"My love language is trying," I find myself saying. Mis en place. I made a new pine needle coaster when I realized a boy was coming over for lunch one day and I had only one for myself. He didn't stay long. I looked at the pine cone coaster foolishly around that time. Such gaudy excess. You eat at the table, then move to the couch. Then you are watching a movie and not talking. I haven't got to that stage. We give up before then. Before a show can begin.

Alt text: as generated by Chat GPT: A bearded man wearing a black hoodie and a baseball cap with "Evans Fabrication" embroidered on it smiles warmly at the camera. He is seated at a desk, hands resting near a large amethyst crystal surrounded by small, flickering LED candles. A ruler and a pen are also visible on the desk. In the top right corner, a small video call window shows another person with blonde hair tied up in a bun, leaning over a notebook. The background is a simple office or workshop setting with a whiteboard or bulletin board partially visible behind him.

Alt text: as generated by me: "I bet you're hating the lighting in here," Tyler says.
"Nahhh!" I protest, looking around the harshly lit space. Overhead lights. What Liz Lemon would call "grocery store lights," that make everyone look terrible like one "just got out of the ocean in a 1700s painting."
We talk about the time we used to face-time during out distance courtship and within a month I installed a lamp by his desk.
"Here, this'll make it better."
The phone camera goes Blair Witch Style as he collects electronic tealights and an amethyst crystal.
"I feel like this face-time is going to start costing me $10 a minute when you start divining my fate."

Who am I to wear the golden dress and dance with the king?
Torn from the pages of "Leaving my Father's House," a psychoanalytic testimonial of three women assessing their role in the patriarchy, the line is teased from the story Allerleirauh, a tale of thinly disguised incest where a princess wears three gowns to impress the king.

There's a kind of magic at a thrift-store, it's where the good lord sends me my short-term romantic omens. Which is to say, if I can find the dress, I can imagine the date, and from the date will come the love.

And from love will come..

I often leave buying nothing. God won't speak to me.

Or the omen portends loneliness.
It is always just a chance.

The perfect dress and they'll never leave..

It has been the same story again and again this winter.

When I brought up being a deeply flawed human incapable of attracting a long-term relationship, my therapist said, "What if it's not about some deep, unfixable flaw? What if it's about patterns - learned ways of relating and, of protecting yourself, or reacting to closeness? Patterns aren't flaws. They're just grooves we fall into because they feel familiar, even when they don't serve us."

Around this time, in this part of the cycle, I realize I like someone.

And I realize I can't be cute anymore.
I realize I have to be a person, and exist in a third-dimension.

It's that feeling of rounding the curve of the body with your palms, just enough to time to have soaked in some broad and minute details. Enough to time to know you want to stay around awhile, and then the uncertainty that follows that realization.

Asking isn't cute. I've done it twice with bad results.

My therapist will say, "Love isn't just this thing that happens to some and not others, like a lottery. It's a living, growing thing, shaped by connection, timing, and choices of two people. And the fact that you want love - real, enduring love - means you are capable of it. People who are 'too much' for the wrong ones are everything for the right ones."

So I look for the dress. To dance for the king. But moreso, the dress that can shape itself into all the versions of me I hold inside.

We're watching Love is Blind and I start to fast-forward through all the second/third date conversations.

They're so boring.
They're always so boring.

Everyone so shocked another person values God and Family and eating and Nespresso and new patio furniture every summer.

But just now I realized maybe I'm scared of being bored. I'm scared of what comes after getting-to-know, fun facts, caught up on the lore. 

You can never know all the lore.
But sometimes we stop asking questions.

Maybe my fear isn't whether the dress is dynamic enough to attract and soak in, but a fear of when a dress loses it's magic. Maybe I'm afraid of not being magic anymore. Existing third-dimension. An
d god forbid a fourth.

There is this purple dress I haven't worn yet.

It's a spray tan and patio kind of thing. It's cava and oysters and two full of months so maybe in May after stuff has come up and we've gone through, and around and things have gotten a little complicated but we're moving our pawns forward.

Still scheming. The things we've come to love outweigh the fear that once paralyzed us.

And fuck the king, but not the dress.
And god save the person who is willing to dance.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5aS6eku2Klhl8k2VYnE5cd?si=0ba88a9a0ea949d7

Having to play the friendly-reminder game.
You're fine. You're going to be fine. We are sitting in a chair, not tarrying near a cliff.
The full moon yawn, beacon in the South waking me up through your curtainless window. A car drove by and you raised the blanket to block my eyes.
Why this energy comes, I'll never exactly know. There are no tigers to fight. No cave to hunker in waiting for the storm to pass. The children are fed. You cross yourself in vain.
Yet it comes. Venus blazoned in the sky watching, Mercury to follow soon. Perhaps it's the scrutiny which makes my nerves pace.
Last night I set them all to bed, seeing who was awake gazing at the ceiling. A kind of Madeleine orphanage of parts. None stirred, but none slept. Pious. They knew there was nothing to be done. Nothing to make it better. Nothing to say or analyze or weigh or consider. They just had to lay down.
Why must it be this way?
Nothing to eat or drink. Just through. Nothing I can write or say, or that anyone can say to me at this point. My mind becomes feral and we must all be patient. We must all let it run it's cycles among the hills. Sow its oats.

To get on the record that Caitlin and I came up with the concept together. That it doesn't belong to me. That it's rooted in the idea others can borrow. That it's not mine. That it's a divestment from social media. That it's a response to the misaligned values of platforms that connect us. That we want to take our voices and content away from that power.

Things I use social media for:

Stay connected to my friends and strangers who I admire
Current events
Current opinions on current events
Keeping a finger on the pulse of social events
Sharing what I'm doing
Wielding it as a tool to control my narrative as a cute creative
Announcing workshops/commission opportunities
Monitoring social status/influence
A continuous tether to social movements
Contact with the way language is changing
Keeping up-to-date with trends
Inspiration
To suck up the times when I don't know what else to do and simply doomscoll

Tools I will use to meet these needs outside of social media:

Fliers, bulletin board, the free weeklys for mainstream local social events
Relying on friends in the network to let me know
Newspapers, magazines, (New York Times, New Yorker Magazine) for current events and trends. I only ever read captions and headlines anyway. How hard can it be to flip through the New Yorker at the library once a week like I caught Josh doing once?
Defining myself by some other metric than overshares. Most likely a trust fall but also this blog, this website, little guerilla projects
Cindy Crabb wrote "Creating a visible public presence" as a means to cultivate a shitty little town into a punk rock town and I coudn't agree more. "Posters, flyers, graffiti, public art. Nothing is more depressing that a town with punks that just post on the internet, nothing is better than walking around a shitty town and finding an Anarchy sign spray painted behind a grocery store." Also Cindy Crabb says more in one fucking sentence than I could in an entire book.
Graphic novels from the libary to suck up the idle time. I also have Josh James' zine on my bedside and other books I've picked up weird places.

It's like I can never open the window wide enough. With my eyes I vacuum up every little shred of light. Continuing to tuck myself into the nook of my phone. The endless rooms of an ever extending mansion. To be connected. To be part of something. And to participate in that thing. The place to curate a perfect home, despite all the plugs. We don't even see the advertisements anymore? They're part of it at this point.

Joe today, on the couch. Less nervous that before. Both of us. Mad with a kind of desperate fire. Eating messy greasy tacos I made.

Crafting the recipe for the perfect tortillas.

Step one: End the federally funded terrorism at the border.
Step two: End the continuous threat of violence and deportation of white nationalism
Step three: Amalgamate as a society. Learn Spanish to fluency. Have an integrated friend group.
Step four: Then you will make the perfect tortillas. Because someone will teach you.

The protest. Honking horns. A woman yelling out "HONK ONCE FOR TACOS AND TWICE FOR TAMALES" and just laying it on. And then just wanting to puke they had to be there in the first place, being brave, deserving so much more than the bullshit they've been handed. I'm reminded this is irl.
In the screen: The man in the PTA meeting talking about his son crying after school from racial-based bullying. The white dad saying "then why'd you come?" and everyone screaming him down.

How many of these glimpses shape my reality? What will happen when I "see less"?

Not everything is for you to sieve through your main character syndrome Rachie (that's what Joe calls me). What you see is what you're meant to see. What you're meant to know will find you, whether you're looking out the iphone window or the real window.

Opening the window wide enough. Closing the other one.

Listening: "Montage (feat. Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe) Radio" from Swiss Army Man
Listening: Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley