dreamy weather
wonderland, stagnancy in repetition, and praying to the dead.
The light is still half-baked when I open my eyes, like it was squeezed out through cheesecloth. White walls turn to yellow. Pale wood turns to gold. I like to think that there are things precious to me in this world. If we’re really indulging in fantasy, I like to pretend I’m one of the precious things. It’s no secret that we are very slowly circling around violence. We need it to live and we’re sure that it will kill us. Far, far away, the sun sits alone in nothingness, burning itself out just to crawl limply onto my mattress. I like to think it’s alive. I like to think that this weak yellow beast is precious to me.
My outside world is the size of a pea and it can only grow in weird directions that aren’t socially recognized, so it’s natural that I should leave it for something wider. I’m talking about paracosms. I’m talking about the world in my head. If I’m inside myself, the possibilities for my day are endless. There’s a dozen forests to explore, composites of the ones I grew up in, and a dozen other things to do if I get tired of the woods. Playgrounds, malt shops, the way my bedroom looked when my sibling lived at home and it was our bedroom, libraries, long roads, the inside of my father’s car, the ocean. I don’t have to see anyone if I don’t want to. If I do want company, I’ve got talking animals. There’s always a tea party in full swing. I like to think it’s happening even when I’m not there. Additionally, I could go to my grandmother’s old house and play dress up in the basement, hang out on a lakeside dock and go swimming, make snow angels during the winter of 2011 when there was a strange cold snap— the list goes on. I couldn’t draw a map of my world if I tried. The edges aren’t edges.
I’ve got enough self-awareness to be casually horrified at my own lack of reality. Living in an imaginary world where you have complete control isn’t exactly conducive to forming the behaviors healthy adults are supposed to exhibit. Even beyond that, it’s a fantasy world that I developed as a child— despite the fact that my imagined body isn’t fully corporeal, I’m pretty sure that it’s not an adult body. It’s a psychological nightmare.
I’ll be twenty years old in January. We’re looking at my options real careful because I don’t know how to grow up, even though I want to. I’d like to think that it’s not fully my fault. I don’t know why I’m stuck in my head. Sure, I’m sick enough that I usually can’t leave the house in the daytime without fainting and I don’t have much autonomy and I spend roughly 22 hours a day alone in my room, but there are adults who do all that and manage to exist in the real world. So why am I still having tea parties? Why am I still making stuffed toys for myself? Why do I feel like a marionette walking amongst real human beings? And it’s not as easy as finding a Blue Fairy for me, because this isn’t a Disney movie. Or maybe it is and I’m just stuck in a whale.
Do you want to know a secret? I know why I’m trapped in amber. When I come into the world, I’ll fly in fast and low and I’ll fucking die. It’ll kill me. I’m a semi-petulant unstoppable force and the world is an indifferent immovable object, so when I finally go rocketing into it, the shape it will leave me in is no shape of mine. It’s Charlie Brown all over again. Something in me is trying to delay it because convention will whittle the life out of me until I’m even less of a real girl than I am now. I’m terribly frightened of bureaucracy and I don’t have any stamina for doing things I don’t like— I can’t learn patience and tolerance fast enough to live. Death by blunt force trauma upon impact.
So here I am. I think I’ll sit in the woods today.
One holiday goes by, then another, then another. Why do we even bother? What's the use anymore? I went out walking to escape something I couldn't and even then I knew it was stupid, because it was, and it still is. And everyone looked sharp. They danced in the streets like James fucking Brown, hips and arms akimbo. The word for that is “divine”. I could've shot myself into the sun if I had wanted to. The word for that is mostly “absolution”, but sometimes it’s “obsoletion”. Pack it all away and turn down the sheets. One day, baby doll is gonna leave home.
If you’ve done your schoolwork, you already know it all. The sensation of largeness within immense smallness, creating black hole on a mathematical point, the best places in the world to lay on your back, Eva St. Clare, over the counter idiocy, post-optimistic animism, etcetera— there’s nothing I can say to you that will come onto you fresh. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I am currently laying on the overpass. The cars go under the concrete like hungry tigers. Lions and tigers and bears. It’s probably far too late to be doing this safely. This is not a safe place to stay.
I'm sure it also comes as no surprise that I’m not a very emotional person, or a very loving person, or a very passionate person, or any of the dozens of adjectives that typically describe people who find themselves in tumultuous love affairs. Nonetheless, I’m still in love with something. Not sure what it is yet. I might be in love with the act of dying. It might also be this city, who I can never decide if I love or hate. It's quite a seductive thing, isn't it? It's ultimately the place I've spent the most time in. I skinned my child knees on its sidewalks and let it drink the blood; in return, it locked me in a cedar heart-shaped box like a precious fur coat, never to be worn. God knows how long I've been in it. I wander its arteries like an ophelic cancer cell, floating in its lakes, taking a bus to its left ventricle, prowling through its parks. One day I'm going to leave it— we both know it. It's inevitable. But for now, I let it trap me in its wires and drag me into its mud. It sucks me under. I don't come up for air.
It's 10:17 p.m. I shouldn’t be here, much less lying on my back with my headphones turned up loud and a gas station jug of cheap lemonade. This is what asking for trouble looks like. I spent most of Valentine's Day evening— almost a year ago now— in this exact same position. I had sugar cookies with me that time, in addition to the lemonade; swore to God that I was giving up love and, mixing cigarette ashes with Pepto-dismal pink frosting, drew a cross on my forehead. If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for Jesus. It was good enough for me in February. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.
The rain came as soon as the clock struck 10. I’ve just been sitting here and taking it, tiny needles of ice right to the face, letting it drown me in some nouveau baptism. Isn’t indecision funny? I don’t really want to be here anymore— my hair is probably muddy and my legs are getting numb and they keep finding dead bodies lining the highway below me— but I’m not moving. I think I’m in a lot of places that I want to leave. I’m thinking solely in metaphors because I’m trying to be more of a stranger to the English language, so it’s obvious that this overpass is a stand in for the larger stagnancy of my life. I’m cold and I want to go back to my room; what is that a metaphor for?
Oh, well. My eyes are closed to the water again. At least it’s my legs that are getting numb. I’d say something about self-destructing for the sake of autonomy, but you’ve heard that song before.
If dead people are God, then I would like to make a prayer out to the part of God that used to be Nina Simone. It will not have words in it, but it will be the specific feeling of a heart growing big enough to fit a whole, ugly city inside of it. Of course, it will sound like a flourish on the piano.
I would also like to make a prayer out to Candy Darling, which will go like this: you’re a shining star, Candy Darling, and you’ve really dragged yourself into Heaven with the kind of bravery and grace that I can only hope to aspire to. Candy Darling, you’re a shining star.
The last prayer goes to Dare Wright, because everything is better in threes or fives: my mother keeps telling me my face hasn’t changed and that I still look like a second grader, even though I’ve got all the right parts for adulthood. I’m taking spoonfuls of sugar like I’m a preteen again. Dear Dare Wright, I’m sorry and I love you.
Sometime late last night, I wrote SEX IS HOW EVIL ENTERS THE BODY in all caps on a scrap of paper and it shocked me, as if I had stuck a fork in a socket. What a false statement! And isn’t it so easy to misinterpret? If I was coming across the sentence as a stranger to it, I would have assumed it was someone saying that sex is evil. But I was the one who wrote it. It came out of my hand. I wasn’t talking about the Biblical demon of lust— I was using evil as a proper noun and enter as an actionable verb to try and describe Evil physically penetrating someone, because I couldn’t think of a better way to say that everyone who’s been inside me has left me worse for the wear. Sex was how Evil entered my body over and over and then got off on it. Evil fucked me, and all I got was this lame t-shirt. Would that phrasing make me understandable? Do I want to be understood? Would understanding just end up feeling like a violation?
If I can be selfish with it, I’ll be selfish. Of course I will. It’s not a surprise. The only thing I can be selfish with is myself, and I can’t surrender that, so I’ll be selfish with myself. I don’t want it— anything, everything, understanding and love and hatred and connection. I don’t want it, probably because I’m only half-committed to being alive in the first place. I want karmic retribution for being human instead of sand. I want something for myself. You can’t have me. My hurt is my own hurt, my secrets are my own secrets, my desire is my own desire. I woke up as a stray dog backed into a corner, snapping its teeth at everyone just in case a passerby happens to be the Devil. Don’t read into that. Don’t read into anything I say. You’ll read it wrong and I’ll die. I’ll die because I’m not actually a human— I’m just a ball of vapor in a single room, a loose gathering of fine particulate, and a little more of me goes missing every time I leave. You’ll kill me if you think of me as anything at all. Don’t think about me. Thoughts are so vulgar; the entire world is as shallow and cheap as a kiddie pool.
I kick rocks down the street late at night and try to be a jellyfish. I’m finally going home and I want to be a jellyfish with all my heart. To be underwater for your whole life— no brain, no mind, no desire except survival, no form of existence other than being directed solely by the will of God, unable to see any other truth than the natural truth of the world— and to think nothing of your own death, when you are eaten by something or when you wash up on a beach and get mangled by rocks and small children’s sticks. To feel nothing about it. To make no guesses on why this had to happen to you; you, of all lovely creatures, dying this way, of all the ways to die. Perfect non-intervenience forever. I can’t help but think it would be a very beautiful thing to live without yourself. And I’m trying to do it because I want to see the truth of the world without getting in my own way, but I’ve got all the wrong hardware for it, so now I’m just a ball of vapor. I can get to be so little you can’t even see me. Nobody can find me. Do you understand?
Please don’t. Oh, I wish you wouldn’t. The rocks skipping across the pavement sound like an army of tiny horses. I hope they’re taking me away.