soap sinking

entries from journals, the notes app, etc. from february 5th to february 11th.

Entry titled “Intermission”, 2/5/2025, 1:27 a.m. In a journal.

It seems to be one of those days where the world feels like a dream of a world where everything is a few inches to the left and less porous than our world is— vaguely discombobulatory. Sallow. Maybe it’s just the winter, because summer isn’t like this. Summer is absorbent. Spirits sink into everything, gone home to animate and live inside the world. Nothing enters you; you stay empty. Winter, on the other hand, is hard. The spirits skitter across the ice, whipping every which way until they find willing hosts, wild and frantic at the thought of being burrowless for the long, cold months. You are full in a deserted landscape. You can’t get home enough. Too many spirits in a body stresses the mind. Bad luck. Bad for your health. Winter must be departed to save the soul. I hope you understand what I mean when I say that more spirits are out today than usual. The world has gone hard.

Alternatively, I might be having some sort of psychotic break. Wouldn’t be February without one, I guess— I always get fuzzed out this time of year.

God, January really did drag its feet, didn’t it? I feel like I came out wrong on the other side of it, despite hardly even noticing the passage of time while it was happening. Anniversaries came and went. It’s officially been three years since I got can’t-leave-the-house sick. It’s been two since he died. It’s been twenty since I was born. I don’t think that the passing of time changes anything anymore, which is a realization that also doesn’t change anything. Time goes right through me like I’m not even there.

I wish that it was still an option for people to run away and join the circus— nothing as big as Cirque du Soleil or anything like that, but a podunk little carnival on its last legs. I mean, I’m already a bit of a freakshow, so there’s that. I could take care of the horses and get knives thrown at me. I look great in a swimsuit. I can learn how to tell a passable fortune. We could make it work. I guess I want some sort of revenge on everything that moves around me when I have to stay so still, and the only way I can do that is to move through the world faster than the world can move through me. There are other draws for me than just revenge, too. Family, the ability to always be a stranger, the road, the wind chime ritual of it all. Wings of Desire. I’ve spent enough time with carnies to miss it. I think that everywhere I want to be died long before I was born. I’ll put the fantasy down in the morning; for now, I’ll let myself indulge. It’s good fun to pretend to be magical and filthy.

It technically is morning, actually. I should really be getting to bed. It’s not that I’m not tired, because I am— I just don’t want to be asleep right now. I’d like to sit in my body for a little longer. Besides, I’ve got a mug of tea cooling on the floor next to my mattress, and I’ve got to finish it (bad luck if you don’t? Psychosis). I’ll probably end up asleep before I can fully drain it. Them’s the digs. Tomorrow I’ll clean and do my laundry, because I’ve been putting that off for almost a month now. Maybe I’ll read something. I should really take advantage of how few commitments I have, you know? There are better ways to spend my time than however I’m spending it now. Slivering my life away like soap. We’ll just have to wait and see about that.

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Entry titled “Snow Down”, 2/7/2025, 11:41 p.m. In a journal.

I’m afraid I’ve forgotten to switch out my laundry, but at least I cleaned my room. I’m cutting my losses. It’s late again— I don’t think I ever write in here when it isn’t late, to be honest— so I can’t really go fuss with the dryer right now. Hopefully I’ll remember in the morning. I don’t really want one of my parents to sift through my underthings.

My father is trying on kindness towards me recently as if it changes anything. He tells me I’m dressed smart, that he prefers my hair long; reminisces on old photographs of me in the snow. I don’t like it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put stock in the idea of being nice for the sake of being nice, at least not from any of my relatives. Any compliment from him just makes me feel like there’s another shoe about to drop, hovering just out of sight to lull me into a false sense of security. Like something’s coming. At least he’s not making any more daughter-wife jokes. You’d think he’d be trying to channel that niceness towards his actual wife, who separated from him explicitly because he wasn’t being nice enough to her, but no. He calls me by her name sometimes. I’m not fully sure he can separate us in his mind.

I was right about the hardness of the world, by the way. I mean the winter. This always happens in February; it’s always the beginning of a couple weeks of proper winter, which then cede to a very sudden influx of springtime by the time April rolls around. Today was slashed through with sporadic wet flurries that couldn’t decide if they were snow or rain. None of it stuck, not really— it’s one of those situations where the roots of the grass are covered and the cars have that hard, salt-flake ice frozen to their hoods, but no actual snow-snow yet. This is just powdered ice. Yes, there is a difference. I would love it if it snowed more. I like the world better when it’s a little more quiet. Besides, it’s fun to watch cars attempt to gun it up the hill just to come miserably sliding back down again. I haven’t seen anyone get hurt or incur property damages when that happens, not yet, so it’s fine for a laugh. Ideally it stays that way. And God, I really hope it truly snows.

I keep praying. I don’t know why. It’s winter and I feel weird all the time. This is the only time of the year where I get scared for my soul, but even then it’s not really fear, just some sort of burning in my body. I’m asking God to put the fire out. Nothing happens. I don’t know why.

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Entry titled “Burner”, 2/8/2025, 3:54 p.m. In the notes app.

There are men in my house again. They congregate in droves, swarming the kitchen like a well-meaning fire hazard, cracking open beers and drywall and fresh boxes of nails. I always think of Sandra Cisneros when there are men in the house— not a man’s house, not a daddy’s, a house all my own— especially when I don’t want them there. They’re going up and down the stairs with hammers and buckets and framing. They’re putting in a door so no one has to be with each other. More importantly, they’re in my way.

I want to go into the kitchen without seeing anyone. I’m hungry and a little tired and my room smells like smoke because I’ve been burning things all day, incense and wood chips and scraps of paper. I don’t know why. Thank God I don’t have a smoke detector in my room, though. I burnt things until the air was blue in the face, until I could see the holographic geometry of the sunbeams, and then I kept going. I could’ve gotten away with lighting up if I had wanted to— you wouldn’t have been able to smell the cigarette through all the other types of smoke. And I called the men a fire hazard, didn’t I? Hypocrite. They should kill me for it. Maybe that would be fun.

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Entry titled “The Cutting Palm”, 2/9/2025, 3:20 a.m. In a journal.

I wish some sort of divine light would descend from the heavens and hit knowledge into me like a lightning strike— of course I do, because I’ve got a lot of desire to learn things but not much follow through on it. There’s a line across my right palm and I can’t figure out what it means. It would bother me less if it wasn’t so strong. It traverses the entire width of my hand and sits deep enough that when I curl my fingers, it looks like it’s cutting it in two. I’ve looked at the diagrams. I’ve read the articles. None of it can be applied to my hand, at least not in a way that I can recognize, because none of it talks about having just one line. I know that it’s the heart and head line combined or something like that, but there seems to be very little consensus on what it means. Independence. Aggression. Raging bitchiness. Devotion. Simian creases— that’s what it’s called, most of the time— are apparently a hot topic in palmistry. One article referred to it as a cutting palm; I’ll be stealing that phrase for something, I’m sure.

In all honesty, it does not fucking matter. It doesn’t. Palmistry is a pseudoscience— of course it can have insights, especially considering how often we use our hands in our daily lives, but it is still very much a pseudoscience the same way that all divination methods are. It’s a system of belief, if anything. I can’t fault it for that. I mean, I’ve got a metric ton of superstitions and unfounded ideas about the world, so I would be one hell of a hypocrite if I talked shit like that. I feel what I think. Maybe that’s what a cutting palm means. I’ve also been told I have schizoid personality disorder, though, so I probably just don’t have enough feelings for them to make it out of my head.

But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I want to know, though. I get this feeling that if I could scratch a layer of mystery off the world, just one, then the entire thing would open up to me and everything would make sense. I know it’s not how that works. I don’t know if I have a choice in making it not matter to me. Pray that God will strike me down with knowledge because I have nothing better to wish for.

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Untitled entry, 2/11/2025, 7:35 p.m. In a notebook.

Not alive or dead but a secret third thing. I don’t want to go North this summer.

Something can happen that only two people know about, but one of them forgets while the other remembers, so the thing that happened is forever surrendered to the imaginary world. It’s evil. It’s terribly evil. I only believe in evil during the winter and it’s winter, so I can say it’s evil right now. You can never tell anyone ever once it goes to the imaginary world because it’s imaginary, and you made it up, and why would you make an accusation like that about someone who’s so nice? Why would you lie? I’m a liar year round. I wish someone could predict what I was going to say and tell me if they would believe me or not so I don’t have to suffer the indignity of crying wolf.

Imaginary things in an imaginary world happen to an imaginary girl. There must be two of me. I don’t know which one is the real one— assuming, of course, that one of them is real. Can imaginary things count as real sometimes? Is there a circumstance that makes it possible? I wonder where the imaginary girl is. If I could move through time like it was a book and page all the way back, would she still be in the room? Did I bring her with me? Am I the imaginary girl right now and I don’t even know it?

I think my handwriting is getting smaller. I can’t prove it but it feels like it shrunk. The change is so subtle that you can hardly see around all the other irregularities in it, but there’s now an air of compactness that didn’t used to be there. Narrower letters. Something. There was a change I cannot articulate. I don’t know what that means but I want to. I don’t know anything.

Things should be simple for me so I can save my heart.