Looking through the photos on my phone, you'd think I never look up.
This one is borrowed. A stolen sunset. Tyler sent it to me, maybe a year ago. Maybe farther back.
But I'm not thinking of sunsets. I'm thinking of girls.
There has always been Rachels, there has always been Kellys.  Nellas. Esmes. Hannas.
It's the unfortunate state of the matriarchy we find ourselves in. Compromised. Working in cycles on limited resources.
I do look up, but not with my phone. And it's not something I know how to share. It's not something I have context for.
Spaces. Vast spaces.
I can examine what's close. What I can hold in my hands, in my arms. I don't know what to do with the length of miles between here and there. I don't know what it means. It it makes me feel dumb.

I don't want to compete. I don't want to fight. I don't want anyone to go home alone.

I examine things I've brought in from the walk: a damp headlamp, a stick, pine needles. They are laid out on the table. Treasures. Things don't stay for long. Clutter happens easily in a small house. I'm a gnome in this way, though more of a halfling. "By going far; my looks leash.." Sylvia Plath.
I'd rather have the world before me within 12 inches of my face.
A phone, a laptop, a book, some objects I must organize.

These cycles are exhausting. Man chasing cycles. Man winning cycles. Dancing to be desired. Doing the tricks to be noticed. My phone fell in the chili soaking pot this afternoon. I was filming myself wearing a space helmet full of flowers. The phone was leaned against some books on the kitchen altar. It fell right into the sink and I fished it out, greasy. Wet. It seems fine, but won't charge.

The space between my phone and I is making me deliberate my simple existence. It's not much space, but it's enough.
I can't stop thinking of the Year of the Rabbit, a 12 year cycle. I'm thinking of the dissolution of Esme's marriage to James Ryan around this time. Esme's and I meeting at her birthday in March. Meeting James Ryan at the Easter party over bike croquette. That ensuring summer in that house. Thunderstorm running with Boy Casey. Having my heart shredded by my own stupidity, friendships rise and erode. I had birthed myself again the following Spring but never let myself feel that way again. It was so stupid. I beat the shit out of myself for trusting anyone during that time. For showing softness in any way. For being anything but sharp and aware and angry.

And I feel better now. 2022 was a good year. I was in love and someone loved me back and we had said it. And then I found I loved myself more and left and that felt good too. There was balance in the year of the Tiger. There was healing. There was softening. There were female relationships unmarred by betrayal and pain. There were male friendships that were romantic but nonsexual. 

The question in the cycle is, did you learn? Can you stay soft? Can you see the prophecy of betrayal and love anyway? Can you see the omens in the migration patterns, the way the leaves grip the inside of the tea cup, the writing on the walls, the cards on the shawl and say, "I learned. I can do better."

It's one of those emotional hangover days.
Last night, talking to Tyler, him working on his ego death, encouraging me to meditate.
"You're not your thoughts."
I'm not sold on meditation. I like working. I like moving. I like crafting. I like emotional richness. Messiness. He's doing his thing. I told him about the psychic biome, vibe basically. He's been working on his. I'm not one for deprivation, unless it's fasting. I like going with the flow, being in league with the Divine. I like getting caught up and pulled along or run alongside. I don't want to make a ton of choices. I don't want to blame myself for too much when things go awry.
They always go awry.
I'm going with the flow, I'm staying calm. My ego is my homebase. I don't understand the ego death. I am buoyed by my memories. I define myself by many things and those definitions are foundational. I define myself by my relationships. I define myself by looking in the mirror a thousand times a day.
I was reading the Ram Daas Be Here Now writer's LSD caused ego death.
"What a luxury," I had thought. I couldn't get excited. A man giving up everything in a world that doesn't threaten his existence. What brave. How courage.
I told Tyler about last year's experimentation in meditation and how I'd be in conversations with nothing to say. I was so fucking boring. The usual cadence I could bring into social scenarios was gone. I just listened, was present, and it wasn't interesting or helpful to the person I was attempting to connect with. Maybe relinquishing that responsibility and seeing what's beyond that is the purpose. 
Yet here I am a cacophony of invasive manic repetitive thoughts that feel like music playing in three different rooms. I'm going after myself, unpacking how I showed up in the last few days, examining the dip in my approval ratings. Realizing how on edge so much of the time, vibrating so fast. I found myself just making shit up when I'd speak out loud sourcing information from a unthethered disconnected self. I just wanted to play the role everyone wanted me to play because when I played my own part it was so gross.
I'm never doing enough. It will never be enough. I need to draw back. Accept the not enoughness and sleep for three days. Really disappoint. Withdraw.
I think that's the thing about the ego I can examine critically. It's need for outcome, it's wish for continuous approval. Validation. I could do without. I could have this time of free to recoup the extensions. Pull back. Gather my personal power back into my arms. Reclaim. Try not to spend the time in memory during these states..
Maybe all that's a nudge to meditate I guess. Random.
Or rest. Read. Lay around. Not make plans. Stop lying.
*deep sigh*

The way the light comes in, right before solstice, it cuts.

Horizon skirting, a broad brimmed hat won't keep it out. Dust particles in the air, every grit on surfaces cast shadows revealing the delusion of cleanliness. The space around us full of particulates, the air in the Kokiri Forest village. Full of magic, swirling. You can see someone move through the space, the magic opening up for them. Perhaps catch ghosts this way.
Even though there is less light in the day everything is revealed.

I almost texted Tyler the other day, "I never miss you. I always feel connected."
We go awhile without talking, then we have some back-and-forth.

Glorified pen-pals is what I've been calling it. These identifiers are important. These labels are important. It's important for me to be creative. I'm trying to escape the mundane, but we need to communicate. I tossed around the word soulmate today. It fit in the way it was nebulous, not beholden to physical proximity. Idealized. That didn't seem fair.

Along the margins of the dance floor I watched E figure her place out in the world. She was in her body, yet her body was also forming questions and answering them.
"Are we ok?" it asked, "Yes," it responded.
Over and over.
"It" being the non-gendered objectified third person between her fears and her reassurance. A somatic entity. An elder.  Internal counsel.
"Stay calm."
Her lover danced with another lover. And she was working through her feelings. She was hurt, and the pangs came over her again and again. She wasn't openly retracting though maybe she had wanted to.
"Yes."
Remain open.
Keep moving.
Her lover danced with another lover. Her lover danced with her. Her lover danced alone. She danced alone. Her lover danced with another lover. She danced with her lover. She danced alone. He danced alone. His lover danced with him. His lover danced alone. He danced alone. She danced alone. She danced with him. She danced alone. He danced with his lover. He danced alone. His lover danced with another. She danced with him. He danced with her. She danced alone. She came up to me, "I'm leaving." She smiled. "Bye," I said.

Love is a contract. It's a feeling. It's an agreement. It can be put into writing. Sometimes I want to put it into writing. Put all the words down. All the mess of words. Made up words. Real words. Maybe some words sit between asterisks because they are movements. Maybe it can all be explained in movements.

She was free, that was their agreement. She was free and he was free. They gave this to each other, the freedom to love other people. To be with other people. It was a very important agreement. But it wasn't always easy. It was very tricky. A thing that probably can't be put into words.

I remember being in bed with B and K. He had played a show the night before. I knew they were being cute, a term I use that means kissing/fucking without clear definitions.
Being cute is a contract, an agreement. I think using diminutive terms is important in these labels. Girlfriend/Boyfriend. Kissing friend.
I had wanted to be cute too, so we had all slept in my bed. Nothing happened, just sleeping I mean. In the morning I made coffee. Because they were in a place of being cute it wasn't my time to be cute.

It's tricky. B had been careful about that balance. I knew he had been in a weird position. We all played our cards close. We didn't need words.

I danced around some pang. I wanted to be distracted by E working through her questions. But in my own cyclone of movement, I had my own questions to answer. The questions were basically the same. 

We exist in relation to one another. I read that our sense of self has been defined beyond our body. Our sense of self is in our space, direct and distant. I think of dusty copies of my zine existing in strange corners of the world. I think of the cooling tea on the kitchen counter. All humming with a semblance of self. The way the dust parts as I walk through it, the vacuum behind me. All transient. All in various stages of entropy. Possible growth. We exist so we shape. It's like that Octavia Butler bit,
"All the you touch
You change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth is Change.
God is Change."

The light cuts in sideways, revealing every choice. Every nuanced crumb on the countertop.
Maybe it's cold so we move like molasses.
We can't move quickly. We must be methodical. There's also an element of survival in our movement. Be careful. It is winter. We walk carefully on ice. We move carefully with one another's feelings.
"Are you ok?"
"Yes."
"Stay calm."

Everyone is necessary. Staying warm is necessary. Keep the burrow safe. Insulated.

Even though it gets dark so early the way of seeing things is magnified. The sharp degree of light cast through between the power-lines and the fence sharper than the gaudy generous summer sun.

I just had a deja vu. I was writing my blog. You were fifteen minutes away, headed my direction. In fifteen minutes you are going to knock on my door. I thought about texting you. "Are you coming over?" And in the deja vu, you texted back "No, I'm home. I passed your house but knew you were working." In the deja vu you are coming over and at the time I know you are home. But I can't test any of these theories. And I was in two time-lines at once. This one and another

Everyone is exactly where they need to be right now. Everyone's place in this timeline is determined.
I'm watching it all play itself out. The movement between bodies. Bodies alone. Bodies in burrows. Bodies nervous of their survival. Bodies together. Bodies separate.
I disassociate and play the part of the watcher. 
But my body tells me it's a lie. I'm a mover.
A changer. A shaper.
I move carefully.
"Stay calm."

None of it came true. I waited the fifteen minutes.
I'm in this timeline, not the other.
I made it back here. I'm exactly where I need to be.

 Today I woke up curious about energy. Someone once pointed out to me firewood, logs, are potential energy, carbon, that is useful when burned, creating heat. Trapped life, potential heat. Stasis. I don't have the words to explore these concepts.. is it essential to have the words? I felt the sun on my face while pouring the hot coffee grounds into the compost. The heat of both came from the same source. The heat of the coffee grounds coming from the water heater, the water heater connected to a power grid, the power station, what? Towers of sizzling wires and spirals and cords and poles, metal fortress at the edge of town? And that power station, where is the burning of fossil fuels, and fossil fuels, carbon trapped in the heart of the earth once organic life compressed into a sludge. Millions of years of sun gifted life turned over in the enormous compost pile of the earth? I started texting someone these thoughts, Danny, because he had been in physics and chemistry classes and liked these things. I just wanted more words to explore these concepts. I'm not looking for answers... I'm looking for exploration. Tools to unlock. Feeling the heat of the sun on my face, knowing every motion on this earth sources it's movement from this source. There's a plant in my bathroom slowly dying. It can't go outside because the cold. I should put it near a window. Do humans need sun? Like, if we had all our needs met me but existed Inside (a word indicating separation from the sun I suppose) what would happen? Would we flake away? Melt away? Become hardened, softened?
The sun comes through the window in increments. The cat soaks it up. What kind of exchange is this? A softening?
When I was going hard for Lent a few years back Tyler had told me how the premise of the 40-days of fasting was a Babylonian pagan commemoration of a sun-god. 40 days for the 40 years he was alive it is said. A 40-year-god is fascinating but I understand the sun-worship element. Religion, faith? Collective worship, sacrifice around the elements, came from agrarian cultures I was told. A fact devoid of a named source, so perhaps made up. Why don't we worship the sun anymore? Deities as well have been extracted and converted from their original source into something else. The source of all things is the sun, but from that source comes all the lore. And the lore is so much more interesting. Nick pointed out once the Bible is just a series of recommendations around agriculture. More of a guide to growing that extends to a guide to living. I truly only love the mustard seed quote, which was reiterated by Peeter and made into a theme at one point. "If you have faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it would move. Nothing would be impossible." Matthew 17:20
My gaze moves over to the tapered candles on the dining room table, almost spend, their frail black wicks emerging from the white. What is wax? Is it oil? The roses in the vase, do their leaves still photosynthesize? The bulb inside the lamp, a careful unwavering flame, is it the light of the sun? A replication? An abomination? Is a bulb or a candle or the firewood a false god, having the ability to defy the night, the darkness, the Inside? The sun does not feel for us.. yet we feel for it. We pull at the strands of her long hair, forever braiding the alchemy of her light into something of use. We fight and fuck by her command. We form relationships completely one-sided and honestly who fucking cares. Why not? Us, the humming surface alive, competing for her attention. Even in our depths, acting as potential fuel, flares in the Kuwaiti oil fields. Volcanoes? Are volcanoes an exception? Does the earth produce it's own heat devoid of organic life, devoid of the suns contribution. Finding plot-holes in my own curiosity... other gods emerge, which is to indicate separation. Magma, as a source of the earth's hearth - Fuel, trapped carbon? As a source of the sun's hearth. 
As I type my hands are losing circulation. Yesterday they turned yellow with brief exposure to the winter. What was  doing that required exposure? I'm an indoor cat. I don't like being cold. I was walking around the property of a house I was cat-sitting for and holding my journal. I know I have to remember to move, to curate circulation, to be exposed. Practice exposure. Get acclimated. I have not risen to the challenge yet this winter. Will I become a husk? Or a blob? The heating unit in my apartment exhales its white nose, keeping me soft. Trapped energy converted into circulation. I don't have the words for it, but it doesn't matter.

I visited the chestnut trees yesterday. Nick had been obsessed with them in autumn a thousand years ago. He told me chestnut trees work in pairs by cross-pollinating. In order to have viable chestnuts they must at least be downwind from one another. I go to this spot and see spiky chestnut husks littering the ground. There are shiny chestnut shapes but their bellies are sunken in, empty, infertile. "Perhaps I'm too late," I think, or "perhaps the tree has become cursed.." My black boots wade through the roughage, at least looking for the half-chewed bits dropped by squirrels. I turn on my ears. Rain lightly hits the almond-shaped saw-tooth leaves above. Droplets condense and drop onto the earth in thick patters. I try and listen past this white-noise. I'm listening for something else. A big patter. It happens. Something is crashing from the trees. The leaves make way with a thrush. The quarry hits the ground and I have visual. I run over, black coat swaying with my leaps. A gaping demogorgon face stares back at me when I reach my destination. A shining pregnant chestnut caught in it's splayed mouth with another nearby. I pluck it out and hold it in my palm: is this what Nick loved so much? Is this the "right" kind? When we'd gather under the canopy he would do the procuring. I would eat the squirrel chewed remnants and draw pictures in my journal while he listened and turned over husks. I hadn't paid enough attention.. I'd have to look up how to process these later. Above me a squirrel chitters. Pissed. It has a chestnut in its mouth. It too heard the chestnut fall and sought to swoop it up. "Do you want it?" I ask as it curses me, "come and get it!" It scurries down a low-hanging branch to get closer. I walk over to meet it. It scurries back up, anxious, leery. I gaze up into the canopy. It's enormous. A squirrel village of gathering, preparing, hibernating invisible to my eye. Nick had told me once why some trees have points and other trees are bushy. It has to do with deer eating their tree tips when they're saplings. Conifers have points because they shoot up faster and grow faster than the deer can eat their tips. Deciduous trees are bushy because they grow slower and the deer have nibbled their tips making them branch out. And from an evolutionary standpoint they inherent hormones that make them do this with or without deer nibblings. But this is all based on my memory. Unreliable. And I won't text him for the answers because he's getting married this week. I pocket the chestnuts and keep my ears open. Back then I timed it. When the chestnut would drop. It's like shooting stars during the meteor shower times. One every two minutes I'd say. It's a rush in the same way. You sharpen your senses the best we can be being mostly phone addicted and indoor oriented. Perhaps I'm just speaking for myself. My partially gloved hands crammed in my pockets, my stupidly chosen synthetic socks doing nothing to stave moisture or cold from reaching my core. Stupidly dressed, even for a brief foray into the "outside." Always abysmally prepared, always mildly uncomfortable. Still, inside me I harness my inner wolf and keep my ears perked for the sounds of chestnuts falling. Another. Another. By the time I see three people headed to the chestnut tree with soft bags I have captured five. "It's their turn now," I think, and begin to depart. One of the people headed towards the chestnut tree says to me, "I will be a monkey and climb in the trees to get them." I show them I caught three. I wonder if they are disappointed seeing a white woman clamoring under this spot. An indication that the secrets of the chestnut tree will be exploited in the wider white woman world of over-harvesting, colonization, and commodification. I write this knowing I participate in a wave of white woman bullshit. I want to keep the secrets of the chestnut tree. 
It is another day. I break the thick leathery skin of the chestnut with a paring knife. I put the chestnuts in water and let it boil. The skin opens up. I drain the water. Let the chestnuts cool. I pull the soft meaty chestnuts from the skin. I pop one in my mouth. It's soft and slightly nutty and delicious. I wonder if my face will break out because of my food sensitivity to tree nuts. I have another half one. I do little chores around the house. I wonder what the difference is between horse chestnuts and these chestnuts. I look it up online and don't feel satisfied. My stomach hurts. I feel nauseous. I look this up as well. Horse chestnuts are toxic and can make you nauseous, make you vomit. Maybe I'm being psychosomatic. I drink water. I eat a salad. I feel better. "Isn't there only horse chestnuts in the US?" Cazo asked. "Edible chestnuts belong to the genus Castanea and are enclosed in sharp, spine-covered burs. The toxic, inedible horse chestnuts have a fleshy, bumpy husk with a wart-covered appearance. Both horse chestnut and edible chestnuts produce a brown nut, but edible chestnuts always have a tassel or point on the nut," the internet tells me. The chest-nuts I have came from the spiky cased ones, not warty ones. I take this as a positive sign of not being poisoned for now. Who fucking knows though. Smarter people know, I remind myself. This is knowledge that is well-known in certain circles. I'm reminded of the wolf berry alleyway I lived near, and the delicious berries that came from the bush that was carved back constantly. What white people don't know fucks everything up. What white people know and exploit fucks everything up. Wolf berries, goji berries grew in the alleyway, creeping out from someone's backyard. They look like the kind of berries parents slap out of their kid's hands screaming "THAT'S POISON!" as little birds skirt about the bushes stuffing themselves. During times of particular ripeness and abundance someone would take a hack and cut the bushes down. It was disheartening to have a superfood carelessly removed from the ecosystem. It's whatever. Who knows about the secret of the chestnut? Will one be carelessly cut one day to make room for another baseball field thereby losing it's pollination partner? How did these chestnut trees get here? Were they planted? Who willed them? How old are they? Whose stories of gathering are held under their boughs?
I learn by touching. By listening and tasting. I don't know any other way. I worry about my impact. I take from the squirrels. I take from other gathers with greater histories than mine. I must be careful. I poison myself a little every time being curious. I don't have a people of this place. I don't have anyone to tell me the stories. I ask the wind. I ask the internet. I make stuff up. My stomach hurts. My face is breaking out. I am a person experiencing incremental bits of the world and have lived this long to tell about it. Nick is getting married this week and I'm happy for him. Legacy work. I occupy my own small space, my own small story. I tread through memory, I accumulate, I live another day. It's just how it is. How it's gonna be. I wonder if anyone checks up on me. Sees if I'm getting married. Believes one thing or another about where we're at and what it means. We survive another day. We're doing it. I don't know what it means but I'll keep wondering.

Time passes in a perfect clip. Getting lost in the hour by hour sand timer, not leaving home. Everything I have is here in this nest.
Everything I need.
Enough personas to keep myself occupied.
One makes the jokes, points out the absurd.
The other weaves, makes the connections. "Have you noticed," she starts, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, thread between her fingers forming, "how part of us are birthed from one another?"
I stay silent, waiting for her to continue. "Voices emerge when encouraged. Voices silence when unheard. This is the creation of angels and demons." Then I see her reconsider. "No. There's no such thing. Even among the multitudes, there are multitudes.."
It's about warmth though.
I understand what she implies.
The thought began when I wanted to talk to Andrew Evanson, some stupid joke only he would understand. There wasn't a phone or an ear that could reach him to I kept the thought inside. "Perhaps if I hold it closely it will reach the ether, the veil.
Perhaps the thought can cross over if I concentrate on it enough."
I meant to put into words a stupid thread we shared, perhaps it's not to late to send to Beth.
Evanson and I were really good vacuumers before we got ourselves promoted out of vacuuming at work. I cleaned out the vacuum before each use. He knew the perfect way to wrap the cord.
"You twist with your wrist before you lasso it in," he showed me, opening his wrist to turn the cord, and then pulling it in.
We had perfected the art of putting the vacuum away, making a perfect cord fold and tuck, hanging it over the shoulder strap. We would separate the nozzle from the tube. We would set it perfectly in the corner of dry-storage, between the cash machine and the box that held the growlers.
When another person vacuumed and put it away sloppily we'd send texts.
"How dare they," we'd say. "Such disrespect."
We believed in quality where no one cared, and in that, we were the absurd ones.
Without him, I run through our script as if he responds.
He tells me about rugby, I tell him about my projects.
We talk about what we're going to do for the winter.
I tell him about my new crush. He tells me about Gracie.
What are these rhythmic echoes of sentiment after someone is gone?
We pantomime, we project, because we miss.
We long because a part of us is actually fading.
A part of us loses our voice in a way. There's nothing new. It's imagined.
There are many strange steps to grief I read in article recently. We could call these nuances of the original five.
For me, I feel like the best place and the most realistic is to be a state of the so-called "beginning" and "end." A place that is both denial and acceptance.
I still have these conversations with him. I still find myself reaching out and believing I am heard. And in my delusion feel there are words returning. I'm comforted knowing we cared for each other. I'm comforted he still cares, and I still care, and we're still rooting for one another in every iteration.
I tell myself it's enough, because it's all I have. To be alive is to create new moments.
I miss him.

With every sip the sadden deepens. Inarticulate. Just a vague sadness.
“If I can’t have love, I want power.” New Halsey album drops.
Renaissance Madonna cover. Virgo season mood.
Tyler pointed out once that so many artists are Virgos. Beyoncé.
Hayley’s a Virgo. They give the best advice. Always ten-steps ahead waiting for us to catch up. To their detriment. While we lag behind we make unpredictable moves. They have to refresh the homescreen. Sankofa. Having to go back.
Inarticulate longing.
In the mornings, in France, I’d drink my coffee with Peeter even though he was thousands of miles away. It was a visceral connection. The sea stones he had plucked from the Baltic shore in my hand, cool and smooth. Uks, kaks, kolm, neli, viis. Correct me if I’m wrong. He told me I read in Estonian well despite not knowing what I was reading. The phonetic guides, the umlauts, especially in the word for Night, öö. The sounds an owl makes, as if the owl were maker of names for it’s nocturnal hunting time.
This morning I have coffee with no one. The sadness deepens.
Megan sends me a quip from a mutual friend’s instagram:
“sometimes it feels like Globemallow is smiling in a way I used to know how to,” it said.
Reason aligned.
Virgo season.

“There’s no photos of me smiling,” Mom says, scrolling through the photos of my brother’s wedding on her phone.
“Did you find the ones of you dancing?” I asked. She hadn’t.
“Keep scrolling.”

I find a photo of me smiling.
I’m next to my brother, clutching onto his arm.
My sister is on the other side of him.

My mom finds the photos of her dancing. She’s dancing with her son.
She’s smiling.
It’s the moment that made my brother break down alone in Mexico maybe a week later. Seeing her happy, or having connection sink in.
So much actual emotion happens in the memory, later, not in the moment.
Sometime unexpected, when the memory moves through sleeps and becomes distilled.
The weight doesn't exist in the wash of the present.

Sometimes it takes years.

In my memory, my mother is smiling and dancing with my brother and everyone has moved off to the side and is cheering.
They are dancing to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”
They have a loose choreography. My mom was nervous about forgetting it so we practiced it over and over beforehand. I told her it was mostly improvisational, these kinds of things, so not to worry.

“You’re a dancer anyway,” I had said, “this kind of thing will come natural for you.”
“I was never good at choreography,” she had responded, memorizing the moves. It’s why she dropped out of dance school. Too stressful.

It was really special, watching them dance. It’s what Mom always longs for.
To dance with her grown children on a special day. It doesn’t happen often, these kinds of things.

Virgo season.
I’m dotting the edges of cotton handkerchiefs with a kind of seam adhesive and hanging them outside with clothespins. The cotton waves like ghosts, the sun becoming a little more slanted everyday, harsher on the southern horizon.

The vague nostalgia deepens.

I laid in bed this morning watching tiktok videos of people using this filter that makes a child version of themselves meld into a present day version of themselves. It went along to “Where’d all the time go?” Everyone had different reactions. For some it seemed validating. For others it seemed as if they were reacting to the bridged time in-between, a culmination of pain, experience that had accumulated into a hard-won wisdom.
When they’d cover their mouth, “reacting,” the filter of reddened lips superimposed over their hands.
It was real, it wasn’t real. It was whatever.
I scrolled through them for maybe twenty minutes.

“I wouldn’t react like that,” I thought of the ones that looked full of regret or pain.
The ones where they’d cry, making that off selfie non-eye-contact with the person on the screen.

In hanging the cotton material out to dry there’s a sense of satisfaction roped in with doing something old-fashioned and wholesome. Hanging the linens out to dry after beating them in the washtub with the rendered bar of fat.

What we call simpler times. Times when we didn’t experience the simulated and repeated human experience of watching the time pass through someone’s existence on a media platform?

Last night I bought her book, and life now is just waiting for it to come in the mail.
Then it will be slowly processing it through winter.
Then it will be reflecting on it for the time after.

The Holy Yonder.

I told her about eudaemonia and the zine I’m writing or not writing about words. About the connection with the muse, all of our connections with that entity that exists alongside us that isn’t exactly us, doing the work.

A daemon, a genius.

Now is just waiting.

There's this succulent thriving in my home.
I don't know how.

Nothing thrives here.
I keep the windows open.
Flies come in, die in the window frames. Little dusty corpses line the base being ground and raked by the opening and closing of the sliding window.
Waiting to be vacuumed, their final resting place. 

Is it the succulent you bought after finishing that Baldwin novel?
Were we experimenting with sobriety then?
You usually pulled a healthy 2 oz from a bourbon bottle. So why was this time different?

Trying to create new traditions.

For all I know this could be a different plant entirely.

I barely remember how or when plants began, their stories impulsively entering my life to exist in months/years long state of entropy.
Slowing falling apart, starved of light and sun, or too much light and sun?

There was a boy once I was seeing for a small amount of time.
He had teeth like buttered-popcorn jelly bellies.
I told him they were beautiful and unique. A special part of him.
He grew succulents in his room under a lamp, a surreal blue UFO glow filling his room.
He worked at a nursery and talked about plants a lot.
It was strange being intimate with someone who cares about their job and talks about it endlessly.
I had plastic succulents in my room at the time. He picked one up and examined it with the eye of an expert.

"It's not real," I had said.
"That must be very depressing to see, considering how much you like succulents."

I don't remember what he said.

When I ended things through a text message he had protested.
I had kinda lied and told him I needed to prioritize time with my friends and family.
It wasn't a total lie though.

The truth was I had completed a major self-publishing project (major for me) and he hadn't really been that interested or curious about it.
The zine I gifted him, he had rolled a joint on and had left it in the backyard, bits of marijuana sprinkling the cover.
The wind eventually separating and scattering the unstapled pages across the patio.

When he had showed me his photography, a coffee-table book he had had printed of forests, I had spent time on every page, making observations and inquiring about his process.

When I ended things, he said I hadn't actually got to know him.
There was so much more about him that was fascinating.
I should see him in his element, the woods.

I told him he was really great and that it had nothing to do with him, I just needed to take some time to be with people that are close to me.

He told me he was at work and we'd talk about it later.
Then he sent me a screenshot of our conversation.
Then he told me that screenshot was meant for a friend for analysis.

I told him, "let your friend know I have plastic succulents."

"Salt of the Earth."
"Worth their salt."
"Take it with a grain of salt."

Tay Tay and I were obsessed with salt. We had a little pinch-pot that rested on the shelf above the stove that accompanied our plates to the dinner table. It was sprinkled liberally on every dish.
Gandhi walked to the Arabian Sea to protest the prohibition of Indian citizens from harvesting and selling salt, requiring them to purchase exclusively of the English market, taxed heavily.
Salt is gorgeous.
Ranging from the briny white encrusted surfaces of ocean shores, the peach marbled of Himalayan salt mines, the sel de gris harvested from the base of the sea, and the mottled granules harvested from seaweed in Japan.

It's sources varied, it's flavor familiar.

A small lick of a salt rock acts to prime the palate.
It enhances and brings out the flavor of any dish (especially sweets) and satiates the body in a way its lack will not.

My friend Anna makes this broth. It's so many things: vegetables, bones, a dash of fish oil right before serving.
The comfort in all the hot savory elixir imbibed at the temperature barely below burning your tongue seemed to cure any ailment. "My rule of thumn is 21-25 grams of salt per gallon," She let me know once.
I remember the way the broth would make me stretch, as if I came from a dry sauna or a hot spring.
Everything loosened, relaxing into a place of better alignment.

Cari has my favorite salt, I still can't find it in stores.
It's that flaky celtic sea salt that holds a crystalline shape like a snowflake dissolving on the tip of your tongue.

There is no better pair with salt then a lover's warm skin dried after wave chasing.

With these indulgences of course comes the consequence of their imbalance, the reality in which I am personally aware.

As a personality trait, to be salty is to be irritated, angry, hostile.
It's attributed to the agitated, the one with the ruffled feathers, reacting rather than listening.
Frustrated and impatient.
When I think of "salty" as a personality trait I imagine an angry salt shaker clamoring back and forth on a tabletop, spilling grains from its porous head. I imagine a salty person grabbing this angry shaker and turning it over their food, adding fuel to their own inferno. Slamming a spooned fist at the table to command attention. Spewing a rant to a family who exchanges downward glances and stirs their potatoes.

Then why is it such a contradiction when they say, "worth your salt?" or "salt of the earth?"

Salt was currency once. To be worth your salt is to be worth your paycheck in Roman times.
I like to think of it as the saline quality in our blood.
Is what we do, our action, worthy of the salt in our veins?
Are we earning our keep as stewards?
Are we maintaining our worth as children of the sea?

And "salt of the earth" is term used for the best kind of people.
I have earthbound grounded salt people I love so much. Their faces easily come to mind with this term.
There's something about soil stained finger-nails and thick unwashed hair.
Something about the way the earth collects on them in a way that makes them more vibrant then others.
I think of Matthew Carter and Anna.
I think of Seth, Hailee, Caleb, and Melinda. These are salt of the earth people. Chicken raisers and broth makers.

I can't exactly put my finger on the magic of salt.. it's presence is common in spell-casting and purifying rituals.
Salt circles are meant to protect, seal in a ceremonial practice.
Playing off of old cliches, I hold the memory of shaky teenagers spreading the baker's cabinet mortons in a circle around them to candlelight in anticipation of a demonic force. Even a base knowledge of salts properties is known in a pinch (no pun intended).

Why am I writing this treatise on my love of salt?
On the subject of salt as so fundamental and woven into the personal and the cultural?
This meandering love note addled with inaccuracies no doubt.

I made these little salt rings to cast ritual circles and needed to put into words what salt means to me.
I'll take whatever salt you offer, a grain or a boulder.

Any sort, I'll inevitably touch it to the tip of my tongue.

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. - Karen Blixon

《 Take some time to document all the ways you let impatience derail your creative process & share your findings with Elijah. As a Water Sun, awareness is their specialty. 》- costar astrology recommendation

Where do I begin?
Does this look like a list of excuses?
Last night, Mom & I ate sushi & played cards. We took a couple wasabi hits to the sinus cavities by accident.
《 Is this because I told Erica that you and I never talk? 》she commented.
Us, having dinner together, hanging out, shooting the shit. Something we don't do as often despite living in the same house.
I laughed a little and said《 no - but I could understand the mention. 》

I work in these cycles. There's a finite amount of time existing in these cycles. I don't make a lot of decisions what, how, and when these shifts will happen. I've learned to move like a river through them. Learn to stop destroying myself when these shifts happen because I realize I don't have control.

All of this has the tone of defensiveness.

《What the river says, that is what I say, 》

I can make choices within this snow globe of course.

I explained to my mom, about when I lived alone, my silences went unquestioned. There was no one around to question them. My absence wasn't felt in the common areas, I wasn't a ghost in places I frequented because my inconsistencies were consistent enough to not create a void of space to be questioned.

I wasn't missed. This suits me.

For long stretches I'd exist in my head. When the quieter guides, ancestors, muses took a turn in the mind chamber. Pulling the strings. Acting as congress.

I'd become so quiet.

Sometimes I can be so loud.
People meet me then, during the loud times. Dancing times. Fill-the-room-with-my-presence times.
《 We should hang out again, 》they say, and I write my number on a little slip of paper knowing by the time they text, I will have turned inward.

It's not a creative impatience as much as it is running out of time.

The micro-seasons, the micro-climate within the shifts, I'm no longer the same river. The experimentation of a particular project falls from my hands.
Suddenly, where there was once an obsession with print-making, there's now a need to write every friend a letter. Where there was once running on a treadmill everyday, drinking probiotic smoothies, and performing sugar scrub exfoliation, there's remaining on the couch for eight hours reading Sylvia Plath's journals. 

It looks like giving up, but it's more like giving in.

Right now, I've been writing in my journal everyday and checking costar astrology for prompts in which to accomplish.
I've been ravenously hungry and consuming seafood. The DnD group is gone and I haven't been scheming with friends. I'm into buying old scrolls of paper at Thriftstores and wanting to write long letters to an old partner. I'm very into earthy scents: burning incense, using cedar oil in my skin moisturizing routines, and spraying my bed twice a day with a sheet mist that smells like flowers.

All this will pass.

I used to be so hard on myself about this. I still punish myself in the way of believing it's a kind of fundamental flaw in my hard-wiring. Others, it would seem, move out of the fetal process of their mediums and projects.
You see them grow into richer artists, making progress with their prolonged focus.

You are very much like this. It reminds me of when you were a tree in the redwoods overlooking the ocean. You grow like a tree. You are slow and deliberate and work towards your goals. I'm comparing, but not comparing.

I like how you are, and I like how I am.

It's just so slow for me, in a different way. My cycles seem quick, but are actually long.
Eventually I come back to the place of loudness, but the same friends aren't there.
Eventually I come back to the printmaking, but the tools have been given away.

It's hard to see, it's hard for me to explain.
It was hard for me to see for a long time. It was hard to allow myself some forgiveness and grace.

Ah, another Stafford quote comes to mind.

《There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change.》

Je ne souviens pas prenez la photo..
Désolé, c'était comment un rêve. Tout le monde était là. Disons que c'était il y a longtemps..
Chaque hier sens comme un longtemps. 
Il vaut mieux dire tous tes secrets en français.
Laissez-moi vous en dire un maintenant: je ne sais pas ce que ça va se passer.
Je sais à peine ce qui se passe maintenant. 

There's this certain calm after a shake. Have you ever driven for several hours in a day and find you have no thoughts in your head when you arrive? All that vibrating, all the pulsing, and suddenly you feel almost as if you've recently been inutero.
Recently born again, having been rocked gently by the rolling wheels over concrete and dirt.
I abuse the word vibe, and vibration.
It's a concept I'm obsessed with.
When things are still, we gain a reflectory composure.
We lapse into the quiet of our minds and wordlessly, without drama, tektonic plates shift into place.
"Here I am caught, in the amber of the moment, there is no why," Vonnegut said once?
"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why."
Apologies for the slight misquotation.

Now, I've stopped asking why.
It doesn't seem to matter.
My demand for reasoning when there is none, puts me always at a stalemate that can't be explained.
At best I can construct a reasoning, and in that create a deity molded out of paper clay and tinsel.
But if no one believes it, it doesn't really matter does it?

Resonate with me a moment.
Through a series of choices and agreements the wheel turns. The destination is no where in particular, or rather, the goal doesn't matter much.
I, too, was a small decision.

Now here I am surrounded by stuff, gelled in a moment of dustless stillness.
Maintained, awoken, shaken, gathered, placed.

Is existence anymore than a collection of spoons? A temperature? A potential stifled violence intended to stave off the needers and the takers?
And I've stopped questioning the role you play in all of this.
I've stopped asking you and the cracked idol on the altar for these answers.

If I want to, I can go. I can stay. It doesn't matter.
A multi-dimension will play through the other versions and I have enough faith in that to live within the multitudes.
A shoebox can make a proper diorama to peer through and see what could've been. We are flesh-toned pipe-cleaners against a hot glued cardboard background of the house we live in together.

Anything is possible.
I wonder what the other-dimensional self sees, peering in at me now.

In bed everything fuses. It's the ultimate resetting point. My eyes could blink awake anywhere, at any age, in any form and I'd pick up my script and the words would roll out.
It wouldn't make sense. But this version makes as much sense as any other.
There's the costume, the lines, the taped X on the floor. From behind the curtain emerges the friends and the reoccurring conflict and here's the person you get to kiss, lebensabschnittpartner.
Here we are trapped.

An excerpt from Waking Life:
"One thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as, a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of it, it's like your life is yours to create."
So it goes.

I don't envy the curiosity of children, which is actually perpetual confusion with crude sticky manual dexterity.
But my question has always been the same since then.

There's a line on my hand called the "fate line." For the "typical," it usually starts at the palm base, right in the middle, and dances it's way vertical, up towards the slouching hammocked head and heart line (blessed are those who have both).
This is the question we form, the question we pester the adults about and then ultimately turn inward to act as the forever child persona demanding of the deity-manifester persona.

Ever in curiosity. Ever in confusion.
The way the Little Prince queried the pilot about the sheep eating his rose as the pilot attempted to repair his plane: "The thorns are of no use at all. Flowers have thorns just for spite!"
And it's possible in all this shaking I've given up and become a mushroom.

My question will always be that of love.

As a kid I wondered what it meant to be loved and still I wonder what it means to be loved.
I wonder how it is I can love rightly and how my own heart exists in the world.

In posing the questions I draw in the hypotheticals. 

It's that vibration.
The stillness feels satisfying after the movement. The calm is because we affirm can still feel.

We can still smell one another. We are given permission for closeness. We move through the olfactory layers of one another.
Shake and be shaken.
Move and be moved.

I'll take this time, when the Why has fallen away.
Because I've been shaken the last few days, rocked and held and shaped by hands.
I will be settled in a transient certainty of being loved. I will let this vibration into the core of me and accept it.
I will remember it.
I will let it shape my delusions and let it hush my small child-self into repose.

Painted me blameless and allowed my anger.
You apologized.
You apologized.
You expressed a regret and considered me, a part of it.
My feelings were hurt. You saw them. You always saw them but it took you 9+ years to let me know you saw them.
You gave me permission, a retroactive slip, that validated all my anger.
And let it go.
Let it go.
A strange pain makes us who we are.
We actually need this pain
or
we become indefinable.
A wall corrals a city, a fence corrals a yard.
Horses are kept in a field held in by electric fences.
We need a moment to pause so we can retreat and come back into a center.
Definition.
I wrote you back. I don't remember what was wrote. Lots of gratitude.
I didn't tell you were brave even though I thought you were.
I think you are.
I wrote "there are many of these kinds of letters I have in me," and finished it with, "please know you're not alone in examining old choices."
You are brave Nella.

In the mountains I think.
Somewhere, away.
"Gone from my sight,"
but not like that.
The pamphlet poem during the Hospice times. Not like that. As long as we're still alive there's a cord. A visceral vibrating cord.
When we pass, the cord becomes translucent, like silkworm thread, thin and slick, but impenetrable. 
All my lovers come to me in dreams still. I always let them. Nothing is as it was of course.
We're not still reading through out the same one-act.
They're usually doing other things, not the same things, and come by to show me.
They've moved on. It's the way it goes.
I'm always glad to see them even when I wake up alone.
Couldn't get warm all day. Wringing my hands together, pressing between the creases of my knees. The best medicine is to lean into it, do as the Estonians do and plunge yourself into the Baltic. Put your galoshes back on, offer a few girls some cigarettes and beer, and continue fishing.
I'm always in self-preservation mode.
"It just works better for me that way. Emotions are messy and complicated. I honestly don't believe us as humans are equipped to have them. I'm shocked at how long I've lived while knowing/understanding so little about how to manage them." I wrote this to Maya today, in a letter I'm uncertain I'm going to send. It's written on the jacket of vinyl in thoughtful handwritten letters that get less clean as I move into a place of expressing some pressing honesty.
I don't know if I'll give it to her. It gets messy. I don't like getting messy, even if it's on paper.
Actually, especially if it's on paper.
The other day I woke up with Matthew Carter. It was cute, not like all that. We had fallen asleep watching Star Trek and I had a touch of whiskey in me. I think it was after his first round of snores I had woken him up declaring, "Matthew Carter, I just want to promise you, if/when I get into a relationship I still want to be your friend.
I don't want to cut you out like I've done before. I just want to promise you that."
This feels safe.

What am I even saying.

He comes and goes too. We all come and go. It's fine. It's the way it is.

What I'm trying to say is there is no cutting.
Nothing is ever cut.

He's somewhere in the mountains, I think.

"$10,000, perfect. We'll take it."

All the money we had. We moved everyone in. All the friends who were on couches.
The friends about to drive South for the winter, we caught them and said, "hey, come in, we're gonna do a thing this winter."
We could play shows in the barn, set up baths around the property and pump in some water from some underground hot spring. Who knows about those things.. That Irish guy in East of Eden with his water stick waving over the dust. A thousand words for every scoop he said?
I can never find the things I'm looking for when I need them.

We're gonna get all the rugs and lay them out.
Then we're gonna get a bunch of paper and pens and typewriters and lay those out too.
We're gonna have these nights where we all lay on the rugs and answer writing prompts.
Some folks will crawl on the roof for a little space.
Write by the light of the moon.
Write by the light of Mars,
of Venus,
of UFO beams or whatever.
Then we'll read what we wrote. Some won't. We won't force anyone.

We'll spit whiskey into the fire and cast "good riddance" spells on our exes even though we still love them.
We'll never eat and never sleep. It'll be all work. All dance. All strum strum on the strings and "when's your producer friend coming up from Oakland with their equipment?"
Nail mattresses to the walls.

Line books on the shelves we wrote.

Of course we'll eat.
The kitchen will always be warm.
The stove will always be on.
Coffee and beer will collide in the tween hours of 1p and 5p.
It'll be venison stew in the Winter, dandelion greens in the Spring, river water in the summer, and maple syrup in the fall.

There will always be kittens and they'll either all have homes or be wild. Coyotes will come and go to pick up the kittens but our kittens are smart.
Ducking under holes in the barn just in time.

And somehow kids will be there but they won't be assholes.
Their parents will keep 'em busy and curious and exploring and they won't run into the sides of tables and scream, or touch anyone's shit.
They'll ask all the best questions.
They'll be elected king and queen and they'll put on these plays that will have everyone roaring with laughter or sobbing.

When someone gets sick we'll cover them in blankets and ladle bone broth down their throats.
When they die we'll bury them deep into earth. When they come back in our dreams we'll gather everyone around to tell of the visions.

Of course we'll sleep.

I know it sounds like it will smell terrible. The drafts will never be fixed because we're artists. The roof will always leak. The walls are full of mildew and mold and we'll all get coughs.

The property tax will never get paid and the cops will come and throw us all out. Toss bleach on the clothes and things so they're ruined. Board everything up. Like they do.

But imagine for a second it smelled like warm caramel, fresh linen, and a little cedar. Imagine the kittens came in from the barn as we pulled quilts over our heads and their heads and our lover's heads and we knew nothing could come in to hurt us.
Imagine the coziest of cozy sleeps where everyone you know is safe. Where everyone you know is right there and you can just call out and ask them a little question if you wanted to.
Like, "did you see the sky during sunset this evening?" even though you know they did. Because you were right next to them.

And just like in that Kerouac poem, "everybody goes, 'Awww!'"

The problem with loving is when to stop.
I pulled the lavender inside, keeping it from the smoke.
It has forgiven the elements already and reaches for, with wispy tendrils of sun starved fronds, for the drapeless window.
I shake my head at our spiritual juxtapostion.

What if I offered you little pieces of my heart, one bit at a time, so you wouldn't even notice you held it?

A feather
A cottonwood bud plumped with autumn
A squash seed
A sunflower petal
A walnut

You wouldn't even notice,
the pieces would be placed absently on your altar
next to the photographs of your great-grandparents.
You wouldn't even notice me there. You wouldn't notice the eek of the walnut cracking or the petal rustling.
Oils of the seed leaving a single drop.

I still love you.
I still love you.
I still love you.

Even, and especially when, I come apart.

Photo of Emmy, 2017
Quote by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Note to self:

Touching, swinging, primate,
parsing details
Sitting with confusion

"Here we are, trapped, in the amber of the moment. There is no why." -Vonnegut

So it goes.

I've been swinging lately, shifting weight from hand to wall, bending the core of my will around the spaces and moving through them deftly.

Once I was a room.
An impossibly big room that fit jokingly, like a father's robe around a child.
But eventually I grew into it. 
Or perhaps it shrank?
It was a corner room, with two brick walls meeting, laden with enormous windows secreting leaden weights which lifted the glass from tarred cords, somewhere inside their frames.
To fit properly I started sewing the holes, deft thread in and out, closing the cracks - the material beginning to show form and match itself to my shape.
I filled it with music, and ran my hands along its edges to familiarize myself with its shape.
As it began to know me, it grew comfortable, and collapsed itself onto my skin gratefully. 
It breathed as I breathed.
In every corner, and even on the broad parts I hung bouquets of yarrow. Asking for the stuck energy to filter away, letting the fresh in. A protective spell cast.
We knew each other, and that is all I can say for what love probably is.

Now I find myself in places with many turns, not open, like the room I once wore. Curved and nooked and slim. Made for bodies to come into contact, to crash a bit. I always find myself calling and singing around these corners, anticipating the eventual collision of another body, perhaps clicking their way around. It's strange actually how seldom we actually meet. There's always a bubble that seems to catch us. I've begun to say, "Excuse me," rather than, "I'm sorry," in these moments.

"The body is not an apology," Sonya Renee Taylor let's us know.

It's ok to exist and get in the way a bit. Impossible to avoid unless you are a ghost really. One day.
But not today.

In this place of many turns I find myself swinging. There are
dirty points,
smoothed points,
worn,
grooved,
of many quick grasps where the weight is shifted.

A quick story to explain what I mean:
There is a black bronze statue at the Grotto in East Portland, that sits overlooking the scrum of highways connecting Oregon to Washington. It's of Mary holding a slumped Jesus, her left hand extended in a gesture of .. grief? confusion? questioning why this useless violence that has happened?
There is a sign below the statue which makes observers aware not to touch the statue.
It's let's us know the bronze material is very sensitive to human oils.
Yet, despite this warning, the finger-tips of Mary's outstretched hands are patinated, touched by the oils of many hands. The fingertips stand out, gleaming gold in spite of the obsidian radiance of the rest of the statue.

So many hands seeking perhaps to comfort her. Seeking to redirect their own balance in the space.

It's an extension of our movement, these pivot points. These spots that indicate our movement, the smoothed altered surfaces we return to again and again.

And it reminds me of our ancestors. The old wise ones. The elders. The ones who lived in the trees. The ones who made smooth the branches of the jungle, who's hands were so much stronger than ours now. Of course I'm making some assumptions. I'd like to pretend I feel them in me when I move through the spaces, hands always catching my balance from wall to railing to pillar to door knob. The feeling of fallen and caught weight, the feeling of swinging through spaces. The feeling of singing around corners, of narrow misses always, but rarely crashes.

The way we move around each other, singing and dancing and touching. Making marks, touching, leaving our prints.

We are not ghosts yet, we cannot pass through one another. We move in our spaces and touch. We leave an imprint. We leave a path in our wake. We are always, always swinging.

What does it mean that Mars is suddenly watching us in the East?

Each evening I come home, I see him hovering over the trees and rooftops.

I could ask some astronomy friends.
Mars? patron of passions, fucking, force of will - what does his presence bring in the story of natal charts and constellation trajectories?

I could ask the woo-folks: what do you see? What does he tell you in your dreams? Has he always been there, or I'm finally noticing?

Or I could ask Mars himself: what brings you here on these cooling summer nights, when the curfew has been made, but we still take to the night streets?

(He took the plane North, but didn't let me know he was in town. It's no matter (That's what I tell myself))

"You're so full of joy," they tell me.
"It's right there," I tell them, "all the pain and anger. It's just right there,"
I point to the top of my throat. I swallow it down.

Once you asked, "what's on your heart?" as we walked slowly, taking the dogs out free-range, down the alley, and it all came spilling up.
It took everything I had to choke it back down, swallow it, and respond in some benign way.
I had always wanted to be asked, but had never prepared for what happened if I was.

An invitation to spill out.

These ruptures at the seams.
It matters.
It's easy to mask. We get so good at it when it's expected of us.

Nature craves balance, I admitted to myself yesterday, that revelation clicking playfully into place.
I try to always and only have good days.
No bad days.
Trying to hold the pendulum swing at such an impossible arc, a frivolous endeavor.

So, I'll ask direct:

Mars, what brings you here?

All the pieces coming together, I take the moment to pull things apart. Instead of binding journals I want to mediate of paper. Instead of copy-pasting her essay into a doc and compiling the book, I want to spend time brushing over fonts. Considering hand-writing everything. I slow things down, so much they don't seem like they're moving at all.
At the cafe in Sisters with Matthew Carter, talking about paper. He wants a leather bound day-planner that will last three years. I push him towards the mixed-media Canson paper, almost comparable to watercolor pages with its thick tooth and fraying tear style. "Let's do this!" he said. He'd been on me all week about getting together and doing this work.
"Don't you like living forever in the planning stages scheming impossibly ridiculous expectations?" I texted him.
"Can you come in the morning?" he responded.
Things are sitting, unseen / unread, in binders, in files, in journals. It feels ok this way, but there is wisdom that needs to be fleshed out, put on page and bound.
But I slow things down. I want star alignment, I want validation and approval for my movements, continuous reward, like following a candy trail into the forest. Something familiar leading into the unknown?
But I know it's because I'm just scared. The actuality of my dreams is terrifying, not even the failure or disappointment, though those factor in. But actually seeing a flower transform into a fruit, because it's like love, and there's something so frightening about about that to me.
This is such an embarrassing story, but I'll tell it. I told it to Jonathan the other day, all weepy, and excusing myself for being three weeks into Wellbutrin. It wasn't that. I was just sad.
A friend and I have been soliciting dick-pics from Tinder matches. One in particular who I sent my number to who claimed he was offended by the site of dicks in porns, because they were as attractive as his. We continued a very inconsistent conversation around cunnilingus, food, vague reflections on our day, and really nothing interesting. 
Ultimately, without too much exchange and without more reasoning than why not, I texted him after work for his address. Heading over the fucking googlemaps took me down every fucking unlit neighborhood and road detour until, within being within two minutes of arrival coming to a gravel hole in the earth indicating "Road Closed."
The headlights hitting the sign I could only think, "This was a joke I set-up for myself, on myself, and everyone is laughing but me."
I just went home, and cried and cried because I had gone to fast. I thought, for the moment, it was ok to cheat a bit. Cheat love a bit, and not have a connection or a thousand arrows pointing yes, and just go. I just wanted to be loved, made-out with, eat guacomole on the counter-top, talk about my day, talk about his day, fuck. Why not.
And it wouldn't let me. They wouldn't let me. Whoever they are that sits with me all day pulling the pieces apart and not together to examine yhe bigger picture. The force that takes me so long to finish anything, if I finish it at all.

Once, in the Wal Mart parking lot, I had found a mess of glossy scraps and arranged them into a photograph of a man and a woman. It was a selfie, cheek to cheek. "A bad breakup" I  hypothesized, a connection that hadn't made it in the car, to the house, and into a frame on the mantle. Left as rubbish to be stirred by exhaust on hot concrete.
I don't know what to do with this box full of photographs. I printed them out. They made it home. They made it to a place where they were passed back and forth, smiled over, and set gently away for another time of sweet nostalgia.
"Stay Awhile," I had painted on the top. It's all one can really ask for, even if a relationship lasts a lifetime. It's always just "awhile."
When people come into my work celebrating a ___ year anniversary I always comment that, "once I made it three years."
Once I had been loved for awhile.
In 2013 I had a great purge. I burned everything, all the tangible memories, even stuff I had done in kindergarten. I burned everything that I didn't use on a day-to-day. I burned all the photographs and projects. Matt Ozrelic had walked by and asked if I was "going through a thing."
"It's the Year of the Snake," I had said, "it's time to let go. It's time to be lighter. Time to not be held down."
I was also borrowing a memory I had had in Olympia, Washington watching Alexis burn all her journals before moving to London. When I had protested, she countered, "there are things here just for processing. Things I need to let go. Things I don't want my mom to know if something were to happen to me and these were left."
She granted me permission to fish out her French notes from Evergreen the way Matt, years later, would fish out a little zine I wasn't proud of.
I'm not of Chinese ancestry, but I do consider the Lunar New Year and pay attention to Chinese publications that come out with omens and predictions. 2020 is the year of the Rat. In my own inappropriate appropriation of that symbol I think of rats as being pragmatic survivalists. They are considerate collectors, thoughtful, and sentimental.
This is all to say, I don't mind holding on right now.
I know it's holding me back from moving on, weighing me down, and sabotaging creativity, but letting go doesn't feel right at the moment..
Holding on is the opposite of everything I've ever done. I have no precedent or proper defense.
I'm not ready for my relationship to be bits of shiny paper strewn in a parking lot.
I don't want it to be ashes in the fireplace.
There is a community of people in the Toraja region of Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia who keep their dead close, perhaps lying in bed. The state of death of their loved ones doesn't create an absence as much as a stillness or silence. Is this how I feel? Is this what I'm doing? I do not expect in any way my past relationship to raise its head and speak to me as it once did.
But the symbolic discard of burning/burying feels as much as a useless gesture as keeping the box. In fact, it feels wrong.
Keeping the box feels right. That's all that can be said in its defense. In my defense.
In the least, if anything were to happen to me, a stranger could pick up the box intact and rightfully hypothesize, "she was loved once."

In this memory of at one time being chosen, I am at a loss. At one moment yes yes yes trails into ellipsis, cake crumbs into dust we walk over on the way to somewhere else.
We're in this moment of dwelling, a Sousa saudade maybe, a longing, a reflection that keeps us awake at night, so aware of the sounds of everything but another's soft breathing next to us.
Claps of laughter go where? Where goes all the little details, where is the slip between the cracks as seasons change?
"I don't want to be obsessed with relationships, or yearn to be in one, but it hurts when these women loved me so much and then that love is gone," you told me once. I snap my fingers in agreement.
Why don't memories keep us warm? Is there a hole in the ether that opens once a year to crawl into the blanket of the past and slip into the moments of sweetness whose flavor has been forgotten?
You're probably the only one reading this.
What spell do we cast? What items do I lay on my altar during what phase of the moon to unlock the place where there wasn't loneliness? What drugs do we take?
"Why aren't we longing for each other?" he asked.
"We are, so much."
I missed the comet. It didn't matter.
Why look when you can never shift your weight into another and hear them say, "wow."

Maybe it's just the way it is.
Listening to a playlist I made during a time when everything felt beautiful and it falls flat.
All the pieces of the project splayed around me from the working times have lost their coherence. The ink went out, so things paused, then they sat and collected dust, waiting for me to animate them.

Sometimes things feel like they're swirling, sparkles caught up in my spinning wizard's cloak.
They swirl and swirl with me until I tumble, the moon wanes, we fall, become heavy, become weight.

I've never understood why it's like this, just the way it is.
The momentum, the building, then the sudden drop.
Where once there was meaning in every song and color, every conversation, every word, every letter.. to finish is to labor.
The sparkle becomes a heavy rock. The people I met during the times when things were good, couldn't possibly understand that all I want to do is lay down for weeks.
No singing, no dancing.

So this cycle continues. All the heaviness is put away instead of finished. Texts and e-mails go unanswered. The tapestry I was working on ends in a fray.
Maybe it's just the way it is.

Sorry.

I think I'm gonna keep grieving.
I think the moving on will happen, I think moving on is happening, but I'm not going to pretend to be moved on.
I think I'm gonna let myself be sad.
I'm gonna lay awake in the morning after the bad dream and sit with it.

I think I'm gonna let myself not get over it right now.

I think I'll keep listening to Lee Hazelwood and Mountain Goats.
I think I'll be ok with not being ok.

I'm going to be ok with not moving on right now.