Today

Listening to Suzanne by Leonard Cohen repeatedly and I am sick I am SICK, she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from china and the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor.. unwell quaking astral projecting screaming into this void etc.

Nose is stuffy I cannot know peace please Thank Jesus all you with clear sinuses, love, your unwilling mouth breather

I sit in a a hot car in a grocery store parking lot. The car is off to save gas, so the air conditioning is off too. I sweat out every drop of bittersweet tea I’ve drunk in the past week. The tea tastes bad today; the sugar granules haven’t dissolved. I enjoy it anyway. I consume my second bagel. Today I got contrasting flavor profiles, salty then sweet. A song that begins as a lullaby and ends in screams of terror plays on a loop. I did not intend the loop, but technology has a mind of its own, and higher powers than my own feeble will have decided this music bears repeating. I stare at asymmetrical rows of palm trees and contemplate the human condition. It is July again. I think I might be healing.

Actually I am going to love as hard and as fully as I can knowing it will crash and burn and disappear because what loss is worse??? The person or the possibilities??? No pain is as great as I should have, and so I will cry over happy memories instead of wasted ones. Good night, love recklessly everyone

Palllllllllllllls I haven’t slept in 30 hours and I’m flying home in 36 hours and my room is all packed and empty and blank and depressing and I still feel my amph high even though I took it 20 hours ago maybe bc I took the previous dose only 12 hours before thst so I had more in my system at once anyways I feel kinda loopy and euphoric over classical music Berlioz is my BABE what a bonkers king uwu that’s actually the first time I have ever used and uwu but I am looking around my room now and I may burst into tears I don’t want it to end??? I am aware I sound conked but also bro there is so much everything right now Jesus Lord Christ who I love please help me it’s all coming apart and I still have three finals to do 😘

Today I am overcome

Such art, such joy, such satisfaction

It has come right back around

And become sadness

The only joy with any depth

Is tempered by grief

A study in contrasts

I weep over Peter Pan

I drink cocktails

I wander alone through a foreign city

An awfully big adventure

I remember the tragedies

I stare at the paintings

I read and hum and try to keep it all in mind

Why must emotion hurt?

My stomach is in knots

My cheeks are sore from smiling

I’m getting crows feet from squinting into

The bright sun on my face, on my skin

It is warm and I am beyond expression

Too lucky to believe this is my life

This is the escapist fantasy

And yet it is not enough

I remember the God-sized hole in my heart

The Lord has promised good to me

His word my hope secures

He will my shield and portion be

As long as life endures

I am obsessed with the passage of time

Clocks and watches and cycles and things

Why must new experiences

mean new endings?

I’m falling in love with being alive

With God’s creation

Art from sinners

Of the saints

Beauty makes my soul ache.

I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.

Henri Lebasque, Village au bord de la riviere | Martha Gellhorn

Journal

And its all in my head, (our past, our future)

I can’t get you out of my head

Mind reader, you can see inside my head

Seeing you it all comes to a head

The thought comes into my head

I’ll love you until I’m dead

There’s a part of me that’ll always love you.

The part of me that’s still 13, the part of me that was the beginning of who I am now, not the child but the person. You watched the change, you changed yourself, and we survived that terrible process together, the death of the old us, the horrors of becoming, the fear and loneliness and hope and desire.

And that’s the foundation of who I am today, and you’re there too, imbedded in the cornerstone, along with all the joys and disasters, and I can’t not love you. I love you like I love summertime, or old musicals, or a favorite book. But it’s more than that. I don’t love you like a friend, or a brother, or a lover. Maybe I love you like I love myself. You’re a fragment. You’re a coin I flip, tails for a grudge and disappointment and bitterness, heads for overwhelming tenderness.

And our bodies never meet, you’re so careful to stay a few feet away, but the meeting of our minds is tangible enough for the brush of your fingers to seem irrelevant. And it’s so tragic and so romantic and then tragic again, isn’t it? You’re divorced and too young for that, I’m a virgin and too old for that, and we won’t say those words but we know it in the sidelong glances, in the shapes we draw around in our conversations.

In the scandalously intimate front seats of the car, in the dark and deserted corners on our evening walking, in the quiet of the galleries where we pick apart the art like it will tell us something about ourselves, I can’t bear to look at you for fear of what I’d do. And we’re two ships in the night, a long day together and then a long year apart, and maybe a year becomes forever, because despite our best efforts and egos we aren’t psychic, or perfect, but I think, I hope, we both want otherwise.

And I think about other things too, about your fingertips through my hair, about how we’d laugh, and it would be so strange, wouldn’t it? But if you were the last man on earth, I think we’d be grateful for the apocalypse to leave us to our own devices. And you’re nothing without an audience but I would laugh enough for a whole auditorium, just you and me and the end of the world. But these are foolish things, flights of fancy that die in the sunlight, in the statistics. So I stop thinking about them, about you. And I can go without thinking about you forever, but you’re always there anyway, in the map of my subconscious, in chess and in that christmas card, in showtunes and in shame and in shivers, in dialects and old sci-fi and always, always, in dreams. I hope I’m more than just an old face to you.

There is so much love and joy in my life right now!!! And it all comes with an expiration date!!! How can I brave this season knowing it will be gone in the blink of an eye? How can I be brave enough to give away my heart knowing I will all too soon pack my bags and have to leave it behind? To love is to lose and lose and lose, and there is no other version of this story, and this joy is a mountain top I am about to fall off of. Someone catch me, please.

It is father’s day in this foreign country, and I miss my dead father, and I didn’t intend to bring him up at all, but my host mother of all things mentioned that anne hathaway is jewish because she was on the news, (I can’t understand well enough what they’re saying on tv so I couldn’t tell you why) and I said that I’m jewish, and that my grandfather came from Russia, and she asked if it was my mother or father’s father and I of course said my father’s and she said not your stepfather who lives with you right? It’s your father who doesn’t live with you anymore? Which in retrospect is a bit intrusive, and I was like yeah and she said, does he still live in America? and I just said, because I don’t know any euphemisms or nicer ways to say it in their language, he’s dead. And I feel glad to have spoken of him aloud today, to have remembered him, but I made things uncomfortable and awkward and I could have avoided it, and I feel a little shame, but I haven’t done anything shameful, so I am writing this out in my own language to process it. Thanks for listening void :/