BE WITHIN
ENTRY 105: October 27. 2024 ---

Setting priors

It's hard to understand how we could have ended here, like how chance rules us without us even knowing, three cards drawn, two black and one white, how did we know, in the snow that night, how do we look back on that moment, the card removed now, as though it had always been, looking now through the certainty of that night, the card is black, it always was, there was never another way for this to go, never another way for us to look back, we see that night in the certainty of now, each word becomes certain as it is spoken, there was never a night we met without snow.

---

What I wonder about

new construction in the greater Seattle area

new buildings which have big white insides and are being filled with the contents of the nearest Home Depot,

and as the dust from the sheetrock is blown away and the windows are wiped with a finger of caulk

the big rooms are said to be homes now.

And the wind begins to blow papers from the table.

---

Release the sun - two suns burn now, yours and mine. To hold the sun engulfs you, destroys everything but you, I love slower, I release your intensity, because it was never really yours. I wished you would turn to me and take my face in your hands, I wished you would look at me with care, I wished for tenderness, I wished your eyes would open towards me, I wished you would love that I was with you.

But you are hollow, there is nothing in you that wishes for me. The threads I weave now are complex, no-one is easy to love like you, and I don't want that anymore. I am no longer taken in, I am careful and I choose.

---

Dilemma, I stroke the dilemma, spread my thighs and slip my hand down the skin like a knife in butter,

through the veil of the curtain soft light comes into my room, I lay alone, my barrier comes apart like the breaking of a shell in the hands, slow at first as the fingers reach through, the center of the husk of the sand dollar, then all at once, as the shape becomes many, form lost and changed, only moonlight lands on my skin and I pull myself apart, into strings spread between fingers, before I sleep, to wake whole again tomorrow.

---

ENTRY 104: October 23. 2024 Last night I turned out the light and laid on my side with my ear to the pillow. I heard a familiar beating from deep in the synthetic feathers, like the sound that came before I slept in my old house, I listened closely and tried to tell if it was frogs or insects, calling out near the water, the clicks of wings coming from a secret pond between the buildings. I turned to the window and fumbled with the handle, twisting it in the dark to let in the sound, then I realized the chirping was coming from beneath my hand, from the radiator.

This week at work I finished my audio book on the fall of the Roman Empire; I skipped through the part after it became Holy, but I liked the parts with Caligula and Marcus Aurelius. I switched to a book called Effective Editing, it started with a congratulations If you're reading this, you've just finished the first draft of your novel! You should feel very proud of yourself.

I realized quickly that I knew almost nothing about writing. I had to learn 'show don't tell' in an email from my ex, tactfully trying to tell me not to use the word 'memory' in my piece more than 10 times. The book tells me the most important elements of a story are it's characters, If someone asked you to tell them the plot of Hound of the Baskervilles, could you do it? Probably not. But if someone asks you to describe Sherlock Holmes, you could immidiately picture the brilliant detective. Actually, the only thing I remember about the Hound of the Baskervilles is the word 'moor'. But if you ignore language, then sure, characters I guess.

It's important to identify what your character WANTS, then identify what your character NEEDS. In attempting to get what they want, your character will change by instead receiving or realizing what they need.

What does the person writing this blog want?

On the train this morning I was sitting in the back with my head down listening to Metric,

I'm in the front row with a bottle
Don't know what I can't decide
I'm in the front row
I'm a model
Don't know what I can't describe

I see the ticket checker coming behind me and realize in that instant that my pass expired at the end of September. I have another one in my email inbox from my school but I hadn't bothered to actually set it up yet. The guy stands above me and sees my expired pass and starts speaking in German. I'm saying something like, I really have it I swear, it's just in my inbox, I'm a student I swear, he doesn't seem aggressive, just burnt out. He says more and waves for me to follow him off the train. There's something in his movements that signal to me that I can just run away, and when we get to the platform I just tell him I'm going.

Ma'am, you need to please have respect for my job.

It's all half-hearted. I just turn and walk away, I'm sorry, I'm leaving.

Some things aren't real if you don't make them.

---

There is something funny about me feeling sorry for myself all the time. I recently told my favorite co-worker about my blog, he was asking me how often I wrote, I write all the time, I have this blog I keep up...

Oh, I'd like to see some of your writing sometime.

I went into the bathroom and pulled up my blog on my phone, imagining my co-worker looking at it. It suddenly seemed so ridiculous, the repeated eyes, my sad poetry on the first page, I imagined them reading it aloud to their boyfriend as they laid in bed together, saying yeah, this is really who I work with.

I see that this girl I know is getting published in ROOM, 'it's a story about a lesbian threesome at the end of the world' she writes.

Fuck.

She's working on this story about a woman who fucks a tractor, but first publishes a piece about how she's working on it. It's cool, like how she views sex and love, and all these different perspectives she's gotten about object sexuality. I message her instantly that I'm sorry I never sent her my favorite object sexuality doc but here it is, and did you consider this ending, etc. etc. etc.

I asked her about sex when we met, is it important for you? when you're with someone?

Sex? I could snap my fingers in the street and have sex with anyone I want. It's about the connection with the person, the tension, you know?

I think about this line from one of Marina's poems, I want to want to masterbate.

ENTRY 103: October 21. 2024 My favorite trains have a window to let you see out the back, so you can watch the cars following as you get pulled away from the buildings and the street recedes. I watch my coworkers walking towards me on the sidewalk, holding hands, they came together from Mexico City, the man looks more embarrassing than usual, his pants blowing wide and strange in the wind, he's wearing sneakers on the leaves, the woman's hair is pulled tight to her head like always, they both look down.

Can't you see we're at the edge of the harbor? and we have to leave to come back together?

I watch an old video of Elliott Smith performing in 1997. He sits at the edge of a blue leather armchair and his leg won't stop shaking as he sings, behind the chair is a doorway the same deep blue, like the screen is saturated, and the blue engulfs the people standing there, except two, the types I'd see in Portland now, young and sitting in the doorframe, so that their faces can be seen, below Elliott's, as he rocks forward and back, looking behind the camera after each song, only for a moment, to the filmer, I wonder, like asking if it's going okay. He asks to sing without the microphone, his voice is soft.

I'm frustrated. I'm always frustrated. When I was a kid I realized that, that I was always frustrated. That was my biggest emotion, frustration. And it always rushed inwards, when my glue didn't stick, when my book didn't look like it was supposed to. I want to learn a TOPS song on guitar, it doesn't matter which one, just one from Picture You Staring. But there's no bearded man on YT who's made a tutorial already, and the tabs are wrong, or just too complicated, and I realize again that I don't even know how to mute the strings.

I've started thinking, give yourself 15 years, that started as a joke to myself because after k I said give yourself one year, but that might not be enough I realized.

15 years is also a bit more than double the time that M and I were together, if you don't count the few months we broke up that one time. I can't really get into that right now.

If I stayed up every night, could I get where I want?
If I did more, If I was myself more, could I be who I want?

I can't help but think about Elliott Smith watching that video, that he would never see himself like I see him.

I finished On Earth We're Breifly Gorgeous in one day, today. I thought I wouldn't be able to get into it as much since the love interest (it's more of course, this is poetry!) shares the same name as my brother. But actually it was easy to imagine Trevor as myself instead.

The part of the book that made me cry was unexpected, it wasn't any of the deaths, or my longing to be loved like Trevor, the loving descriptions of masculinity. It was the part when they have sex 'for real', and LD accidentally shits himself, and Trevor takes them to the river, and they bathe and Trevor returns to LD and sucks his dick in return, to show that he is still clean.

I never told you this but I worry often that I am unclean. A few months after k I realized that we'd only ever had sex on my period, and the last time, they'd gone down on me for a long time, I'd never come with them before, and they came up with blood in their mouth, and said it was good but I knew, I saw their disgust before they could hide it.

The part about hating my vagina is printed now, anyone can read that, but it solidified in that memory. I realized that even if I'd imagined it, the risk was too great. I felt exposed when I thought about that, thought of someone touching my vagina and being repulsed, once the thought came it didn't leave, it became certain, I wished someone had bathed me then, and showed me that my thought wasn't true.
ENTRY 102: October 19. 2024 [CW: sexual abuse, alcoholism]

We are in a compound somewhere warm, between the roads are thin pine trees and the roads are made of rock and yellow dust. I'm walking with a group, we are deciding which road to take to get to the store, I see the large grey brick buildings ahead but we go a different way, down a smaller road and past adobe huts, we see someone far away down the road and wait for them.

There is confusion about rooms, I end up with three old german women, I go out of the room and into a dark hall filled with water, everyone is sitting in chairs underwater, I swim to them but I can only see the back of their heads, k, hair floating up in the water, I try and grab them but I miss, I swim outside and the buildings are still like in a western, tall, with orange dust over them all, but it's also my home town, and I try and find my old house, but I get stuck on the walls of a building and can't make it, I know it's a dream then.

I wake up and can't open my eyes fully, I try and turn but can't see everything, like I can't find any shape in the light, my eye lids are pulling down, I'm looking around the room for my clothes, the german women start talking to me, I move to their side of the bed and try and smile as my face is slurring down, my words are so hard to form, they are asking me more but I can't see their faces, I'm turning back and I find bags, of course, my bag, I remember bringing it the day before, I reach to my eyes and there is gauze over my left eye, I pull it down and blink but my vision still doesn't come, and I turn around the blurry room as the women watch.

I wake up in my bed, and I hear my phone, it's messages from M,

Drew punched me in the face

Then the slurred voice notes, he says he's going to sleep and I can't talk to him about it now anyway, his message ends with I love you and I know that he means it, but it's a kind that I know, and I can't take in.

Someday it will be time for forgive my mother, maybe some day soon, maybe as soon as I can tell her what I'm about to tell you. I spoke with someone new last weekend and they told me a story on the train. They'd induced a vison of what it was like as a child, they 'were back', hiding from their mother in the closet, and later they told her about it. She was upset, but they didn't blame her, only told her the story, and they are much closer now.

from Yowler:

My heart is a part of me, but she lies
I'm shining sea to sea, but it's not right
You'll lose me in the trees, but I'm alive

Your hands look just like mine and
your voice went into my spine
when I was just a gleam in your eye

There were ghosts in the sidewalk, that night
but the fear of them was absent
with you by my side

And you can lead me to the water
but you cannot make me drink
but you will not be avoided
because your ghost is haunting me
you made me in the spring time
but my body met the cold
you were crying in the corner
and that fear is all I know.

There was one night, things were getting worse towards the end of my senior year. I was never at home if I could avoid it, I would spend as much time as I could out with my friends, leaving early in the morning for work before they got up and coming home late after they'd gone to bed, at night I'd sneak out and sleep in my car a few times a week, sometimes just alone. If I was home I would bring my friends too, and they'd see the change too if it happened, and we could talk about it, more like it was interesting and dramatic and not my mother falling apart. But a few nights that year I remember, everyone else was hiding in their rooms, and she came up the stairs, there was a sound she made when she was drunk, a shuffling that I could hear anywhere in the house, a slowness that was so removed, and she heaved against the door, it had no lock, and I braced against it from the other side, and I yelled for her to stop, but she screamed for me to let her in, and it wasn't the first time I'd held the handle like that against her, until she pulled it open and forced herself in, her fingers reaching around the doorframe and I sat on my bed and watched her hunched form move around the room, black in my mind and her reaching for me on the bed, saying I didn't know what sex was, that she would teach me what sex was.

She only touched my face, maybe my arms, but I remember her insistence, and I sat in bed and pleaded with her to leave, and she looked at me from so far away, her skin loose on her face and there was no trace of her there. Eventually, I lead her away, down the steps, I put her in her room and held the door closed as she pushed against it, asking why I was doing this, saying I needed to listen to her and let her out, saying it wasn't right, since she was my mother.

There were many nights like that, but I don't remember any sexual abuse, but there is a strange cloud that hangs around the memories of her touching me, that may have only came later, when I started to wonder. When I started therapy my therapist asked if I remembered anything, perhaps there was nothing. but with what you describe, and your symptoms.. but I also make many connections, and imagine many things, and does it matter in the end? What happened, and what I wonder happened, how she acted when she wasn't there? There are no answers.

I met a girl earlier this summer, we got close but I stayed a bit wary of her. We sat on the beach one night and she told me she'd been sexually abused as a child by her brother, I couldn't fully relate, but I understood, and her story was different in that it had broken open, her family knew now, whereas the memories I have have only drifted away, my mother back now, and loving, and completely different, as though she really was asleep those nights, and something else inhabited her body.

I knew the girl liked me, but I still wasn't sure, there was something aggressive in her, and a faraway look that I recognized. The last night I drank, we were at the bar she worked at, I could feel that I was also far away, as though I was sitting deep behind my skin. I felt my face loosen, hanging down strangely, I went to the bathroom and put my face up to the mirror, it was like looking at a photograph of someone else, I am beautiful I thought, but not like a person, like a mask, like a sculpture, I pulled my hair over my eyes and stayed there for minutes, looking at her in the mirror, when I came out of the bathroom, K pulled me aside, you look terrible, the tips of my hair were stuck together with spit, my eyes in black sockets. We walked to another bar and the girl and I fell behind, I wanted to be desired,

her, you know I like you right?

me, yeah, I know.

I stop, waiting with her at a corner in the dark, a man is unloading a fruit truck behind us, a light from above shines down,

me, I just can't do this, I'm so afraid of something happening, it's going to be just like with k, I'm so avoidant, I'm going to pull away, I'm not ready to trust someone yet.

I start to cry, she hugs me,

her, hey, it's okay, we don't have to be that serious, we can just have fun together,

[silence]

you have such beautiful eyes, I want to kiss you so badly—

I pull back and she moves forward, our lips meet, I don't know what to do, she tastes sweet but I don't feel right,

I pull back from her, I tell her we'll go on a date, I lead her back to my friends, and afterwards I decide not to talk to her anymore.

---

As I age I notice it more and more, the curve of my cheeks under my eyes, the way I smile, it's all her, with glasses on especially, and I dress like her, in layered blues and patterns, I feel like I live under her skin, to find me attractive is to find my mother attractive, to sleep with me is to sleep with my mother, I want to have my own face instead.

I don't blame her, I don't blame M, I don't blame the girl, I don't blame myself. The mistakes happen like in a dream, the curving away from the true self to someone else, in the end, only one of us remembers the action, to the other it is blurred, and I'm left with someone far away from their mind, who cannot remember, who cannot see me.
ENTRY 101: October 16. 2024 Ghosts

You see me as a ghost. How is it possible you can't see my edges, can't see how I stand on the sidewalk, how I watch the cars in the street, how I call to you, how can you never turn towards me? To you, I feel nothing. To you, I am like the walls you look past, I am again in the closet of my parents house, looking up at the dark coats and sitting on the crumpled shoes. With you I am like a ghost, as though my words were never spoken, I want you to wonder about me, you don't care what I write, don't care what I say, even the things about you pass right through, I have no form, no skin you think of reaching towards, I am the forgotten buildings you pass, we are the two cities atop each other, I am the siren sound in the street and you continue walking, I am a curtain for the light, I am things in the grass you never noticed, I am the blue between you and the mountain far away, I am like the rest of the world you never saw.

I wake up to a text from my father, it's only a photo, of my mother sitting next to the family table with a cake lit with candles, she is alone, the chairs behind her are all empty and the room is dark, she smiles at the camera in her strange way, it looks strained, she is so far away from me.

I immidiately think of another birthday, one when my dad came to ask me to make a card for my mother and I forgot, then she was crying, somewhere, maybe in the kitchen, and I didn't understand, she was drunk and crying and saying we didn't love her because I hadn't even made her a card, I ran up to the room and cut paper and glued it and made a card for her and when I brought it down she had already stopped crying, and she seemed embarrassed, but my dad thanked me, and I never saw my mom upset on her birthday again.

I call my mom while I'm still in bed, and she answers because it's still not too late there,

Hi honey, it's nice to hear from you.

It's nice to hear from you too, happy birthday! Hope it was nice.

It was, I had so much great cake.

At home? I saw, dad sent me a photo, it looked amazing!

Yes, at the office too, and your father got me a big cake.

[silence]

Well, what's going on with you today? It must be.. early morning? Early wednesday morning?

Yes, I'm just going to work today. Last night my friend came and we made dinner together and stayed up until two just talking, it was really nice.

Yes,

[silence]

Your father told me you had some event at the Swiss Embassy? Some demonstration recently, has that already happened?

Yes, it was a few weeks ago, it was just like setting up our equipment and showing it to people, but it was fun and went really well.

That's good to hear, did you meet any bigwigs?

I don't know, I couldn't really tell.

[we laugh]

[silence]

Well,

Thank you for calling sweetheart, let us know when you know when we'll be seeing you.

Yes I will, and I hope you sleep well.

Okay, bye honey!

Bye! Goodnight.
ENTRY 100: October 8. 2024 Cold Mornings

The woman on the bike stops at the bottom of the hill, she wears two shades of blue, maybe one is periwinkle, the wheels lengthen, and touch the road.

I go to a glasses store and pick out these cheap black frames, give me the ones that say the least, I don't care so much about how I look right now.

K is adamant, your twenties are for being alone and crying, the real Diana Vreeland quote includes dancing but K adds that later.

Pleasure doesn't matter so much right now, my appearance doesn't matter so much right now. You moved into me in a strange way, leaving me happier alone, and with so much more to think about.

ENTRY 99: October 6. 2024 My father's birthday today, and a month until I'm 25. I remember my mother looking at me through the bathroom mirror, pulling down her lips to show me her receding gums and the yellow stalks of her teeth. They looked normal to me. She says, everything gets better until you're 25, then it's all downhill.

My old friend reminds me on the phone that I'm losing sleep over an ameoba, and they move slowly, plus it's cool to get your eye eaten. I get to sleep sooner after that but it doesn't change the fact that bright lights and screens hurt my eyes now, and I get a strange pain, like pressure within the eye. Not to mention the tooth in my lower jaw that hurts when I eat now, the gum frantically brushed away, bringing it's pale yellow root to the surface.

I try and tell myself It's Very Punk Rock to have strange maladies, but at night I am very sure now that I will die. I promise myself I'll masterbate every day now, and I think of getting back with my ex. Worst case, they're an asshole, but I already expected that, and what if I die before I love again?

I try thinking of my body like a building. I know from my building collapse YT videos that buildings can really take a lot, this is like the first leak, my roof flooding and the water seeping into a few rooms, weaking the ceiling slightly but mostly cosmetic, will be patched within the year and will leave only water stains, which I like the look of anyway. But you never fully know about the internal stucture, a missing bolt somewhere.

Days

In the field, lies an old farm house. Within the house, on the table, sits an egg, Gwendolyn's egg, bluegreen. In the morning, the bluegreen egg is taken from the straw and placed on the table, the sun rises from the mountains and warms the farmhouse and a sliver of the table, the egg is bluegreen, there are no people in the house.

A tree out in the prairie looks strange. It is too big, a comb of branches that are too high and wide, the tree takes up the whole sky when I look that way. In the wind it takes the horizon too, turning it's branches and catching all the air, turning much more than the other trees, it is grey while they are green.

There are other structures near the house. Metal tubes, spines and ribs, ivy covers many, you can see into some windows and there is a desk and a bookshelf, but outside it is cold and mostly made of metal, the sun sets every time I go there, and I watch it go down, leaving this place.
ENTRY 98: October 3. 2024 [CW: This post is disturbing and unpleasant in many ways: gore, death of loved one, anxiety ]

Where do I start and you end?

I stand in the bathroom and look at my eye in the mirror. Red veins have emerged between the corner and my iris, and within the mass I swear I can see a perfect circle, outlined in red and glowing dull grey. Like another eye has fallen in.

I dream that night that I'm going on a trip with my parents. Before we leave we go to my grandmother's house to say goodbye, but we can't find her. I search the rooms and the empty hallways until my parents say we'll find her later, and we drive away. Two weeks later we come back to the house, everything is like we left it, every room is empty. We search and call for her until I notice the sound of flies, circling near the ceiling, all trailing from one room.

When I start to believe I'm going blind, what I see starts to change. White surfaces begin to look more black, I begin to see faint crosshatch, fuzziness, like TV static, surrounding me in white rooms, between myself and objects I see only a strange blurriness hanging in the center of the room, and the halo of lights, now lasting minutes, hours, burning the negative image of chairs, tables, into my retina, superimposing my room into the laboratory, everything pressed and darkening onto everything else.

In the dream I follow the flies, to her bathroom, tucked behind her bed, through a small door we never checked, her arms and legs hang from the tub, I close the door and tell my parents, she was dead before we left, my mom laughs, so it didn't matter anyway.

At night, I watch the red curl and spread under the edge of my contact, thinking of what it will be like to be blind, that I'll have time to think then, can learn to write though speaking, that the dark is only another room, that it's good to always change, that I'll feel wind differently then, and pay more attention to voices. I imagine being left with only what I've seen, to recombine and imagine more, I try and feel good about that.

But I worry about the clear blue iris, as the grey mass throbs and breathes in the mirror at night, slowly growing from the white tissue and soon to break the surface. The nice eyes, that look just like my mother's, you have such beautiful eyes, the strangest beauty, the only beauty that I couldn't control, but could lose, I see now, the risk of things that come easy, and never really felt like mine.

I fall asleep and dream again, this time I cannot open my eyes, the lids heavy and sloping down, one after the other, I stand in the bathroom of my grandmother's house and watch halves of my vision go dark, I try and pull the lids open but my vision is slow and blurred, I hold the walls as I walk down the hallway. I realize that I know this feeling, and that it comes in dreams, so I close both eyes and move deeper, leaving the house and waking in my bed.

I explain my symptoms to the eye doctor, redness, light sensitivity, pain from contact lenses, he prescibes me eye drops for seasonal allergies. When I go home I see that the red veins have faded, the circle barely visible now, back to hiding within the lens.
ENTRY 97: September 26. 2024 On the tram home I watch two people through a window, the room is a portable storage container stacked and sitting at an angle, the inside is lit yellow and I can see the woman facing me in a black shirt and the back of the man facing her, they stand behind a bed and watch each other under the yellow light. The trams stops and I watch them swing back and forth, as though they are about to circle each other, the only face I can see, the woman's, is laughing. I watch her watch the man, she smiles and moves around him, like she is glad he is in the room with her.

Yesterday night I dreamed that I was trying to get to a race, I picked up my spikes and held them by the shoelaces and ran through the woods, the grass was tall and rough against my skin and within the blades were cockroaches, all brown this time, they moved alongside me through the grass, looping through my hands and my legs, then falling in my clothes and against my skin, I pulled one from my back pocket and held it as it ran around my hand. After the grass is a house, I'm trying to get to the other side but trapped in a bathroom full of pink plastic, many tubs of plastic containers all sticky and grey with wet dust and I hear the crowd outside the house, that the long field is right in the backyard and I hold my shoelaces and run but I wake up before I get there.

When I was on the cross country team we used to travel at this time of year, the older girls all said you'd miss it once you left and I didn't believe them, mostly because I usually felt out of the place with my team, even the year it was almost all lesbians, but in the fall I do miss it. Life on the team was very easy sometimes, they drove you to a big field and you'd run around it with your friends, then you'd drink a protein shake with them and talk in the grass and feel very good, and if you had a good race that weekend you'd have so much hope for the next one, and I felt cool a lot of times after the workouts, so much so that I didn't even notice I didn't really feel like a woman. And I was always outside, in the cold while fall came in and moved the trees and I would watch it all, and like my city then.

I get home and my roommate is making dinner with her partner in the kitchen, they've put on this old blues with a guitar that has that lonesome train sound, I go for a run at night and listen to the songs I used to listen to with my old roommate, L, the rain gets stronger until it's sheets and blurring my eyes, the water splashing everywhere and turning the street into a river and the light of the streetlights becomes big and blurred.

I've been thinking about my house then, because I moved it to Portland in the fall, and I have the best memories of it then.



I've been thinking about my crazy landlady, and of sitting in the chairs with B, the fall after I came back from Germany, when we listened to Elliott Smith and smoked out the window, and went to play pool once at the tavern, and coming home to the trailer sitting in the driveway, and some years when everything felt orange.
ENTRY 96: September 24. 2024 Meant to Be

There was a time before we could have understood each other. But it wasn't to speak to me that you learned my language, and it wasn't to speak to you that I learned yours.

I walk in heels down the street. I am going to print out my documents to tell the city that I have moved, although I really moved 10 months ago, I wasn't allowed to tell them until now.

The structure of the city is a body, they say roads are arteries but they don't mention that the construction of the city dictates not only our world but also our dreams. It is the path of the streetlights that allows you to walk, it is the concrete overpass that blocks you. It is the building that allows you to climb the steps, and sleep a hundred feet above the ground.

My friend tells me a friend of her cousin got the ameoba that falls into your contact lens solution and eats your optic nerve. The ameoba is largely untreatable and leads to total blindness, infecting 100 people in Germany each year. A few months ago my monthly contacts began to hurt my eyes and I switched to buying dailys, if I think about it, I can see faint black lines all over my vision, and the impressions of the things I've looked at, I blink and the lines remain. I am convinced that I too have the ameoba, and start to feel grateful when I notice I'm seeing, look at the street and the buildings, you are not blind, you soon will be blind, enjoy seeing her face, at any moment you won't be able to see it any more.

I want to go to the eye doctor to ask them if I have the ameoba, and get glasses, but my health insurance refuses to send me my insurance card, until the city can tell them that I have moved. I learned in the Kafka museum that Kafka worked in an office writing workplace safety protocols, i.e. examining how the tool impacts the body, what happens when the body works within the greater body of the city? How does the city carve the body?

I went back to watching court TV, in this trial the accused becomes obsessed with the character Dexter and decides to become a serial killer, he justifies the killing by deciding that he is an agent of fate. That were he to kill successfully it would be correct because the universe allowed it. This strikes me because I also tend towards this logic, if something happens it was meant to be.

One night k and I both wore a black turtleneck to our date, everything was going wrong. I wanted to be with them so badly but they were apathetic and distant from me. Instead of sleeping together we sat together in bed and started talking about free will, I pointed out that we wouldn't be acting like condesending assholes if we both weren't wearing black turtlenecks. Then things were okay and we kissed and I asked if they thought we were meant to meet. I don't think that way they said, I think people construct their own reality,

yeah, I'm not a dumbass. But it can be nice to think that things are going to turn out alright.

and they didn't.
ENTRY 95: September 21. 2024 The body complicates things, perhaps a bit like the war, which spread your friends across the continent, or your mother's addiction, the unconcious body lying next to you in the grass, I think of my own mother's addiction, to not understand the order of things, of love, the order of love, hearing me and responding, when this is disturbed, it complicates things, turns life into a new game, I too wish you were only a bright light, and that I was the tall, thin body of a streetlight, curving above the strange world, and most alive in your absence, but complication brings us much more, the elaborate movement of DNA replication, would you ever prefer a world where nothing moved?

green glass bottle
left on the sink
I'd wake to find
you missing

slippers on tile
shoulders bent over
I knew from your voice
when you'd crossed over

I always wondered
what did you find
in that place
away from your mind

or was it
you only wanted to speak
feel for my skin
and say that you loved me

but all those mornings
you'd wake and see
all of your words
were only a dream

we closed our eyes
the house turned dark
the walls bent forward
to help you up

now you're back
but I've already seen
a world that you
could not believe

The table is pulled too close to my chair and my eyes are too close to my microwaved rice, making the salt crystals more visible than I've ever noticed, and of course the rice still looks like meal worms. I eat very slowly and think about if I was really eating meal worms, that it doesn't really bother me to think about, the rice still tastes the same.

Days after receiving it, I cry thinking about this text in my phone:

'I'm here'
'Very busy'
'But waiting to see you!!'

Waiting to see you, I won't leave before seeing you, I want to see you before I leave, I'd like to see you, seeing you would be nice for me, I'd feel good seeing you, I enjoy being with you, I won't leave yet, seeing you makes me feel nice, I like you.

I cry and cry, I cry at the same spot I always cry walking home from my S-bahn stop. The spot at the bottom of the hill where the road begins to even out and I can see the other people walking towards me, they always hold their kids' hand and smile, then I start to cry.

I feel mostly numb, numb is most of my feeling. I realized this last month that I wasn't in love with anyone, not even my partner, not even the person who I've been sad about, that actually I feel almost completely numb, like the nerves are burnt out, or I'm in a padded suit, that I'm really afraid of that soft of thing,

This makes me cry a lot because I didn't really think it was happening. I felt it changing of course but I didn't really think it was true, I thought it was just kind of funny, like how in movies people say, I'm afraid to get hurt again but that's kind of a ridiculous thing to feel.

I can't turn towards anyone, only away. Things that used to seem nice now seem scary, like sitting across from someone at a dinner table. Like looking at someone. Like liking the look of someone.

That sort of thing, I think I'm afraid of that sort of thing, I deeply want, that sort of thing, I think I'm afraid, of that sort of thing.

ENTRY 94: August 14. 2024 Goodbye For Now

I was getting used to seeing your skin, I looked through the doorway at you standing in the kitchen, looked secretly at your back and your chest, desire in an unconcious way, that everything was tense, it was your stomach that I wanted, wanted to scrape my fingers across the skin, wanted to see your body move under light as though it were mine.

I leave a faraway train station late at night and there is movement in the divider between the roads, cars speed around the dirt clearing under the bending trees and within there is movement. Many rabbits chasing each other, many rabbits running in circles in the space between the roads. They are black circling feathers, the clearing ringed in the self storage building lit all white and the speeding cars, red light threading out in rods and crossing the meadow.

You admit you masterbated in the middle of the day yesterday, you never masterbate, you say, and the cum was mixed with blood. I think about you masterbating in my house, on my couch, the same way I did that afternoon, that perhaps we want to touch each other.

You tell me this late at night, before you leave, and I think of the reasons you would rather touch your own body than mine. I think of the reasons I am afraid to move my hand to your stomach, that no matter what the desire will remain, that we are so uneven, a body alive and a body wishing to become the other, that no matter what you feel, I don't desire myself and thinking through you, I cannot move.
ENTRY 93: August 2. 2024 At night, Seowon goes back to the lab to watch the anenomes alone.

We call Seowon from the beach and we hear her voice break on the phone, we hear the crack of glass as she hurries, turning off the microscope light and taking the soft flowers from her pools of salt water, their arms pulling in and the barbs slipping down, her fingers, wet and smooth like theirs, shoving open the steel door and soon she is running, her skirt to her ankles and rippled with sequins, shaking and crashing around her knees, the ocean body has laid down beneath the stars, a dark desert before us, we wait before the water, waiting to hear her steps down the bank, and her breathing coming, sandals loose on rocks, she dreams of glowing water, wet, soft, teeth of the anenomes, all turned blue in a light eminating from within, the sea lit with embedded stars, mirrors all around, she feels dizzy, and then she is with us, reaching our silhouettes on the beach, we envelope her but she cannot breathe,

Have you seen it?

We urge, yes, we have seen it, the water remains only a velvet covered bed, one could walk on it's belly, the soft back of a cat, one can slip into it's wet mouth,

Seowon is walking into the water with her skirt, the fabric melts into the black velvet, I step into the water too and follow behind up to my knees, she turns from me and swings her hand through the water, the noctiluca erupt, her arms fly up, her hands to her face, covering her mouth still turned from me, her body turned out to the water, she breaks towards the horizon, where we cannot see, only hear, her sobs as the beads of the algae light her legs, carried in the water to her skin, globes she has seen but never spoken to, as they hold her in their world, and light it so that she can see.
ENTRY 92: July 17. 2024 Cowboy Songs

Loosen the ropes but tighten the knot, horse stands in the night, turning to myself, loose on the sand, I remove my clothes, beneath the shirt I am like a larvae in the light, I curl in the dirt, head bent forward, I watch the light bend on my stomach, I feel the core, soft flesh which buckles and straightens, horse turns flat, we leave each other alone.

I take it out of me, I ask why I would want you here, and take away that I want to be around you, that cannot be, so I take love out of me, from my stomach I pull it like ropes, saying there is no reason.

She walked into the Florida stream, her ankles thin and skin stretched around her legs, wrinkled and clear, spotted like the water, I look often in the stream, both from within and from the bank, the stream where I am afraid, in the black water, I forget what things are supposed to look like.

Our house broke apart in the sand, I watched from the shore as it began to fade into the mud flats, first the shakes turned grey began to fall in the wind, twisting down the walls until only holes remained, what did we talk about? before I learned to think about you, before I learned to be quiet.

I built the house with my hands, I straightened my arms and carried the wood to the shore as I stretched my body tall over the sand, reaching the beams and steadying with hands and nails, shimmed and tied together because always the wood was bending away.

I notice arthritis beginning in my wrists, the tendons pulled wrong too many times, strange sparks come into my mind, I wish I saw and understood but I only keep working.
ENTRY 91: July 13. 2024 If you can see me, then tell me, her face falls into the window, her face is curved just so, is it too much? I leave everyone and go far inside, I look up from the flies and the sky is dark like a fall evening, and the rain comes heavy like hail, waves from the eves and down the building across the way,

I'm still in love, I'm not cured in the slightest, even though I pretend I am,

Found out that there were arranged marriages in the Italian Renaissance, idk why this captivates me, as if love and marriage were related, of course the nobility still found love through mistresses or whatever, or just chose child brides they liked, idk why I feel that this is so important, when did love come about? love is ancestral? what is ancestral? Joyce: when was the birth of modern man?

Evolutionarily ( Toledo: What do you know about Jesus? What do you really know? ), we think that love is a way of finding compatible genes, why do we have sex? If I have to hear about the Red Queen Hypothesis one more time—we think we recombine our genes to withstand the rapid changes of the bacterial world around us, so love is an impulse to drive us towards genes that fit well with ours, complementary within the offspring, what can you fill within me? what can you add to my genome?

I wake up sad every morning and listen to Fleetwood Mac and think about if Stevie Nicks had never been sad, is being sad ancestral?

Right now, though, I'm listening to Led Zeppelin IV, can I just be honest with you? I'm afraid that I've built myself an aquarium of sadness and actually I can just step out, do you like them? What do you know about Jesus? What do you really know? Why don't you just text them or something? Why don't you just try being friends, life is so short, you'll be on your deathbed next to the bubbling treasure chest and thinking about them, why don't you just give them another chance?

But what if Stevie Nicks had never been sad? Why should I go back? They've never even apologized, and now I get to light my candle in the evenings and read Faulkner as I cry, I don't even like the Italian Renaissance, a bunch of pricks, but you never hear da Vinci saying 'I wish she'd apologize, I can't go on', what can you fill me with? the implication is that my child will be better, but will they? What do I want to happen?

I go outside and play my guitar, I make my coffee and write in my notebook and try and move towards something else, I want a new feeling, not only the layering of this one, and the stretching out of arms, the paint on the rocks from long ago is repainted again and again, the symbols are changed but something remains, the white marks stretch through the valley, many hands, did they find it? After all the work of love, am I better off? Stretching out/feed off, I remember the subway well, I remember going down in that dark valley, like entering the river, Pound: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.

Did I even like it there? Where do I like it?
ENTRY 90: July 9. 2024 Ulysses/Emperor Angelfish/the Unconcious

I cried all day yesterday, which was actually lovely, it was like being in a play, where I go about my normal day but soft little tears run down my cheeks at opportune moments, it started on the train to my stats class, writing in my notebook about camping with my mother:

I wake in the trailer in the woods, to the cries of the insects, I left to find you sitting in the plastic chair in the meadow, I knelt at your feet and looked up at you in the sunshine, the only god in life is mom, when will we find each other again in the grass?

but then it was on to my bayesian models! priors, posteriors, a priori, slopes, sigma bar, actually side bar; I haven't talked much about my stats class but it has captured my artistic imagination, I've started writing with a bayesian framework, i.e. what can you predict will happen if you do the same process thousands of times, what can you know from the past? But moving back to my tears, things picked up on the train to my german class,

re: me, standing at the platform and thinking about the tattoo I've been considering, tropical fish, strange I know, I was thinking it was the connection to the 90s, this blog, the old aquarium with plastic fish I had as a kid, I start looking at various tropical fish online and at the sight of the Emperor Angelfish I am transported back to the same camping place (the rugged pines of the North Cascades) where my grandmother helped me write my first story, there were two trailers up there, our families and my grandmother's (hereby: mom-mom), and I'd go over to mom-mom's trailer in the mornings to work on my story, we took a little plastic fish and cut slits in the pages of our book so the fish could slip through them, to visit the sand, the seaweed, moving through the book itself..

I start to cry, overwhelmed by the power of the unconscious, the metaphor, the marks left by living, and I'm serenely letting the tears fall down my face when the man across from me leans over,

I was doing the same thing three days ago, crying on the train..I don't know what's going on in your head but we are with you,

I'm shocked by the kindness and humanness of this (from a German!) but I also can't tell him about my grandma's stroke, so I nod and think about moving, but I'm practicing putting myself out on the table, and letting things be flawed and true, so I just go back to crying quietly and looking out the window, and we sit silently until we both get off at Friedrichstrasse, and he asks if I have a boyfriend and I decline, but am flattered that my show of train emotion was so beautiful, and he wishes me the best with pure love,

I have to take the surprise test that I missed last week in my german class, and I tear up in between my teacher calling on me to fill in the der dem die dieser diesem ihr ihm ihn etc etc etc but it doesn't bother me, I love to cry,

I feel everything building on my train back home, and it's pleasant, like waiting to orgasm, I decide I'm going to make it to the meadow next to my apartment before I full break down, but I climax on the sidewalk instead, the final piece falling into place as I put my hand over my mouth and sob,

where was the fish going? as it slipped through the pages? what was it looking for? looking under the seaweed and beneath the sand? the final page I drew with my grandma, where the plastic fish comes to the end, and meets it's twin, it's mother, the fish was searching for his mother,

I go to the park and cry in the grass under the clouds, things are so perfect sometimes, it doesn't matter if I'm held or not held, if my mother is away or here, both are true, both happen at once,

At night, I dream that I'm in a dark movie theater, the screen so wide and bright that it hurts to look, and there are two beds, water beds, my hands sink down as I crawl up the bed, I crawl towards the feet and legs of my family, my parents, my uncle, I'm searching for k but they've gone to the other bed, they make tea and prepare to watch the movie, I wish they hadn't left, but I stay where I am, the theater is a wide and empty blackness,

I wake, and write to you, now I will go to work, and see you soon,
ENTRY 89: July 4. 2024 When I was 16 I lived with a host family in Bavaria, one morning I found a small pond in the forest; a sign was posted in front with the long, spread body of an eel. I wondered about the eels swimming at the bottom of the black water, I thought of wading into the pond, but I left without going in,

I remember my host father stuck his head out the upstairs window and waved goodbye to me in the driveway, his face leaning out the top of the little house reminded me of a cuckoo clock, and I had a vision of this same goodbye playing out year after year, as he aged and I aged but always returned at some point, to be sent off in the same way,

Premonitions work like this sometimes, that you know a moment is important but you're not sure why, or maybe it was just Nadine's expression when I said that I was excited to see her parents, that made the news make sense somehow,

On certain nights in spring, eels leave the water and move over land, they slip in black masses over the ground and find new pools, it's rare to see the eels moving through the forest like this, because it's always at night, and often in the rain,

It was my grandmother's 93rd birthday last week, I kept getting busy in the evenings and promising myself I'd call the next day, five days later my dad texted me she'd had a stroke in the night and woke up with aphasia, the paths to reach her words had been erased, and she could no longer find the words to speak,

Eventually, the eels reach salt water and swim to a gyre off the coast of Mexico called the Sargasso Sea, there, they dive so deep that no sensors can find them, and no one knows what happens then, but the eels resurface months later and are found again in the brackish water off the coasts of Europe, where they enter the rivers, and move back to the land,

I went back to Bavaria this last weekend, I visited the pond but the sign with the eel was gone, only the mud and the black water was left, Did it look different now? Could I feel if the water was full or empty? I never called my grandmother and now she can't speak, time changes what you can't see, the eels I never saw have left, what would we have talked about? My grandmother's words overflowed the banks, your father passed away in March, I came back to Germany, the eels slip over land while we cannot see, leaving the pond to look the same in the morning, we sense only the skin and beneath, time is working, in the night, her words had already passed to me.
ENTRY 88: June 30. 2024 When my friends E and A came to stay with me last week I had to move a few things around to pull the bed out for them, I moved my mirror so that it faced my chair, and then realized that I could watch myself bent over the table and scribbling in my notebook mid-breakdown. Sometimes I write as though someone else is writing and I'm only reading it, this was a similar feeling except my body was the actor, I could play 'write' in my dark room late at night, realizing that the action (my body in space) was perhaps more important (since I could now view it) than the actual words on the page,

Actually, who doesn't think often about their two selves? The self that thinks and the self that is viewed, at times separating the two selves can help. That's why I like to write on this blog, I type out the words and then read them as though I had only found the words, not written them, also pretending to be in a movie can make you braver, or make the aftermath less scary. My German friend recently told me that she only writes in her diary in English if it's something deep, that way it sounds to her more like a sitcom.

This all ties to the whole, fake it 'til you make it, something I think of often as I carry my guitar in it's little fabric bag to take it out carefully and sing I'm goin' out sleepwalking in a hushed voice at the local park. The mirror creates the distance between the two selves, seeing myself playing guitar in the mirror or in a photo allows me to see that I appear to the world different than I think of myself, and maybe there's something else to that...

I know there's advice online about doing work facing a mirror, to be your own body-double to use the updated DSM, but I wonder if human reflection exists without the mirror? Before mirrors we had water to see ourselves, and most animals could also see themselves in this way, or even with glass, like flies landing on windows, dogs can recognize themselves in the mirror, but do they see the incongruence between their two selves? Could a dog use the mirror to stand more like it believes it should stand? To look more like it wishes to in it's mind? Do dogs wish to change their bodies?

There are internal and external reasons for wishing to change the viewed self, do you want to look more like your thinking self or do you wish to change your viewed self to be more attractive to others? Although I have no evidence, I believe a bird would use glass to smooth it's feathers, but is this to appear good to itself or to others? This introduces many selves, our ability to assume the perspective of others, we slip ourselves under what we believe is their skin and try to empathize, imitating their calls if you will-

So we have many selves, how do we capitalize? It can be beneficial to assume other selves when we wish to change our thinking self, if you believe your thoughts can change your body but how much do you let in? The thinking self is already a mixture of the 'true' selves of so many other people, but there must be some true self in all of us, otherwise what is the collective built from? And in this circular way we return to boundary, and I sign off because I have to actually live my life instead of whatever this is, I moved my mirror back,
ENTRY 87: June 29. 2024 Then

when will the street begin
that they did, that you did
A vision inside of a laboratory,

Why am I leaving so late? I'd ended up at
little dirt trails but at one edge was a chain link fence

and of course that night I wasn't there
you extract something real then

plastic the water tumbling
wake, the sweet steel beneath


Transition

when I was in 2nd grade, I was
lots and lots, but who matters?
to tell the teacher you understand

outside a body, within the lanes of the track
in the lines of your hand when you start to wonder what has changed

I get confused in the order of things
A conversation I remembered through each person was mostly a stranger to me
we are sitting next to a tree next to
the sound
and look where we came out, see
spitting loudly, couple with white
spiraled, laying with right shoulder on
you stop and sit in silence
to have that done, another thing to read

I put on my socks or get into bed
I live in the house in my head

stimulus and response lightened me
when I decided to be alone.


Now

behind the lake it does not move
you became only a shape which I met
at night, a light shown into the basement windows

that you saw me. I'd like to be more
biting down and opening the mouth

vibrant, I won't listen to the fear
want, I don't understand what
I'm a writer, that I'm actually
to sleep, to feel it all again


Mom

you always go to sleep too quickly
you were taking me somewhere else, somewhere I feel now

how do you approach me
it coexists with what you want

let me slip past your hands and hold you tenderly
you might be able to hear that I am also crying with you

my disappearing skin that I am in

it was actually funny because she
really would not be mad if I

need? could it really all be


Dad

I see your disgust, placed back into me

two existing bases were combined
so off balance, even beautiful
she reached for the crocodile in the Florida creek
like me, why did I mess everything
of course I can't even say it
I lie
lets move on

giddy up, I get on the
my body transform, and you would see
dreams where you cannot see it, the place
within the barbed wire it's still just woods, under his gaze I'm still me

mine, a distance you maintain
fish mouth to the surface, gasping
spoke to different people
other in code
through thoughts instead of through the hand
now, ones I think I made
the food apart and incorporating


Love

that sweet joy, of feeling you taking

the base of the receding glacier, that she wanted us to bury her

yesterday, that maybe it's time to send a letter

a cold that I remember and through it's soft voice

control in the purest way, through perception

behind my back, why am I thinking of you?

ENTRY 86: June 27. 2024 Barriers

Yesterday I think I gave myself a chemical burn on my hands. I was just cutting some labels at work and I realized that the skin on my fingers was peeling, a small strip on my other hand was white and dewing looking, I thought of all the lab disaster videos I watch on YT, that the acid (once activated) would continue to peel my skin forever, until my entire hand and arm were covered in the small openings of red wounds,

I went to the back room and washed my hands with dishsoap, the peeling stopped and my hands have already mostly healed, but the strange thing was my indignation, only I get to cause slow, irreparable harm to my body through many tiny wounds inflicted daily and randomly, not you! The irony of my instant fear at seeing the small peeling at the tips of my fingers, relative to my complete apathy towards the resurgance of my eating disorder the last few weeks, was..illuminating.

From my notebook:

The thing is, I know it's bullshit. I know I can't even think straight, I know I'll never be good, I know I'll never have what I want. Because I don't understand what I really am, somehow I think I have to be better, but how can that happen when I'm only ever capable of this? I can only write about my own shock at my own inadequacy—what do you mean you don't want me? What do you mean I'm not good? As if I could delude them, as if I could pretend forever. The thing is, all I have are meaningless thoughts that are as easy to create as sitting or standing, but yet I say to myself that I'm a writer, that it means something, that someone will love me for saying it, and of course they never will, because the whole premise is flawed, I'm not an artist, artists make things that are good.

To Bri:

If I heard you say those things, I'd wrap you in my arms and know that you were wrong, I'd know that of course I loved you, of course you are good, I'd take you to eat and tell you that I wanted you to live, that I wanted you in the world with me, that I never wanted to stop hearing your voice, that every room was better if you were there, that we should have never parted, I'd tell you to please stay where I can always hear you,

I woke up this morning thinking of a line from Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris:

If we lie on the mattress in the closed-off old back porch at 90 degree angles, your legs lifted so that, lying on my side, I enter from behind, the fingertips of my right hand stroking your clitoris, and we go about this slowly, almost lazily, does it make for better understanding?

This line occurs to me daily, I enter from behind. What do I enter from behind? I enter a room from behind, I enter the world from behind, I lie awake in my bed at 8 am and wish that instead of getting up to get ready for work my barrier was broken, I am tired of my barrier, I understand the need for it, one cannot be entered without being separated, but it is also part of the building of the barrier to resent it, a room wants to be entered, otherwise why was it built? But all it takes is waiting. In time, every barrier breaks on its own.
ENTRY 85: June 23. 2024 Sunday in Berlin

I found a special place today, it was a meadow with a junkyard running down one side, with cars stacked on top of each other held out from the wall on hooks, bright little cars with their doors open and the leather seats open to the flies and the morning dew, there was no sound but my steps as I crushed the grass, and an animal ahead of me once, that I never saw.

After the junkyard was a mountain of broken concrete, perhaps remnants of old buildings like the ones I could still see out in the city, places like this make me think of what I like to imagine is over the horizon, a marina like the one in the book my mom used to read to me, with grey buildings and a storm always coming in, or a place where streetlights continue towards the horizon forever, and the sky always stays pink as you walk farther, as the lights turn on above you, one-by-one,

I was happy to find the meadow but I didn't have much to think about, only things about you, but I can think those anywhere. So I walked back through the tall grass and went home. Of course, I thought about what it would be like to take someone there, but I don't think they'd like it very much, and I don't think they'd see it the way I did, probably because we all go to very different places in dreams,

The other special place I found this week was the opening of an old building on a street in Mitte, when you stood outside the doorway you could smell the molding wood and wet insulation inside, and the damp cold poured out so that it felt like I was in the building, though I was only on the sidewalk, everything was condemned, and waiting for collapse, and I thought of the trailer I tore apart to make my old house, the layers of a house that smell also like a body when they decay,

This week I dreamed of a house on a hill far away, in the dream it was my grandmother's house, and on the table were cream eggs in silver stands, I looked at my egg and then out at the trees which spun and thrashed outside in the wind, the kitchen was delicate, my grandmother had run her fingers down each ridge of the wainscoting, sanding the edges and smoothing the paint until there was nothing but her touch left in the wood, she had crafted wooden accents to the corners of the room, which made the room feel like a picture frame,

I asked my grandmother what I should do when I felt sad and she knelt and took the egg which was also my skin, in the rain, the house disintegrated, leaving me to only imagine what she might say.
ENTRY 84: June 19. 2024 Intimacy Cryptogram

Intimacy like my great aunt's burial (rural Alaska, next to her sled dogs)
Intimacy is a clueless word
Why do only kids try and write in code,
I'd like to get a cryptogram from you.

We're running out of Helium
your birthday passed with limp balloons
only filled with our breath now

Intimacy smells like an apple orchard
and like smell,
is difficult to give.
Perhaps I only lost what you gave me.

ENTRY 83: June 15. 2024 I want to tell you about this winter, am I finally on the other side? Can I say something about it now?

To be insane in Berlin, I listened to the album I used to listen to then, alone on the subway, alone and always alone,

What I remember is leaving your apartment and walking up the steps to Yorckstrasse, it was always cold,

I force it, because I don't know if I can say anything about that yet, the person standing on the train platform so distant from me, the sun closing over the buildings, the ring bahn taking me around and around, I never knew where I was, every face looked like yours, or adjacent, or opposed, everything in relation to you, the center of my world your apartment, there was always snow on the ground and it felt like your touch, there was always ice on the road and you'd tell me not to slip, walking was hard without you,

The city didn't make sense to me, I was waking in a dream world, it was always cold, I walked the streets next to my apartment at night, there was an orange glow and the windows of the other buildings didn't seem to belong to anyone, I never spoke to anyone but you,

Let's talk about Christmas, I've never had a Christmas, I was only born this February, before that there was only the Christmases my mom got drunk and drove us home, and fucking on your parent's couch, your mom turning to me during Home Alone 2 and telling me she has depression, maybe I was really in love with her? Throwing up in an alley outside your high school reunion, I wish I could have been hotter in front of the kids who bullied you,

You hugged me once before I got on the ring bahn, because you knew that it would never take me home,

I hope you never touch me again.
ENTRY 82: June 3. 2024 The oldest lie I still believe about my body is that I have control over it,

I eat and my body is built, my body is built from decisions, my body is a bag of food, my body is a bag of time.
When I stop eating my body takes itself apart from the inside,

Actually, the mirror creates my body, my body is a shell cobbled from what's around me, the thoughts I have, when I eat the food disappears within me and only my DNA is reflected in my skin, and the space taken up by my shoulders is filled with your own assumptions of my linearity, of how I spend my time, of what I've done.

Bones are alive, what can you tell from bones? What can you tell from my body? There is no effect from something as simple as food, I wish there was, I come thinking of the simplicity of this, control and release in one, in the body, they are always the same action.

It is the middle of the night and I can't sleep, it is dead summer and I feel like a child in my parent's house, with the fan turning in the night by the window, I am alone, like then, with a mind and a body that have changed but keep the memory, history is a body created by judgement, my body's history is made of judgement.
ENTRY 81: June 2. 2024 Maybe people are also like drugs. It's all stimulus, and I think we all know people are like drugs without even having to say it.

Someone tells me they like me, they aren't you.
Someone tells me they like the words I use, they aren't you.
I sit alone, I want to be held by you and only you.
I want to fall apart, I want to be in pieces.
Where are you? Why aren't you with me?
Why couldn't you like me?
Why didn't you understand me?

There are two reactions to food, the first is bodily, my cells taking the food apart and incorperating it into me, taking the proteins to rebuild my DNA and the carbohydrates to move my muscles and the fat to lie beneath my skin, creating the shape of my body in space, and the shape which you see me. The person you see is a collection of the food I have eaten only transmutated through many systems, many ways of counting and carrying which continue to build me whether I ask to be built or not, were I to want these processes to stop I would need to stop the source, and let them begin to take the scaffolding apart instead.

There is a second reaction to food, the cultural and imaginary. I had my first lucid dream when I was in second grade, I was on a deserted island surrounded by fruits and I could taste the sweetness as though I was awake, so I ate as much as I could, the sweetness perfectly recreated in my mind, and in the dream my body grew and became fat but I knew that it was all imaginary, and when I woke up everything would be the same. My most memorable orgasms happen in dreams, the reaction building and climaxing and I know that it is imaginary, and actually when I wake up, nothing will have changed. Things are better imaginary, or in dreams, where there are no consequences. I eat and change my body and yet the next day you see me the same. But imagine if the dream were real, if I would eat in the real world and my cells and my body transform, and you would see my actions reflected in my body, and know what I had done.

Imagine if you were with me when I climaxed and saw it and remembered it, and saw me from a vantage point I can not control. Even masturbating is much worse than coming in a dream, because my body cannot change when I want, I cannot make myself any shape, and afterwards the real world changes.

I would rather suck on mints for sweetness, things that leave no trace towards you, and hide the release of eating in dreams where you cannot see it, the place where my body shifts and molds easily and there is no delayed, prolonged reaction, aging, as I take in what has happened, and show it all to you.
ENTRY 80: May 28. 2024 Beatrice

There's something I recognize
your skin beneath your eyes draws closed like mine
and nothing catches you surprised
through the distance you hold tight

not even my look to you
we are mirrors that only we see
could we see each other too?
each day we wake into the dream
and watch each other across the water
I see the ripples that follow you like anger
I watch you thread through the crowd
always moving away too soon
nobody else even sees us here, Beatrice
we are together and always alone
I see you've stopped eating
let me hold you, let me feed you
let me place myself inside
and teach you how to eat again
crouch from me, hide from me
you always go to sleep too quickly
I see your fingers torn together
loosen your grip and let in sweetness, Beatrice

We cannot slip through with our
hands clenched so tight
we do not speak
but we hear the answer ringing

Of course you'll help yourself
and so will I
as we watch each other fold
open and closed
biting down on everything.
ENTRY 79: May 21. 2024 I got back from Poland yesterday, don't ask why I was there, actually you can, it's because I'm going through my 6'8" philosophy student phase.

I got kind of upset after poetry last week because I performed the thing about CAP, my ED, idk what other acronyms are in there, I-M-C-R-A-Z-Y and nobody got it, I think people found it boring and like okay you went to camp? what even is this? The dude who cognitively terrorizes me at poetry now (S) just left and didn't even say anything about it. And that, it hurt my feelings a bit because like hey guys I Have An Eating Disorder. but whatever, idk why I even need people to care about that, I guess not everyone has the same preoccupation with food, body, disorder, eating, thinking, feeling, and you know that's alright-

Returning to Poland, I got an airbnb in this coastal town (quaint) and just walked around alone for two days, I ate from grocery stores and gas stations and had a real drifter vibe going, I even brought my guitar except it's electric which maybe makes it look less Chris Mccandless and more just stupid, or just very punk rock, idk. I played my guitar one morning next to a beautiful stream, one thing they have in Poland is birds and bugs let me tell you, and that was real-nice until a fisherman came by and startled me and then I got self concious sitting in the weeds with an electric guitar trying to convince myself it's alright to be singing because 'everyone can sing'

I often have the thought that my throat chakra is blocked, this image is vivid for me, I am afraid to sing because of my throat chakra being blocked. I don't even know anything about chakras except that package with all the rocks representing the different chakras sold at every gift shop and I think I like imagining I can't sing because there's a rock in my throat, or hesitation at least. I think if I could sing I'd be an asshole though, but then again I already am, hence the philosophy books-

Let's return to love for a moment. Sometimes I'm trying to have a conversation with someone and I get distracted because I think 'yeah, there's noone like X, I will never find someone like them, look around, is there anyone like them here?' and then I'm scanning my surroundings like some kind of frightened animal (a dear[sic]) and the person I'm talking to pauses to let me respond but I actually don't know what they said because I got preoccupied with this so I say 'uh huh' and my grip on other human relationships loosens, and in this way I'm torn apart by love. The scariest thing is that I'm turning into such an asshole, I know I just said that but I really. I'm giving [redacted: my father] with my fierce independence and dedication to thinking I'm the smartest mf in the room. Kind of an incel type energy, like no I'm alone because I choose to be, when actually I'm just alone because I'm still feeling the rippling of their presence in my life, and it is true, I haven't met someone like them yet, but that doesn't mean I never will. I think this is the interesting thing about time right now:

I can believe that things will happen in the future:

But now I am struggling against the casing, the shell, the molt, it is scary being stuck here, although the dream begins only outside, with meeting you, who will someday read this and laugh, and with changing myself, who will someday laugh at this too.
ENTRY 78: May 15. 2024 In the Field

We are at the Walmart on base, he grabs a styrofoam cooler from the shelf and holds it out to me, skin hanging from a long face, gaunt from something, I can guess, retired air-force pilot now in the commercial sector, my dad loves to have him over, he laughs at me while we are out of uniform, he touches me with the styrofoam, saying come on college girl I take the cooler and say nothing, he's known me since I was 14, but he looks at me differently now.

We drive far into the woods, 100 miles and we are still on base. We pass many tarmacs of jets and tanks, miles of land is bare dirt surrounded by electrified wire hung with signs with red stars and warnings of Unexploded Ordnance, I think of a story my cousin told me about the Navy, that at the end the year they throw all the boxes of ammunition overboard, so nobody finds out they haven't shot it all.

We make camp, Col. Watson is sitting by the fire, his wife comes in from West Virginia tomorrow. I turn to pick up a canvas tent and when I turn back he's got this look, he's yelling, mouth purple with spit, he's pointing at my shorts, telling me I need to change, my skin is a translucent white shell, I change.

We are supposed to find the black box. We aren't allowed to use GPS and nobody wants to count paces so we pull a white cord with us everywhere, one person takes the front while the marker stays and lets the cord pass through their hands, when the cord is taunt the marker moves to the front and holds the cord again, counting the lengths, we follow our heading, the blackberry bushes scrape up our arms, we check our compasses. The first week the black box is across a field, then an hour away, then a day away. The last days we will need to camp by ourselves,

Col. Watson gives us peanut butter, jelly, and pilot bread, which is hard tack he buys from the surplus store. This will be our meals for two days, and an MRE if we brought one. Then we march away with our cord, the pulling has become quiet, the hand offs are easy now and we hardly need to speak to each other, but every time I take the cord from Ashton she tells me about the animals she saw; rabbit, hawk, fire ants, and we keep track of that too.

At night I string a tarp to a tree with paracord and tie it with a tauntline hitch, Ashton asks me to tie hers too but I do it wrong and her tarp collapses in the wind that night, the next night we just make one shelter, I hold on to her in my sleeping bag and we look through the gap to see the stars bulging together in a cylinder, the arm of the milky way, the chop of a helicopter cuts through, but soon we forget where we are again.

After 10 days in the field I'm back home, there's something wrong with me, something stuck like a seed, Watson is hosting a debreif meeting at his house and I don't go, I realize that my body looks different, I'd never changed my body on my own before, a rope tightens in my subconcious, between force and reaction. I go back to the base only one more time, I'm supposed to be there for a conference but I get lost, circling the on-base apartments, balconies bowed from the rain, the parking lots filled with new Camaros, I pull into a dry lot next to a powerstation and check the directions but my car no longer starts, the engine never turning over, just stalling over and over as the sun presses down, I sit there all afternoon, not trying the key anymore but just looking into the woods as the wind pulls the trees, I don't even think of calling someone, it doesn't seem to matter. The conference has been over for hours when I look down and realize that the car was in drive. I put it in park and start it easily, then go far away.
ENTRY 77: May 14. 2024 Visitor

I walk through the door of a small wooden house outside of town, sitting at the edge of deep red marsh. The dream begins on the other side of the door, dark faces sit around tables and fall out of sight, it's my high school reunion. As I step through the door a boy appears at my side. He talks with me and stands with me as though he is my friend but we don't know each other, he must like me, I think, but he doesn't even know me. We walk through a garden and he asks what I do, I don't want to talk to him so I say nothing. Oh, you won't even give me that? Where are you from at least?

I live in Berlin. I expect the conversation to be over, wait for him to say he lives in Covington but he doesn't,

Oh, I bet you write poetry there. He laughs,

I say nothing, his face is lightened from nowhere, the way light works in dreams, like a spotlight. How does he know that? We find tables of people surrounding one face I barely know, I speak with them and they don't remember me, I see everyone's confusion, but the boy is at my side, he talks to the tables of people and laughs with me, we walk through the dark square outside, all roads curve out of sight, a large man is laughing and I say, the old football coach, the boy says, I know, he begins to look like S, then he is in a circle of his friends, they are all young, thin with curly hair, I wonder why the boy is here, he must have just started highschool,

The boy is kidding me, Why won't you tell me about yourself? With all of your biology and poetry you must have a lot to say.

I never told him those things, I wonder how he knows to stay with me, how does he know that we'll be friends.

I begin to like talking with him, I like his laugh,

I start to wonder, maybe he'd like to go to that abandoned house with me, maybe we could go now in the dark and it would be beautiful and romantic and maybe there is actually more romance and intrigue and mystery here than in Berlin, maybe I didn't need to leave to find that,

We are in the hallway outside the door, the boy is pulling huge cases of luggage, I realize it will not happen. I wonder why he won't stay with me, why he doesn't even ask for my name or my phone number. Standing against the inside of the door the boy looks suddenly older than me, his face is taunt and lines have appeared around his mouth and eyes, he looks down at me,

I know I need to ask something, What year are you anyway? He smiles and says, Oh, I don't remember. I know that this will be our last time meeting so I say I'll see you soon. I don't understand how he can leave, why was he by my side all night if he won't stay? The man smiles, reading this thought, and walks out the door. It is 7 am now and almost everyone is gone, I go to my bag on the couch and wonder where my brother is, he appears with a purple bruise spread across his face like a birth mark, his skin is slick with water. Eric and I were just out, we probably drank a bit too much, but you know, we were driving into town..

Eric appears next to him, a small man with huge glassy eyes like a fish, he looks past me at nothing.

I wake up and make coffee in the kitchen, I'm wondering if I should tell my roommate about my dream and she tells me she had a strange night, found her Totoro she always sleeps with across the room when she woke up. I tell her about the boy I didn't know walking through my high school reunion with me, as I'm telling it I realize a third interpretation but I keep that to myself. When I finish she says, I think dreams are what we make of them,

Discussion Questions:

1) Fluidity of Love

The boy doesn't know me, when we meet we are strangers, and yet he stays with me, why? I want this ease and certainty of connection, the boy needs no reason or preparation he simply knows that we work and we do. He trusts his intuition and stays with people that he likes, without needing to know why or how we work together, without needing to go anywhere, this is S of course, and my confusion when the boy leaves is the same one I feel when S leaves every week, I've been taught to expect some linearity or sense in relationships, that movements are signals, but they shouldn't be. In the dream, the boy moves within the bounds of each second and does not need his actions to tie together in some grand sense of self, he is here and then he leaves when it is time.

2) The Reunion in Dresden

As I explained the role of the boy to R this morning I realized that I had been the boy this last winter, at K's side and moving table to table at their highschool reunion. This moves into recent interpretations of K, in which I'm realizing how little of that time I was concious of. I had to wait at my old U5 stop yesterday and felt a strange nauseating anxiety. Things that I fixated on while in my first-months disassociative haze are strange and tainted now, and I think K is like that. While I still think of them constantly, the thought of talking with them or things being in any way like this winter is terrifying. This was brought to the surface yesterday when I talked to some of the friends I met on New Year's, I wonder how different I seem to them now, I don't feel connected with that other person at all, as though they were a ghost that I don't recognize.

3) The Boy as My Past and Future Self

Of course, the obvious interpretation is the boy as a visitation from my future self. I had hoped to start making my T appointment this morning before I got a headache, went back to sleep and had the dream. The boy is a guiding figure coming to pull me from my past (highschool reunion being a particularly on-the-nose representation) and kindly walk with me to the future, manhood/the open door. The value of this interpretation is the boy's patience. He does not need to rush me or even know why I'm speaking with the people I am, he stands at my side regardless and views my interactions with my past with curiosity and interest rather than forcing me to the door. He leaves because he knows that I can find the door on my own.
ENTRY 75: May 7. 2024 I Too Will Take My Revenge On Seattle

Everything looks like everything else, and that's why my fourth grade teacher said I was good with imagery. But luckily nothing is ever really like anything else, and that's what gives us things to say.

I want to talk about angels but that seems silly now, since you would never think of it like that, so maybe I'll talk about the body of a whale being the forest where we grew up, and that being the long white arms which kept you safe that night when I was far away.

I imagine you walked home steady, and simple, and it seems wrong to say anything about that night but talk about the silver hand of the angel who helped you home and up the crevices of the wall, soft as snow, never letting you feel afraid or confused and who remains now in the lines of your hand when you start to wonder what has changed.

A woman opens her apartment window and I see her skin against the white pores of the wall behind her, the sun illuminates her looking down at her hands in the sink as she washes dishes high above me, I hear no sound, the sun is going down and it is summer, I am trying to write about angels and I can't, so I write about this woman in the window, and think that I would like to walk here again tomorrow.
ENTRY 74: May 5. 2024 There's A Knocking At The Door That Won't Go, Excuse Me But Do I Know You?

I turn off the Miles Davis and begin building. Below ground, I begin building. I wrote that once, so I can't write it again.

There's lots of things to say, some about the Riviera Apartments, those apartments on the side of the highway I'm always on about, set back in a teardrop cul-de-sac, row-like, low roofs and sharp doors with silver numbers that shone on sunny days as I drove past, sixteen and always busy, sun lighting up the tan sheet walls catching on the windows and staying insects between the panes, but the real show was at night, streetlights strung down the lot, light beads, round bodies that created the Riviera Apartments in the wet darkness, each night like that, clicking heels on the sidewalk, I rolled down my window to listen, but what did I know then?

I write about streetlights the way Bukowski writes about legs. When I drink, the next morning my piss smells sweet.

What did I know then? Pretty girl I guess, she set up the camera to pose like a girl under an umbrella, maybe people will like me then, she thought, and the photo looked very serene, her umbrella tilted back and her looking up at what might have been rain.

Can we be honest for a moment? I struggle to speak, I sit in the chair at my friend's house (I'm cat sitting) and begin to write fervently, the night before we are sitting around the table and the hands (aren't they really needles?) of the clock stop, 'your clock has stopped' Seowon points out, 'it always does that', an hour later Seowon screams as the hands run forward on their own, slipping down from twelve to three, I had said I thought about things like fractals, but I don't really know, I stopped talking somewhere back and was only listening, I said, 'that's really really scary' Seowon looked right at me and said 'Oh, you don't look real anymore', then I didn't. The room becomes plastic, words do things.

I hope I don't know myself, like back then when I held up that silly umbrella. Because right now there's a lot of hatred, I really can't catch a break. 'What's going on with me?' I think, and try and talk to you but just start wondering what the point of speaking is, like asking 'do you believe in God?' we now all agree it's all in our head, that's queer thinking, so I start to wonder about talking, if I'm never conveying information except for a recipe once in a while, or telling you to get away from me, but what else do I know?

So what about the Riviera Apartments? I told you about them because I used to wonder if I would live there one day, twenty minutes from my parents house and off the highway outside Seattle, near grey-green parks with salmon in the streams, nobody ever got my obsession with the Riviera Apartments but my small hands on the steering wheel liked to pass by, only to wonder about 'someday', the place I am now, a strange house made up with words floor-to-ceiling, words I placed, they didn't come to me in color unnamed like back then, somewhere I started searching for words and then my vision became constructed, 'words do things', I scream at the clock which is no longer real, only placed near the window by my mind, superimposed on the dark vision of those old apartments, my vision includes all of it, maybe this is something you understand?

' why don't you love me? I have to ask, how can you not love me? and it comes to this, ruby red narcissism, why don't you love me? I ask myself again and again as my blood moves through young veins, as my body opens for you as my skin collapses, as my scab pulls apart and you are inside, within me, only in my memory, keep me in your skin and eat mine, let me be crazy, what is more human? my mouth is held wrong, askew, melted like a meadow, hold me like she reached for the crocodile in the florida stream, don't you believe I can be something? you doubt me and I see it in your body language of your soft touch like morning light on blinds, open me, yes, I'm embarassing, yes, I'm stupid, yes, why don't you love me? I ask over and over to the glass beads, why don't you hold me, sweet beauty? snow holds the mountains and my lips hold my teeth, speak in my ear, love my walk, how do you approach me? like fingers tapping, like my p's and b's (always mixed), why do we speak if not to tell ourselves in the sugar carriage of the words that we are alive? come down and I see you behind me in the mirror, what if I drank every night, hated myself every night, spoke to myself every night? and you, an imagined version of course because you could never be so beautiful, and neither could I. I guess, I wake, you put your hand on my belly and there is hate there, tell me it's alright, because you did love me in the end. '
ENTRY 73: April 30. 2024 Hm..a lot has happened.

Poetry went really well this last week, people really liked me pieces and it gave me some confidence in writing again. I've still been feeling really reclusive though. It's not a bad feeling, until last night when it kind of was, but usually it's just like a distance. I want to be alone most of the day and being with people has been tiring because I just want to leave, with the exception of poetry. I think it's because I've been really enjoying just reading and writing and it's hard for me to justify spending time not doing that. I kind of feel like I'm just latched on/keeping my head down/whatever dog motif you want to use. I'm not really interested in meeting new people or dating now, I have my few good friends and I've realized that I have a lot of emotional walls up. I'm not really interested in being vulnerable with people, so I'm just alone doing all the things I think are cool, and I actually really like it.

I was talking with M yesterday about this and I realized that it's felt good to just give in to feeling sad all the time. I've been quiet and shy and when people do talk to me I've been responding slowly and not saying much, just telling them exactly what I feel and nothing more. I sit and think and feel sad that things didn't work out in whatever relationship, and it's nice because it's like being some indie movie character, and I don't have to worry about people liking me all the time, because I'm just me and don't really need anything from them anyway.

I got my first tattoo this last weekend. I actually haven't shown it to anyone except M yet. I really like it though, and I'm proud of myself for finally getting a tattoo. I understand why I couldn't before this point though, because I had to know myself/transistion/feel in control of my own body and all of that shit took me a while. Also, I liked that I did everything alone, and I felt just calm and quiet the whole time. I really liked the artist I picked too, I could tell he was nice but didn't talk much, so we both just had a quiet sunday and I left with my tattoo. I don't think I even need to say what it is because it's mostly only me who reads this but it's powerlines on my shoulder. My idea was for it to be masc but also distinctive, because I love when people have tattoos that really stand out and become associated with them. I'd like to be associated with powerlines, because they always calm me down in a strange way, and some of my favorite places are under powerlines.
ENTRY 72: April 24. 2024 Again, The Siphon

We used to camp near a canal, the water ran green through the dry dirt piled with knapweed and starthistle and I would look down at the slow water and imagine the mouth as it reached the concrete body, the siphon that pulled the water straight down the hill until it came up the other side, a snake's body, letting out the green water 2 miles from us, before the resevoir there was no light in the siphon, only the crush of the water, a single chain whipped across the surface, swinging fast all day and all night, clanging down the canal and warning in the crack against the hurrying water that it was the last hope. The people who'd missed the chain and were taken with the water down into the darkness beneath the road and the west desert sand and the sagebrush had never survived the siphon, but their dogs had, dogs who could hold their breath through the rusted mass of cars and bikes that lay at the lowpoint, where the water carried it all under the road and left it, only a dog could make it up the other side. I watched the chain beat the water, I thought of releasing myself to the green water, swimming down the slope, a dog without his owner.
ENTRY 71: April 22. 2024 I'm not doing well. I'm relapsing but trying not to, trying to eat and just keep moving and not think bad things about myself. It shouldn't matter but I'm upset I can't write anything for poetry this week, maybe next week I guess. It just makes me feel like I'm finally breaking down, after ignoring what's going on (that I've been left by someone I thought I was in love with and now by my rebound too) it's finally all getting to me and making it a bit impossible to get on a stage and try and tell people .. what exactly? how fucking upset I am? How they should feel bad for me because I'm upset? Now I'm confused what I ever wrote about to begin with, and why did I start talking up there at all?

It's fine, I'll still write to you, silly little streetrees, because I know however bad all my shit is right now it's been worse, and will probably be worse again, but that's just the nature of things.

I think I want to take some steps back from everything. I want to just focus on little things in each day: writing stories that mean nothing to anyone but me, doing my stats homework, learning fast car on guitar.
New Forms in Paril Ten Titles for the Theme This Week of Transplant

To edge becoming a man, because that will make it someday sweeter.

My body looks like a pool of tears, no it doesn't really, it looks like a woman's body.

Were I to fuck you like a man, you might stop leaving. Were I to hold you like a man, I might stop crying.

Writing is not really like opening the flood gates because flood gates open by command, and if you were in love with me it might actually make things harder.

Various prototypes such as pagers before cell phones: yes, it doesn't make sense, but we often have to make do with what we have.

This old thing? I'm holding up the nightingale.

At the end of my perfect day my dad comes to pick me up, otherwise I have to decide when it ends.

If I wasn't in the room with you and you thought my name conciously enough perhaps planning to end it with Biden or S. Thompson could you conjure a new body for me in your head? This body would exist only for you to see (of course I wouldn't know anything about it) but perhaps you might replace me with this new body as your memories of us lapped at the shore leaving ripples in the stone over time, but of course that would be completely up to you.

Right now if you want to see me you have to meet me in an imaginary world, most especially if you come to sleep with me.

All I ask if that you remember to close the sliding glass door on your way out because I actually rely very much on the feeling of running into it.

ENTRY 70: April 21. 2024 my first honest poem

I'm selfmy and I'm in love with you,

when I left myself be true

I run home now in stiff boots under the moon

Why go slow when I don't have to?

Another Dream

I've been sick, but it's been nice. I don't need to leave my room if I don't want, and it makes canceling things easier. I took a nap this afternoon and was at the edge of a lake, I paddled across in a boat with my mom and put my phone in a multi-colored canvas bag. On the other side of the lake the person I'm seeing (it's going very poorly) had arrived with his other girlfriend from back home. They got in the boat but soon he got bored and went back to his room as it got dark, my mom headed home too. The girlfriend was average-looking and I hated her at first but she stayed with me at the edge of the lake, 'do you want to make strawberry daiquiris?' she asked and smiled. We went to the kitchen of the boathouse and collected a red concentrate like hummingbird food. 'I'm still on my tolerance break' I said, she smiled and sipped her daiquiri. I kissed her that night on the boat and I was happy that we were alone and that the person I'm seeing never came to see us again.

I've been very sad. It's been nice. I've liked being sick and sad this weekend, as though there is nothing else to do. I was so upset that I couldn't write anything. I didn't really like my blog (it felt stupid) and I missed writing to you. Then I went to the Organic Store down the street from me to try and buy lavender, mugwort, and rose petals to smoke but I didn't find any of those. So I just went home as it started to rain. But right before I left the store I had the saddest thought, a thought so sad that I started to cry at the very threshold of the Organic Store. This thought was so dastardly upsetting that it broke through all the stagnant water and when I got home I could cry and cry. I'll tell you about the thought if you want, but be warned it's very sad.

I have something that will make you cry.

I stand at the edge of the ocean but the waves aren't lapping softly under the pull of the fresh moon, my body is not fertile valleys carved under sheets to be traced with your hand in the summer morning,

When you left I wished I was a man, because men don't cry and I cry every day. You told me to take my books and I didn't, then I walked to this place called Springwater and kept walking thinking I might make it to the Burnside Bridge. I waited for you to text me that you were okay but you didn't, so I figured you were dead, laying alone in your apartment on the floor with my books mixed with your books.

The way I stopped being a woman was funny. It happened in a zoom meeting. But when I realized I wasn't a woman I didn't become a man, everything just stopped making sense.

When you left I wished I was a man, because I thought then you might have stayed. I thought you probably hated my vagina as much as I did,

Release, I want to release this feeling. I would stand in the mirror and invert my skin so that it pulled taunt to my bones and then maybe it would look right, one day I told my nutitionist that looking at myself got easier when I pretended I wasn't a woman, I thought this was an obvious solution but Katie stopped and there was silence over the computer screen and then she just asked me if I wanted to use different pronouns.

I remember you used to draw everything with top surgery scars, they were the next lines after eyes and a mouth, when I write about you I grit my teeth and it looks like I'm smirking but it's really because I'm uncomfortable, and it's funny because I got that from you.

Crying feels good sometimes, when I was a kid I cried a lot, my parents put me alone in the room I shared with my brother and tied the door knob to the door across the hall so that I couldn't get out. Then I'd tear the room apart and we'd all laugh about that later, how I used to cry.

My friend transitioned when we were 15, one night we watched Stand By Me in their room and I think we fell in love then, but I didn't know it until a long time later. Now when they go to work nobody even sees their old skin beneath the new, people just see a man and move on,

I live in a bubble within the world, you view me and I look past myself, so to you there is a body but for me there is nothing below, only a hole and a drop where I can't see the bottom. Something is wrong but fixing it isn't so easy, because it starts with crying, and I often get stuck there.

I think if I were a man nobody would ever leave. Because men don't cry because they have no reason to. And everything would make sense, and the hole would dissappear and you'd just see me instead of all the things I should have but don't.

ENTRY 69: April 16. 2024 Recent Dreams

My nuclear family was escaping some sort of BBQ/family reunion, it could also have been Berlin itself. But I remember sitting on the handlebars of the bike as my mom peddled me up the hill, I felt light, calm, it was getting dark and my mom noticed a white van motionless at the top of the hill, as though about to pull out onto the street. I turned around to her, she was starting to cry, 'there's the car,' 'what car?'
I tell her, 'everything will be fine, it's just a car' I laugh
The car starts and drive away.

My ex-roommate (J) is taking me up many steep steps within a white yurt. We reach the fourth floor and the stairway is now so steep that I balk - I know that soon the room will start spinning. I don't tell J and keep climbing. My vision is blurring and I don't know how to move my feet, I feel drunk suddenly, J is calling to me from far away, 'what's going on? do you need help getting down?' He tries to walk me down the steps, the carpet is beige and long like in my grandparent's house. My eyes are opening, I can clearly see the wall of my room, the large MODERAT poster partially covered by a wave of yellow flowers that is my comforter taking up the bottom half of my vision, I'm trying to walk down the steps but now I only see my room, I realize that the yurt is a dream, but when I try to lift my body out of bed nothing happens.

Soon, my parents come to help me, but they are more like the two old people in the hut in the Princess Bride, very strange looking, bald yet necks covered in silver hairs, and long ponytails. They stand at both edges of my bed and prepare medicines for me, 'I just want to leave the dream' I say. They nod, unconcerned. I try to remember what I'll do in the real world that day, I try to move my fingers to the giant wave of yellow, to just nudge it would be enough. 'I'm discombobulated' I think. I hear my phone buzz and I'm able to turn away from the poster and see my desk, the door, finally out, It's messages from M, 'you're discombobulated' he says. I look at my phone again, I'm know I'm really awake now, and the messages are gone.
ENTRY 68: April 15. 2024 It's been two weeks since I wrote on the blog. I actually changed this page to April and removed the March stuff on the first of April, but I didn't have time to write an entry so I didn't Git-Commit, and now you've all been left with the March page all this time.

I'm so tired. I don't want to see anyone. I want to be left to my own devices. I'm working on canceling plans, right now I'm not very good at it. I say, 'lets try next week', then next week comes and I don't know what to do, because actually I want things to be like back when I lived in Lichtenberg and I'd walk across the street to the coffee shop and talk with the nice lady there about her kids, and she didn't know but she was the only person I would talk to that whole week, her and cashier who'd say 'Beleg dazu?' and maybe someone at a bank. But nobody who knew me.

All I wanted then was to have a friend, but now that I have friends I miss it. It felt like I was being scraped down the sidewalk every time something bad happened, and when I was in my room the time was like an open window, or just endless really. I was always trying my best to get through the time, the cut it back with my knife as it grew each second and became suffocating, but I'm sick of similes and I: have so much reality to report on.

I went back home for 10 days, it was good. I'm starting a Bukowski book and I'm 1/3rd through a book about African dictatorships, I had my first day of class today and canceled two plans and laid the groundwork for canceling two more tomorrow. I missed one of my finals last week and had to go to a doctor's office to get a fake sick note. Today I couldn't register for the german class I wanted because my placement score was beginner german. I retook the placement test and got a high enough score but by that time the class was already full. I went to an applied statistics course this morning at a new campus, it was fine. I'm afraid of people, and I'm afraid of people leaving. I'm afraid of writing, and afraid of not writing. I got a tax extension.

Will Toledo writes, 'If you really want to know yourself, it will come at the price of knowing no one else'
'if you really want to make the change, then you would cut yourself off completely'
'if you really wanted to be kind, you'd have forgiven them a long ass time ago'
'if you really want to know how kind you are, just ask yourself why you're lying in bed alone.'

Thanks, Will, it's not that I want to cut myself off completely (because I do) but I won't, it's that I want time to process things again, and write again. That's all, okay.
ENTRY 67: March 23. 2024 God help those who thought I really was a dissociative little mouse, a little girl even, that person I was all winter. Please Fucking Help Me I called out alone in my room, I took my guitar and looked out at the street buried in fog late at night and I cried, I played the same chords for hours and they didn't even sound right, I came outside and turned over my shoulder, I smelled the crowd and was nauseous, I sat limply at the corner of their bed and didn't know where to put my hands, What Do I Say? I Need Fucking Help I left and the world was empty, I faded away to nothing. Do you remember?

Give and Take

I'm trapped on a train
turning away from the track
my train car now empty
plastic seats moving with the walls
line ends between stations

You've never met someone like me
but you'd never say
I wonder how your poem goes
when you look back at me
through dreams and glass lenses

Tonight, someone knows where I am
long night looking at the ceiling
when you turn from the platform
I will have disappeared
each moment happens only once

Ring train doesn't really take me home
just around in warm circles
a father scolds his son
I watch like fog
fading from the factory towers

With love, with great satisfaction, with a grossly inflated self, I say I'm different now. Today, I am in control. In every sense but only the good ones, today I loved being alone, I'm so excited for every second that I will spend alone, all the things I'll do in secret, perhaps won't even tell you about. I'll change myself beneath the surface of the water (fuck a phoenix metaphor/I'm into mermaids now) and with beauty I share with only myself, I will love my life so deeply.

Sure, I could come back to center (and I probably should/out of respect for you) and tell you that maybe this is all just coming from k texting me,

'hey, i'm going to still try and twist this to seem like i'm in control and you're in pain, and i'm just worried about you, and how to talk to you, because i want to do that, but i won't say it, but hey, maybe i didn't really see this side to you, and maybe you're actually not as dependent on me as i thought you were? anyway how should i go about trying to talk to you again? now that you don't really seem like you care about me.'

But I think it's actually more to do with having actually too much to do right now, I want to go on a date with this hot they that messaged me but I'm actually booked up, sorry king you're getting put on hold. And damn, sorry to say but that's a nice feeling. S wants to see me before I go, but I already have Wednesday plans with J, and I'm supposed to see K this weekend but I have to study for my test! It's really not that deep, I just have friends now, but, damn (with venom), sorry to those who missed the boat.
ENTRY 66: March 21. 2024 Pee man at Berghain. Shay's in the K-hole and I'm watching you work. Many teeth missing and blackened, like always or like new? What corrosives are in pee? You approach the man at the urinal, lion tattoo, you crouch on your knees and hold your cup up to him, bitte?

Later, when everyone is gone, you step up to the urinal, a soft dribble emerges, cup on the floor now, you don't collect your own I see. Let it fade into water, do you ever wish someone would ask you? And shouldn't yours, with it's complexity, actually be the most worthy?
ENTRY 65: March 21. 2024 Notebook pages, feeling uninspired, I miss you:

My dad used to take me to the park next to our old house, the road led to a meadow of dry grass, weeds came up in smoke with our footsteps, abandoned cars with their doors open or pulled off completely, carpets torn up and hung in scraps from the windows, we looked in the open sides and saw newspapers and torn books, pages stuck together from the rain.

Many things happen at once, in the shower this morning I stare at the overhead light too long and a blue ghost burns into my vision, superimposed on the white tile, is it close or far from me? There is a haze in the air today, I can't tell if it's dust from the new highrise being constructed down the street or the fog that feels a bit like being at the ocean, through these small white particles I see a woman walking, cover your hair and your eyes then.

I live in the house in my head. I used to think, I'm not sure if I do now. But something is different. My day does not move on a track now, rather each second comes like bread from the bakery, seconds don't surprise me now, I have already seen them all.

flow cell, nano pore, taunt cable, quick start, aspirate, reagent, electromagnetic, transmitter

It's not easy to take your own life in your hands, what would it be like to take my own body in my hands and lead myself like a horse through the fields?

It feels like rain, welcome in, drifting home, I float, air feels thicker tonight and something calms me, maybe you? all feels well tonight, 'I'm going home', now I can float, more than that, all is well now, streetlights will be on in a few hours, only counting minutes now, on my way home, the hand on my seat, locks without keys.
ENTRY 64: March 17. 2024 Happy St. Patricks Day!

I'm having an alright time, maybe I'll start by telling you about my tarot spread last night.

I tried three relationship spreads, one with the current guy I'm seeing and two ex's, the current one was deeply confusing and honestly a bit troubling. I was completely caught off guard pulling the reverse 10 of swords for him since I had thought he was just like a chill guy, more of an M type, but it made me realize he might have more draw towards darkness and mental anguish than I thought, gotta check in on that I guess. The whole spread was simply complex, my card being reversed 10 of pentacles: completion and abundance that I am not recognizing perhaps? I know that everything is going really well, I'm in the exact city I've always wanted to live in, I'm doing exactly what I want to do, each day is basically perfect, and I even get to lie awake at night crying soft little tears onto my pillow thinking 'why don't they love me' etc, i.e. still light despair to keep me interesting (everyone likes you more when you're alone)

Next reading things were more expected, but pleasant because for once I pulled more power cards for my side than theirs. I pulled the Hermit for myself which I've been pulling quite often, by design because my life is the definition of hermetic right now: writing, reading, ropin' and I've been good about setting aside entire days to just be alone. I pulled daughter of pentacles for them, reminiscent of when I pulled them as son of cups: gentle, afraid of conflict, kind of the opposite of how I usually try and mold them in my mind (Goethe's: snake in the grass). I pulled the High Priestess as my problem, which, in conjuntion with the Hermit I think is a slay, I'm aware of the situation, I'm powerful, I kind of knew everything this whole time / in contrast I pulled Wheel of Fortune for them which ties to the earlier pull of the Death card, i.e. they are on a wild ride, and they won't be coming out of it the same. Who tf knows what's going on in their head but they're transforming for sure. Our uniting force was reversed five of pentacles which I've pulled for us a few times, we are now united by worry, unfounded, because whether it's worry about us together or separately we both need to meet our lives with trust and patience. I was reminded of when I pulled the Lovers after C left (remember them?), at the time I was upset because it was so far from reality, they didn't care about me and we'd known each other three days, we were definitely not 'Canadian geese who mate for life', but now two years later I believe the Lovers card. I still think so fondly of C, they helped me to see my own potential and first go to Berlin, go to Berghain, date people I thought were a lot smarter and more interesting than me, the traces of them are present in all of the love that I build now.

Last spread I won't talk about but it knocked the wind out of me. I'll just list the cards: seven of cups, reversed mother of cups, reversed Sun, the Devil, reversed 10 of pentacles (my very first card of the night if you remember).

I played my guitar for a bit and then walked down and met my friend K for a drink in the bar below my building. I told her about sexual anxieties, i.e. why can't I just enjoy sex like a normal person. She gave me some great advice, for once moving beyond the obvious connection I'd always relied on: tying the fetish to my ED, loss of control, instead tying to sexual consumption, blurring of the boundary between myself and the outside, letting things in to me, oral fixation. This is in addition to a conversation I had with my friend J a few days ago when I revealed my fetish and she just said, so what's the problem? Your thing makes sense, you should allow yourself to go fully into it. I want to go back to being proud of my fetish and feeling interested in it rather than trying to ignore it/leave it out of sex completely. I feel like my feelings towards sex are so deeply nonlinear. New partners can make me experience cognitive setbacks or rarely, help me break through to a new acceptance and freedom around sex, which lasts until my next setback, and then suddenly I'm back to abstinence. Will Toledo said it best when he said sex can be frightening.
ENTRY 63: March 13. 2024 My fantasy is taking you to play pool, taking you to the Pool Paradise (pronounced the German way) that's on the upper floor of the of the waste managment offices behind the combined car wash and auto parts store in the part of Berlin that reminds me most of Kent, Washington. In my fantasy we walk the whole way because in American fantasies there are no busses and when we get to the 'Shooters, Darts, Billiards' sign hanging crooked with the arrow pointing to nowhere you wonder where this is all coming from,

and I don't tell you but this is just like the Eagles Club down the hill from the Muckleshoot Casino, the place falling apart on the side of the highway with white corrogated metal siding and many plywood 'additions' and the wood soaked black by this time and set in a giant asphalt lot where the Eagles parked their trailers and left their rain-stained awnings and barbeques out all year, and through the screen doors I would watch the old men in the trailer kitchens, looking out into the center of the lot and waiting, waiting until evening when they would go to the lodge and play the slots in the wood panelled hallway under the small plastic clock,

and my dad used to play pool he said, with his buddy Greg, my dad used to smoke cigars, he says. I want to smoke a cigar with you in Pool Paradise, I want to be a contractor who plays pool with his buddy in the evenings. I want stop moving, I want to give up at Pool Paradise, I want to watch the sun rise over my trailer and think about where I will hang my framed prayer, I want to stare at the numbers on the slots and feel nothing.
ENTRY 62: March 12. 2024 A spring erupts, take me down to the old ladies' basement back in 2007 where we found the conch laying on the bookshelf, you put it to your ear but there was no sound. A large lamp was standing in the corner, with crystals hanging from the shade, they kept telling her 'you need to get rid of all this', she couldn't make the steps, 'I never go down there' she kept saying, this was in Algona, it was a cloudy March, ducks swam in the pond outside my mom's office, we lived in Auburn then, buildings still grey, buildings and corperate parks, I walked through the parking lot and came to the chain link fence, behind were the train tracks, once I hopped the fence and I found that the tracks only led to another town, with another corperate park, at night streetlights shown in through the basement windows of the old ladies' house, lighting up the crystals on the shade, I never go down there, she always said, while the lamp stood all night in the wood room reflecting the shards of the streetlight, and noone saw, until morning when we found that the tracks only led to another town, and that through the night everything had stayed the same.
ENTRY 61: March 8. 2024 God Plays Tuesdays At A Bar In Waco

His knee was pressed on the edge, his chest twisting towards me, movement that carried on to the bed and he was already there, his legs softened with brown hairs, and I feel the faint edge of his skin, air slides from his body like water, and it all feels thicker now, darkness spread in smooth layers and heaped on us, certainty arrives like a current, he is seconds from me and I see the pores in his face, where the air coating us both is flowing into him, and I know, it is unmistakable,

His words emerge in my skull like a spring, 'yes'
He takes my wrist, I feel the roughness of hands that made the wood beneath us, I give way.

He leaves at 4:30, taking his glass of vodka from the table and stumbling out to the hallway, I lay in the darkness remembering his eyes on my skin, speaking with him through my mind, it is there that he tells me he loves me.

Do we always need to give beauty back? Within weeks he is gone. Meeting God means learning that God can leave you. His face turns from mine and I watch the world warp around his back, the kitchen becoming concave as it hurtles towards him, he makes no mistakes, I see my life spreading down the dark hallway after him, sticky as black oil.

'Look again' they tell me, I look and look at David Koresh, his face blends into everything I see, I examine him in every thought, he is more than the sun rising because he controls it, because through his words he showed me how to see, so everything is made of him. 'He is not God' they say, but they didn't see what I saw.

I sit on the floor and listen, his words have already sounded within my mind before he speaks. His words are my own thoughts, have always been my thoughts, the rhythm has been with me my whole life, it is only that now it is being said back to me, he is my mirror. I look up at his face, shocking and clear as the world has blurred around him, I think to him, 'our thoughts are the same, how can you leave me?'

He does not respond, only looks to the back of the room. I try and conceal my thoughts, I scatter them in pools so that he loses some, I never think the entire string, only a few words at a time, I layer 'I love you' louder and below ground I begin building.

I watch the muscles twitch below his skin, his fingers releasing and sliding on the strings, he is silent now, but I can see his thoughts plainly, he is thinking of blue cattails. I don't tell him, but I have discovered a secret.

I place him in the waving corn stalks and I slow the blur of the wind until his outline is no longer sharp against it, I make his body lay soft in the grass. In the room, I watch his lips form the words and I take them before he can speak, because they are also mine. In the shower, I pull my own body from the backdrop, my shoulders slipping through the air as it parts for my skin,

The last time I see him, he is sitting on a stool in the center of the plywood room, his bare back curled and seeded with bones. He turns and looks up at me, thinking I'm stagnant and wooden as the wall, his eyes black flies and landing on only what he wants. I watch his world decay, because he thinks that he's alone.
ENTRY 60: March 3. 2024 A lot has happened this last week, some good, some strange, some probably bad but as stated on my spam: even the bad things lead to new perspectives which are always good.

My goals for next week are:

1. Spend time alone in my room, feel bored and maybe even some despair. Write about daemonic (cite: Goethe) presences (people and mists) in Berlin. Revisit crazy island while I'm actually quite sane and have wholesome, lonesome fun.

2. See only people I like, which right now is three people and my roommates of course. I'm culling, I have spread my net but now it's time to check the catch, and I need to get my goddamn nets out of the water.

3. Be both less embarrassing and also more cryptic, which counteract, i.e. poetry is embarrassing when it tries to make something simple into something cryptic, or when it tries to talk down to you, however I want to be cryptic in a non-embarrassing way: because if I just wrote down the things I knew that were right I'd have a scramble. Does that make sense?

I won't tell you about my last week because I was a different person on every day, and I'm trying to make sense of how I (the real me) feels about it. The most important thing going forward is that I learned to prepare fly soup:

Ingredients: Jar from the freezer of the 5th floor of the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin, top shelf, marked 'berlin malaise trap 2021' should contain a thick black sludge the consistency of a jar of capers.

A. Pour jar contents into a tray, out will come thin ethanol then the first large bees, butterflies, wasps that have floated to the top, use a pipette and tweezers to spoon out the black mass below, spots of red compound eyes punctuating, each fly a unique sparkling and spotted bead, held together in a black sponge, spread liberally on the tray.

B. Use tweezers to parse through the thick mat of flies, pull those of similar sizes and place head-down in individual vials, until you have a tray of 96 separated flies.

C. Extract the DNA and perform PCR (auxillary information found elsewhere)

D. Pour the remaining fly soup back into the jar and return to the freezer for tomorrow, don't forget to pick up the smallest specks and legs from the sides, they could also be flies.

E. Think of nothing else. When your mind begins to wander, perhaps towards love, return it gently to the fly soup waiting for you in the freezer. Once you have finished the existing jar, pull another from the back up freezer, there are hundreds left.
ENTRY 59: February 27. 2024 From Prairie Style by C.S. Giscombe :

To have the same sound, to be called by the same name.

Location's what you come to; it's the low point, it usually repeats.

To me, any value is a location to be reckoned with; I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge how an event could be talked about like it was you or me being talked about.

Or location's the reply, the obvious statement about origin; it goes without saying that pleasure's formidable.

-------------------------------

To have the same sound, to be called by the same name.

Enumclaw is the name of my hometown, in 2019 Enumclaw became the name of a garage rock band from Tacoma.

I have one guitar pick, it's yellow and smudged and I caught it at an Enumclaw show. Sometimes the pick is in my wallet if I take my guitar somewhere, once I didn't notice and handed the pick to the bartender with my cash, he said nothing and set it down on the counter. I thought it was the Pfand token and gave it back with my glass.

Location's what you come to; it's the low point, it usually repeats.

My favorite poet is Tony Tost, I found him through the Enumclaw wikipedia page. He grew up in a double-wide mobile home and worked at the pickle factory on Old Pickle Factory road, he studied Gertrude Stein and has two books, Invisible Bride and Complex Sleep, he produced the show Longmire. In the mornings I like to read the stuff he posted on Blogger in 2007, he writes:

Swans of Local Waters

Their color is not a product of the water’s depth; their quiet is not lake’s. These are accidents floating in simple water, taking in nature calmly, in little sips; actions which, like literal swans and lakes, are sometimes scattered. What the swans look like: white, with feathers. It’s getting cold. Someone has made a fire. A flame’s identity depends on what it burns — identity is like a swan for it comes and goes as it pleases.

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge an event. The other link on the Enumclaw wikipedia page titled 'Enumclaw Horse Sex Case'. Man found dead in an Enumclaw stable by ruptured colon after being penetrated by a horse those in the online horse-fucking forums affectionately called, 'Big Dick', the man's own username, 'Mr. Hands'. A landmark case in beastiality legislation and the focus of Zoo, winner of 16 awards at Sundance.

it goes without saying that pleasure's formidable.

I lost my viginity on a logging road in Enumclaw, in the back of a Subaru RX with stickers that looked like bandaids on the bumper. My grandma was Mrs. Enumclaw. They call Enumclaw the plateau. The next time Mount Rainier erupts Enumclaw might be hit with a 100 m tall wave of volcanic ash and glacial melt the consistency of concrete. If the winds blow East, the lahar will hit Buckley instead.

At the Enumclaw pool I sat mornings in the lifeguard chair and watched sun come through the window over lines of winkled skin whirling and churning like barn swallows, wondering: if water is trapped between feathers, are birds always hooked to the lake?
ENTRY 58: February 26. 2024 Found on the ground:

I can't do this. I look like I crochet balaclavas, like I paid 70 euros for a 'working class' haircut (I did) and yes, I'm about to tell you I write poetry.

If Life Is But A Joke, if we envision the role of the poet as a communicator, or maybe a mediator, or maybe a great conversationalist, then really I'm working desperately towards just being understood. But not by anyone, because what good is it if the people I understand don't understand me? And understanding is shorthand for love in this context, and love is shorthand for being very curious about me.

And so if this is our yardstick I've really not done much at all, have I? Because I fell in love with someone who wasn't really very interested in me. So these two years now I've sat in my room writing and raving and researching and practicing thinking, it all just hasn't been enough has it? Because when the moment came, I still couldn't show them who I was.

And another thing, I don't know jack shit about any of this. While the people I love and want to love me back were writing their dissertations on Ezra Pound I was learning the latin names of 400 species of birds. I don't know how to write and I'm supposed to be reading about modern methods of fruit fly genetics but the person I love doesn't care about that.

I was born with a curse. The dream is happening around me every day and I need you to see it too, I need to learn how to show it to you so that you understand. But it hasn't been working,

I write lots and lots of words, I tell you every thing I know, I tell you the color of every object in my dream, they are always blue. I tell you this is all happening at night, you don't seem to care.
ENTRY 57: February 25. 2024 A slay day, a lovely day. I went to a club with my new roommate (from Melbourne, no relation) last night, we sat in the kitchen drinking gin mixed with yerba mate and talked about our failed high school relationships until we left for the club at 12:30, we bought beers at the Späti and I felt the old nostalgic excitment of being tipsy and wandering around in Germany come back.

This morning I woke up energized, I texted everyone that my phone had broke and now I have a new number, something I was naturally embarrassed about since I had to text some random people from Hinge that have ghosted me (because what if they ever want to come back?) but this morning I just did it and didn't care. I went to my old apartment and picked up some mail, then wandered around in the sunshine listening to fanclubwallet. My buddy Jamie asked what I was doing today and we made plans to get drinks later, I went home and my roommate and I did a news quiz together while we made lunch, I made some coffee and walked to a park near my apartment and wrote in a new notebook I just got at Muji. I was listening to Parquet Courts Human Performance and watching the people throwing balls for the dog, the kids playing on the play structure, the clouds rolling in.

I came back home when I finished my page and then played guitar for a bit, tried to learn the opening riff to Berlin Got Blurry, then I made dinner and went on E2 for a while, now I'm here. I'm coming back into myself and I'm so excited. I'm trusting that I'm fun to be around and that people like me, and I'm enjoying being alone with myself too. I'm so happy that I'm here, it feels right and incredibly good. I feel like I'm getting a present every time I walk outside and see all of the things I love about Berlin, the weird shit left on the street and the old grey buildings with people leaning out and smoking from their windows. I feel like me describing how happy I am isn't particularly fun to read or interesting so I'll wrap it up but basically, I am so happy I am here.
ENTRY 56: February 22. 2024 My dad used to take me hunting as a kid. We'd drive his truck into the mountains of eastern Washington and hunt this area called Plum Creek. In the mornings he'd wake up early and load me and my brother in the truck. We'd drive through the gravel roads and I'd watch the steam rise from the coffee in his thermos. We'd hike all morning as the sky turned pink and the frost broke on the pine needles under our boots.

My dad said he liked hunting because it was the cheapest way to get venison, and he liked going out to the woods. But come November there were always new antlers mounted in the garage, and photos on his computer of deer carcasses hung on two by fours between the trees.

When I got older I stopped going hunting with my dad. In October I waited with my mom in the living room,

she said 'I hope Joseph gets a deer this year, he's always so discouraged when he doesn't'

My dad needed the deer in the bed of the truck, he needed to tell his friends how far he followed it, how quickly he made the final shot, he needed them to imagine him holding the rifle.

Even the death of the deer is sometimes unnecessary. Sometimes all that matters is that it runs.

The week after the shooting I was afraid to go to work, the next months I realized everything was different. I began to think strange things, like that my memories might be made up, that I had been saved by God, that I was living in a dream. Many things within the minute of the shooting became important. The flexing of the tendon of his hand, the words he yelled at me before he shot. These all told me things.

I would never erase the shooting. I can connect with people so differently now. I have felt the strange ways that trauma changes our perceptions of others and ourselves, I am no longer naive to how fragile and malleable the way I see the world is.

This means I can also tell things to myself. Like that I'm safe, and that I am loved, and that I am stronger than the shooter. Because he needed me to feel something about himself, but I don't need him.
ENTRY 55: February 21. 2024 I had my soil ecology test this morning, it went well I think. I've been busy this weekend studying for it, which has been nice in a way, of course, all of my usual thoughts were still there, always. It reminded me of how my 4th grade teacher told us to chew gum while we studied, i.e. no matter what I was reading or what time of day or how my I wrote, my thoughts floated around the background like some faint peppermint bullshit.

It made me think of this E2 post I read forever ago about a man who meets a priest on a mountain top (etc) and is instructed that he'll be happy once he can have no thoughts for 30 minutes, so he practices every day first trying to go only 1 second without thinking and then 2 and then after an entire lifetime he can finally go 30 minutes and I think he's really happy or like dead or something at that point. This might actually not have come from E2, anyway the point is I'm practicing not thinking.

When I was a kid and having the can't-sleep anxiety (I'm trying to write about this right now but I'm stalled because I'm realizing writing about my childhood bedroom is deeply lame) my mom got this book from the library to help me, I imagine it must have been about bad dreams or dealing with anxiety or something, but I remember her reading one section that advised that if you were thinking about something unpleasant just superimpose a nice thought in your mind, like thinking of ice cream. The book asked, Can you visualize an ice cream cone in your mind? What color is it? How much detail can you add to the image?

Mom: You can try imagining something nice when you start to have thoughts you don't like, you control your thoughts.

I think many would disagree with this idea that we control our thoughts, and find it actually quite condescending. In the E2 post the man didn't try and replace his thougths, he said that he tried to just let them pass, not becoming angry that he was thinking, but just letting them flow freely and pass by. Of course everyone fucking knows that,

I'm trying to reroute myself slowly, trying not to be mad at the thoughts but also move away from them, not towards them. When I realize I'm there I'm trying to softly course correct, like slipping a paddle into the water. I can't tell if it's working yet, but I am feeling better and better.
ENTRY 54: February 16. 2024 After I read last night a few different people came up to me and told me that they really enjoyed my writing. This man from Brooklyn said he loved the way that I craft the story, someone else said they loved how quickly I accessed the emotion in my poem, that one was k actually. But on the bus too, I walked with my friend Will and they told me them and their partner had come a few weeks ago, when I did the cockroach one, and that their partner always talks about it and asks if I've read again. My friend Sophia Rose said that she was inspired by my lucid dream piece last week, my friend Kat just said she loved everything.

W: When do you usually write?

H: I write all the time.

W: But like I usually write in the mornings, do you have a time that you..?

H: No. I've been writing compulsively at all hours of the day, I wake up and all I want to do is write, in the middle of the day I have to structure my other work to keep myself from writing, I write at night, I write on the train, when I'm not writing I'm thinking of what I will write soon.

W: That's such a gift you know.

I'm in an interesting place. I can feel I'm returned to a semblance of the heidelberg period, back when I was happy, unbothered by everything because all I wanted to do was work on my blog. Last night I sat on the bus going home and felt so content, I'd talked to my friends, I'd made new ones, I'd had fun and people liked my writing. When I got off the tram I ran home in my cowboy boots under the moon and the cold sky and smiled all by myself.

I read my tarot cards this morning and listened to the sound of the cards as I shuffled, the pages of the book turning, it felt grounding and calm, sitting on my bed as the sun rose and I could watch the sky turn pink to blue. First I read k, of course I still think about them, as much as I don't want to admit it. I finally got a letter from them yesterday, this letter was finally vulnerable, I could feel their thin tendrils of honesty, which at last, gave my power back. They told me they knew the problem was unrequited love, that we simply don't work, and not because they can't access emotion or whatever bullshit they've been saying, but just because they don't love me, and that love doesn't make sense.

I liked the letter, it was finally in line with how I've been seeing things (re: the pool of unrequited love) and I liked that they included a second letter they'd written later, saying they had been afraid to send it since they didn't want to come off too harsh, but that they wanted to talk about love more with me. It was the backdoor M had been warning me about, that k will always try and pull me back one more time. They're afraid of losing control of people, so they need me to say that I want to continue to talk with them. I thought it was funny they were worried about it being too harsh, as if I haven't already built my own self back from falling into a disassociative pit the last two months. I do feel incredibly strong now, since I found my way out of the underworld basically on my own.

My cards literally told me, it's time to pack your bags and get moving, there's nothing left for you here, it's time to look to the horizon and keep moving forward. And then told me that again, and again. I believe them too, I've been thinking about the beauty of giving k unrequited love. Not mine anymore, but theirs, because I think they're going to regret what happened. Their cards showed that they are about to enter a period of rebirth and creativity, but reversed, and also involving the death card; I don't think they'll like it, but I'm hoping I can give them the beauty they've given me, the pain and reflection and the growth that I feel now.
ENTRY 53: February 15. 2024 Wolbachia

It emerged slowly, doctors said it had been present since birth, probably passed from my mother, and suspended, waiting, within the follicles that pupate the ridges of my seminal tract, a small thing, a burrowed worm sleeping between the cytoplasm walls, until provoked by an unknown mechanism, maybe the necessity of time, maybe the chemicals which formed my wings,
what was one cell became two,
a pulsing colony began to spread it's arms through the funnels of my reproductive system, then moved to my lymphatic, whispering new instructions to the enzymes working in my brain, I was only 20.

I woke one morning with a growth the size of a mango above my thigh, I lay in bed looking up at the ceiling and touched the new extension of my body, I was afraid. Doctors couldn't find the reason, but they cut into the growth and removed the colony, taking the stems but not the roots. What was only skin above my thigh was left a pink scar. The infection left my skin and hid within my eyes.

I remember the day when you told me you didn't feel right. It took months for you to reveal the size of the growth, how much of you was now enclosed by the corral, all that had changed. I listened in your living room, there was nothing to be done.

I took your hand at night and curled my body around yours, together we lay in Wolbachia soup, we gave a name to the intruder, and he became part of us.
ENTRY 52: February 14. 2024 I remembered last week that I'm a voyeur. I'd been playing my guitar in the evenings just sitting in my desk chair pointed at the curtains when I realized: I can just spy on my neighbors.

My new apartment is wonderful, it's large block buildings arranged in small squares and courtyards, so I can see the entire wall of the neighboring building from my window, each row 2 or 3 apartments, many people leave their curtains open in the evening and I slowly play Angeles over and over as I watch my neighbors reading to their kid in the drawing room, or the old couple that loves to smoke together in the kitchen, or the men who live alone and cook rice.

Last night, the clouds had cleared and I could see Orions Belt drifting over the other roof, it was like a dream, the patchwork of still-yellow windows, the people moving and talking and smoking, me making my own music, my fingers sliding on the wrong strings in the dark and slowly correctly, rewiring the sound until it matched the stillness of the night outside. I keep my lights off so I can't be seen, and I think about how I can do this every night. Every night I can come to my window and feel something I've dreamed about since childhood, seeing into the windows, uninterrupted, alone.

But do I want to be alone? Of course I thought of k last night too, that nobody was there to appreciate me being so beautiful and cultivating such a beautiful vibe in the studio. I have this need for validation when experiencing beautiful things, as if the feeling can't be as strong if it's only me there. I understand this in a way, because sharing something beautiful with someone else forms a bond. The question is then, can viewing beautiful things alone bond you to yourself? What does that even mean?

I'm thinking specifically of the street light outside my house in Auburn, the one I used to go out to the porch to watch for hours. I didn't want my mom or my dad to understand the street light , and I definitely didn't want to try and explain my fascination with it to my friends at school. I've been thinking of going tagging alone, I want to get back in touch with this part of myself, the part that knows where the beautiful things are: night, trainyards, broken windows, and just wants to see them because I love them, not because I need someone else to see that they are beautiful too. I wonder what that would feel like? To explore something beautiful that only I will ever see, I wonder when that idea got so far away from me?
ENTRY 51: February 12. 2024 I got home and went to the doner place across from my apartment for the first time. I stood at the counter and forgot that I wanted to say halloumi doner so I just stood there trying to find it on the ceiling and the man carving meat from the stick turned and pointed and said doner with cheese and bread which was in fact what I was about to order.

There's two paths in my life; the Will Toledo path and the 'you're being a dumbass' path. The Will Toledo path is the path I've been taking lately, while there, I write silly things, I make my life important, I think things like, 'I am very smart', 'I am very special', I walk through an art exhibit and think 'I really get this, unlike these other mfs, I'm really putting the pieces of life together'.

The funny thing about the Will Toledo path is it veers into long stretches of sadness, i.e. how can I be happy when I'm no where close to being Will Toledo? How can I be happy when I can't convey these big 'ol thoughts I'm having, or more earnestly, my dreams and imaginings, which are always gut-punching me. I wish so badly that I could take your hand and lead you into the dream, and when I can't, I am devastated.

Then there's the other path, the one where I realize that the Will Toledo path is kind of silly. The one where I realize I kind of don't actually matter, and I'm just a trans man in a camo shirt trying to find halloumi written on the ceiling of a doner shop. On the other path I think things like, 'what exactly is my 8-hour rumination on my failed relationships giving the world?' and 'maybe I should stick with lab work' and sometimes, 'maybe saying I'm trans at the end of every piece isn't as interesting and transcendent as I think it is.'

The other path teaches me that writing may not in fact matter all that much. Even if I could write, who gave me the right? (bars) This is also stemming from an exhibit I walked though in Copenhaven where some writer decided to absolutely go off and take up half the wall space with their 'artistic musings' and I was reading it, and getting it, and then realizing, this is fucking embarassing. To put your own 'the woman is beautiful in her dismissal of the viewer' next to a painting, like just let people look at it? What do you or me or I even have to say that people wouldn't have a better time just seeing themselves? Moreso, your audience is bitches at an art musuem in Copenhagen, and I am a bitch at an art museum in Copenhagen, it struck me, I'm in a pretentious twister'

Note:
(I wanted to say black hole or tornado or something but I thought ending with twister' might have add a level of hope, perhaps with colloquialisms we can escape our fate, and anyway moving on to the concepts of Neue Sachlichkeit..)
ENTRY 50: February 8. 2024 I've been having this issue with reality.

In lucid dreaming, they tell you to use 'dream checks' to help you to realize when you're dreaming.

My dream check right now is money, I'll open my wallet to pay at a cafe and I find these wadded up green papers, Why did I only bring American money? I think, then I realize I'm dreaming.

The idea with dream checks is that you're supposed to practice doing them while you're awake, like when I take out my wallet during the day I should always ask myself, 'am I dreaming?' to encourage that thought to come more easily during the dream. Lucky for me,

I am constantly evaluating whether I may or may not be in reality.

In the evenings, it becomes harder for me to know that everything is normal. I sometimes get confused. I'll know very clearly that I am not dreaming, but I'll feel wrong still, as if I'm standing at the edge of a cliff in the dark. I can't see any danger, but I can still feel the gap spreading out in front of me.

The thing about living in surrealness is that it's surreal everywhere, my bedroom walls can feel like they're made of cardboard, the sidewalk outside my apartment can look like glass, sometimes I decide not to fight it, A few weeks ago I matched with this guy on Hinge, the only name he gave was Mindfuckboy, he'd offered to take me to see an abandoned building. I knew almost nothing about him, except that he told me he was obsessed with the Berlin sewer system.

Mindfuckboy had those wide pants with the buckles down the legs, when we met I realized he was shy, and kind. He reminded me of the kids from my high school who made shuffling videos and smoked weed outside the library.

He had brought a bottle of cheap red wine that he held out to me, then told me he was sorry that he forgot cups.
We walked down a long chain-link fence and he told me how he'd found this place, that he'd stayed at the shelter near there when he first moved to Berlin. He was carrying all of his belongings in a blue hiking backpack and tied with various cables to his belt and his pockets, possessions like a slingshot, and his bluetooth speaker, The clinic was all concrete, just many blocks sticking out at odd angles and stitched together, all black silhouette now in the dusk, the bottom pane of the door was broken and we crouched under the jagged edges of the glass, entering a room of bare concrete and pooling water.

We climbed a few flights of stairs and reached a wrought iron ladder hanging down from the roof, Mindfuckboy showed me how to open the doors and we stepped out onto snow, he reached under an old air conditioning unit and pulled out two plastic folding chairs and two candles that wouldn't light, I noticed an empty bottle of red wine already leaning against the gutter.

To fill the silence I started asking him about himself,

'What do you think about when you come up here alone'

'I think about the end of the world' he said, 'nuclear sunrise'

His answer was so manic pixie dream girl that I felt myself wake up, the buildings below differentiated, stopped being a grey scape of multicolored squares, each it's own imaginary world, like icons on a computer screen, red, yellow and blue holes that I could fly into like the holes of a birdhouse, the buildings were just buildings, they had windows, I watched the crossing light flash on the intersection down below.

I asked him about where he saw himself in the future,

'I know I should care about my life and stuff but I don't, I have everything I need and I'm happy.' He waved his hand at the two folding chairs,

'Have you ever gone to therapy?' I asked,

'I hate therapy,' he said, 'it's just talking to a mirror'

One week later I was leaving the office of a therapist in Friedrichshain, he'd written in his email, let's have a first meeting to see if we get along and go from there, it would cost 60 euros.

I'd come to him to ask about the problem I was having with reality.

I started, 'I'm having these disassociative episodes, I'll start to feel like the world around me isn't right'

He nodded with his mouth open.

'How was your upbringing?'

'Yeah, I mean my mom was an alcoholic.'

'Ah, so a lot of ups and downs.'

'Are you staying active here in Berlin? Not spending too much time alone?'

'Yeah, I mean I go to this poetry group every week, but it's hard because I sometimes get confused if I'm even in reality. '

His mouth was open again, 'yes, I can imagine that is..frustrating?'

When I left the office I got on a bus to go to a new part of the city, I had nothing to do for a few hours so I'd decided to just wander around and see what I came across.

It was getting dark and I was walking down a side street when I saw Mindfuckboy running in the opposite direction. Naturally, I followed him, running behind him on the other side until he sat down at a bus stop and I could corner him, 'Mindfuckboy' I said.

He looked up, 'are you stalking me?'

I told him about my therapy session, 'I was doing everything, I came with very concrete problems that I wanted help with and he just was completely unreceptive, all he could focus on was my childhood, He didn't even ask me about how I was feeling right now.'

Mindfuckboy looked back at me with a kind of pity, 'your problems are kind of funny' he said.

'why don't you just try and enjoy the dream?'
ENTRY 49: February 6. 2024 I've been trying to write something for poetry this week and its just turned out so fucking awful, like deeply, hilariously bad, the words are stiff and lifeless and also make no sense and have no point and are also condescending and self-righteous and deeply boring. So I was looking back through my old-old blog since the theme this week is 'grit' and I thought, hey, I used to be gritty, and damn I, I used to be able to write. I used to be quick, and maybe even funny? and I didn't fuck around with all these platitudes or 'the sound of the water/rippling lake/my bare flesh' whatever the fuck, LOVE, bullshit, even this entry is too long, when did I forget how to shut up?

I'll say it, I need you B, I need someone looking over this mess and keeping me from wandering away from the interesting path.

I've been wasting everyone's time talking about some some sad disassociation, 'what's real? what's happening to me?' I can't write about feeling sad, it's boring, it's pitiful. If I really wanted to workshop the thing I created this morning I would analyze the torn psyche of someone who thinks they can write about 'is it all a dream?' for 500 words, ending with the 'of course it is'. God,

I think things broke apart when I started to think my writing was good. It was maybe two months ago, after I'd started up the blog again, and I stooped down to tie my shoe and fell into delusions of grandeur, and love I guess too but I'm done talking about that, and that bitch k got me in the habit of wasting words (this will also be my last alliteration for a while so enjoy it) and talking like I'm writing a 60,000 word shakespeare fanfiction, which I feel bad making fun of but simply has to be said.

But now that I've isolated the problem it's time to stop the bleeding. I need to lighten up, I need to light up, and I need to get laid (Florida Project, 2017) I need to be more mean. I need to be scathing, sorry everyone around me, you're now in the splash zone. I don't fucking care, I have my childhood friend staying with me and I'm having realizations, I'm having the good kind of visions, the ones where you realize you're being a dumbass, the ones that teach you that you can take the stick out of your ass and just be one silly cowboy. I'm not a good writer, but I am telling the truth, and I know my stupid prose hasn't been working this last week because I've already moved away from sad, confused, Jäger, no longer am I 'gorgeously sad they writes aggressively in their brown paper notebook on the train, and what couldeth arth thou be writing? pain, we cry for them, and their mother lost at sea'

Now I'm just regular Jäger. I don't get out, I don't have fun, I'm living like a captive of the sun it's the streetrees renaissance, baby, I don't got no family now, nobody to provide for, nobody to try and 'impress' with my 'prose' the blog is back in the hands of a madman, and I know all 0 of you regular readers are grateful.
ENTRY 48: February 4. 2024 I just got back from summer camp. I just had the sensation when I sat down to write that my blog feels lonely now. Maybe it's because I just posted the below entry on E2, and got real life people in my DMs being kind and telling me they understood, giving some good advice as well. Actually reading about unrequited love on E2 was strangely helpful, I pitied the people in some of the nodes, which helped when I reread mine and began to pity myself too, poor baby girl, you're sad and in love, you think they matter so much, you think you're experiencing something completely new. Someone posted something like, 'focus on other people, humanity is amazing! don't ever focus on yourself, you'll never be happy' and like yeah I know that, but the 'focus on humanity' part was strangely important, something clicked and I realized by putting this random mf on a pedestal I've just been gouging everyone else around me, constantly ignoring them and discounting them as 'not them' when it probably would be a lot healthier to ignore them instead and try and focus on everyone else. I tried to do this at summer camp, and while I still had my scheduled breakdown around 9 pm both nights, I was doing better during the day, trying to remind myself that people are amazing and beautiful and interesting and that's why I bother to do any of this.

In an interesting coincidence, my school google docs account is about to expire. I was just mass downloading everything onto an external hard drive when I came across this poem I wrote in August of 2020:

Just Thoughts

I’m looking in the mirror
my face bubbles and pearls
my thoughts are clouding there,
heavy in my ears.

Let’s talk in the afternoon,
set your boundaries, and
openly communicate your needs,
I hear starchy words come out of me.

I lay like a child
flat to Earth and up towards trees,
warmth is a feeling that comes easy,
when our eyes meet.

Why couldn’t I tell you
the many lives I’ve dreamed for us?
when you ask in blunt pink lipstick
“where do you see this going?”

blue dusk is on us now,
wire branches grip a gritty sky,
I see the dark fall coming,
still wrapped up in my head.

Someday, I promise
I’ll throw a party on your birthday
we’ll wear evening dresses
and dance under dim brown light.

You’re a beautiful idea
multicolored in the shades of the day
thoughts humming under skin
just thoughts I’ll never say.


I dug deeper and found this prose I'd written some time in the spring of 2020, I had absolutely no memory of it.

There is something practical in you. Your love feels simple and utilitarian. I hesitate to call this feeling plainness because the feeling is more effortless than plain; imagine the way that a bird’s wing is designed. Of course, we are not supposed to say designed in biology, but so feels your love. We pretend that love is never forced, and that it comes on and goes out without direction. The same is true for evolution, we are taught that it is random and neither right nor wrong. However, evolution is driven. Yes, there are many causes for this phenomenon but to come back to your love, let us examine competition.

Your love is not forced. When you think of me and send me the video that you just watched, it is unconscious. When I open the car door and hold Bramble out to you, you smile with this base of love. These are easy examples, but there have been more difficult ones. What does it mean to force love? Does the act of forcing emotion prove that the feeling exists all the more strongly? There must be an element of deceit, of hiding your true feelings, and I do not see this in you. Tomorrow you will prove this to me when you break your rules and come back in an effort to fix things. Had your love been forced you would not do this.

So what drives you then? There are moments of intense feeling and a strong desire to fix what we have lost, and then there are moments of apathy. When I cried a few weeks ago you were so quick to say that you would always take care of me. You held me until I was calm. The next day you were distant, seeming to break the promise you have made. I say seeming because this is my perspective, and I tend to misread things. Maybe I simply caught you at a bad time, or you truly could not come out to visit me, I cannot know. But we all have moments of hot and cold when it comes to our partners. Is it possible that every showing of love is given out of feeling selfishly threatened? Do we play up this side of ourselves when we sense competition?

If love is like a bird’s wing; it is not designed, but it does follow rules. It will morph in a predictable direction, determined by all other organisms that have come before it. Your love is natural and real, but it is shifted by the environment we stand in. I wish that I could generalize these rules, but I haven’t found the patterns yet.

And what of my love? Surely it must also flow from light to heavy as the winds change. Lately, it has seemed caught in a hurricane. I’m afraid I don’t even know what to tell you tomorrow. My love is selfish, it grasps you because I know that you will help me. You do. There may be more I’ve realized. I spend exorbitant amounts of time planning how to make you feel happy. It’s amazing then, as I’m sure you know, that these efforts have seemed to produce the opposite effect. Am I simply overriding them with my own fears? likely. Still, there is thought there, and it has been said that attention is love.

I like the spot that we have kept this week. It is intensely freeing as well as wonderfully hopeful. There is the potential that we completely return to normal, but I don’t think that this will happen. For one, I don’t think that I want to be in a relationship.

I had already written the above intro to this blog post when I found these, including that line about 'you think you're experiencing something completely new'. It turns out it isn't even new to myself. I found some other stuff I may talk about at some point, but the best thing was this,

The city was bathed in rain last night
draining sickness from my street
streetlights rose in red waters
weaving threaded sheets
motioning seas of droplets
fish glistening in membrane
remind my skin of another time,
move me back to another rain.

back against the cool stone steps
the weary light on every night
mother willowed in the moonlit house
left hollow in the windchimes
father in the moldy bedroom
green light flowing down his side
I felt their movements through the walls,
as the mist filled up our sky.

ENTRY 47: February 2. 2024 God is holding it out in front of me, pulling it away when I reach out to grab it. And I need to be grateful, I need to understand that I can't be there yet, contentedness is what killed me in Portland, contentedness is why I moved, I need to be scrambling, frantically writing as if my body is about to pull apart and I just need to get this out, get out of this, I need to be in pain right now for anything to make sense later.

I'm grateful that I'm in love, I'm grateful it's unrequited, I'm grateful I'm in this obsessive and delusional state, because I've never been here before.

I've been listening to the first Soccer Mommy album,

Wasting all my time wondering if you really love me
I was wasting all my time thinking about the way you treat me
Wasting all my time on someone who didn't know me
I was wasting all my time on someone who couldn't love me
And I knew when I met you
I'm not the one you want to be with
Because I can't see you blossom
In the future that I'm dreaming

I love my painful love arc, I love feeling so deeply for someone else and being completely crushed with understanding that they simply don't care about me. Because it's so fascinating, it's teaching me so much about myself, I never thought I could feel like this, love so intensely, I almost missed it too, I think about people who are settled with their partner, the way M and I were in Portland, I think about people never getting to understand the intensity of love we are capable of, it's like I'm accessing a secret vault, the same one accessed by so many writers or whoever the fuck before, all these people before me have eventually come to the magical and moonlit pond of unrequited love. I'm so happy I'm here, my hands grabbing at the water that will always and inevitably fall through my fingers, someday when this is all finished and my feelings are burnt out, when I finally move on and accept that I don't want this intensity anymore I'll look back at these weeks and months that I sat by the pool, I'll remember the beauty of each day being truly new, because I don't know myself like this, each day I surprise myself, because I never thought this experience was possible.

Their face is removed from the backdrop, removed from the room, they are in focus and the world is blurred, when they speak I hear their voice as my own, I hear their thoughts in my inner world turned out, when they say maybe we should have some distance, I have the initial jolt of pain, I'm acting like T, I need to be normal, I need to have self respect, but when we stand at the street corner, talking fast past 1 am and my cold jacket is blown open and I'm caught in the February wind, when I can't catch my bus even though it's passed twice, when I know we're talking in circles, but I can't stand to see their face disappear, I'm so grateful for the pain I know is rising in my body, the pain about to burst tomorrow into this, and my thoughts for the rest of the day, and a thousand other words I'll write someday.

I think of Marlowe and Alec, these two trans men I've been jealous of forever, today Marlowe posted, 'I'm so grateful to be able to love and be loved' and it's so obvious, they complete each other, they see the world the same way, I think of the intensity of finding someone like that, who you believe sees the world the exact same way as you. Then to have them pull away from you, not seem to understand, not agree, when they see you you're just another face in their day, they think of your name in passing, they look away, when you speak you're just a voice to them, someone else standing there on the sidewalk. I think about if this had happened to Marlowe and Alec, how beautiful that would have been, how much more interesting. Life isn't supposed to work, life is supposed to be walking back home alone, life is supposed to be waking up and deciding who you are, without someone else to tell you or show you that you even make sense, life is supposed to be constantly speaking into the closed circles of their ears and knowing you won't be understood, life is supposed to be speaking and never getting there.

I sit by the pond at night, the water blue-black and rippling, I'm here, feeling my own body as I sit at the bank, my hands over my legs, feeling each brown hair sprouting from my skin, pulling at the follicles and finding the pattern of their interlocking threads, the hair is thinning, my scar, I'm running my finger down the beautiful white stripe, healed now from the surgeons knife and the weeks of dressing changes, pressing my finger along the skin and remembering, the once red and bloody opening above my thigh where the green and yellow pus was pulled from my body, the opening to my inner world and the flesh-eating bacteria within. I smile, see my torso, see my back, beautiful in the white light reflecting from the moon and the ache of the water, I write about myself the way I wish they would write about me, I see each burning irritation on my skin, I track the lines of my muscles and I watch my necklace tear pink swaths into my neck, I stop by the neighbor's window to look into my own eyes, imagining what it must be like to be them, to be seen by these eyes in such excruciating detail.
ENTRY 46: January 27. 2024 My try-out therapist nodded with his mouth open and asked me if my eating disorder was 'still a thing?', asked the same about the shooting trauma, then asked when my condition started, 'college', I said, 'can we draw a diagram?', 'what?', he draws a graph on a piece of paper and puts two tick marks at the bottom labled 'Portland' and 'Heidelberg', but the tick marks are both at one end of the graph, leaving the entire page for 'before Portland', 'I don't know how to fill this out? my condition? I told you my anxiety started in college.', 'how was your upbringing?', 'yeah, I mean my mom was an alcoholic', 'ah, so it was a lot of ups and downs, are you staying active here in Berlin? Not spending too much time alone?,' 'Yeah, I mean I go to this poetry group every week, but it's hard because I have this underlying sadness', he nods with mouth open, 'yes, I can imagine that is..frustrating? you're masking your emotions?' I look at him and his colorful sneakers, he seems kind, I like that his sneakers are all primary colors, with spotted laces, he's young, I can see that he's trying, but I'm also aware that this meeting is costing me 60€ and I'm somehow the one doing all of the work. Mindfuckboy's words come back to me, 'I hate therapy, it's like looking in a mirror'.

I've isolated my own condition. I'm terrified of k leaving because of a few factors, all painfully psychological,

Most importantly, they represent a kind of shortcut to my own dream, of being a writer of course, where if I continue to stay with them my own dream seems close at hand, maybe they'll help me? I think, and were I to lose them, I would suddenly find the door to my dream closed, locked, maybe blasted out with dynamite, fuck! I'd think, I've lost my greatest asset.

To counteract this train of thought I have to, of course, achieve my dream. They are irrelevant to this process, and I need to prove that to myself. It was similar to moving to Berlin I think, I somehow insist in getting in my own way, when the path forward is actually quite clear and achievable. I become convinced that I can never do it because, 'I just won't!' or now, 'I can't! I'm stupid! and each day that k moves farther from me is evidence of that' the fear grows, 'they're leaving because they know you can't do it, therefore you can't.' This train of thought is funny because this person is so deeply irrelevant to my actual life. I've known them, what, two months? And I've made a whole fucking lot of Hunteresque decisions before that point and now, without them or their input. And I like myself, and I know I can do it, so I just have to, to finally end this curse and probably move on to a new one.

Returning to Mindfuckboy, after my therapy I was feeling strangely uplifted. The whole experience had been so deeply bad that it had come full circle to being very funny, like of course this would happen to me kind of thing. I left and went to the burrito place across the street and got a burrito bowl without even thinking about it, even rizzed up the dude working (auf deutsch) then I wandered happily over to a bridge nearby and sat in the dark next to a busy intersection eating my food. I was so at peace, finally just me, doing normal human things easily, and alone, and calm. Some time later an older woman staggered over in cheetah print leggings and sat next to me, she was very obviously looking at my chips so I asked her if she wanted them and gave the box to her as I left, when she put the chip halfway in her mouth and looked up at me she reminded me of a baby. I then found a bus to the poetry event T had invited me to (still hours away) and wandered that part of town for a while, going aimlessly down a street by large factories, billboards, looking at the various train stations. I was singing Change by Big Theif to myself but forgetting the lines and order so it was just a strange self-soothing chant of change, like the wind, like the water, like skin / change, how I find, like the water, like skin with butterfly and moon thrown in 'ad hoc' as the dude from the Plateau youtube guitar tutorial would say. Anyway this was my state when I looked across the road and saw long curly hair that I immidiately recognized, cross-referenced with the wide buckled pants and blue backpack I was certain it was Mindfuckboy, and he was walking extremely quickly down the sidewalk, almost running. It was such a white rabbit situation that I immidiately followed him from the other side of the street, eventually catching him a few blocks down at a bus stop, where I cornered him, 'are you stalking me?' he said, we laughed and walked a lap around the block, he told me about getting a new job and his new goal of moving to Barcelona. I told him about my interpersonal drama, 'your problems are kind of funny' he said. I had really not considered that I would ever see Mindfuckboy again, but I think we both enjoyed this second meeting and it put an interesting extension on to the relationship.

What will I do now? Well, I'm going to work on some homework and then devote some time to my dream, hit that shit Pomodoro style, I'm giving myself three years to make this work, and I know I can.
ENTRY 45: January 26. 2024 How's it going? I can't make sense of my blog right now. But that's alright. It's serving no one, not even myself, it's truly become a repository, like a cellar, or a buried storage tank. Anyway,

I decided my goal for this week is to write something fun. Nobody likes my sad bullshit and it's getting old for me as well, i.e. this is what I wrote in my notebook on the subway home last night:

It can be quite beautiful to be sad, especially a long sadness.
I wonder if this is how it started for my mother?
each day becoming layered in sadness, but I live in sadness now
it is beneath my words, a simple pain that stays around me,
But it is sadness that will someday let me see someeone else feeling the same, to know them and give them the understanding that I need now.
My sadness now is what will allow my to love someone even more deeply than I ever have.

Like okay, king, baby girl, it's okay. I'm tired of this bullshit, I want to be seething. I want to write a scathing critque of my own sad 'musings' - linking here to the 'philosophical' writings of various 'thinking' men, specifically in this case the dude who spoke last night and told us about our own morality, look around you and ask yourself if evil was right in front of you, would you recognize it? Now look back, at the MIRROR , okay.

I'm done being 'deep' and 'upset', there are more interesting things. I've been trying to figure out how to write about Mindfuckboy, because there's a lot of humor in that story if set up correctly, but I also am no comedian (by design) and I want to reflect him as a troubled and redeemed soul, leaving everyone with a wistful and melancholy feeling of worry for him, out there alone, riding the night. In other news, I serendipidously (I fucking hate that word) learned the correct way to play this part I keep messing up of Plateau last night. I was talking shop with Moon since she had brought her guitar and she showed me some beginner concepts, also agreed that the MTV Unplugged album is 'seminal', we are great friends.

I'm going to my first appointment with a new therapist today, there's a lot that I'm looking forward to telling him.. I wonder if I'll cry?

It's funny that I move in such cycles, I was all ready to call it on this whole sadness thing this morning and now coming back to this post a few hours later I'm suddenly talking about crying. I don't know how to feel, and I don't know what the right thing to do is. I'm constantly thinking, my thoughts give me absolutely no relief and move incredibly circularly, i.e. this post itself, if I wrote you the stream of conciousness of my day I think people would understand better why I'm suffering, my thoughts give me no space to sit, hide, drink my tea in peace. Just always moving me right along to the next fucking thing, and when I try and combat them it just becomes a never-ending fight.

I do actually wonder if this is how it started with my mom, if one day something happened and she just never got out of it. Then she started on the medication and was able to finally become numb, or so they say, I seem to remember my low dose of prozac actually feeling quite normal, just more stable. What I'm saying is I'm wondering if it might be time to try medication. I mean when you realize that you're sad almost every day, crying or about to cry most days, and the really interesting thing is this has been happening for almost a year and a half now. 'It'll be fine once I get to Berlin! I'm just so upset being here! Ha Ha Ha, we all laughed at that didn't we? But walking through the train station last night I felt empty, hollow, and I recognized the feeling from last winter, and last summer, and I thought, 'I've been here a whole fucking lot'.
ENTRY 44: January 21. 2024 Love is just a more acceptable delusion

an old friend's voice from the phone,

how are things going there?

An answer, a voice hung out to dry in the cold.

I don't know who I am. I don't know how to make this feeling stop.

light moves over the face from the COORS sign hung sidewise, ice crystals tied within the cracks of the door hinge,

are you okay?

hesitation, a being begins to flow from a spigot, amoeboid movement towards a door, a hand reaches into the pocket, things can't break before they've fully formed.

Alex, listen, you've gotta help me. - on the freeway, a semi treading heavy, moving too fast and too late. - it's like falling down an orange well, orange circles you on all sides and when you are surrounded, vision all through orange glaze now, vision sticky with your sweat, and you're still seated, you're sitting right here but suddenly from the house across the way you see your own reflection looking back, you're invisible, and also burrowed deep in everyone else.

Answer comes from far away, answer falls silent on the line a mile back, vibration slipping down so soft it falls from the chain and is lost among the rocks.

Maybe you need to come home.

I don't hear him.

In another place, sits a trailer, rusted to it's jacks, with pieces of this baked like smell into the blue striped curtains above the kitchen sink, green bathroom where my small body used to sit, playing with the clay cork.

line falls quiet..

Here's the thing.- the bar door is swinging, work boots stomping on the step, beating with the road, beating with the pulse of the stars, retreating then pressing inwards, falling like sand.- At night, I start to lose control. During the day I can keep hold of myself and keep my mind away from them, but at night, it's like I'm being pulled under the water, I start to suffocate, all I want is them.

My small body, seven, running from the tub down the laminant floor and out to the blanket of pine needles, running between the trees, small, pale body, running out from the trailer rusted to the jacks, scraping translucent globes of sap from the tree bark, running down to the stream to catch the crane flies, waving, reaching small hands into cold water.

You weren't there then, almost every day of my life I didn't know you existed. You have never been there. So why when you're gone now, do I seem to stop being here too?
ENTRY 43: January 19. 2024 Last night I was out of sorts. I was feeling alright until the sun went down, as predicted, and I hurried (like my thoughts) over to Lichtenberg to grab a cockroach for my new friend at spoken word and the rest of the stuff in my old apartment. I was listening to Parquet Courts or Modest Mouse or something usual on the train but it wasn't helping to distract me, I was absolutely consumed with these strange thoughts, playing conversations I might have with k over and over, playing different words and imagining various emotions: I could yell at them, tell them I'm leaving, a thousand ways of doing this, they could apologize, they could say it isn't working out, and would I go home with them? and should I tell them before they ask that I won't? The whole sensation wasn't like thinking, it was like falling, it was like I was caught in a trap and was wriggling to get out. I could not move past it, even trying my best to distract myself.

When I got to spoken word I found my friend and gave them the cockroach outside. I really like them, they're the only other person I've met so far that can ground me and remind me that I am understood here. I asked them if they ever go someplace to write and admitted that I really wanted to be their friend, they said that sounded wonderful. I was alone at this point, since k had said they were going to try and come later, but luckily I have enough friends at poetry now that things were all okay, I was still distracted but able to keep things together.

It was at the beginning of the second half that I felt panic. A new performer had just gotten up and was starting and suddenly I was spiralling. I was thinking about k not showing up, never going back to their apartment, never seeing their friends or them again,

then it went further, I'm alone in Berlin. I'm alone everywhere, I'll never make it happen, I'll be stuck in this panic for two years and then give up and go home, and I'll know that I'm a failure, and I'll know forever that I couldn't do what I knew I was meant to do.

my body physically began to shut down, I felt my mouth get dry and my heart beat spike, the room suddenly felt consuming, I was not sitting in the chair, I was sitting at the end of my life, I was sitting at the turning point of hell, everything was wrong.

I thought of my friend, I thought of my DBT worksheets. I thought about the sensation I was experiencing, trying to trace the physiological effects in my body, L's words came back to me, 'let's get curious'. I tried to imagine writing about what I was feeling, I tried to imagine answering the questions in my worksheets,

'are you mind reading?'

'yes, I don't even know that they won't come, none of this has even happened yet'

'are you jumping to conclusions?'

'yes, I can be loved here, I am. Remember T, remember that they are excited to write with you, remember that this panic is only a sensation and will pass, soon, soon enough..'

The feeling moved away, the whole thing was over by the time the person on stage finished. I think that was the first time that I felt panic that strong but also that short, it passed through me like someone turned out the lights, and then with my pressing they came back on again.

k came about a half hour later, I felt their hand on my shoulder and they sat down with me, after I performed they moved to me and told me it was good, afterwards they explained everything, I told them I had been upset, they said they were sorry, and it made sense. We went home and everything was fine, better than it had been because I think I understand them more now, and it's getting easier to talk through my own self doubt.
ENTRY 42: January 18. 2024 If it's not obvious I wrote that mf below to read at the open mike tonight. I'm actually excited to read it, but nervous for other reasons (linked here).

But I am doing better. I think I'm almost through to the other side, maybe in the next few days, or weeks. I love living with people, it's already made everything so much more bareable. I'm able to get up, stick to my routine, small talk, I don't have to sit in white-walled hell and try and motivate myself to not jump out the window. My room here is perfect, and beautiful, and so is the whole flat (I have my own coffee nook!!)

I won't say there's not problems, all internal of course. But they're reduced now that it's morning and I'm drinking my coffee, like Alex Turner says, 'they say it changes when the sun goes down',

I'm trying to take back my life. In all ways. I'm trying to do things for me again, i.e. I finally bought myself a leather jacket, after I've been thinking about it for years of course, since first realizing it's a right of passage here. I'm also finally going to go and get my ears pierced soon, and I'll go alone, which actually is kind of poetic since I think I've told probably 400 people throughout life that I would go and get my ears pierced with them. It's going to be kind of profound to go by myself I think. On friday I'm hoping to go out with this weird dude from hinge. I actually have no idea what to expect but I kind of like him. His name on hinge is Mindfuckboy and it's just deranged shit you know, a photo of him with a bloody piercing, his description said he wanted to find a wild dude to do crazy shit with and you know I responded well to that. We messaged for like an hour last week about the most mindless bullshit, something about being robosexual, he said he works with computers and wants to explore the sewers, I was like yeah I know the type. Then last week I thought about texting him randomly to ask if he knew any good abandoned buildings, even though that hadn't come up in our robot conversation, but I had a feeling. Then randomly on tuesday I got a message from him asking if I wanted to explore an abandoned psychiactric hospital. It's moments like this when my predictions come true to exact detail that are turning me crazy. How can I answer the 'are you mind reading' distortion on my DBT sheet when it feels like I sometimes am?

We'll see if that works out, I have a feeling the dude is going to show up stumbling, but it's alright because I'm bringing the paint. I'm remembering that being in a transitionary period doesn't need to involve me just being sad as fuck and mourning my old life or something, I gotta spend money to make money, and that means grabbing this filly (Brokeback, reclaimed) by the balls (strapped on).
ENTRY 41: January 16. 2024 I came out to my mom on Sunday.

Every part of your body is built from genes, and genes are made from a sequence of four chemicals, abbreviated as A, T, C, and G, that form the pattern of DNA. The order of these four chemicals is what gives all instructions to the body.

But DNA is never made new. When your body begins to build it's skin it reads the pattern of A, T, C, and G written in the DNA, but that isn't a human pattern, it's just additions and substitutions to older patterns. The pattern that creates your skin was once the code for the simplest kind of barrier, a wall that separates a being from the water around it, the creation of an inside. Then elements became added to this code for an inside-space. Sometimes the A, T, C, and G's got turned around, eventually, a mechanism to create more mixing was built into the code, because the new patterns could sometimes work better than the old patterns.

But we don't lose the old patterns, they stay locked in drawers and cupboards of our genes, we take them out sometimes. Taking apart an insect egg the curled body inside looks like a human fetus, because that's time when we rely the most on our old patterns, that's the time when we build ourselves gills. The codes for fish, and bacteria, and the being that first had an inside, those codes are still being used. Your DNA isn't clean, it's just long, and carries the memory of every stage of the life forms that carried you here.

I came out to my mom on Sunday.

My mom can be sober now, but she will always have crawled, crying, towards me on the floor. How we see each other now is formed from threads of each of these stages, and these moments come back and live with me in each day that I am afraid when the sun starts to set. There is no way for me clean these things away.

I don't want this anymore. I want to disconnect. I don't want to think about my mom.

Because I know when I speak she doesn't hear me.

But we have the same voice. And when I speak I can only hear her.
ENTRY 40: January 9. 2024 I'm feeling better. I can tell I'm coming back to Earth a little bit, things aren't seeming so intense today.

I was finally able to make my hinge profile normal. I truly was not emotionally ready to ride back out on that desert, but I was forced to because k is still on there, and I need to meet people so that I'm not so reliant on them. I was getting out poly-ed, but the problem was I was also (and still am) having something of an identity crisis. I realized it because as I was making the profile last week I had no fucking clue what I wanted to say, and not in like a 'how do I make this good' kind of way, it was like 'who is this? what do they even want?' and I kept feeling like I actually didn't want anyone to know anything about me, which led to my profile being obviously insane and aggressive and horrible, and then obviously no one messaging me, and then me being sad and feeling worthless, perpetuating the identity crisis.

But today I was finally able to add a few more normal things to it, like 'hey I'm nice' kind of stuff instead of just being extremely standoffish. And I had tried to do this all week but something has been truly breaking in my brain. I'm having massive esteem issues, but I don't have anyone to talk to about it so it just festers. I don't have anyone around that I can speak to completely honestly and get reassurance that 1. I'm loved 2. I'm cared for. 3. I'm understood. I try and talk to k about it to an extent but I can't break down with them because I know they don't really want that. I haven't found anyone in the same boat as me, terrified and alone, so the feeling just gets amplied and I struggle to meet people because I feel like shit and don't trust myself to act even remotely normal.

But anyway, I forgot I said I was doing better. Yeah, things haven't seemed as dire as of yesterday. I've been having ear pain, I'm looking forward to moving. I'm trying to feel better about myself in small ways and also expect less from others. ie. celebrate the wins. It's kind of sweet because I don't think that people understand how deeply happy I am when they talk to me and how much I value it and remember and replay all of the words they say. I'm so grateful any time someone shows the smallest interest in me and it's causing me to put more thought into random acquaintances than I ever have. I'm remembering and rehearsing every personal detail they give me to try and show that I care about them too next time we meet, and maybe it will lead to a friend.
ENTRY 39: January 8. 2024 December

The subway smells like blood and oranges
I'm at my reflection again
This month, I couldn't look away
as I watched my fear burrowing
and making a nest beneath the skin

December, I crept out the door each night
only the cats on the balconies saw
as my body began to pull apart
moving through strands of metal coils
that sounded just like windchimes
I couldn't help it when
each minute came unlatched
and the hours became like windows
hanging loose on the wind
ENTRY 38: January 5. 2024 How does one become stable? I think I forgot how to write. I started writing this thing about a home depot worker today and it's just so angry, it's like seething and I think it's bad, but I don't even know, is this bad? what is something good?

I think if my therapist were reading this she might like it if I brainstormed some ways to find stability. I think the problem is I feel so untethered, and not in a good way. In a way like, nobody knows what I do at all when I'm on my own. Today I went to the library and I actually was cooking for a bit until I went home to take my lunch break and suddenly I was in my white walled One-Flew-Over-The-Cuckoos-Nest desolate room, where my laundry is hanging on a rack in the only open space where I would usually be able to sit and play my guitar but instead when I opened the door it was like walking into a sauna, but cold, like walking into an arctic swamp, like walking in to a ghostly cold chill, like walking in to putting on BioFreeze and also it was snowing, which should have been nice but something was so wrong as I looked past my three old plates stacked on the radiator that I need to clean and return to the plate rotation because we only have a few left and my roommates are about to notice, and you would think in all of this I would have been grateful to be where I was (welcome home: you're in your destiny) but actually surprisingly no, no I ate my toast and lox in about 7 minutes and then tried to come up with a game plan. There is no common grounds coffee house here, there isn't even a park ave, there isn't even a rose city. My favorite coffee place used to be fine, it was corporate, off-puttingly arranged interior, but I liked to think me and the barista were friends, we chit chatted, she told me her kids were sick every time I came in, I said 'oh nein!'. But I think there was a management crackdown over the holidays because lately I've been seeing a lot of the bald boss guy and they've switched from an all 90's R&B playlist to the same looping christmas song and I do mean the same song. I mean one little Christmas melody, unwavering.

So I went to a new coffee place that I somehow hadn't found before as I scanned every 'cafe', 'bar', 'lounge', 'späti', 'kaffee' on google maps within the entire radius and surroundings of Berlin just looking for one without the oversaturated set photos of pouring coffee, the stools, the honey glazed counter. Because this one actually did look a bit like common grounds, and so I went and it almost was, it really truly could have been, if there wasn't this insane mandate here that you can't work at your computer at 75% of the tables, and the computer zone was already occupied, by a kid doing his calculus (truly unending, and I did try and wait him out, and it was impossible, he's still there, he will never cease) and I also had forgot my pen. So I just read the rest of To the Lighthouse on my phone while taking up a table that was supposed to sit six people because there was nowhere else, and instead of a happy group of smiling germans there was me sitting there, one they in a sweater vest reading To the Lighthouse on my phone while I glared at a 17 year old watching Khan Academy. And imagine that's you. And now you have to go home and look down the barrel at another day like that, and probably more. And tell me you wouldn't feel unstable, and like something is deeply wrong with you?

So how do we fix this? Well we could try and wait it out. I'm trying to remind myself that time does move. Time does go by, even without my input. Even without my command line time is continuing to bring me closer to Monday morning, when I will have school, and a dentist appointment, and then I'll have a whole week of classes to go to and sit in and drink my coffee and talk to some girl outside about how nice it is here and how much I like it. And then the week after that the 16th of January will come, and that is the day that I will move my belongings out of this very strange box in Lichtenberg and into a completely different four walls with people that I actually like living in it, and on the day after that, I'll be able to make tea in the morning in the kitchen and talk to a human being other than Sahar leaving for his job at the airport and saying hey, I cleaned the floor. And I will keep living. I will write something down on that day and feel differently. But the strange thing is it doesn't feel like it works like that, I feel like it will never be tomorrow or even an hour from now, when I'm at home and taking my laundry off the rack and putting it back in my closet. And that's what I'm talking about with the instability thing, because you can't feel okay when you don't believe in continuity. When each moment is a cell separated by septa with a nucleus, and organelles and free-living! floating off into oblivion and you're thinking, aren't I supposed to be building something here? But instead each thought comes in an out and doesn't seem to remember the things you know to be true, and you wonder who you are anyway if the pieces don't seem to be staying together?
ENTRY 37: January 4. 2024 How has the week been? The first week of the year. I'll be honest, I've had some ups and downs.

I've been feeling unstable. Some moments I'll be doing great, thinking: yeah, I'm in control, I'm in charge of my life and things are going well. Hey I can walk down the street and have a great fucking time. And I just started learning this new song on guitar, I must be doing okay, this is right,

you should have it quoted, I say it all the time
I will be, I will be, who I'm destined to be

And I think, I'm so completely in control: I'm a trans man I mean how much more in control can you be? I can build anything that I want to, I can start up with MMA again if I want? Or maybe I'll start playing pool, or I'll take a welding class, and god women must love me.

But it's not exactly, it's not quite true is it? And I know in the moment that it's not true, and I know in a few hours the caffeine will wear off and I'll be standing at the subway platform and thinking about how it would feel to walk forward, creep down into the rails when noone is looking and crouch there on the track and just wait, pitiful, how dreadful,

I'm reading To the Lighthouse, it's growing on me.

The problem is that I do understand Virginia Woolf, maybe it's because I already read her letters with Vita, or it's because she's One of the Greats and of course you understand her dumbass, she's Writing to Tell You Something, but I also think it's because I do understand her. Last night I read this part where she writes, 'through the crepuscular walls of their intimacy' and that, now who would write crepuscular unless they enjoyed moths, and we already know that Virginia did, but I see her associations, I feel like I can trace back what she's getting at, which: great, I'm learning to read I guess.

There are hours in the day when I feel Woolfishly adrift. I'm sitting in my strange square room in Lightenberg within the cornflower estate grey walls of my flatshare with the white square plastic lightswitches and the appliances that are all the same strange imported brand and the IKEA table and this wave comes over me (although I don't realize that it's a wave at the time because it feels more the air has slowly turned noxious and suddenly I'm waking up and not thinking straight and I need to open a window but I don't even understand that I'm being gassed) and as the wave comes I feel actually incredibly out of control. And I lose sight of what's going on, and what's real, and who's speaking, and who (me) who I'm listening to. Because I know it's untrue, I know these thoughts are ungrounded, that even quoted: I will not be who I'm destined to be: and that actually I'm not doing very well at all. And suddenly everything seems to be up in the air, and why even keep going at this rate?

From Big Thief

I already died
I'm singing from the other side
Underneath love
Avoidance and pride
I look you in the face and lie
I tell you I want your love
You're the cigarette in my fist
You are so hard to resist
I can't help but breathe your love
When I'm scared to die alone
That's when I call you on the phone
I tell you that I need your love

Oh, frailty and fragile words
You tell me a lot of words
You tell me all about your love
And I feel what I hear you say
I don't talk the same way
'Cause I don't feel like love

As the dog opens his eyes
As the blue crow flies, I'm going to meet my love
I already died
I'm calling from the other side
Underneath love
There's a bottle out in the sea
With a message inside from me
Saying release my love
Release my love, my love
ENTRY 36: December 31. 2023 Four Pictures

T came up to me after school, I was walking to practice and he'd come to find me.

'Jose showed me something today, at weights. He just came up to me with his phone and there were photos on it, of you, and he swiped through them and then told me he was going to send them to everyone.'

I was shocked, I'm sure I felt some fear, but I mostly remember it being funny, of course that dumbass Jose would try and do something like this. And he was using me to threaten T, that meant they were talking about me. And it was so funny that it happened in the weight room, with T sitting on a bench press of all places, and all of the sweaty bodies moving around them, and Jose in red shorts holding out his phone, trying to be intimidating.

'What did you do?'

'I didn't know what to do, I just didn't really say anything, tried not to give him a reaction. I'm thinking about talking to the Dean?'

'Yeah.' I was going to be late for practice, 'If you think that's best, I mean what else can we do?'

I went to see the Dean, maybe the next day or a few days later. I think they sent a slip to my class, You've Been Called to the Dean, I wasn't embarrassed, I would have told people if they'd asked me why I'd been called, I knew this wasn't my fault. I had been indignant when I told my friends about it, 'Can you believe that crazy bitch Jose thinks he can blackmail me?'

The Dean was a middle-aged man, I'd never met him before, he looked like a cop, large neck, I remember the office being like a white-walled interrogation room.

'Hi H-----, thank you for meeting me today'

I still wasn't afraid, or ashamed, I was just curious to see where this would go,

'So we received a report a few days ago from another student, that Jose ------ was showing photos of you to them without your consent or knowledge, and that Jose ------ was threatening to share these photos. Are you aware of this?'

I explained the whole story, how I'd been dating Jose and that now I was with T, and he hadn't taken it well, and how T had told me about the blackmail. The Dean nodded encouragingly.

'What we want is for you to feel safe and to know that this is not your fault, you've done nothing wrong here. What Jose is doing is completely unacceptible and we want you to have control over how we proceed. I already spoke with Jose in this office yesterday and asked him to show me as he deleted the photos from his phone,' the Dean pauses, a faint look of embarrassment crosses his face, 'I did not see any details, when he showed me the photos they were just small squares and I watched as he deleted them'.

I smiled and nodded, 'It's fine.'

'Now, we have no way of knowing if he has copies of the photos somewhere, or if he'd already sent them to anyone, I asked him and he said that these were the only copies of the photos, but you know how these things go..'

I did, I had already thought through where those photos could be. It was interesting to think of who could have seen them,

There were four photographs, a girl standing in front of the mirror, a towel wrapped around her shoulders, her face centered, smiling, turning to the side, the photo cut off at the waist, showing only the bare chest, breasts, the towel covering the lower section of the body, the aqua blue walls of her childhood bedroom making the grainy photo look like it was underwater.

I don't remember taking the photos at all, I don't remember having any urge to take a nude photo of myself or send it to Jose, I don't remember us having a sexually charged conversation, or me wanting one, as far as I was concerned I wasn't even visible in the photographs. Even at the time, the body in the photographs was not tied to the body sitting in the office, that was my face and my mouth, but when I thought back, I couldn't remember looking into the mirror. The photographs were compromising only that a face people could recognize as mine was pasted onto bare breasts, which people might interpret as indecent, slutty, which people might see as wrong. But even at 16 I looked at the photographs and knew they were not of me, my body was something I did not even know or understand myself, of course Jose and anyone seeing these photos could not have understood it. I thought of Jose sending these photos to another man, and how their eyes would move from my smirking mouth to the nipples on my bare breasts, that they would think, she is so young, that they would imagine touching me. But they were looking at nothing, the sheen of the plastic on an advertisement. It was more embarrassing that someone would fall for it.

'Since this does qualify as the possession of child pornography, seeing as he is 18 and you are 16, you do have the option to press criminal charges. I want you to know that we will stand behind you 100% if that's what you decide to do, and we can support you with talking with the police.'

'Let's just see how things go.' I was calm, unhurried, I thought about what an idiot Jose was, giving me this power over him.

'We will be imposing a school no-contact order, Jose won't be allowed to talk to you at school or on school grounds, you won't be placed in classes together.'

'Okay, that sounds good.'

They didn't tell me that when a no-contact order is filed they send a letter home. My mom got it weeks later and cornered me in the kitchen.

'I got this letter from the school today, it says that there's been a no-contact order issued between you and Jose?'

I didn't care, sure, I'll tell her, 'Yeah, it was this big mess, I already got everything figured out, talked to the Dean, but basically Jose was threatening to share these nude photos of me around the school. But it's all fine now.' I didn't have to tell her that, I only did because I knew I'd done nothing wrong, sure, I've got nothing to hide.

'Oh my god.'

I think that I was the one to tell my dad too, there in the kitchen, why would it matter? But his face tightened, as though the winding coil that began when I was born had finally stopped and suddenly his skin was taunt, breaking open.

'You did what.'

'I had sent these nude photos to Jose and he was threatening me with them, everything is already resolved, everyone has sided with me and helped me. The Dean offered to help me get the police involved but I didn't want to, because it's all already settled.'

'How could you do this? Jesus Christ H-----, how could you be so stupid?'

He contorted, he became an old man, his eyes glazed and became white and ghostly, his skin greyed and suddenly loosened falling slack now around his face. Our tether broke. I watched as he imagined the photographs, seeing her smile and her bare breasts and somehow he couldn't see that I wasn't in there. I saw that he was the man who would be stupid enough to think that they were real. He was gone from me in that moment, there in the kitchen. I looked through his eyes and saw the frame through which he saw me, sitting there on the stool, a young girl, his girl, ripe, bursting with sexuality, soon to belong to another man, the things that I liked fell away, that I was funny, that I was interesting, that I was another human being telling a story to him. The girl in the photographs was suddenly superimposed over my body, and I would never be able to escape from underneath it.

It's strange, but I love those four pictures. I love that they function like a sparkling prism in my dad's mind. That even the idea of them is enough to obscure the reality of my voice, my body, my being. I love that they exposed my dad to me, that they confounded him and laid him bare in the kitchen and that suddenly I was in control, because I knew without a doubt that he was wrong. At that moment, I became free, because the illusion of me was already fixed, so it didn't even matter who I really was.
ENTRY 35: December 30. 2023 Young Men

I remember the bedroom wall best. In my mind, the wall was painted deep turquiose, but in the darkness of the room it cast just a faint glow, like light reflected from a stone necklace. I see the bed from the side, looking across it's black thatched blanket, the wooden headboard against the wall, strewn yellow pillows, and the glint of gold hanging from the wall, a picture frame? I can't tell. My memory draws shadows in the corners, and covers the walls in smoke.

Sometimes I can imagine his face emerging from the dark air, his body splayed like a table,

my body was white, my knees rose from my legs in bulbous knots, my ribs were thick fingers gripped under my skin, my legs laid straight on the bed.

His mom and his sister were in the other room, of the blackened farm house with the peeling siding at the end of the road where my friend lived. The house with the dirty chicken coop and the muddy yard that just sank into the hay fields and the ditch running along the road.

Our first date he took me to the BJ's in Tukwilla. I remember his Subaru WRX in the driveway, clear stickers that looked like bandaids stuck to the dent in the fender, my dad scoffing in the living room. I remember looking down at my shoes as he drove, blue slip on sneakers leaving dirt on the stiff grey carpet. He told me what it was like being in his senior year, I was 16. We talked about his family too, and what it was like to cross the border.

His mom taught me how to make Jamaica in the farmhouse kitchen. I didn't speak spanish so he had to translate for us, or she'd just smile and slowly put the hibiscus flowers in the pot, make a stirring motion, point to the sugar on the table. She would always hug me goodbye, and he would tell me that she loved me.

I remember it hurt, I didn't expect that, but I didn't bleed on the blue-black bed in the old corner farmhouse. We only slept there once, the other times were in the back of his car, him curled around me saying, 'are you comfortable?', the back of my head cold against the window.

Two months later and I told him it would be better if we went our separate ways. He agreed until he found out I'd kissed the white kid I met in theater, then he said I was a whore and a slut, and that he'd been planning to marry me.

Now, I wonder if the turquiose wall was all a dream, and the gold, were they plates? hung up on the wall. I don't really remember any of it, not his hands or his teeth or my body lying there on the sheets. Now I remember it like someone else was lying there, a young girl's body in my place.
ENTRY 34: December 28. 2023 Dad: What are you doing today?

reading user Arienette on E2, description: 17 years old, maybe gender-queer female, in love with Doctor Who, last seen March 12 2009.

She's depressed. but how can that be? when nothing bad has ever happened to her, muses about the effects of puberty hormones, bodily repulsion, is she sick enough for therapy? it's 2009. she's working at the library, wants to be a writer, no, WILL be a writer, and she's been accepted into her dream college, if only she could forget about that bad relationship with that theater kid from her past (Jason). she's writing a novel about a kid living in the 50's who's gay and misunderstood, unfortunately she's not gay. her teacher recommends she visit the Gay-Straight Alliance meeting lead weekly by her (gay) science teacher, she explains that GSA is open to everyone, they didn't even ask her sexuality!

LATER

take your hands off your neck and
hold onto the ghost of my body

That's not what I meant to say at all
I mean, I'm sick of eating I just wanna hold you
(did he say eating?)

Those are you got some nice shoulders
I'd like to put my arms around them

I wonder if I could ever be your Will Toledo?

I'm replaying every word I can remember, no not in sequence, but looped over each other:

would you ever want to live on a house boat?

it's not even that you're trying to get them to like you, people just love you

why are you not sure?

and you cried, how did I forget that you cried?

Dad: When you say you go to the coffee shop to work, what does that mean? What are you working on?

writing something new, maybe I have to like what I'm writing to write it, maybe then people will want to read it too. maybe I could write something people would want to read?

Suddenly—I'm calm. sure, come when you can, I have something else to do,

Hey, I think I'm onto something

To Dad: yes, it's just studying for school, we don't really have homework so it's a self study kind of thing, my exams are next month.

writing a child's diary, writing about the house I walked by on NE 21st last year around this time, when I caught a glimpse through the front window, behind the long grey curtain, and there on the mantle that I recognized from aisle 15 of Home Depot were felt stockings with white felt names and I knew that the upstairs was carpeted in beige and that there was a TV room and a desk chair that was too big and swiveled and a family that I could never create but in my mind I knew them well, and that the house may as well have been an alien house, because long ago (when I was crossed up as an egg in my grandmother's womb?) I had diverged from that house and could never enter, because what would our house look like?

Dad: Well, we had two just tremendous meals. [pause] But you know your grandparents, I know the whole thing is so tiring for them now. Grandma, [laughs] Your Grandma, she fell asleep in the chair, while we were sitting there going around opening gifts, and it was her turn and Grandma was asleep.

She keeps saying we need to take her watch in to get repaired, she calls it Hunter's watch now.

these are the people that I get drunk with
these are the people I fell in love with

I'm running and I realize I have stopped thinking for a moment. Like when I'm reading and suddenly I'm trying to remember every word of our conversation and I'm thinking about where you are and how I could ever keep moving now that I'm here, and all the things I still need to say to you, and then I've turned 10 pages but I haven't read a word.

I had the thought that I should jump in front of a train, because I'm so happy now.

To Dad: Yeah, I'll probably be back for spring break, don't worry about shipping the stuff. And yeah I don't know why they would appraise it at that value since they appraised it at $4,500 before, maybe you could take it back to the shop in Portland?

Dad: I just talked to the insurance today, they say that the market has changed since the first appraisal and now the evaluation has changed, we have some options but for one they won't send me the original paperwork of the appraisal, they're saying it's no longer valid but additionally we may be able to get the original bid from the shop in Portland, who estimated the repair at $3000, but there's other considerations as well, with the market conditions the way they are, there's many possibilities.. I just talked to the insurance today, they say that the market has changed since the first appraisal and now the evaluation has changed, we have some options but for one they won't send me the original paperwork of the appraisal, they're saying it's no longer valid but additionally we may be able to get the original bid from the shop in Portland, who estimated the repair at $3000, but there's other considerations as well, with the market conditions the way they are, there's many possibilities..I just talked to the insurance today, they say that the market has changed since the first appraisal and now the evaluation has changed, we have some options but for one they won't send me the original paperwork of the appraisal, they're saying it's no longer valid but additionally we may be able to get the original bid from the shop in Portland, who estimated the repair at $3000, but there's other considerations as well, with the market conditions the way they are, there's many possibilities..
ENTRY 33: December 27. 2023 I told k that I loved them, we'd gone to their friend's house for drinks to pre-game going to their class reunion at the local bar. We'd all had a lot, but I could tell things were going bad once we walked into the bar and I was stumbling and couldn't focus enough to sit down. I got k after we'd been there 5 minutes and they took me outside where I threw up in the alleyway. At some point in this I know that I told them I loved them, and that I was afraid, and that I was in a foreign country, and that I was so far away from home, and they said it was okay, and we got back home (which I don't really remember) and then I was saying everything, that I knew they could never feel the same way about me that I felt for them. I said I was so afraid, that I would always go too far, that I was insane, that I loved them like an insane person. They said they were afraid to say that they loved me too, because they were afraid that I would leave. I can't do anything but believe them, and respect them a bit for always keeping an ace up their sleeve. It's a move I would do, to always keep something out of reach to make sure that it can't end. And It Shouldn't Matter, I know that we work together, and I know that they want to see me, but it unnerves me that we're reacting differently, since for me the last few weeks have been cosmically intense, and I worry that there may actually be things we think differently about.

They did read their response letter to me, as I drunkenly whispered on their parents couch that they had made me believe in God. In the letter they said it was incredible that they felt no fear about me coming, that everything with me just worked, perfectly. And that was exactly how I felt, with them and even since I've met them I've had this deep trust in my intuition. and this is where the insane thoughts come in: that there has been an invisible thread guiding me to this point, the decision to keep learning german, always for a reason that I could never explain, the need to come to berlin, the writing, I've just been going towards a horizon I did not understand for so long. And suddenly, with them, I don't need to think, when I hestitate, the right words always come.

But what do you even like about them? We went to an art museum in dresden on my last day there. Do you remember the bridge painting by Ernst Heckel that I had on my old blog? It was in the post I made about suicide bridges and Fuller, but the point is that the painting was of dresden, because Fuller's favorite group of Expressionist painters, Die Brücke (the Bridge), were formed in dresden in the early 1900s. The museum had some work from members of Die Brücke, and other modern artists from dresden, and a film I really liked from an artist in Berlin, and it also had a picture of Kafka on the wall, which we took a picture with. But I have never walked through a museum in the way I did with them, slowly and seeing each painting in relation to myself, then them, then us both, what did they notice? what did they think? what did they hate? everything is a curved mirror that I can turn to see them in a different way, and then since we are mirrors, I see myself.
ENTRY 32: December 22. 2023 I said my goodbyes and walked out into the cold around 1 pm last night. One of the other people from the spoken word group came out with me, then hesitated outside of the bar and asked if I was alright getting home, I said I was. Then I walked shivering to the bus stop across the way and waited for the night bus. It's been windy here, the kind that tears signs from the walls and drags garbage into the roads, I huddled in the bus station and looked up at the clouds rushing in fast sheets over the moon, I thought of horses and chariots. It was an ugly moon, a gibbous of some sort, but it made me feel like I was in a story book.

I met someone named moon last night too, she performed a piece about violence, and we spoke after. Her piece had hit on so many of the feelings I had written down after the shooting; mostly a focus on the systemic reasons for the violence rather than the shooter himself, a strange empathy and connection felt to the shooter, a feeling that his suffering is similar to mine. She gave me an essay excerpt she had printed out in her bag that I'm excited to read, I think she might be a genius.

I spoke with a woman who had just submitted her master's thesis on feminity in Barbie and Legally Blonde, she was thrilled that her thesis had been well-recieved, but it meant that she now needed to decide if she wanted to try for a PhD, 'I just want to relax and make money and buy myself a new bed' she said. She asked me about the cockroaches, since I had performed the story about my cockroach dream. I told her about Dresden, and the roaches. She said, 'you're insane, you're an insane person, and I love it.'

As I waited, braced against the wind, tipsy, standing against the wall of the bus station I felt that old complete sadness, the one that feels a bit good as it's coming on, I looked up at the story book moon and thought of all the different ways I had felt looking at that same moon, that it's made me feel loved, far away, scared, watched, safe, and a thousand other things. The fleeting moments of seeing the moon with someone else, wondering how they are feeling as the bright face reflects back at us. I felt sad for tiny reasons, that I was alone, that I had nobody to say all of these things to who would look back at me and say 'it makes me sad, too.' that I felt so indebted to others, that I couldn't just sleepily make my way home, perhaps sad, but content with my thoughts, soothing myself in the cold night and thinking 'I love you, I love you, I love you.'
ENTRY 31: December 20. 2023 Each day, I walk farther into a special and strange closet in my mind, one that is familiar, and one I understand. I'm not afraid when I go there, but I can feel the strangeness of my internal world spilling out of my skin, my mouth, like an odor, and I'm afraid that people can sense it. This morning, I realized that I have been waking up and just thinking, haven't needed to put on a youtube video to distract myself, keep myself occupied, constantly stimulate my empty head, no. I have woken up all week and just thought, then thought as I brush my teeth, make breakfast, ride the train, sit in class, walk back home, sit in my room, write and write. I've wanted to be able to do this for years now, to have no urge to leave my thoughts, but now that it's happening I don't feel calmer, or healthier, or more peaceful to be around. Instead, I just feel insane.

I had the realizaton today that I have the power now to do other strange things alone, that I could just fill my day with strange things and tell no one about them. Doing strange things with someone else is sweet, doing strange things alone is more interesting, more suspicious. But there's nothing to stop me from doing strange things just to do them, i.e. the cockroaches. I also went into a strange sewing shop yesterday and got pins for my bugs from a woman who looked just as confused about the interaction as me. I can just become weird if I want to. There's nobody close enough to me who will be able to stop me.
ENTRY 30: December 19. 2023 I went to an insect dealer in Neuköln. It said it was really a reptile feed store online but I thought they might have what I was looking for.

I walked in the door with a paper sign taped to it that said 'Insekten Laden' and ran into a large man standing in a narrow hallway. The store felt a bit like being in my dad's shed, bare studs on the walls, clear boxes stacked everywhere, a rotting plywood counter. I tried to explain to the man what I wanted but he only pointed to a wide square hole in the floor at the end of the hallway. A cracked wooden ladder was nailed to the wall and disappeared into the yellow hole. 'He's down there' the man said in German.

After a minute passed another man stuck his head out of the hole. I quickly explained what I needed;

'I'm looking for cockroaches'

'What species?'

'What do you have?'

'I've got Dubia'

'That's perfect'

'What size?'

'The biggest you have'

The man's head disappeared down the hole. I looked around the shop while I waited and noticed that he had an incredible collection of isopods, 15 or more varieties that I had never seen, new colors of clowns with yellow and orange sides, dairy cows with white spots on the body itself not just on the edges, and totally new species that were brown and blue. A few breeding colonies were crawling around in giant glass bulbs at the back of the store. Nearby were stacked boxes of lab mice huddled in a mass and clawing at the glass.

The man came out of the hole with a plastic box of 10 scuttling cockroaches. They were larger than I expected.

'2 euros. What animal do you have?'

'I don't have an animal.' I said guardedly, 'I'm just getting the cockroaches for now'

'als Haustiere? [as pets?]'

'Yeah. It's strange I know, I want to get a tarantula in the future.'

'It's not that strange, for some reason it's always women who are into spiders'

'Yeah.' I pay the 2 euros.

I squish the plastic box into my bag, the blister closure on the top makes a cracking sound against my laptop and my notebooks. I get a sick glee as I get on the bus, then the subway, trying to listen for the quiet crackling of legs, exoskeleton, the soft swishing of the sawdust as they climb over each other.

After I run all of my other errands; the pharmacy, the grocery store, my class, I finally get the roaches home and get to open the package, holding a female the size of my thumb and letting her run through my fingers, carefully passing her between my hands as the others clamber up the open walls of the container, when they reach the top I place the old roach back in the box and pick up the new one, we play like this, circling each other, like cat's cradle, or shuffling cards.

At some point, it's time to kill the roaches. I take the isopropyl alcohol I got at the pharmacy out of my bag and dab it on some tissue paper, then lay it down in an airtight tupperware to create a make-shift killing jar. I gently pick up each roach one-by-one, shaking off the sawdust, and when all 10 are in the box I close the lid and let them crawl over the poison fibers.

That night I dream that I'm at their parents' house. I've brought the box of cockroaches but they are still alive, climbing around in my bag. As we lay wrapped in each other on the bed I see a dubia roach the size of my fingernail disappear between the mattress and the bed frame. I pull up the sheet and find five baby roaches escaping quickly under the mattress. They've bred. I quietly slip out and open my bag to check the roach box, twenty little roaches are shoved between the plastic closure, their legs steadily pushing them under the lid, leaking out like a liquid.

As they sleep, I wisk around the bed, pulling the roaches from their hiding places in the dark corners of the sheets, I pluck them with my left and collect them in my right, pushing and scrambling to escape, until I have a hand full. Then I go to the kitchen and pour them into a glass of Glühwein, hoping they won't be discovered. Unfortunately, their mother is up preparing the Christmas ham, and it was her glass of Glühwein on the counter. Before she can take a drink, I pour now ruby-colored roaches down the kitchen sink, running the water and nudging them down the drain with my fingers.

'What are you doing over there?' She asks in German.

The roaches are suddenly getting backed up in the sink, they begin to crawl out instead, now all colors and sizes, green, blue, purple, and the water is blood red, I wonder when it will overflow.

'Oh, I'm just fine' I say as I watch the sink fill with the squirming bodies of thousands of cockroaches. And secretly, I am ecstatic.

ENTRY 29: December 15. 2023 I called Alex this morning to try and tell him what happened last night. He was sitting up on the roof of a hostel in Kyoto, I was walking down a sun-lit alley in Berlin. Our phone connection was horrible.

A: So what happened?? You're meeting their parents?

H: Yeah, I mean it's so insane, are you outside yet so I can start telling you?

A: Yeah, yeah, I'm outside [voice cuts out]

H: So we went to this open mike last night and they performed a poem about us having sex, I mean it was insane, like it was this beautiful poem and stuff but I knew it was about me, but the crazy part was people loved it! Like 5 people came up to them afterwards and told them how much they liked the poem, but I was just standing there and I knew it was about us.

The poem wasn't really about us having sex. The poem that k performed was about how when they have sex they sometimes think about their old art teacher, something about the negative space/small of the back, then they somehow ended it talking about how they also think about colonoscopies, but that they just want to be held at the end of the day. The poem was only fractionally about me, but the part that's difficult to convey is that it didn't matter, because I could sit there and understand each aspect of the poem in total. Sure k is a great writer and stuff, I mean other people in the audience really resonated with the poem too, but it's a bit like having a thought and then hearing someone else say it, but constantly with them, all of the time.

A: Wow, that's kind of a lot, right? I mean was the poem like graphic? Were you uncomfortable?

H: Oh no, it wasn't really graphic. It wasn't really about the sex, it was just all of it you know. Just about us I guess.

I was realizing I wasn't really able to convey the atmosphere at all. I'd been nauseous the entire day and the day before, just thinking about them and how things would go, in the hours before I finally got on the subway I was switching between writing a fan fiction about Reed college and strumming once through elliott smiths 2 45 then turning off my guitar and lying down on my bed. I was despondent. When I finally got to my waiting spot outside the Tränenpalast (palace of tears) I was standing and rubbing my hands together under this fluorescent light that kept turning off and back on every 10 seconds. When k showed up they said it looked very 70s, in retrospect I think that was to do with my haircut. We had semi-awkward train conversation and I remembered that they are beautiful, then we eventually got to this Gyro place and sat at a bench next to a French bulldog. I told them about my friend who makes a lot of money doing OnlyFans in Miami. When I had drank half a beer things got better and we eventually left for the bar, got there, and k realized they'd left their bag at the Gyro place. I knew in my insane delusions of the last week that their bag would be completely fine, since I had come to the conclusion that nothing bad would ever happen to me ever again, but I tried to act normal and concerned. Their bag was there and we made it back to the bar before the event started, then I immidiately got into this insane conversation with the man turned around in front of us about his lucid dreaming workshops. k performed in the second half and when we went outside for the break things were beautiful and immidiate. I was talking with lucid dreaming guy about my new years plans when k went to the bathroom, saying yeah and to think we met on Hinge (which I thought was funny) and yeah, hopefully k wants to make plans with me, who knows. The guy was like well we can just ask them, and facilitated us through us realizing we were both free, laughing. I performed the stream of conciousness bread extravaganza that's on the other page of my blog, it wasn't my best work but to be fair I had no gauge for the audience and picked the poem and came up with a funnier title while I was sitting there and intoxicated. k seemed to like it.

H: Yeah, so then during one of the breaks or something we were talking and they were like, yeah, you can come to Dresden with me if you want? Like as in going to stay with their family over the holidays. It was insane, because I just knew it was going to happen, but I had been doubting myself because that's crazy.

I had really known, it was like I'd already watched it all play out, I can watch it play out right now if I want. And sure, I'd left obvious traps for them everywhere, bringing up Christmas and how I didn't have plans, who knows what I'm going to do, woe is me, and of course switching our positions and knowing that I would invite them, but it wasn't really like they were playing the game when they told me, it was just the obvious words to say. They were like, yeah I knew I'd invite you immidiately if we weren't dating, the only reason I'm hesitating at all is because we are and my parents don't understand casual dating or non-binary stuff or any of that, but I'm realizing that I should do it, because I shouldn't let that stuff control my life. I was like, I knew you were going to do this. and probably sounded absolutely deranged to the lucid dreaming guy who was still listening in.

A: [long pause] this just seems like a lot, I mean you do you boo and everything but it's a lot to hear.

I was looking up at the quaint little Lichtenberg balconies painted fading yellows and pinks and immidiately was transported back to high school, when I was about 17 and Alex had said almost the exact same sentence after I told him that T and I were getting hand-fasted, or maybe it was after telling him we'd had sex in my car while my best friend sat in the passenger seat and masterbated. In either case, and now, what he was saying was true. I felt manic, as though I was drifting away from the normal realm of what people talk about and towards a strange psuedo-religious rambling, constantly looking down at myself from another vantage point and turning my life into this post itself, a character, a plot, how will I describe these events as they are occuring right now? My vision and my words had become a meta-analysis of themselves, a house of mirrors.

H: Yeah, I know it's crazy. I just also know that it's going to happen this way, so there's really nothing for me to do.

I felt a twinge of fear, that wasn't true, I've made so many decisions to get to this point. I don't want to be passive, this is exactly what I want and I'm just actually getting it this time, that's why it feels surreal.

A: Well, I'm happy for you, truly.

I think about trying to tell him about the snow thing but I can't figure out how to say it without sounding even more insane, I vow to act normal for the rest of the day and try and fake that until I make it, I end up writing this.
ENTRY 28: December 14. 2023 I felt nauseous when I tried to eat breakfast this morning. I had to just slowly force myself to take one bite at a time, reevaluating what food seemed the most appetizing after each bite and then waiting until I could try again. I knew I had to eat because that was the only way to get out of the nausea. If I could eat it would settle my blood sugar and help me to feel hungry later today, so I slowly chewed my toast.

Two men get on the subway on my way to class. The smell of alcohol comes in with them, they both have a small brown beer bottle in red hands. They sit together and laugh until things get quiet, one has skin on the side of his nose that is blistered and soft, he scratches at the skin and looks confused as it comes off of his face and lands in a mass in his beard. The man looks across the car and says nothing, just holds his bottle in confusion, he seems to be wondering where he is.

I think about my skin rejecting my own body, flaking off and falling to the floor. I think about finding myself stuck on a train, having lost my power to move to the door. I think about how similar we are.
ENTRY 27: December 13. 2023 Our Fractured Selves Move in Cycles and I Have Proof

Five years ago I was living in a dorm on S Jackson St. in downtown Portland. My window looked down on the sparse parking lot of Max's Mini Mart, a degenerate corner store with confiscated ID's taped all around the counter. My roommate was a singer from Colorado who thought she was going to study biochemistry but ended up dropping out two years later. That first fall we were unstoppable together. I was a real woman then, a young lady, my hair was long and colored dark green, we made friends everywhere, people would stop us on the street to ask if we were sisters. I knew exactly what to say to get her to laugh, she and I smiled exactly the same. She held my hand as I reclined on the bench at the tattoo shop and a guy with a purple mohawk drew a needle through my nipple. I held her hand when she got a spider that looked more like a speck of dirt poked into her forearm. When we fought I'd go for a long walk, usually to the waterfront or to the Burnside Bridge, I hated how much I loved her sometimes.

That fall I fell in love with this guy who lived in the dorm next to mine, in retrospect I think I liked him because he couldn't turn his brain off, he'd wind himself up and you could tell he was just thinking about the same topics compulsively for days. I'd say something to him and he'd really think about it, the same way I do. I got convinced we were supposed to end up together because he was in the Chipotle under the building the day my parents dropped me off. My mom noticed him looking at me even through her slurred speech after drinking half a Corona. Our romance only lasted a few weeks but something about his small dick has stuck with me, and the way he lifted me up on the bed even though we were the same height. Now he goes out with my current partner every weekend and they smoke cigarettes outside of this gay bar called Scandals because it has cheap drinks. He's proposing to his girlfriend this month.

Going one room down lived this guy from the Portland suburbs, we slept together after a party one night that fall and we never separated. We read books at the same speed and liked all the same music, lately almost all of my favorite music is stuff he's sent me, he makes me laugh every day. Only a few weeks after we slept together the first time we went to a tattoo parlor and he got this prophetic tattoo, it was a Kafka quote from the short story collection we had been reading together, I still wonder if my life guided me to that tattoo or if the tattoo is now guiding my life, I don't think either of us knows.

Across the hall lived this girl who was from Montana, she was a Taurus, she was beautiful. Even now, I've never been attracted to a woman the way I was with her, she was pure, kind, she never wanted to upset anyone. I don't think she ever understood me, and I didn't understand her, but I wanted to make her happy so badly, I still do. She deserved to have someone treat her in the same beautiful and open way that she lived, but I didn't do that. I was messy and cold with her, I would try to be a good lesbian and felt like I was constantly fucking up, I wasn't listening, I wasn't asking her what she wanted, I still feel selfish when I miss her.

At the end of the hall was this guy I still talk to, he reads this blog so I can't say much about him but he was there too, we've written letters and read our poetry and our stories to each other for the last five years. We processed a lot about that fall together and everything that happened afterwards, I think in his words sometimes, now I use the things he taught me to sound smart and well-read, when it's just stuff I got from us fucking around in his apartment. It probably would have been easier to just read the same queer philosophy books he was, but now I get to hear everything in his voice when I think about it.

Now, I live in Berlin. I've only been here two months, and it's winter. I'm starting at a new school and living in this building that feels like a dorm. My nipple piercing is being held in by the smallest strip of skin that is sure to break soon. When I look in the mirror I see a man now, I think in a man's voice. I met this runner who likes Kafka, I like to go for long walks to the bridge.
ENTRY 26: December 12. 2023 Yesterday

We sit in a classroom with red, orange, and green painted walls. The steam from my thermos drifts about the room, fogging up some girl's glasses a few rows down from me. The room is sloping forward to a vanishing point, where the red, orange, and green meet and turn to a patient and creamy brown. like coffee foam. My professor stands up there, to the right of his slides projected on the wall.

We watch a video of elephant seals fighting for dominance on the coast of Georgia. Daniel has moved to my row, balding, foot tapping, legs splayed, he talks like a woodpecker hammering. Daniel asks if male elephant seals ever evolve to mimic the females (he laughs) to sneak on to the beaches and avoid the detection of the fighting males to mate. My professor says yes that's possible in many species. But then moves to a slide showing the great disparity, that almost all of the male elephant seals will never mate at all. Daniel laughs, the class grows quiet and uncomfortable.

We meet up in a group outside after class then walk to the student cafe. The girl I've never noticed before is telling us she's interested in wine production. I already know that the hot guy in our group works at a wine store, they surprise me by instead talking about the Italian mafia. I watch the girl's teeth as she smiles and think about why she might have clipped her hair back. Everything fits, it's easy to speak. When we go outside so she can smoke her hand roll I already know what she will ask, I'm from Seattle, she's from Naples. I think about some day in the future when I will touch her hand as we pass.

It's never that easy. I go home and think that I will write this but I don't. I go for a run and try and make it to the abandoned apartment building next to the Seidel table factory, I make it but I'm on the wrong side of the highway and the cars aren't stopping, I think I'll just try again tomorrow. At home, the only things that seem edible are orange juice and gummy worms. I wonder what I'm waiting for.

At night, M and I argue over the phone, but it's a pre-arranged argument, so we try and listen to each other. In the end, we've said everything we can think of and still laugh before we hang up. I make ramen, sliced avocado, and vegan schnitzel for dinner. I talk to k and read 1984 until they tell me they're going to sleep and I realize it's midnight. I finish 1984 and dream that I've forgotten to feed my cat for two months.
ENTRY 25: December 10. 2023 I woke up and Berlin was a tropical island. A wave splashes against the Spree bank and pulls the dog shit and the food wrappers and the broken bottles into warm eddies that swirl with thick oil far out to sea, we wake and stand at the bank in our leather trenchcoats, we watch white tips appear and fade on the acres of waves. Our boots sink into the sand and we see kids take to the beach like flies pulling squirming crabs and starfish from the surf. Gulls come to land on the streetlights overlooking the water and call out to us, drowning out the people stretching down the sidewalk and the trains still rushing down the tracks. I walk inland and find the air stuffed hot and humid between the buildings, my shirt sticking to my skin I grip a fire escape and began to climb, the new ocean brings a warm fog and as I climb I began to see the marbled sky above the clouds lit with a red sun. Breaking into the canopy, I look out across the new sea and see freighters and steam ships glowing on the horizon. A bell sounds and the building is a lighthouse, I sit on the iron edge and suddenly the ocean stops, waves grow cold and snap together into a tight mirror, I see each concrete face of each building reflected in the water, a million yellow windows. I see my rotting shoes dangling from the fire escape, my legs pulled taunt like threads, my hands gripping the banister blood red, my neck white and smooth like a stone, my face is painted to a building, a body suspended in the sea, I look and look, but I can't seem to recognize myself.
ENTRY 24: December 9. 2023 I'm at my british friend's birthday party. We are 8 people in the apartment of a small french woman who's boyfriend has COVID so he's staying in the other room. One of the people there is from Denmark and reminds me of Saoirse Ronan. They've come with their childhood friend and they tell me they walk to each others houses for Christmas every year. I say, 'wow, so you're like sisters?' Saoirse says, 'yeah, like siblings maybe.'

I leave early with Saoirse and the friend because my head is hurting, the S-bahn workers are on strike so I walk 15 minutes to the bus stop. I'm listening to Sweet by feeble little horse:

I'm only down the street
Can't keep him out of me
Inviting me to leave
See it in everything
I'm stretching out again (feed off)
I'm putting this to bed (my sickness)
Too sweet, holes in my teeth, chewy
Dead dog, passenger locked, it's too hot
Do you think I'm stomaching a good thing?

Once again, as I walk up to an unknown intersection I think about my grandma. I think about the 15 thousand dollars she gave me to live here. The buildings are lit in the way you imagine they would be, at the bus station a poster for a cell phone company is pasted to the window of the concrete mall, I feel like I'm in the world I used to dream about. Even the foreign words on the posters feel right, like I'm coming back to a video game I used to play.
ENTRY 23: December 6. 2023 Dear Diary,

Take each day seriously, my teeth begin to rot below the gums. I feel the hole forming with my tongue in class, ouch.

This morning, I traveled under the ground, and under falling snow.

What do I deserve? Why aren't I happy with myself?

I watch glowing green spots form on C. elegans. Taking them under the microscope I watch them burrow in green gel and bacterial colonies that look like the surface of the moon, I scan for the green spotted worms and tick tick tick I tally them in my notebook.

I think how few people have ever seen this, GFP has only been possible since the 70s. Darwin never got to see a worm glow.

By chance, I get to go home first. It was only luck that my worms were the first set.

At home, I promise my nutritionist I'll stop drinking coffee to feel lightheaded. After our session I make espresso.

The person I'm talking to is reading their novel at the university today. Of course they are. It's probably too far for me to go. Yeah, and I'm busy with my espresso.

I walk with my cup in the cold night. I think about what I'd like to write if I could just think straight. My rotten tooth falls into my mouth and I roll it around on my tongue. Maybe I'll stop drinking water next.

Call M, we agree Kafka was a whiny author. I'm re-reading 1984, I say.

I play my guitar, I've finally got the entire intro to Angeles. It's slow but I know every note, the sound of my own playing gets stuck in my head.

I can't believe I saw a worm glow, I think. How can anyone hate someone who lives a life like this?

Brush my teeth and my gum is tearing open, my nipple piercing, too. This morning it felt punk rock, now it reads as self-destructive.

Take each day seriously. Wait to see if they tell me about the novel reading. Pretend I'm writing too.
ENTRY 22: December 3. 2023 No Victim

He drove a white van with a dent in the driver's side door. A dent like a meteor crater. He was stopped in the intersection, mid-turn.

A man unlike any I have ever met. A man who would block the intersection just to get my attention. A man who knew that I was important.

He was whispering sweet things. He was telling me how much he loved me, in simple fragrant words that soothed me as I stood on the sidewalk, waiting for the crossing light to change. He said I was the most beautiful person he had ever seen, that I was wonderful, that I meant so much to everyone on this block. Then the passers-by looked to me and smiled too. The man who was stopped in the white car behind him rolled down his window and waved. The woman looking out from the apartment across the way lifted her cup of tea. I took in the soft encouragement and hardly even wanted the light to change as it slowly blinked, a red hand keeping me here a while longer, asking me if I'd like to stay, and I did.

The man raised his hand from the open window and motioned for me to come over. A shy, quiet motion, undesiring, unexpectant. His fingers still then suddenly more, a movement of camaraderie, as though we shared a secret, as though we used to fight on the same side.

The people who had been so eager to get home now stopped their cars. They rolled down their windows and looked out at us in the dusk, their eyes reflecting just a thin strand of light from the gas station on the corner. They watched me protectively, like many mothers and fathers. I couldn't see their faces, but they saw everything. They understood what was happening.

I stepped into the intersection. Watching the man as I walked up to his door, smiling coyly as I felt the power of being asked to be only myself. The city cradled me, soaked me in love then opened like the stamen of a flower to let me choose, I knew that I was safe, and so I approached the window.

The man's left hand dangled out, his fingers still now, yet full. He had jammed a black cylinder into his palm. I will never know why. The metal had cut and soured his skin, leaving its shape in permanent sores that still clutched the grip long after he had wanted to let go. He looked afraid now, and I saw that he needed me. He looked at me like he was my grandfather, and with acceptance, he took something from the powder at the bottom of the barrel.

I touched the cold metal and he dropped the object into my palm. I stepped back and met his eyes. In our look, I thanked him.

The crossing light turned to a white figure. The onlookers quietly started their engines and the white van itself drifted off, out of the intersection and far away, to a place I never visit.

PPB Incident Report #62823

At approximately 9 pm on the evening of June 28th 2023 there was a report of an unlawful firing of a weapon at the intersection of Hawthorne Ave. and SE 21st Ave. An officer was dispatched to the scene and arrived 30 minutes after the reported incident. In talking with witnesses at the scene the officer was informed of a white van with a significant dent in the driver's side door that had stopped illegally in the intersection facing East, on the side of the Arco gas station. The driver of the white van appeared agitated and was yelling what was described as slurs and graphic language at bystanders. Refusing to leave the intersection, the driver fired what witnesses described as a small, black handgun into the air. The vehicle then fled the scene. Responding officers determined that the shooter posed no public threat and noted that no victim had revealed herself.
ENTRY 21: December 2. 2023 I'm afraid. night nips and rips agitates my calm clean water,
where are you when I'm alone?
who will care for me like I care for you? right this minute I could jump
over a little white paint on the floor
to clutch the train pulling from the other platform
doors unlock green and I'm faster
sagging like a sack of potatos I'd
hold the handle and scratch
up and out, up and out,
these things start to get to me.
ENTRY 20: December 1. 2023 Give and Take

I'm trapped on a train
turning away from the track
my train car now empty
plastic seats moving with the walls
line ends between stations

You've never met someone like me
but you'd never say
I wonder how your poem goes
when you look back at me
through dreams and glass lenses

Tonight, someone knows where I am
long night looking at the ceiling
when you turn from the platform
I will have disappeared
each moment happens only once

Ring train doesn't really take me home
just around in warm circles
a father scolds his son
I watch like fog
fading from the factory towers
ENTRY 19 October 28. 2023 The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

When I was around 5 years old my mom mom gave me the home phone, my dad was calling, he said my cousin Brian has died.

Brian was young, in his 30s. His wife had announced that she was pregnant with their first child only a month before. He was driving to work that morning when a large delivery truck moved into his lane and crushed his car into a concrete barrier, his car caught on fire within seconds. My aunt, his mother, found out from watching the morning news.

Some times things break. Lots of things have broken in my life. I remember chasing my brother around the house and coming around a corner too fast. I slipped in my socks and slammed my head into the corner of the wall. Worse was when I was an adult and I got hit by a piece of wood that 'kicked back' from a table saw. I was only wearing my regular glasses and the wood hit me so hard that it scratched the glass and forced the glasses down my face, leaving a vertical cut and nerve damage that lasted months.

In the spring of 2021 I woke up in excruciating pain after feeling completely normal the night before. As I lay in bed I traced the pain to a large swollen lump under the skin where my leg connected with my torso. This area had been tender to the touch for the last few days so I had assumed that I was having a problem with my hip flexor, but there had been no mango-sized lump until now. When I went to see my trainer that morning I could barely walk to her office, I felt nauseous, feverish, and the lump caused shooting pain when I moved my leg. I was taken immidiately to the hospital where I was diagnosed with an inguinal hernia. The doctor pushed on the lump a few times until she determined that it had 'popped back into place' and I was sent home.

That night and next morning I remained in excruciating pain, the fever and nausea was only getting worse. Out of desperation I returned to the hospital the next afternoon. This time they diagnosed me with a severe infection and started an IV of antibiotics. But that night it wasn't enough. When I got up to use the bathroom I noticed that my torso and back was covered in a red rash that was painful to the touch. It was so painful that I couldn't stand up, it felt like my body was completely rigid. When the nurse saw the rash she told me that I was going to need emergency surgery. That night, the surgeon came into my room and told me that they were going to make an incision at the top of my ribcage and insert a scope to see the infected area, then they would make a second incision at the lump itself to take a look at the origin. They were looking for Necrotizing fasciitis, the infamous 'flesh-eating bacteria'. The next morning I was wheeled into surgery where they removed one of my inguinal lymph nodes. With three more days of intravenious antibiotics I recovered and slowly made my way out of the hospital with my still open and 'draining' surgical wound. I would later get the lab tests that the whole thing was caused by a regular skin infection that had overwhelmed my lymph node. The whole thing had been relatively routine, other than the delay in antibiotics caused by my misdiagnosis.

When disasters happen, like Challenger or even the recent OceanGate submersible deaths, agencies are tasked with understanding the exact mechanics of what went wrong. There are physical reasons that things break, such as the cold weather on the morning of the shuttle launch causing the specially designed O-rings to no longer expand and fully seal off the hot gases released during ignition. The OceanGate submersible was contructed of carbon fiber, which is formed by layering strands of carbon together with resin, this allowed small imperfections and a 'weakest point' to form within the hull. After repeated dives the pressure on the carbon fiber caused it to delaminate (the resin releasing from the carbon strands) and the hull buckled to the ocean pressure. These shocking and random events are really not at all shocking when they are magnified under physics and chemistry. This is what Feynman meant at the end of his Challenger report when he said 'Nature cannot be fooled'. These physical principles like the amount of force, the reaction time, or the material limits does not change, it is only our understanding that does.

But before this understanding comes, there is a moment of surreal confusion. Our understanding of the world is proven wrong in an instant, what we thought could hold could not, physical laws appear meaningless, because we have just seen them broken.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? There is a deeply human fear in this moment of not-knowing. The second after delamination when in an instant, the truth is shown to be a lie, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. When this moment happens we lose hope in everything that we know, the dominoes fall.

But when we investigate we realize that the catastrophic event was actually quite customary. We realize that we could have forseen the breaking point if we had just examined the materials more closely, thought more comprehensively about the outcome. We have thousands of years of recorded outcomes, our world behaves predictably.

So do people. In psychology we record how people react to stimulus. The difference is that in social investigation we play without all the cards. People lie, physics does not. All of our records of human events and outcomes really are built on sand, biased by the time, the author, the audience. When a person behaves unpredicably its much harder to break through the surreal not-knowing that floats around us like a fog. The realization that the social laws that we thought were binding were actually never there at all. But, like in engineering, this fear of chaos can be broken with understanding.

My therapist sent me a worksheet last week that was meant to help me isolate how the trauma from the shooting has left me feeling. The first arrow says 'the unforseeable' which points to 'no way to predict it would happen' which points to 'grief/sadness'. I wish that I could treat the shooting like a mechanical failure, that I could compile a list of contributing factors that caused each failure in the sequence. I probably could do this, if I were an investigator, or if the cops had decided to do it, but that's another failure entirely. The point is that we do not live in chaos, we just don't always have all of the information. We live in a state of never completely knowing, but nothing exists that can never be completely known.
ENTRY 18 October 19. 2023 Return Trip

I got to Germany on the 2nd of October so over 2 weeks ago now but I haven't had the courage to actually write anything on here until this exact moment, and what changed? I'm sitting in a coffee shop near my campus in north Berlin and Life Is A Highway is playing softly on the speakers, I'm listening to an American on his first date with a German woman explain his latest body building competition (in which Arnold WAS in attendance), I'm home, life is truly a highway.

So, my first week here I was sick in basically every way. My biggest problem was that I flew into Frankfurt and had this very cold, lonely, dreary night staying in a hostel near the airport. I tried walking around that night and just felt so afraid and upset, I couldn't handle the language change and just felt deeply afraid being by myself. But hey, I thought, I'm sure everything will feel better once I'm in Berlin.. No, actually things would get much worse. I rode the train into Berlin the next morning and dragged my suitcases through the streets absolutely terrified. I finally got to my new apartment exhausted and found a dingy room with no windows and three male roommates (My room actually does have a nice window to be fair but the tiny kitchen where you enter does not). Long story short, I stayed in my room for about 7 days straight, only venturing out out of necessity to get cold medicine, TRY to open a bank account, and get some groceries that I struggled to eat. Everything seemed to go so horribly wrong that first week that I would come back to my room and genuinely consider buying a ticket to fly home. When I would walk outside I would start to disassociate and get confused, It sometimes would feel like my eyes were a screen and I couldn't see around the edges. It felt like every time that I looked at something it would look different. I had stayed in my room for 7 days before I realized that the sheets were white, the blanket was black, you could see dirt on the bed, the window looked out at the road. It was like I wasn't processing my vision fully. Yeah, so that was a lot. I also couldn't really eat which was stressing me out, everything was making my nauseous which only compounded all of my other fears of getting trapped in some sort of disassociative dream world forever. But, that did not happen, I'm here and now Grouplove is playing and I am concious.

Things are getting better surely. I'm starting to like wandering around and I've stopped feeling so afraid being out alone. This was kind of a strange realization because I didn't remember feeling so afraid last time that I came, my therapist thinks this is due to the trauma I experienced with the whole shooting thing this spring... that's maybe a story for another time. But I think she might be on to something because I've been feeling better this week after we started some trauma focused DBT. I was thinking about putting my victim impact statement as my first post back just for the drama of it but I think this captures my mood better. I'm doing good, surely, just still a bit unsteady.

I'm not sure if any of my old readers will come across this but I'm going to be updating regularly again now that I'm back to the big B. I'm excited to reflect on everything that happened this last year while I've felt so clouded. I'm realizing how different I feel than when I first came, I feel absolutely weathered now, as though I've lived about ten years since the last time. My whole outlook has changed, but maybe that's the difference between coming for four months and coming without an end date. Anyway, glad to be back, talk soon.
ENTRY 17 March 14. 2023 Unknown Graves

At the end of the The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) the three gunslingers betray each other for the final time, after almost three hours of screentime (more if we include A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and A Few Dollars More (1965)) we are faced with the fact that Tuco has again been tricked, that Angel Eyes has been beaten, and that although Blondie frees Tuco, as was their agreement, in the final moments of the film he sets off alone. As a kid, watching this shot of Blondie riding away through the scrub brush mountains I always wished he'd go back. I couldn't understand why he would choose to abandon the relationship the film spends three hours building. To ride through the desert and into unknown futures. Leaving his friend to do the same.

I was reminded of a night I went running last year, when I looked up at the moon and thought about the moment that my parents will leave me. I thought about what that would feel like to be alone, genetically speaking, because sure I will have some friends along the way but there will come a time when my close genes become held in my body alone, under this same moon. It's such a prehistoric thought, your genes laid out there on the stone slab like every other organism that has come before or since. I'll always have my brother, and this is addressed in the film too - Tuco says it's so good to have a brother you can always count on for a warm bowl of soup, says this as he rides away, Tuco's brother throwing them out to the wind. The truth is that you and I are always alone. Our thoughts will never be heard in every way that we mean them, we will die and be buried in an unknown grave, unknown soon enough. Even those that do live on in some sort of quasi communal conciousness; Socrates, Shakespeare, Jesus Christ, are not ever known completely in life or death. Sergio Leone didn't give Blondie a name until the final movie of the trilogy: he is a ghost, he is what we take him for, and as he rides away we are shown that he does not belong to us, and that we all meant nothing to him in the end. The film builds a sense that this will all be soon forgotten, that even as the soldiers battle through the dirt and the cowboys roam through beat down towns everyone is ephemeral, names misplaced, or remembered wrong for a price.

I called my parents yesterday. I hadn't called them in a while and it became obvious when I had to try and explain to them that M and I were going to Albuquerque in part to visit E, who by the way is now pregnant. I was using a goddamn fliphone to call them and my mom sounded like a child, like she was curled in bed in her robe, speaking from a million miles away. She said, 'We can't really hear you honey. Did they ever get married?' 'Yes they've been married!' I was angry, I was even walking outside! It was raining and I was only in a T-Shirt, huddled over my phone at 8 pm outside my neighbors driveway. 'I just started this new job, I'm working with a bunch of kids and it's so surreal, it's such a surreal place with these kids and cockroaches and tarantulas. It's like David Sedaris, and it's just so funny. Like the other day this mom and her kid ask me if they can return this cockroach, a cockroach! Because she said it's not fitting in! As if it was a pet, you know? It's just so funny.' There's a long pause on the other end and my mom starts to make noises like she's laughing but she isn't, 'We really can't hear you but that must be a really funny story, you said it's about cockroaches? I'm sure it's really a good one.'

For one of the first times in my life I've been feeling like I want to give up. I try and think about how much I want to move to Berlin or how much I'd like living in the desert, or building my own house, or about being a man. And I start to feel like I'd rather just do none of it. I start to feel like I'll never get there, and that it's all impenetrable, especially the man thing.

I think I should have told my therapist that I wanted to look into some gender reassigment stuff before she left for maternity leave, but the problem I've had open in the other tab for weeks is that I wouldn't be able to get surgery before moving in the fall, so I'll need to try and get surgery in Germany, or try and come back for that part, or just never get it at all. It's funny that I think some people my age worry about the prospect of losing fertility, but I worry about losing time for the testosterone to take effect. I want to feel like Blondie riding into the desert and I often feel like I am close to embodying the exact opposite. I think that's why it feels useless to move forward, after all of this hard work I've put into my life I'm never going to be thought of like that, and really it shouldn't matter. In the end, we are never known, our genes eb and flow and whether I had breasts in this life doesn't really matter at all, my genes still code for them, I don't have a horse and don't really want one, I'm not in the desert. The beautiful thing about Blondie is he wants nothing. But then again most days neither do I.
ENTRY 16 March 8. 2023 I finished (!) my last graduation requirement thereby making me now lost without a purpose again. I have been crying a lot, I can cry on command right now:

Last night I got up to go to the bathroom and saw the wooden slats of the ceiling with new eyes. My good friend was sleeping (or maybe pretending) on the loft opposite my bed, we used to see each other almost every morning, I'd pick her up in my subaru and drive us both to AP Bio, I'd take her back to my house every afternoon and we'd do our homework in the living room, in the snow my tires would slip in the ice and we'd scream and laugh, she would tell me about some Brody or Brendan she talked to out in the gravel lot as the trucks revved in the bright sunlight, I trust her so deeply. I looked up at the dark ceiling with the hanging lamp I bought at the antique store 4 years ago, the lamp I love. I looked at the decorations of my little house and felt for the first time that it was perfect, that I had created a place that I wanted, that here was something to be proud of, a reflection of myself in wooden boards, framed walls holding taunt to the elements and the sadness all around. I got into bed again, and the wrongness fell on me like a blanket, fell on my thin bones like snow, held me tight to the bed and seeped around us, in our perfect nest, I didn't used to feel like this.

I felt like a doll. M drove us to Cable World around 5 pm as the sun lowered on buildings that stretched in grey white storefronts and corporate signs and parking lots that could have been in a Tumblr post back in the day. Cable World sat between the JU JITSU place with the green-belt family silhouettes and the travel agency with resin-blue tropical fish window art. Inside was white-walled desolation and product signs printed out on yellow printer paper and taped to PVC pipes. Just floor tiles, HDMI hybrids, and LED lighting. Behind the counter were hundreds of signs the owner had found on Facebook and printed out, such things as 'Working out give you the confidence to dance naked, then again so does Tequila'. A man came in before we could ring up our cables and started talking to the owner, saying 'sorry kids' and telling the guy about his T.V. hookup problem, their tone made me feel that they were in love. Later we drove home as the moon back lit the clouds, making them turn to blue blankets over the strip malls turned plastic as the workers slept, back again in their apartment complexes and fumbling with the wires crawling from the walls. The blank framed portraits, purple mountains, above our beds.
ENTRY 15 February 23. 2023
Three Things That Change: Snow came heavy last night and it occured to me as I walked through the bright white neighborhood that we love snow because it is change.

Herbs and Alters released a video today talking about his time as an alcoholic. He said when he was near his lowest point he called an ambulance to his house. The EMTs listened to his chest and told him that they heard another heartbeat, so Dorian went to the hospital to have an ultrasound. There was no baby, but he stopped drinking.

Big Thief described change like this:

Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?

Would you smile forever, never cry
While everything you know passes?

I sat at the bus stop, freezing, phone dead, and watched the snow get swept from the gables of the next door apartment. This day was so different than I had imagined just last night, as I found myself waiting at a bus stop I'd never even noticed, the city looking alien. When all I need is change, I don't even notice that I miss it. I wonder how much I want to change, that I don't even see right now. Of course, how much do I have that I don't see either?
ENTRY 14 February 16. 2023 The middle-aged woman at the Arbys in Fargo North Dakota is staring at me. I move before she does, going to her in the half lit dining room and leaning on her table as she chews her steak sandwich. She looks up expectantly, unbothered by the sharp edge of my shoe pressing into hers under the table.

'I'm waiting on you.' I say.

'Me?' She said, slowly and giving me a smile, 'I don't even know you.'

'Aren't you supposed to tell me what to do?' I press my boot into her pink ked. Grinding her toes into the tile floor. She doesn't let on that she even feels it.

She sips her coke through a plastic straw, leaving her lipstick on the rim. 'Oh, that's funny.' she sips, she acts like she's thinking and smirks, 'I think you should just give up.'

'That's a really great fucking idea.' I lean in farther, bearing down on her as she sits there calm - legs crossed delicately, 'I've come all the way here, I've drove how many miles - and you know what kind of sacrifices I've made to get here too? I could have stopped with Zoe you know? I could have just fucking stayed there in Montana and everything would have been fine. We'd be sleeping out in the bed of a pickup right now, under a whole bunch of stars and I'd be happy ya know?' I take my boot away and sit down across from her at the table, it teeters with my weight and I grab both sides as I slam it into the tile. 'And another thing-' she looks up at me, still smirking, and sips her straw, 'I could have stayed in Germany too, I didn't even have to come back, I could have hid out or something. I could have just started over, but I didn't. I came all the way back here just for you, so that I could be here to have this conversation, and you're not even going to have it. You know how good it was for me there? You know how happy I was? I'll probably never be that happy again, and I don't know what the fuck to do with myself. Everything feels wrong everywhere now.' With that I grab the plastic cup out of her hand and crumple it, getting coke on me as I throw it into the paper bag she's left on the table. She laughs,

'Oh my god, you're really so sweet.' She picks up the last half of her sandwich and takes a bite, turning her head sideways and gripping the bread with hot red acrylics. 'You think I can help you? You've already decided all of that, you didn't do it for me or for yourself or anyone, you just did it. And now you have to live with it. What do you want now? You want me to just give you directions and you'll be off, huh? Since when has that happened? You know that you have to just wait here for that better life, that one you've left again and again, the one you always dream about to come around again. And then you'll leave that one too, and you'll be back here, and I'll say the same thing.'

'What the fuck is wrong with you!' I can't help but scream at her. There's only a few other loners in the restaurant, quietly pretending to look out the drawn blinds at the burnt dirt hills all around us, the sky is turning as the storm comes in.

She's finished her sandwich and is dabbing her mouth with the napkin, still smiling as she collects her trash and places it carefully in the bag. I push the chair back and get up as she does, 'No, you can't leave! I'm dying out here, I don't know where to go now. I know I should have taken all those other roads but the thing is I didn't, and now I just need to get moving again, or get back to one of those old exits, or just settle down here, but I can't think right when I know all I've done is throw things away.' I trail off as I watch her toss the bag in the garbage. She approaches me cautiously, looking up at me with pity, taking my hand for a moment and holding it out between us,

'You won't ever be happy staying here. Why don't you try actually trying.' she drops my hand coldly and walks to the door, the bell jingles as she opens it and she walks quickly into the parking lot, doesn't look back.
ENTRY 13 February 7. 2023 I've been shaking back and forth for a few days, I think I'm on vacation but it doesn't feel like it. I just want to make progress, and I feel like I almost can, but then at the last second I move on to something else. I need to give myself permission to wait, but I feel like if I just push harder I can make things easier for myself down the road. There we go again, always worried about kicking the can down the road. It's funny because my problem right now is I don't have a can to kick, and I'm so worried that I'll be overwhelmed later on that I'm overwhelmed now.

Been thinking about my presence online, about people reading my writing. A long time ago people used to have piles of letters that they wrote to each other, and in those flimsy papers were the words that created change in their physical realm. If someone really into german romanticism were writing this they might go into a anecdote about a sweet shoemaker in the 1500s who was knock knock knocking with a little hammer on the inner sole of a dress shoe when a letter arrived from some faire maid living down in the valley where the purple thistles and clovers bloom. The letter would say something like hark ye - oder besser: ye alte Schuhmacher kannst du bitte sehen! ich bin verliebt! then the shoe maker would carefully place his hammer back on the hook and put the Magd's letter in the carved wooden canister he recieved from his grandmother when he was a boy. Someday the maiden might look in the canister, after they were married for some time - and the shoe maker would be embarrassed, nein my poor maide they are only scribbles! but she would see something else: my dear these are the words that built us! The light from the Kamin, the sod above our heads, the life set here before us: these words built love.

Hark ye: these words built love, so I love them too.
ENTRY 12 February 5. 2023 Sometimes I get afraid to write, this is one of those days. Sometimes I fear I have left too much of myself out on the countertop to be slowly trimmed with the old deli meat slicer, that some user named ihatestreetrees69 is about to log in and tell me that I'm really not very interesting. More likely though they won't say anything at all, they'll just leave me to fill in the blanks.

I applied to be a busser at Claim Jumper, then I drank a lot of the very-good $2 coffee at Common Grounds and fucked around with google sheets for a while. Someone asked me how is it being in limbo? It sucks, I said. Today is an off day, was from the moment I tried to upload some files and the website errored - leaving me stranded without a purpose, no way to keep moving, and too tired to find another way around. Seems I'll camp here for the night, but it's only 1 pm.

Last night I left the coffee shop and held my jacket to my chest walking walking briskly but soon the understanding began to set in that in the dark I did not know where my car was. This wasn't too bad since I wanted to walk anyway, and I never was really trying to find my car at all, I had just been walking. Then I looked up and saw the clouds were many small rectangles that looked stitched together like a quilt, a quilted sky I thought. The quilt was being pulled quickly over the moon which was of course, full. If I made music I might make a song called A Quilted Sky, then I would make one called Bugs in the Curcuit Lounge which is the subject line of an email that M forwarded to me yesterday.

And while we're on the topic of yesterday, I saw the girl in red yesterday. I call her that because she always wears these ridiculous red cowboy boots and is just so obviously a lesbian. I didn't like her for the longest time because she also wore plastic bug earrings and only I can wear those. But really it's comforting to find your mirror, once you get used to it. I wasn't seeking her out exactly but I did go to the insect zoo where I knew she worked, and since it was a full moon she was of course, working. She seemed happy and startled to see me and offered me an orange jumping spider to hold. She told me they watch TV together.

I like girl in red because she usually reminds me of my mom. That's also why I usually dislike her. Later that day (yesterday) I was looking for some way to kill the flies that burrow into the shit sitting in the plastic tub beneath my composting toilet. I used to use this strange brown powder I bought off eBay but I can no longer find it, so I just bought more fruit fly traps. I walked into a beautiful nursery with a mural of native birds and fern fronds on the outside and started searching for some sort of toxic chemical. Wait, the lady said - how do you even know they're fruit flies?
ENTRY 10: January 23. 2023 Film students. We all know one. Film students are to writers what a shiny purple rock in the souvenir shop is to refined post-processed pure uranium ore. All bark and no bite.

Ha Ha Ha. I'm just kidding. I got to meet some film students this last weekend at a fun little house party. I made my rounds and talked to this one named G a lot, he asked me what I study and I said the typical: Biology and German. He didn't really seem interested in that and started telling me about this movie he directed, it's this surreal psychological thriller about coming of age or something. Have you ever heard of Heidegger? It's like completely sein v Sein ya know? No, Ha Ha Ha, really everything is about perception. Recently, I've been obsessed with the notion that my thoughts become my reality, so for example I believe, that thoughts can change your body. And then it dawned on me, your body can change your mind.

Now, I'm sorry to ask but were those car seat headrest lyrics? While I'm at it, I don't really see what Heidegger was concerned with perception at all, it actually seems like you just threw that in willy-nilly. Now, I on the other hand am a writer. I know I said I was a Biologist before but just forget that, I actually am a very accomplished writer.

Oh. What do you write?

Oh, I write .. I would call it magical realism. Surreal. Like Kafka, I have a blog. It's very cool, and I write about my life and what happens to me but like, better.

Are you writing as a character?

Yes, I mean we are all characters right? You and I are playing characters right now.

Hey, can I have your number?

Film students. If you ever want to hook up with a film student just tell them you've been thinking a lot about how our perspective changes our reality, like how the lens of the camera can change the perception of the viewer, yeah I'm actually on prozac right now too, yeah it's been weird.. and go from there.

G: You should really try writing as characters. So in a film script it's all about action and dialogue, right? And I'm fine with the dialogue but sometimes it's the action parts that get me.

H (in character): I thought your background was acting, wouldn't that be the easy part for you?

G: God you're aggressive. Have you ever written any screenplays?

H: Um. no. I just write on my blog mostly.

G: It's like a travel blog?
ENTRY 9: January 18. 2023 A Strange Dream

I've been feeling strange, I guess you could call it sick. Sometimes when I look at a window the glass seems to move like water. Other times I feel that if I go to sleep I will never wake up. I start to listen to my heart beat and it begins to feel unfamiliar. I worry that I am dying.

Strange thoughts came last night, I was again confined to the bed - somehow unable to straighten the room that seemed to slide downward into a lifetime of this strange feeling. I opened my eyes and looked at the wood grain of the ceiling as I wondered when it would happen, that I would die. I thought about the Burnside Bridge then, a place I used to always walk to when I was feeling out-of-sorts, when I lived on that side of town. That seemed to do it, yes, I'll walk to the Burnside Bridge.

Only a short walk down the hill and I came upon a figment, a man huddled over in the cold night, holding a loose blanket to his chest and leaning over the grass along the road. Of course I knew that I was meant to talk with him;

Do you have a flashlight?

No, but I can light something up for you.

Yeah, these are definitely not Psilocybin.

You're looking for mushrooms? (Laughs)

I studied Mycology.

I hand him a cigarette. The mushroom searcher stands in the road, his backpack on his hip, his face carved in deep grooves, all the while he is young, only 40.

You ever find magic mushrooms out here?

Here, no. Once I took a whole quart of cubensis, that was horrible. The whole ego death thing.

I had that once, I took salvia, it was crazy, I thought I had become a letter.

Oh salvia, yeah that stuff will mess you up. I took some once and died.

Yeah, exactly - like you think you're fucking up the whole universe -

No, not like that. I really died. I fell off the Burnside Bridge.

The mushroom searcher asked me if I believed in God. 'It's half and half' I said. I don't believe in Free Will.

I just do what matters to me now. I just go where I want. I screwed my whole life up, selling dope on Couch - getting shot up. But I value myself now, I like myself.

It's strange you said the Burnside Bridge, I'm headed there right now.

That's a long walk, you'll screw your feet up.

It's okay, I probably won't make it.

I have a bus pass if you want, the bus driver is a nice guy - thought I was sleeping on the streets just because I had this - I'm actually headed somewhere right now though.

It's okay, I'm alright to walk.

Take care of yourself. I hope to see you around.

I continued down the road, then, make it to the train yards, maybe that will be my ending? The machinery and the many colored boxcars are still and silent, only the sterile lights above the yard seem to roam along the ground. The ground below the overpass is a great mud puddle, reflecting my face back to me. I keep going, until the walk has gone on much too long. At some point, long to far, I begin walking back. My feet are killing me and I see racoons playing in the tree on Divison. I feverishly make my way up the last hill. The sky is becoming light beyond the buildings.
ENTRY 8: January 17. 2023 A few lost days here and there, a few days spent between the floor boards.

I wouldn't say things are going great with the whole Germany thing, I got an email back from the school I was interested in - they said I'll need to be basically native-speaker-type-fluent in order to take classes there. That wasn't exactly good news. Then my German professor here at PSU said, H---- I can't help you with this at all, frankly I'm not sure why you are asking me, why would I know anything about graduate school in Germany, I'm here aren't I? No, she didn't say that, but it was between the lines.

Well, I'll keep it moving. The last few days I think I've gone numb, like repeated hands in the fire.

I'll just keep trying, maybe going to school here wouldn't be so bad, so long as I could move for a while. Maybe I just need to take steps towards the individual things that matter to me? i.e. talking to hot people

I got around to doing my year tarot spread, my theme of the year is the eight of swords - not the highest swords but we're getting there! Kim Kranz describes as follows:

Surrounded by obstacles and threats on all sides, you find yourself the victim. You see no way out, no available choices. Your perceptions keep you from opening your wings and taking flight. What keeps you suspended here? Yourself or others? The Eight of Swords demands an answer. You cannot hang here much longer.

She even had the audacity to draw the card as a butterfly (we read: moth) pupa hanging precariously above a bed of swords, presumably before the moth will climb out - dry its wings - and take flight, the swords below revealed to be merely an illusion.
ENTRY 7: January 16. 2023

Suggested Listening:

WHERE THE NIGHT ENDS (TOGETHER PANGEA) 		waking here by bonfire flames
rasp revolt the smoke climbs in
haunting our lip pink throats

fire lights your neck,
crouching morning sun behind
all bruised eyes in hillsides

land calls out from our new center
meet my eyes - the edge of glass
stars tear 'round our circle

black fields of starved
prairie town skeletons
dead weight in hot wind

drive me out just drive me out
leave me rotting in the road

drive and drive
but it's still here
green of the dashboard light

drive and drive
but it's still here
green of the dashboard light
ENTRY 6: January 15. 2023 TW: ED

I just can't seem to move, I can't seem to get to it.

I don't feel well.

Moving Right Along: B's Blog (Breezeblocks) got me thinking about legacy today, which is always a bad sign.

I think we all fantasize about having our writing published posthumously, it's fantasically passive to think about someone else valuing your work so much that they do everything for you - all the editting and the fretting about whether anyone will even like it. Plus, you don't have to go through the embarrassment of peddling your thoughts around, the hubris of saying 'yeah, I actually think you guys should listen to me on this one'. It sounds delightful. Of course, you do give up control. I'm thinking particularly of the tale of old Nietzsche's nazi-loving sister. Still, you are dead anyway, and future historians can probably sort the whole thing out.

I think I like this sort of thing, passivity. Perhaps not in a way that I should. I was thinking today that if someone offered me to be back in the hospital with an exploding lymph node for a week I would take it. I would be so glad to be taken care of, to finally have absolutely nothing to do and no reason to pull up my god forsaken knotted crummy crusty bootstraps. I could just lay there letting god take my hand and lead me as They pleased.

Earlier this week, L and I talked about why I am restricting food. I told her it's because I'm trying to signal that I need help. But Help's A Fickle Thing and I realized as I was talking with her that I don't actually want any help at all. I mean, sure, if someone could just figure out what I'm doing for me that would be great - but it also wouldn't, because I probably wouldn't even like what they came up with. I think that I want support but I don't even know what that would look like, so I'm just restricting food into the abyss. That's kinda how mental illness goes though, huh, it doesn't usually make sense.

I think I need routine, or maybe rest. Or perhaps Prozac? I just don't feel like moving forward, mostly because the place I am feels so dismal, why walk when there is only another dark tunnel ahead?
ENTRY 5: January 13. 2023 Ummm. hey guys.

I think I accidentally made my blog too clean and then stopped wanting to write on it. A few years ago I had this old notebook I repurposed from my intro to calc class or something and goddamn that was a good notebook, it was like falling apart, and yellow, and had coffee spilled on it a bunch of times. I wrote in that thing daily. Then it got stolen out of M's car, anyway.

I invited the folks from E2 to my blog, if any of you guys are reading this - glad you made it... crazy weather we're having right now, huh?

To get into it - the last few days I've felt a bit strange. I keep ending up drinking too much coffee and then being unable to form long-form thought. It's like I'm bumbling around (babbling about) and staying right outside my ability to think straight. This is what happens when you can't use weed, let me be a cautionary tale.

I went through all my old posts, cleaning things up a bit, and I guess it taught me a few things. They weren't as bad as I was expecting, most I still respect. I talk a lot about Germany, which is sweet - wanting to go there, wanting to be there, wanting to stay there. I met with L today too and talked about this, can we call it a hyperfixation? I think I need to chill out, but also I'm not sure where chilling out will get me? I'll feel better? Okay. But maybe I should just let my anxiety take this one and I'll ride 'em like an old filly ("ain't never met a filly that could throw me" - Brokeback Mountain (2005)).

Another point: I wish I was a higher level on E2 just so I could put this photo on my profile (young kafka):


At least it's good to have goals. The problem is: how do you cope when your goals are so all-consuming that you appear to be wildly depressed and struggle to find any reprieve in any activity that you try and do? The thing is, I desperately don't want to do anything. I feel like I'm bare-minimum existing, and daydreaming - all the time. Here's my new one:

I'm back in Berlin (side note: my computer booted up with a picture of the Brandenburg gate today, how fucking dare ??), I'm in the middle of the giant asphalt plaza (not limp/nor stale) that is Tempelhof airport, I'm back at the music festival watching Enumclaw perform, I yell up to them that Holy Shit I'm FROM Enumclaw ! The main guy sees me and is like, no way! I say 'Yeah I'm A MotherFucking Horse Fucker' we all laugh. C is there and we're married, also to Enumclaw. they're part of the polycule too.
it's really good to have goals.
ENTRY 3: December 28. 2022 Yesterday, M and I went to the beach to see some thirty foot waves promised on the news. The day was stormy and blustery and much of our drive was spent winding through dark forest trees that swayed and shook their mossy arms over our heads. Rain was everywhere, sometimes turning the windshield into a blurry mess when the wipers couldn't keep up. It was really coming down in sheets, as though you could see the lines of rain in the air coming in vertical waves, the sky looked like rippling fog.

On our way home, M asked me about my plans for going back to Germany. I happened to be looking towards the line of beach houses out to the west, focusing on one in particular that formed three concrete sections, harsh things that sloped down to reveal a car parked beneath its sallow body. The far wall was open, a bright square of light that showed through to the sand spraying from the ocean and the ocean itself, another body.

I pretended to be thinking about the question and instead thought about labyrinths. About hopelessness.

I answered agressively and then went back to picking apart the open window, the bright square of light that appeared sunk below the belly of the neighborhood. Thought about turning around and around in that concrete, looping through tunnels to come out at that sea window. Thinking you've gotten close enough.