since high school English: “widow Dido,” “Popchik, Popchik.” She makes the packing of my lunch seem frantic. I am misted in parts and soaked in others. I contend with the parts of my commute I have the least affection for when they offer me shelter. Boring duties are renewed with care (I check my bag like a friend) and the umbrella surprises me with a watery caresse. The pour stops and starts in uncaring moods, while I marvel at the fleck of dry sand on my fingernail, as expertly dropped as a seagull’s bird shit.

Making food, spiked-seltzer drunk, feels like something I should be doing in my early twenties. Still in my shoes, not quite bumping into our move-in mess, navigating to the stove where my peppers are patiently cooking. Technically drinking alone, I suppose, although Nat and Trent are in the room next door. They’re as if teenagers had gotten married, playing locked-up video games, eating pop tarts and pop corn. I’m being mean, but still. Give me a friend other than myself to be arrogant and drunk with.

14.08.19

The day has felt like a skipping record. I sit with my shoes awkwardly up on the bar of the old geology classroom table where we have our lab meeting, legs apart, changing the position of my hands to look more like the men on the team. I’ve been wanting to project to them, and to convince myself, that I am confident, and unashamed of myself as a researcher. The flattened squamate skull Kelsey has been segmenting all summer spins evenly on the projection screen like a rainbow screensaver. “It took me a lot longer than I’d like to admit to figure out how to make it loop in PowerPoint,” she says, in the bored and awkward silence preceding Anjan’s arrival, “does anyone hear that ominous beeping noise?”

As the meeting goes on I feel bad for my cynicism. Anjan is helpful, and full of feeling; he kicks his voice into a fury about how the auditorium in the new science building will have no exhibits for modern research, only stupid, dead, drunkard white guys, dried out carrions in their graves whose work we refuse to shut up about. Pisses him off; he’ll go up and give them a piece of his mind. “How about you Alice?” eventually he turns as he does for each of us to ask about my progress, paused and attentive, a gooey ring of white exposed all around the iris. “That’s good!” I flicker my eyes around the room, unsure if I have ended my explanation. “If you’re working on vomeronasal projections you should look up nervus terminalus– nerve zero. It’s kind of an old theory, might be totally wrong but you never know. It’s worth looking up. Some of those old dudes tend to say more interesting things than some people in the field nowadays.”

I think back to the ominous beeping at the apartment, poked through my reading by the musical sting of Trent’s medieval strategy game a room away. He and Nat hadn’t realized I was home at first, and had cooed at one another in a way I knew I would only hear now as they would never do it around me again, and talked about how mushrooms tasted like cum, Trent explaining that he had, yes, sampled his own cum which is why he knew what it tasted like. I made myself coffee, which I never do, half milk and three spoons of sugar, feeling like a thief for taking from Nat’s Knick-knack teapot. Worse, I catch myself wanting a drink, in pathetic emulation of Theo’s own self-seriousness, the brooding, world-bereaved young man, for whom defensiveness is not only perfectly reasonable, but noble.

15.08.19

Jack, you came up in conversation with Nat. There’d been a build up to it all week, me thinking about morality and self-image, feelings of guilt, feelings of rancor. I sat on the couch, wrapped up into myself, furrowing my brow because I wanted to feel myself do it, wanted to put myself here, guilting profusely over every movement and word I said. I was too arrogant, didn’t notice when Nat stormed out that morning, I steered the conversation wrong (“how do you learn to do that right?” had asked Max) toward myself, or towards the wrong kind of comfort or advice or recognition, sloppy, really. Just sloppy, when you can be deft. And I thought about how guilty I felt for what I’d done to you I said, “if I forgive myself for what I did, then I am no better than him for forgiving himself, for absolving himself of the need to think of the pain he’s caused, and the pain he might cause in the future.” The difference, of course, and I don’t need a shrink to remind me, is that I need to hold us both to the same standard. That does not mean I’ll happily dismiss you to my advantage as deranged, or a dick, as you surely do me (I can almost hear it) but it does mean that I can expect for you to think on your behavior as much as I have mine, and when you do not (I have no way of confirming that you do) work accordingly. Same standard for you and I Jack— simple as that. For me and you and everyone else. Mix and match.

16.08.19

The next day I wake up thinking “let’s try impunity” and what an immediate delight. I walk and I see: GMC pickup, electric pole panel, security camera, parameter, when was this constructed? Are they working on Payne Whitney? Yale facilities vans have reference numbers. Brick patterns on the windows, tinted glass, where does this bus go? My voice picks up, I am un-embarrassed to speak, I listen to rap and move around the lab. I work. On the way back the air is breath-hot, and mercury light pushes out from behind the clouds in blingy prelude to a storm. I’ve selected a song of Lis’ that pulls my confidence all the way up through my spine, two gender-fucking voices, one slapping and modern, the other age-old and trilling.

17.08.19

I didn’t think I wanted to swim until my feet were in the water. Perhaps it is like weighted blankets and hugs that make you cry: being held never uses the front door of the mind. There is movement, my froggy propulsion through the water, and then there is the off-handed way the ocean sloshes to the shore with you still in it. I cannot conceive of the volume in any other way but the sea. Knowing what it is like to drown can change everything. Barnacle cuts are pink and radiant but impossible to feel, the opposite of paper cuts, which I suppose makes sense in more ways than one. I tie my ribbon around my hand like a tribal fisherman, hung up by all limbs in the water. I accost the dead skin on my heel. I speak and sing to myself. I do not notice the fog until it is in.

18.08.19

Shovel-fulls of visions arrested on their way to meaning. The day is jumpy and bored until. I am marvel-bound until I am talking, at which point I am stringing conversation and looking at your tattoos. Your eyes are clear, like lemon beer. The walls flake, and your photographs are grainy with dark, looking for fish in the deep. A sense of light, an understanding not semantic. A re-wiring. I climb and make, I sit in your smoke, I show the different angle which is absurd and funny, makes us tiny toys. You are from Moldova, I have to remember. I hold your hand on the backseat. You were talking yesterday about the moving holes of LSD.

19.08.19

The sequence of the day has seemed completely natural— something a hobbit would set their watch to from the porch, looking out into the turning of the world. Chris was around, and will be for the next few days since his New York conference got cancelled. We both understood the afternoon so well before carrying it out: we would both get chai lattes and bump around the Willoughby's unembarrassed when our orders get messed up, say we should “make the usual walk to the Div school” and stop to sit in a tree by the observatory, perch in the stormy wind like two academic birds in the Marsh Hall belfry, and chat about efficiency, and language, and morality. At work, it storms. I pack up to walk home some half hour after the rain and head to Stop and Shop in the gold-dripping postdiluvian afternoon: an excuse to see a neighborhood that isn’t mine, where streets fan out into the unknown, sparse with people and rife with churches, a zone I’ve not yet added to my mental map. I buy bread, hair ties for my roommate, “nice” jam for the other, slot them in my technicolor backpack, and glide home on the sound of crickets and seagulls beaming through the limpid air.

20.08.19

I’ve decided not to go to work (Laurel hasn’t asked for me, I’ve figured out the extraction problem on my own, I’m getting lunch with Chris and Julia near the med school, I’m not even getting paid anymore, I have other things to do, and if she needs me she can just text). The only thing I’ll be missing is the chill of the lab, without which we are faced with an unclenching strip of hot, humid weather than I scroll across the weather app on my phone. The apartment is still as whispery as a wood: spoon tinkling once against my chosen mug of tea, Trent or Natalie taking a rising sip from the vape pen, mindlessly clicking at a video game, against the faraway in-and-out of chittering cicadas.

21.08.19

Around 1:30am we left Viva’s and dropped Jenna off with her three-year-faithful, less-successful-than-her boyfriend (Andrew? It would be weird if Chris slept over with him walking around the one bedroom apartment in the morning) but the rest of us had other prospects. I guarded Christina like a puffed bird while she changed in the trunk of the car from a black striped shirt to a black striped sweater, and helped list the roofs in the area. I could do Dwight, Kris had the password to the Howe Street roof, and Cameron still technically had keys to the whole building, but their first suggestion had already taken it: the creepy, stony walls of St Lawrence Cemetery mausoleum.

Next, drinks: I had half a bottle of mango-nectar orange juice in the fridge, and a flask of vodka that’d last been used at dinner on Friday for one of Christina’s mosquito bites. Nat and Trent had moved in with a dreg of Maker's Mark, which was waiting on the kitchen counter, and Kris, of course, had more vodka at home. Halfway out of the apartment, waiting for Natalie to get dressed and join us, I couldn’t help but laugh at our situation: we’d pulled into the parking lot like a bunch of gangsters, crouched over the giant electric fan in the back seat, Kris smoking and blasting some dark, full, floor-of-the-mind Witchhaus for the entire tenement to hear. We were making things exactly as we wanted them, speeding off onto a road that was empty and ours with the arrogance of a Neo-Tokyo biker gang.

Campus, which had felt like a kingdom until yesterday, has been retaken without a breath of effort. The air smells like a firecracker, and the dorms like shoe-box houses. People have started partying, and practicing, and working, as if they had spawned there already in the act.

22.08.19

I am drunk and sober enough to write. We are magnificent tonight, you would see it. Our kisses barely hold back— I kiss Kris on her rough, shorn head, I rasp at her slenderness, the meeting angle of smile and cheek, I kiss Keduse on his good man’s t-shirt, on his Egyptian locks, the enamored look in his eyes and hands, I kiss Cameron with hands around the waist, into bony rebellion, hated and going, spirit that knows me in a pair, dyed hair.

And for those who are not with us, I have planted a kiss on your neck— feed me more alcohol. For those who are too lost to stay— you are guiding yourself, and we are here waiting. For those who are trying us, getting their feel— our love extends to you too. We are the city, that much I can tell. She is in the blinking foreign, she is in the dollhouse lights, she is in the streets of police and the things out of their sight. The drug dealer, the broke, the roped-up nervous boy, and those who’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to look for.

She is the stage for us, the in between. She knows I see her— she is the mint I bring to my lips with inexpressible longing: wilderness of love. I cannot smell it without knowing it exists. After all, she is here: kiss them, she says, for I cannot quite do it in a way they will understand. Dutifully I do, and imagine hers, smiling sadly, pearled horizon, born dressed. I will miss you, Christ! God I will miss you! How much I owe, and this fantastic longing, it stands for all the rest of it! What tender love I will feel until I am torn from this.

#creative writing #daily wriiting

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possibly-meaningless · 6 years ago

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Dailies - France

19.06.19

I feel myself travelled through by something flammable, down the mouth, but not ignited. I remember knowing that I was drilling my eyes next to her plate, and hearing only what I allowed myself to hear. “The desire to be needed?” I did the dishes like a murderer washes their hands, put up the laundry like a sociopath smiles. In the morning, the sky is gray and I cannot read.

20.06.19

An especially specific thing to do with a three year interval, participate in a study. I’m healthy enough that hospitals are a fascination. I ask about the make of the machines, and what work in the unit is like, about the roof gardens and the validity of measuring BMI. When I wrote about being picked up from a hospital by Akira Touya, I did not know how to say it. Now I am different than fourteen, and could tell you how these rooms are made, and look up who might be allowed to pick me up at all.

It was misty too that freshman year, I remember it more like myself than anything else from that time. Funny that, once again and exactly, I ordered the salmon, and noticed the drum flourish of the MRI scan, turned at the incongruous smell of the hallway cafeteria. I suppose this just means that I am still myself, in a way separate from the certainties I have and how I feel, that my eyes and senses are still the same as those that worried on the dirty floors of our Bingham suite. Or at least that they are enough like all human eyes that not much would have changed anyway.

Le musée par contre, c’est différent. On peut y aller pour pleurer. Je rejoins Millet sous le ciel et je déborde d’amour, mais j'oublierai les noms des impressionnistes, comme d’habitude.

21.06.19

I am preparing myself to go home, weighing the luggage of my person. I am practicing retorts to catcalls in my own language. I will leave the house on Sundays. I have stopped paying attention to New Haven. There is a transitory phase.

22.06.19

Retourner est comme une obligation. J’échange mes inventions du livre comme une exercise. Thumb the blue house of New Haven between the cracks of my phone. Je sens le pli de l’inquiétude dans mon sourcil, et je sais que ma prose en anglais est longue comme du français, l’as toujours été. Je retourne vers les femmes-mères de ma vie, les femmes-famille qui se marient, et laisse derrière moi les ébauches de mes femmes-amour.

23.06.19

I wonder how long I will last being happy to be home. With some grit, until the end. Right now, I have no reason to doubt it. Our candles match the pool chairs, the avocado the grapefruit salad, the water the sky. Children on the plane ask a million good questions, my mother reminisces that that is exactly how I was, I hope that is how I have remained. I look at my cat and think no wonder the Egyptians worshipped you, perfect thing, little piece of god, scarab-sniffer. I’m glad to be back.

24.06.19

Ça commence bien avec Marie. Maman me regarde dans mon costume masculin depuis le fauteuil et ne sourit pas. Elle veut bien, je fais ce que je veux, mais elle ne sourit pas. Marie me demande si je suis “entièrement lesbienne.”

25.06.19

Getting home and dropping into the pool is the kind of thing maharaja’s son does. I take the long way home. Eating fruit here is so much better. I forget my mosquito bites. The women on the metro are, god. Something about it. I smell the air deeply. I think how I would hold Eda’s face if she were here sitting on the banquette next to me, I grip the head of my hat, the woman’s bag on her lap looks like a stomach, I talk about Adrian’s sectioned jaw, Marie’s friend is studying to be a nurse, bonne maman is the eldest child who did not run away she said of earrings “there are things you have to get used to. I got used to my husband, thank God.”

26.06.19

The weather is an occasion for us all to wear sweat. Some things get especially sticky, like the kitchen table, and my computer charger. Everyday utilities gain the properties of an oven. We migrate out of our beds and into the ground for the night. I feel I deserve to live only in the morning, when the air is cool and clear like the first bite from a fruit.

27.06.19

Une brise clémente détend le cimetière du Père Lachaise. Comme les corbeaux je pends mon cou le bec ouvert, et je me crois intime avec les morts. Je verse la larme d’une femme dont le mari et la fille sont morts il y a cent cinquante ans. Les sépulcres sont C.A.P. Faire corps avec l’histoire plutôt que le présent est quelque chose que je dois aux BDs en partie. Adèle Blanc Sec, Corto le faisaient, et leurs auteurs... un cimetière n’est jamais une mauvaise idée, à New Haven non plus, certains coins se recoupent avec celui de la Côte-Saint-André, ca se sent à leur odeur. Un vent clément détend le cimetière du Père Lachaise.

28.06.19

Paris drunk is not the same as New York drunk is not the same as Paris drunk is not the same as New Haven drunk. New Haven drunk has the weight of all my questions in it: whose weight do I want on mine, what kind of love will I accept? Paris drunk has all my answers: not yours, not yours. Even if you are very polite, and you scout out mines on a ship of 26 for the government « secret defense » you are getting off here and I am not giving you my Facebook contact.

29.06.19

Grotte musée, j’en fais l’usage convenu, les yeux humainement levées dans la pénombre, je somnole dans l’abri indéniable. Et en le pensant je m’écorche sur les mots d’hier, peur très peur de l’arrogance. But what of it? If I were a man, I would have no qualms in seeing myself like Picasso saw himself, megalithic, and right, the figure-man in his cave.

Une nostalgie infinie pour la main sur le bois, sur l’os, les salles de cinéma où on s’enfouit, la poussière et le sable, le geste comme l’insecte, l’artiste qui pense, et comme tout au final se ressemble un peu, toujours.

30.06.19

Punition pour ne pas avoir écrit: un rêve qui me détruit.

01.07.19

Compliqué de décrire ce que c’est de parler à quelqu’un derrière un clavier. Grey et moi parlons dans un monde baignée de leur odeur orange, un soleil américain, le ton de la voix surgit des détails du textes, et du choix des mots. Je ris tout haut, oui je vous jure. Et avec Claire c’est l’argent, le violet, c’est une voix qui est comme grave même si je la sais aiguë.

Je peins n’importe comment, mais je peins.

02.07.19

Si je rate, j’écrirai

03.07.19

The idea I have of the metro north when I am away from it is just of a yellow line zipping down a glittering sea. Not much of that is true to what you see (red seats and yellow floors, complications regarding what you are eating or will eat, and who will take you where and how) but of the experience that is it: I am zipping down on an eyeless snake, and the light is always golden.

04.07.19

I haven’t found a way to describe this sky that isn’t electric blue. The air from the window feels like a classroom fan blowing on just some of the leg, someone across the street it seems is eating at a table alone, in an apartment being painted auburn, but I cannot see clearly through the balcony. I keep getting these feelings, dredged up like photographs of a childhood moment, and that way of seeing the world seems so much less complacent than how I currently see it. Not that I am unhappy now, or inattentive, but perhaps feeling for children is more, stronger, stringent and my mind has mellowed to a hum. Feel strongly, think right. Feel strongly.

05.07.19

You got up too late again. You eat like you’re choking and there’s something missing from your movements but licking the spoon of jam clean is the same as many times before bitter on exactly the same parts of your tongue, and reminds you what awakeness can be.

At the section of light before the airplane door all the colors are bouncing out: the raspberry pink of a woman’s dress, the orange chitin of the plane, the misalignment of the pilot’s teeth. Baldwin’s words are still in my head, categoric.

We pass by clouds that look sculpted by a frantic hand which still had in its terrorized tendons, all of herds crossing a path, broccoli and cloaked monks, a monstrous overgrowth of cotton on the stem, the photo-perfect disposition in ranges of mountains as if for a family photo, all of these, behemoths in flight, animals the size of maps, on which you find your way from the relief, shielding your eyes, and in this, smaller yet, I think of Claire’s Leviathans coming often to this playground, so tiny that they would need to shine like pin-prick mirrors to be seen at all.

06.07.19

Il fait gris ce matin. Poppy doit être en train de flipper. Je rythme des sabots au pas est quelque chose auquel on n’est plus habitué. Si je voulais l’écrire il faudrait le décrire plutôt que d’avoir confiance de le trouver dans un esprit ka-pok ka-pok ka-pok. On s’extirpe d’une région sonore à l’autre, oiseaux, grillons, cloche d’église. Je partage le hamac avec deux mouches et au final je vais quand même choper un coup de soleil.

Moment cinématique de la soirée: je m’éloigne de la fête pour regarder l’horizon violet hors du terrain de lumière. Le DJ, fils du propriétaire, pas clairement fille ou garçon au premier coup d’œil, est assis et nous regarde comme le personnage principal fumant, le misanthrope magnifique.

La grande tente a attrapé un frelon. Tout le long du repas on le trouve toujours là, changée à peine de coin. J’y vois un mauvais augure, chiante que je suis.

07.07.19

Fantasy maps tend to be like bowls: a valley of the known hugged into certainty by mountains. I was seated, slouched and film-able, in monoliths

The gravel driveway, too, was a circle of light. Darkness waited at the gate, knowing itself to be charming, and did not speak to me.

The fact I was well dressed matters. All that femininity can be, staring like only jaded men who know they are of adventure’s mettle, out the lip of this great shivering bowl.

08.07.19

Mon impression de la Poyat est comme rayée. Je sens les choses une fois (l’eau de la piscine qui monte au nez, le hall de la maison en odeur de béton et de carrelage, les pages de livres pour enfants qui s’affinent et jaunissent comme la peau d’un rat âgé) puis, plus rien. La musique de mon telephone est une petite voix microscopique sur ma couverture. Les personnes âgées parlent de la maladie comme de plans de vacance. Mes cheveux sont rêches, je ferme les yeux et je vois une forêt noire aux troncs nus et propres.

09.07.19

I’d like to think all of us do this, go up to the attic to sit on the side of the bed and look at Stephane, photo paper stare phasing through our own which traces smile-crinkled eyes and heavy eyebrows, a fringe which would certainly have disappeared by now. I wonder if that is what cuts through my mother’s mind: what he would have looked like now, where he would hang in the house instead of like a funeral mask on a wall of the attic, what it would have looked like to see his face next to ours rather than in them.

10.07.19

La lune est à Demi dans le ciel poudré, je trimballe avec moi une boîte chantante, le chat est là, mais je me teins les mains comme un ancêtre avec des baies mauves. Le ciel n’as jamais été le nôtre, nous n’avons fait que grouiller dessous, heurtés toujours par les mêmes choses: l’eau, l’odeur de viande cuite, la capacité à peindre nos corps, à se sentir être là. On s’entoure de nos créations dans un jardin en perpétuelle construction, mais le ciel n’as jamais été le nôtre.

11.07.19

Le soleil me cuit lentement, et miroite à grandes volées sur la plaine. La peau rougit comme une question posée, répond du doigt pressé comme un photon sur la rétine.

12.07.19

Media is the perfect litmus test for maturity. I watched Breaking Bad having honestly no idea how to follow, what meant what, what was real and what was fanciful, how adults act in hospitals, at work, at home... now I’m an inside interpreter, more or less, I’m keeping track of the script. It’s funny to see Adrien make these assessments, I have no way to tell if they correlate to understanding. It’s like when we trap a wasp under a glass and he asks “do you think it knows it’s under glass?” and I tell him there’s no real way for us to know: our best bets would either be observations of its anatomical function, or tested behavioral response, but the proof that it can conceptualize as we do, that we will never have.

13.07.19

There’s a cat in heat outside. I have my period. I told my grandmother that no one I was sleeping with had the ability to make me pregnant. I say to Max and Adrian “that’s why it’s easy to substitute the idea of entropy for the idea of death, and life for what goes against entropy.” I wear the bathing suit that hides my body the most. I wear a white dress and a pad. I tell them “wait, I’m going to change my mood.” I don’t want to fold napkins with you old women. I want to write about religion and autonomy and women who are in love and make the case for complexity and the risk in having a conscious mind. I’m wrong in thinking these activities preclude one another. I try to think through clamorous music. I want to hit myself to accompany the fact that I cannot be a student of every subject. I want to stay up and write. I will likely fall asleep.

14.07.19

Il n’y a que le quatorze juillet où l’on se surprend à être dehors en robe d’été alors qu’il a commencé à faire réellement frais. Le vent est aussi inutile que les foulards que l’on se pose sur les jambes. Le chat passe, oui gris. Et le feu d’artifice on l’a déjà vu. Ce qu’on remarque peu c’est le rouge attrapé par le ventre du nuage, et la lune qui nous regarde, la nuit qui fuit volontiers à nos yeux tous les soirs, et nous qui si rarement nous éloignons de nos propres lumières.

15.07.19

On s'arrête au long de la ligne, une excroissance routière où les camionneurs passent leurs vies. Petit royaume tout de même, j’y trouve l’abandonné (un terrain de basket), l’explorable (échelle de la station service), l’histoire (coquilles d'oeufs durs, rib blanchi) et une colline d’où tout voir. Les champs, comme toute surface vue de si près, restent infinis. Ils sont disponibles pour s’y perdre, même si ça ne se fait plus beaucoup. Et moi, mon humeur j’en veux bien: je chante comme jamais.

16.07.19

I refuse to tear the weeds out of fear they might be saplings. The stem is too tender not to feel like murder. So it is perhaps with my crying teenage self, who I let possess me, out of fear she had not lived as she deserves.

17.07.19

Lever les yeux dans le métro pour voir les yeux d’un acteur se baisser. Toucher pleinement l’arme flic à Opera. Cette ville que je croyais me scruter à présent c’est moi qui la tourne, mes yeux sur la foule qui danse, et moi dedans. C’est avec Jack que j’y danse, c’est mon visage qui s’ouvre sur la porte de la pharmacie. J’ai la dépose d’un gamin et du lévrier sur la scène, le regard qui ne se rompt pas. Les miroirs, j’y suis, je porte un costume d’esprit. La ville, c’est moi qui l’aime. Je suis acteur, j’ai vue sur la scène.

18.07.19

It’s late, and I’m making use of a moment of outsider eyes I’m being granted by rereading my own writing, my site’s curation. I test my mouth, considered cutting into my tongue to speak more slowly, comment on deep voices, try on a beard. I lean into the mirror and try “I’m gonna fucking kill you.” I draw looks on and off my face. I wonder if I will ever be depressed again (which would mean I have learned nothing). I consider feelings had weeks ago, picking them up and examining them. I dreaded going back, now I dread going home. I wonder if I can be depressed again. I can do things like love Jesse, although not quite the same. I suppose it’s up to me.

19.07.19

The man in Saint Eustache I suppose he is praying, knee-leaning, alone-eveninged, humbly day-rumpled. He is as serious, as husky as the nave-drawn lights, gold folding on skinny shadow. He sighs, or at least it is as if he does. He has as much to say as the church’s Igor, the Latin mass, but as incense he says none of it.

When I pray, because I do pray in holy-water-sampling, pretty-moved, starwards-gazed and history-guessing, it is not for the lovely waitress and the kir, not for my mother counting change, my grandmother and her therapist, the piss and cracker on the street, the fire set to oil or the motorcycle-kicking kid, the woman stroller-helped over over the fence. It is for nothing if my own wonderment, if for the light itself.

20.07.19

The day I leave the weather is unbearably pleasant. The wind is the kind you personify on the mosaics of a villa-home, passing low to bless the living. You are the kind of hand awoken by a clean damp cloth. And the day I go home, the shower-fawn is still there yes, her color has changed with the towel behind the tile. Storm coming like an undertow.

21.07.19

The more I think of it, I haven’t landed in America, idea of itself as a loud city and wide upset nature, America thing, but home, my home in a different kind of air to breathe. I’ve returned to the place I named myself, the place that saw me different, the beast I saw insane across the valley and touched of my own knowledge-less hand. America has kept a piece of me in it, more than the other way around, more perhaps than good old continent.

Through the windows of the Whitney the world itself is diegetic. Circle ‘round or stare through, the wind is installed for now, I placed this tarp just here, ordered the leaves and printed the sky. Can you tell what it is I wanted to make? What the making of it was like? Take care how you look at it, or you’ll be missing out.

I want to be with you, lullaby-flat, baby-funny, rub-the-face. There’s no shame, no shame at all, when tenderness is in the game— if the note is soft and so is your skin, why in the world should it matter what we listen to, what we look like? We’re children, monkeys, old ladies with Alzheimer all at once, we paw and glance and try the world in our hand— hold me won’t you? It just seems it’d make sense.

22.07.19

Everyone in my part of the train is sleeping. The Paleocene outdoors barely watches us go. A strange world is better than one I should get. Storms are uncertainty I’ve come to adore. I’ll go get the mattress, I’ll call up a friend, eat something untimely from the fridge or the table. We are hacking through tropics up to alien machines, weirder and weird but delightful.

#creative writing

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