rain

It rained for a work week. Today’s the first day I felt the sun. Yesterday the sun maybe reared its head, but I didn’t leave my apartment. I’ve been walking around like a wet dog for the past week, since I don’t have an umbrella or raincoat, so I wanted one day where I stayed dry. When I was soaking wet on the street I imagined chloe sevigny in the last days of disco, dripping wet in a cab.

I believe fear and attraction are very similar feelings. I tried explaining this to my friends, because it’s the idea I brought to our roundtable (we are making a school): Fear inspires attraction. Beauty and power and sexuality and certain perverse and lurid qualities both strike fear and entice and allure. One follows the other around and eggs the other on like a baby sister, and sometimes this reality can make sex both titillating or unbearable. My brain feels soft. 

Yesterday I watched lost in translation and annie hall. Both movies I love for their tenderness, the former much more so. The love between scarlett and bill is so gorgeous to me, completely contained. I think love exists purely when it is contained, when it serves no other purpose than simply to spend time with each other. When it doesn’t serve a future. Which is often tragic. I experienced this before sunset kind of love once in Boston with a boy from Barcelona. We met at a party a month before he was supposed to leave. He bummed a cigarette off of me on a fire escape. Then we each left the city for a week and then spent the weeks leading up to his departure together. We walked around the city, went to museums, laid in bed, talked about a lot, watched the aforementioned film with a sort of masochistic self-awareness. My hair was short and blonde and I pinned it with bobby pins. The ends of his dark brown hair were bleached, by his friends. The last few days felt too sad. I distanced myself and then wrote him a letter. We met at the park and didn’t talk about much. I filmed him on my camcorder. The footage lives on a mini CD. We decided, like ethan and julie, on a date when we would meet again. We discussed all the ways we would be different, how life will have changed us. Decided that we wouldn’t text because that would feel grossly unsatisfactory, and I despise the way relationships deplete themselves slowly, with each text. I think about him a lot. 

Parameters are really beautiful to me. Why shows should know when to stop. Why people embark on affairs. Why monogamy is chosen again and again. Why fasts cleanse you of your sins. Why rainy days are so romantic.

alausi sent me this.

Death is the ultimate parameter, huh. Tragedy, famously, magnifies romance. Feels fitting for such a film about the beauty of parameters.

wake me up...

A breath of fresh air was blown across the city. I ran after a woman who left her purse at a table. It was late. After I caught up with her the man waiting for the bus told me that I was a romantic person. That no one ever runs anymore. In New York? I said. Everyone's running. He laughed. You have to be romantic here. 

I’ve been hankering to buy. I’ve convinced myself that I need a lot of things, mostly because so many of my clothes are either irreparably dirty or disintegrating. But then also I want 23&me, a straightener, lipstick. I’m working far too much and need to let something go. That decision will come in time. a said I (royal) make the rules, and she’s right. The power of a boss amounts to very, very little, especially in restaurants. I like when time is my own so I’ll make it that way, after I find a way to make rent. (I am becoming very bitter toward people who have parents that can and do support them, even in small ways. Even if it’s probably good. I need to let this bitterness go. There are just too many people who fall into this category.) I’ve been rather paranoid and anxious. Things transpire. Money comes and goes, mostly goes. Work demands blah blah blah. I only want to see people I love because anything else is a waste of time. Though still I’m managing to see a guy tonight because I want to feel desired. I cried, in a whimpering way, myself to sleep last night. Explosive wails aren’t my strong suit. Sadness is right now. But I think that feels right for autumn. Let’s recite the old psalm:

Summer has come and passed

The innocent can never last

Wake me up when September ends

intense, as augusts should be

(I heard venus was in retrograde, which makes everything make sense.)

It started slow and began with parties and kissing and sweet sweet visits and me falling asleep on my stoop. Then I ran out of lexapro and got the zaps and became preternaturally alert. I read a clarice lispector book that I hadn’t before and everything seemed right. I wrote on august 18 that I don’t know what I’m doing or how to get out. I don't know when the doors closed. what window can be unlocked or how. For now I sit here in the dark, counting the wrinkles on my wrist, debating whether or not to paint my nails. What exquisite a cell. 

The zaps kept me from sleeping, so I was occupied by torture.

I am heavy as a log. I toss when I sleep. My house quivers as I do. Occupying is such a depressing act, takes twice of me. I wish to fold the calendar like an accordion, count the wrinkles in time until I am in the right place. The right bathroom, smoking. 

I want my plants to die. My passport is gone. I have lost all forms of ID. I can’t hold onto a thing. I am a disintegrating person. I can’t bathe because I am soluble.

I got called off that day and all was well. I continued: I like putting my life in the ladder’s hands, the ladder that leads up to the white roof I lay naked on. Facing God. Daring when I lean. He smites with freckles and raised dots on my skin filled with estrogen. I raise him one, with vapor in my mouth. Ink enters my bloodstream. I drool it out. It drips down my face. Kiss me while the world decays. Suck the ink from my fingerprints. Stop seeking my monstrous cacophony. I’m losing pens.

Lispector had entered my bloodstream.

19th: a rave in bushwick. We took the dj and his tour manager home. He looked at the sky and then back to the dime bag in his hand. He dug his credit card into it. Held it up to my nose. I sniffed. 

I loved this gesture. I was being spoon fed k. I laid in his lap. He rubbed my back the same way he did later when I was lying on my stomach. He traced a line from my shoulder down to my asshole and back and forth until he propped me up.

I had entered insomnia at this point. I wrote myself raw. My consciousness is this part of me that craves sleep but cannot have it. It wants no one solely but only their declaration of love. Lies anger it. Cowardice angers it. A lack of connection with one’s own being and the courage to face it angers it. I’m speaking specifically at this point: august 25. 

I've been really happy, incredibly satisfied with my life. Socially I feel fulfilled, professionally things are happening. I am, though, by nature, greedy. 

I have immense faith in life. I believe that I’m walking The path. today (8/27), while I walked to bedstuy to buy cheap books at 8am, given up on sleep, a man drove up to me and asked me to slam his trunk closed. with all my might I did. He said thanks, baby! and drove off. I felt irrefutably useful, almost saintly despite my deprivations. I thanked god and new york for that, for the bizarrely divine elation I felt in that instant. In that moment I felt like everything thereafter would transpire in my favor. I don’t know if this was due to how quick these actions unfolded or my insomnia-induced haze, but I still think about it. then beach; that’s down below.

September came and with it a vacation in jersey and planting blooming bombing. On the first we watched the moon rise red over the sea. It burned like we do. waves crashed down on top of us and heaved ruthlessly, pulled us in deeper than we can touch, tumbled over our heads. He threw himself into them and I ducked under. I feared for my life and he laughed with my panic and broke it to pieces. The waves were enormous—are.

Other forms of torture: Torture by Pleasure Moderated. Torture by Fantasy. Torture by what one knows could be, and wanting the, real. Torture by being unable or unwilling to sieze.

Back home, september 8: w and I laid out pâté and goat cheese and bread and f's tomato salad while the bunny convulsed. I lost my treasured necklace. I dreamt of my teeth falling out. I feel as though no artisan could keep up with the rate at which I crumble. The thing that wove us so immaculately together has lost its elasticity and now refuses to bend. And I refuse to plead—my knees are already bruised. I'm choosing to let go, to let lost teeth lie.

I dreamt that a disaster was forecast to hit the earth. And it did. Death wasn’t immediate, at least for most. It produced a tingling sensation that signaled pending dissolution. One scrambled to find those whom they loved to spend their last moments and die with. Free houses were advertised with the purchase of a car because the housing market had crashed alongside the comet or nuclear bomb or whatever ambiguous disaster heralded the end. I had sex with strangers and looked for 1 and considered buying a house: An investment in hope, I thought. If we survived, we could live there.