there’s a disconnect between now and some time not really that long ago when i did things for fun, like write poems and play my instruments all the time and read and sing and write stories and start novels and took photos i called photography and started drawings. now i fiddle constantly with the most bare beginnings of anything and produce nothing. instead of crafting anything i throw my thoughts out there and hope they will accidentally coalesce into a form identifiable as art, and of course this doesn’t work at all. and i don’t like anything i’ve made.
and i secretly hate these tumblr posts, but they’re also one of those mini arenas into which i toss my mind’s contents, hoping for some excitement to come of it.
the truth, i’m pretty sure, is that i’m simply trying without trying, which is great if i want to justify to myself that i haven’t given up, and horrible if i ever actually want to do anything.
somehow i knew jake would pop in with the you can do it montage
somehow i knew leah would pop in with the somehow i knew jake would pop in with the you can do it montage comment
last summer i got drunk off wine at dinner while it was light out in a friend’s familiar but unknown apartment. i drove down twisted streets at night that curved so all the streetlights’ beams disappeared too soon to know anything about them and i wished things were as fun as the last summer had been. eventually i ate lots of peaches and peanut butter and felt miserable and left out, and berkeley wasn’t better until i made it so. when my friends got too cool for me i ripped over the same pacific coast asphalt and talked to people i didn’t know that well online. i don’t think it was a very good summer. i don’t have any memory of the beach even though i know i was there.
this cubicle doesn’t allow for summer, only painful shoulder twinges and hopefully not pale and slothful gluttony. it’s perfectly air conditioned so i never have to make the permanent change to summer wardrobe, so it seeps past the layers into my skin and i walk away stiff with nowhere but myself to go to. it has been months since i’ve been to my home. except for 2 weeks in june and maybe another in july i won’t be home or get to see the ones who warm me most for months and months after. northern california’s cool has become refreshing and if it gets warm it will be too soon.
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate…
wear my contacts for over 24 hours at a time
eat ice cream every day
everything else
my apartment is where i keep my body when i’m not using it
and home is somewhere out there
n. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
i’m tired but not tired and full but not full and anxious but not anxious. whatever life just is.
