Untitled from Notebook

I split the center of a big, beautiful leaf of a little tree that I love like a mother. She wept at the tear.

She doesn’t understand why she is hurt. Living in the lawn she is accustomed to a safety not granted to her ancestors.

She wept how she had never wept before. She wept as her mother may have wept. And as the seed that became her had, cried the hidden tears of the seed still burrowed under the earth waiting to bloom.

She wept as the rainforest has all these years. How the rain must have muddied the earth when a piece of it was torn to bring her here.

An Heirloom

I told him I had a vision of him as a peanut and myself a little person standing on top, pointing a bezel in the crack to break it open.

He said he has never imagined me as a vegetable or legume.

I responded, “you don’t think of me?” He said he thinks of me all the time.

I would be a tomato, he suggests reluctantly.

All God Wants Is for You to Make a Salad

Pick out rotten kale

toss the rest in a bowl

massage with lemon and pink salt

add olive oil, mix

chop cucumbers

toss in

chop tomatoes

toss in

check the box for moldy blueberries

toss in the rest

add olive oil, mix

fill up a glass of cold water

sip the water

eat your salad

sexistuglyperson-2.pdf

From Lockdown

4/13/2020

I don’t have anything to say. I’ve been working on grounding but I don’t know how well I’m doing at it. I think I’m taking back some control and maybe I’m finding my power or whatever. I’m not really interested in this spiritual awakening business but i’m trying to put something else in my thoughts so that I don’t revert to the spiral of finding myself or god or something magical within me. I think he listens to me when I pray. I think prayer is real and maybe that’s just because I’m saying it. It’s interesting how beliefs and thoughts intertwine and come about. What puts one over another? I believe that the world is beautiful and everybody is good because that’s what I want to think. Excessive optimism is probably covering up fear and hate but deep down I do not feel that way. But on the surface I do. Sometimes it’s switched.

A Sidewalk or a Highway

Walking down the fan felt like Kaneohe and it felt like a certain familiarity that is both here and there. It reminded me of taking a bus up when the pali was broken -- driving for an hour, getting off at a stop that sounded close, and walking two miles or so to get to Kinsey’s house. That walk was so nice I almost didn’t want it to end. It was like when you drive around aimlessly but you have a direction and while that direction is so far away and you’re exhausted because you’re on foot all you want to do is keep going. Going and going and going and going until someone else requests a stop. Then you can get off. Wherever that is. Wherever they want you to be.

When the pali was broken I ended up everywhere. Nowhere was the same as it had been before. Every path changed, every stop was nonexistent and there was no rhyme to how it would be afterward. I went up to class and did what I thought I should, I got off by foodland and got back on -- also by foodland -- the driver said if you’re going to school you need to get off here. I had a feeling he was only talking to me from my backpack but I had headphones in and didn’t want to walk on the highway and didn’t want to risk looking stupid. I always wanted to seem like a local. So I stayed on and ended up spending nearly two hours on the bus and never making it to class. The way back home was the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced. H2 is through the mountains in a way that the other routes were not. It was like they would go on forever. The small island felt big and expansive and ever growing with richness and hope and God’s promise of existence.

Grove Balcony

There’s something about spring when it’s just warm enough, and the sky is grey, but it's still bright enough and it feels like it’s going to rain, but you know it won’t, or maybe it will, but that’s later’s problem because right now everything is secure under a cloud and you’re safe in the breeze. 

There’s something about spring where the wind blows pollen everywhere and the leaves on the trees twinkle like their friends do on Christmas. There’s always a bell ringing. Maybe not right now and maybe not sometime later but you can have faith that no matter what the bell is going to ring. The windchimes will chatter around with or without you waiting for them, with or without anyone ready to listen. The wind doesn’t care about who feels it. It doesn’t care to hear the stories that lie between the ears it whistles through. It just moves. It touches the world with the same gentle loving caress that everyone’s skin longs for. The breeze comes to you soft and careful and reminds you what a perfect love feels like. Then it drifts away.

Moving Back to Virginia (The First Time)

It’s really weird being back in Forest Hill but it doesn’t feel bad it just feels comfortable. 3200 is so close. 

It’s time to work this through.

I guess it’s not that simple            It was a really specific gap of time that I was gone. Sometimes it feels like that wasn’t real. Like I just went through a portal and now I’m here, unaccomplished. It shouldn’t have to be so hard grieving your childhood. I shouldn’t even have to, right? It’s just so gone. It’s not grown out, it's just disappeared. And that’s hard to grasp. How can you come back home when there’s nothing to go back to? I feel like I was encased in amber while the rest of the world kept turning and spinning and eclipsing and changing and now I’m here

Out of amber

Out of ideas

I didn’t anticipate how it would be with my dad gone but I don’t think I anticipated a lot of things. I can’t blame it all on him. That’s just lazy.

Someone I vaguely know is here. I don’t like the feeling of that. An immediate memory of when we met at ashby with Jasmine. I was sitting on a blue couch and my friends were looking at rings. I think. That’s how it always is.

This dream that I had a sudden guilt of not chasing is not there anymore. Not right now. Strongly not right now. I need to go home and my first and only home I gave to myself is Oahu. I can’t forget that but I can't live in the past.

 It’s not no going back. You can always go back. I think it’s fair to follow your soul and look for god.

I think it’s hard knowing better. It may be good for you but it’s no help in passing the time. I miss Alex's house and getting high in his attic and sitting on the trampoline and it being ethereal despite how strange I knew it was. I remember going to the river that day and things being easy. Maybe that was another day. I remember rolling a joint on a Clash cd in the passenger seat of my car at the train station. The lights were moving. You used the knife I used to carry around to cut it up. Things used to be so easy. Self awareness is a curse. Hilariously adolescent.

IG Model

I’ve got this urge to share many of the things that I feel and experience and also those that I wish to experience. Who am I sharing them with by posting on an instagram story? Is it any less of a call for communication when it’s presented as a joke? Or, at the very least, does it come off that way? I miss people and I am communicating with them by posting on the instagram story I know they will view. This way they see me. While they may not want to talk to me or be around me, they will see me. And I need to be seen, if only as an unintended periphery.

I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One by Yo La Tengo is playing. Genius. Their music is so unique but feels like it encompasses everything. Emotionally, of course, this album expresses something personal and universal and just seismically calming. But it also encompasses so much culturally in a way I’m not sure I can explain. While their sound is totally their own they’re also fully a product of their time. Though Yo La Tengo  played a role as one of the pioneers of that time’s sound. IDK. After seeing them live I’ve been more impressed with this band than anyone else of recent. The singer sounds a bit like Lou Reed.

Series #1

November 25 2024

Two Cans of Soup

I'm chainsmoking cans of sop

Sufjan Stevens “To Be Alone With You” is playing

December 4 2024

I’m in the living room this time, putting a damper on the flow of the fire escape writing series. Eating spicy vodka big shell pasta with chicken sausage. Something like Italian garden spiced, pre cooked. Sautéed the sausage with garlic on low heat with the fancy olive oil. Mixed tons of parm into the vodka sauce. Spiced that shit up with some red pepper obviously. It is so good. I got my hair dyed at a salon for the first time in years. The last time I went I fully bleached my hair immediately after because of how fake the highlights looked. Looking like a girl with highlights was intolerable. Now I look more normal than I have in a long time.

So I really like garlic in concept and often it does taste good but I kind of find the flavor of it off-putting if I get a good bite with it in there.

Ridgewood sublet

It feels like the past year has been waiting for life to get beautiful again and now it is. I still feel ungrounded a lot of the time but I think it will go away soon. My skin has shed. I’m crawling out of the folds slowly

slowly

The much older man that I had been seeing and I sat on the fire escape looking at each other. I said that my roomate and one of my closest friends are both in their thirties too. When I told one of them that I made a met a 38 year old he said “what are you doing with us?” When I repeated this to the man I was dating he asked “what are you doing with this?”

I’m sitting on the fire escape again and I just dropped my cigarette through the cracks

My desk is my salvation. I needed to suffer and to seek reprieve to find true inner salvation. All I do is run away. And get stuck. And fear being trapped, and run away again. Stillness is not a failure. Calamity is where you find strength, it is not in battle. I nuzzle my propped up knee in the same way my cats do. The last day of august is cold. Every day after this may be too. I hope it is.

For a long time since moving to New York I felt like I was away from my life. Like I was on an extended trip and I yearned to go back home. In the same way you feel around the end of a long vacation when you’re ready to sleep in your own bed. But this bed is my own and the only one who sleeps in it now is me.

I have such an attachment to my bedroom. I’ve been nesting. Or I needed to find something in my life that I could control and perfect it. You can always control aesthetics. I’ve learned that I’m a highly sensitive person and that includes the way things around me look and sound and smell and feel. In college I never stressed about my apartment and how to decorate it or how to exist properly in that space. Everything could just be natural. I need to embrace what is natural again.

I have a scented candle lit outdoors. All I can smell is the coming fall. I whine that this city is un-aromatic compared to Virginian trees and cobblestone streets. Maybe it’s just me. I’ve forced myself to grow up the wrong ways in a city meant to nurture creativity and inspiration and anti-aged selfhood.

Thursday August 22nd

My biggest turn off in a person is weakness. And I don’t mean boys-don’t-cry or even physical incapability. I mean emotional, mental, lack of responsibility weakness. Dishonesty is weakness. Selfishness is weakness. Holding in is weakness. Maybe this is something you realize when your frontal lobe starts to really develop and ego doesn’t really have much sway anymore.

G Train Life

What’s up, computer.

This evening I am at the Variety coffee roasters typing, typing, typing, researching cable knit sweaters, typing, listening to dogs bark, peeking discreetly for the third time at the person sitting next to me, sipping tap water, typing, typing, typing, wondering if my celebrity neighbor will pop in tonight, looking at the remnants of a soy latte, typing, putting my sweater on, smiling politely at the man pacing the cafe, taking my sweater off, polishing my glasses, going to the bathroom, typing typing typing.

This morning I spent my half hour commute sitting next to a man covered in shit. The 7 o’clock G train is typically inviting in terms of seating due to the fact that everyone on board is toting a Milwaukee contractor bag. Which is to say that the crowd is regularly limited to construction workers, indie high school students, and myself; a natural blend of both these categories. However, from time to time blue collar men run late, white collar men run early, the weather runs cold, and outsiders join our biosphere.

The orange and yellow seating, in turn, becomes less inviting. (The stares, incidentally, do not.) So I do my time standing against the door waiting for rest and at the same time that a seat for me opens up, a seat for a stranger does too. He is a heavy man with three coats, two of which have a certain smell to them….

I’m balancing trying to show the man that I’m an ally with not having to smell him. If you’re covered in shit the last thing you need is someone snarling at you and avoiding you like you have the plague. Like, okay, yes of course that’s going to be the natural reaction to those around you. But you’re suffering enough already! More than they are! So anyway I’m like this man is probably having a pretty hard time let me send him some empathy by discretely lifting my sweater over my nose like I’m a little chilly. But oh my god he smells so bad…

Passing Out is the Psychedelic Opposite of Ego Death

Last winter I fainted in my old, dingy, backwards-plumbed Bedford-Stuyvesant bathroom. It began with a tingle and a not knowing. It arrived soon after I got up from the dungeon that was my roommate’s queen sized, blanket ridden bed. He and I had just begun watching Past Lives, our faces coated in green clay, the air conspicuously hazy from water bottle weed. Supine and borderline indignant at needing to rise, we headed to wash the muck off of our faces, preparing to reveal to ourselves the glowing skin waiting to be unearthed from underneath the masks.

Realistically it began much earlier than that first tingle. Perhaps with months of unintentional starvation. Or the rapid daily consumption of Vyvanse whose confected energy was not properly utilized. Likely it was a blend of both. A misfire set off by the half pack of camels I’d accidentally smoked that weekend. Perhaps it began with quitting my job. Or with the progression into hating my roommate. Or maybe I had just spent all winter hiding in my bedroom and my body starting seeking another way out.

I sit down in front of the toilet following the instinct to hurl. This is perhaps the only action that is simultaneously self-inflicted and a complete seizure of bodily control. My roomate looks over at the results and positions a sandwich between my face and the bowl. I tell him I worry I’m going to lose consciousness. He hands me the sandwich again. I glance back and forth between him and the porcelain tub, deciding his arm is the softer place to land. It surprises me the disdain you can feel towards someone you need desperately. I collapse into him, managing to direct my will away from the ground.

I’m in a tunnel now. Spinning spinning spinning. Everything is cool toned and bright, like the crack in a computer screen or something taken by a satellite. All I can hear is my name. All I can see is my face, right in the middle of the tunnel. It, I, occupies my entire field of vision. The atmosphere is how I’d imagine the room through which you leave the living feels, the way survivors describe a brush with death. I realize the only way out is to go towards myself. There is no light to walk into, no memory, no voice of an elder, only me.

Grace Grace Grace Grace Grace. I wake up and I am still alive.

Untitled 1

I’m laying down in the bathtub

Every time the shower head falters I see a priest standing over me

Did I Lock the door?

There is a constant light outside the hall, it is never night inside my building

The knocking on the wall next door scares me. It seems irrational but my cat turns his head too

I am steaming my head, my sinus, my senses

I shift my back over the tile so that my neck is the only thing getting wet. I have been stuck, I think. My throat is holding me back. The tub is so old that I stick to it trying to move

Whatever has suctioned to me slips down the drain

Did I turn all three locks?

This apartment has 9 keys and I take a different one with me every time I leave

A drop of water drifts through my lips above me. It tastes almost sweet

Sunday April 16

I’ve had this cough for probably three weeks now. I don’t want to listen to music. Tomorrow I’ll wake up at 7am. It is so hard to write. You’re putting yourself in an unproductive position. My log is looking weak. I wonder how I can schedule better. I would like to get up early every day to walk and now that I think about it, to write. I could go to the coffee shop. I want to log all the time. I want to write a story about something my mom told me. Her friend’s son is in graduate school to become a Mime.

Monday April 3

I almost forgot about God. Almost is self charity. I forgot and the remembrance feels almost worse than not knowing. The realization that I’ve wasted so much time.

These are the glasses I used to wear. They became lost at least a year ago and in place of them I bought a pair of cheap blue light blocking glasses just to have something to wear. Realistically they served no true purpose, though I’d imagine the light filter proved helpful at times. These glasses were simulacrum. Would you say, as Baudrillard does, that this false image is diabolical? What about my comfort? What about the false reality I exert to provide myself some ease? I have been looking for a locket because the precious one I wore once is missing. In fact, I’ve been looking at the antique mall I bought it at looking just for another necklace as special. I’ve typed in Vintage Gold Heart on eBay and scrolled scrolled scrolled, secretly looking for the exact same one. I know I will never find it.

Saturday April 1

Does smoking weed work if you’re on Concerta? Right now I'm thinking about everything I know and everything I don’t

Monday May 20 2024

I write with Helvetica Neue. I am above being attached to the font known to me. If apple pages wants me to use it who am I to yell “tradition!”? Times New Roman be damned, this is the new world. I can change with the times. I can adapt. I am brave enough to write with the font my software is pre-set with. In fact, this font may operate as the new defining source of my being. It’s on my website, which took about two hours of deludedly refreshing the page trying to find the font change option, btw.

Tomorrow I will:

Go to gym

Go to post office