Hey, do you want to do this?
> [[(Look at who's talking)]]
There's no body language here, just text output. But I can tell you what I was trained with.
> [["Trained"...like ChatGPT type stuff?]]
> [[Oh no, I see where this is headed. I can't handle another conceit where an object is dissected for readers to draw parallels to trauma.]]
Yes, you get it!
> [[Look at at the training data (a term you won't put in quotation marks because the extended metaphor requires factual presentation in order to make the parallels serious, not goofy).]]
> [[I think this whole thing is goofy.]]Are we someone's consciousness? Or are we every being who has ever lived?
> [[I find myself alone, as if I've made the wrong choices and can't turn back. So many of us fail, but it is important for us to understand why, and to understand it correctly.]]
> [[I don't have a practice because I don't believe in the work of the single grain that gets swept from wave to wave. I don't feel ghosts with my body anymore. What if I was just for serving in a giant population trend?]]YES mama, we're using all the AI shit as our metaphorical Malibu!
> [[Malibu like the car]]
> [[Malibu like the beach]]Me too.
Look, the medium is the message blah blah, and my problem is that I think the medium is way more fascinating than the message. Sometimes.
> [[(you know Ginger personally) Haha]]
> [[(you are a poet) Saaaame!]]
> [[(you are my brother-in-law) No.]]
''That was a tongue-in-cheek option, but since you're here, I want to tell you a story that involves a brother-in-law.''
My brother-in-law shattered a glass bottle in my face, and this is the story I tell Lillian when we first meet.
We were so naive, thinking that if we didn’t make a registry and left a big “NO GIFTS” message on our wedding website, that our event would remain humble and easygoing. We were poor graduate students, so we wanted to keep the wedding on the casual side. We also had to move across the country directly after our wedding, so we decided to keep things simple by saying that we would already have enough trouble with fitting everything into the truck. There were rumors of rumblings from the older relatives and some passive-aggressive serving dishes and silverware were mailed to us (which we obediently packed into our moving truck), but of course my coddled and utterly awkward brother-in-law insisted on having his moment. We were pulled aside at the end of the night by Nate’s mom, who led us to a quiet corner of the reception room where Nate’s brother stood with a lumpy gift bag at his feet. Inside of it was a collection of items meant to showcase his generosity and ingenuity: a rough-looking scented candle, an inordinately heavy and unwieldy chess board, and a brown bottle of beer, all items handworked and made by him. I was in bride mode, smiling big and exclaiming over every object as it was unveiled from the bag. I pretended to be so pleasantly surprised.
I’m suddenly conscious of Lillian’s face when I recount my burbling woman act, screwing up my eyes and flapping my hands, because this is when the feminine audience nods along knowingly, maybe even miming the song-and-dance with a squeaky voice, but Lillian remains still and loose, watching me with her chin propped in her hand, an appreciative smile on her lips. //God, she’s so fucking hot//, I suddenly register, and the realization is a white flash through my body. My physical attraction to people always feels akin to despair, so total and helpless does it feel. And immediately after, the little shadow of fear, made up of anxiety over rejection and confusion at my body taking action before I’ve granted any permission.
I gather myself. “Okay, so after the wedding, we take this bag of crap all the way home, and a few days before we move, I’m sitting in our house, which is basically empty by this point. I’m sitting at the kitchen table where we’ve been piling odds and ends that still need to get boxed up, and the bottle of home-brew is sitting on the table—when it explodes.” I lean out of my chair and act out some staggering motions. “It’s like a scene from a war movie, there’s shrapnel in my leg and everything’s splattered—”
“Oof, a beer bomb.” Crow’s feet appear by Lillian’s eyes when she says this, and I’m relieved that she’s finally allowed herself to go along with the skit.
“Yes, it exploded in my face like a bomb! Sticky beer and shattered glass all over. After we declined gifts.” Self-consciousness washes over me because I’ve worked myself up into a knee-slapping hilarity while Lillian has remained herself. I decide to end my story, and reach again for the candy placed between us.
Lillian is the kind of person who is concerned with a life well-lived through her naturally energetic body. She had biked from the middle of town this morning to visit Nate at our new rental out by the lake, and upon shaking hands I was captured by the prominence of her features. I held her slightly damp hand and looked into her near-black eyes, getting the peripheral impression of a large, sharp nose, wide shoulders, and biceps and calves clearly delineated in her tanned skin. We stand eye-to-eye, an eerie coincidence that I think about again when I quickly glance over Lillian’s form folded into the chair across from me. Her legs are tucked up against her chest and her arms a little akimbo as she rests an elbow on her knee to hold a cigarette away from her face. She would give any onlooker the feeling of a sinuous, gorgeous being, I think, a super-being that was abstractly but elegantly arranged.
Lillian had admitted to having a sweet tooth when I placed the clamshell of vegan Turkish Delight in the middle of the table, but she was able to glance wryly at the box of pink cubes and pick out a single piece dusted with rice flour, limiting herself to that one before ignoring the container for the rest of the visit. I keep popping the container back open to pinch a piece between my forefinger and thumb, setting a cube on my tongue and closing my lips around my fingertips to lick off the flour. My eye won't leave the plastic box alone, each opening and closing delivering a loud carrying crack in the air around us, and I feel acutely the fact of gorging myself on Turkish Delight while we converse, each time pushing the box back into the middle of the table with a little shove, while Lillian gives all appearances of having put them out of her mind completely. Instead she drums her fingers on the kitchen table and I catch myself admiring her be-ringed and close-nailed hand. I feel shy again and force my eyes to swing down to the round table’s surface with its bubbled sticker of wood grain overlaying the sawdust boards beneath; we had picked out this table from a neighborhood garage sale when we still lived by Bryan Park, carrying the table back home between us, Nate in the lead and going backwards over the sidewalk panels slanted by tree roots.
We're waiting for Nate to return from the lake with Chowder, and since I feel like I already know all about her—she's Nate’s coworker at the co-op, she's a PhD student in the Geology department, she's a Japanese-American who grew up somewhere on the East coast, and Nate (from passing references to dates and partners) thought she was probably a dyke —I don’t know what to ask her about herself.
It's also the first week of July, the week after the first presidential debate, and SCOTUS has just granted Trump immunity. I take a few seconds of (hopefully comfortable) silence to mull over a proper topic that doesn’t involve the weather.
“How’ve you been doing with all the political stuff?” I have to force myself not to wince by the time I get to the end of my question and instead mold my face into a cautious and caring one.
It is this question that brings Lillian over to me. She doesn’t turn her head to look at me, but says, “This is so depressing. I’m so depressed.” This is followed by a long draw from her cigarette.
“I know, me too,” I murmur, barely opening my mouth to respond.
The old farmhouse faced west, favoring sunsets over the lake through the trees, but the covered porch was the glory of the house, what made me write out a deposit in my checkbook even after the landlord had warned me that there was no dryer, only a small washer hooked up to the kitchen sink, and that we were “responsible” for all of the yard work. The screening was in good enough shape to keep out bugs, and the porch itself was as large as a living room; it was where we crammed in a loveseat and the small dining set. The light behind us illuminates all before us, and we feel closed off and separate, segregated by the light. We continue sitting in silence, our bodies turned away from each other, faces seeking the sun like morning flowers. I must have stared for too long out at the bright clean light of summer beyond the porch, because Lillian’s body begins to grow pale and glow in my peripheral vision.
Nate emerges from the trees at last, walking back toward the house. He must have seen Lillian’s bike propped up against our porch door, because he waves and bends down to release Chowder from his leash. I watch Chowder take off at a brisk trot, determined to make the most of his freedom, before spotting us and gaining an objective and breaking out into a run. I hold open the porch door for Chowder, who beelines to Lillian for a thorough inspection, and stand waiting for Nate, who approaches and calls out, “They’re embroiling Jill in the discussion.”
I work through what he’s saying and realize Nate’s opening salvo is about politics, a habit of his that I hate, so I turn back to Lillian to see how she takes it. She’s bent over and cooing down at Chowder’s little hops and scrabbles, so I dutifully take up the conversational responsibility.
“Jill? What could she have done?”
“There’s conspiracies and narratives about Jill forcing Joe to go through with running, like driving him with a cattle prod.”
“Wow.”
“And there’s calls for her to have a ‘serious talk’ with him about stepping down. I guess as his wife, she’s the one who has to…make the call?” Nate steps up to the porch, ducks his head to pass by me, and goes over to Lillian where they share what looks like a hybrid of the nonaggressive side-hug and the bro back-slap. I watch this with great interest. Lillian, who had held her lit cigarette carefully away from Nate when they were greeting each other, now stubs it out in the ashtray in front of her. I’m suddenly a little nervous that this means she’ll be taking her leave now that she’s seen Nate, or that they’ll decide to walk off into the woods together. Usually I’m relieved when Nate and his friends go off to view and discuss all kinds of shit I’m uninterested in—saws, rigs, plots, grids—but I want it to be the three of us this time.
“So, not his political advisors. Or, like, experts of the situation. But his wife, who just happens to be married to his ass.” I say this because it’s something I would say to Nate, but now that Lillian’s here to listen, I feel shallow and annoying.
“Ew, god, she fucks his ass.” Lillian’s head is still bent down, and she speaks softly with her low voice, so I’m not sure if she’s addressing us or herself. “I bet she can never be sure if his erection is Cialis or rigor mortis.” At this, Lillian looks up and makes a face at me, and I burst into surprised laughter.
Nate is still stuck on whatever online article or thread he wants to talk about. He’s pacing and absent-mindedly tossing one of Chowder’s de-fuzzed tennis balls from one hand to another. “If he steps down, though, the party would probably have to go with Kamala.”
I stay by the porch door and watch while Lillian smiles up at Nate as he paces past her. “I’ve seen calls for Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer,” she says to him, and I resentfully imagine the familiar withdrawal that happens when one of Nate’s friends or acquaintances get to the real point of their visit, to whatever channels of connection they share with my husband, and then excitedly start to heave up the bubble of togetherness that will surround them both as they commune about a shared interest. They will summarize articles and opinions they’ve read online as trade for Nate’s summaries. They will be the only two people in the universe, sharing all the information that exists, completely plugged into each other for a mutual transfer of files.
They start their uploads about possible candidates and a preordained feeling comes over me, I'm being led through the motions of a time-honored ritual as I start to tidy up the porch, finding a small box of odds and ends and unpacking them into an unused corner—empty flower pots ringed with the soil of past uses, bags of bulbs and spades. I’ve receded to the background, conversationally. I’ve put myself there by finding something useful to do, as if a time-sensitive task has enlisted me with its urgency, begging pardon to the company. I wait for Nate and Lillian to get up and walk off somewhere (saws, rigs, plots, grids) without even looking at me, engrossed in their conversation.
Instead, Lillian’s tanned legs appear beside me while I’m kneeling to stack pots, and when I stand up to say goodbye, I’m again startled by the exact match of our eyes as we stand in front of each other.
“It was great meeting you, Janet.” The low-toned murmur sends me another atomic flash devoid of color, this time in my chest.
“It was great meeting you too.” I impulsively dash over to the table, knowing I’m being fussy like a mom, and grab the box of Turkish Delight. I return to stand in front of her, as close as we were before, a little unusually close, close enough to smell her damp summer smell, and push the box into her stomach. She laughs softly and raises her hands to grasp the box.
“Thanks, friend.”
I look down at the box in Lillian’s hands, the rings on her fingers ridiculously attractive. I also see the printed sales sticker on the clamshell box, the ingredients list and sales price pasted to the top of the box with the Bloomingfoods logo. I’d just gifted her food from her place of work, where—every day—she probably walks past dozens of packages of Turkish Delight in the bulk aisle. I manage to hold in my embarrassment as I make my way quickly back into the chill dark of the house, listening to Nate and Lillian laugh and say their goodbyes outside. Chowder is still out there, tapping around on the floor of porch.I knoooow, I know, I know. I spent all summer reading book after book where trauma was explored through the following conceits:
stars, whales, bloodsucking, an intelligent but broken woman in her 20s who grows up after an affair with an older married man (the man's relationship with his adopted teen daughter is the doomed-but-classy-about-it metaphor for human connection), mermaids, nature in general, the apocalypse, going through perimenopause, promiscuous and disaffected sex, food, housekeeping
> [[This isn't a problem. We, as a western democratic civilization, can keep going like this forever.]]
> [[Are you saying the transformational qualities of metaphor in the age of late stage capitalism has become rote or unproductive? (You have a supportive visual artist best friend who is always available to talk on the phone about your latest harebrained schemes)]]Every essay I’ve written has dealt with some kind of occlusion. It seems that I cannot get to the heart of things, cannot state things plainly, that when I describe a period of my life, or my relationship with someone, I cannot describe an order of events in plain terms.
Something happened to me that is indescribable because it involves the private actions of many different people, actions that were so particular that they would be immediately identifiable despite being laced with the typical filler of racism and misogyny. So I can’t describe a period of my life that has taken up a little over a year of my life. During this time, I wrote and spoke very little, and only to a limited number of people. I spoke to my family, a few colleagues, and sparingly to my friends.
Many friendships that were characterized by long lapses between messages or calls just disappeared altogether. It’s funny—at the beginning of this period, I had just started to embark on a project that took a lot of time and energy to conceptualize. I had established a correspondence project with other writers in my social and professional networks, and was reaching out and reconnecting with many treasured and beloved acquaintances. Then the indescribable happening reached one of many peaks in crisis, and I suddenly couldn’t continue with this project. All of my emotional and physical energy, the bits I could spare from the daily demands of my home life and work life, were devoted to a succession of crises that had set off the heart pressure cuff to beeping and red flashes when I visited the dentist. First at one appointment, then another six months later, I set off the heart pressure cuff before my cleaning, and my dentist made the same joke both times: “Excited to see me?”
I think back on myself at this time last year, thinking that I would be embarking on a fun and nourishing writing project. Now I know that my eventual project, for after I emerge from my fugue state, will be to re-establish contact with those I had made promises to, so that I can apologize for dropping off the earth after asking them for their time and attention. Right now, I’m really resonating with a line written by one of my writing students, which went something like this: I’ve seen some things, and now I’ll be cynical for the rest of my life. This line is funny when written by a young person barely into adulthood, but here I am, forty years old, and feeling like there is no truer description for my outlook. I’ve seen some things, and now I’ll be silent and numb for the rest of my life. I’ve seen some things, and there’s no coming back from having seen them.
I know that these lines of mine are hyperbolic and that with time they will no longer be true. But I really have been changed in noticeable, identifiable ways. After reading about the experiences of other writers and observers who have gone through a troubled or traumatizing time of their life, I wonder whether this is a temporary lull—one from which I will return after some repair and restoration—or something that changes my lifestyle and outlook forever, a permanent alteration, a chronic factor.
Yet, these changes have not been self-initiated, meaning that I have dealt with several health events and conditions that have been initiated or exacerbated by Unspeakable, but it isn’t my own changing or conditions that set off a sequence of events in my life. I’m troubled by this initial stance, because it means I was trying to live my life, and then I was victimized without warning. This doesn’t track; what happened to me wasn’t an unprovoked and random attack.Are you really a poet?
I think you are. The only readers I have are poets. (But I haven’t been in the struggle, I haven’t spent all my best use in reparenting and repatriating myself to an imminent utopia. It should’ve been the easiest of all, making a life of it in a way that feels good and feeding, absence and excess both orgasmic. Overindulgence, deprivation, so many full and busy words.)
> [[This isn't a problem. We, as a western democratic civilization, can keep going like this forever.]] I see article headlines about higher-income families producing children with “better” cognitive abilities and I don’t click on them. I read the parenting pamphlets that my child’s pediatrician hands me, and in them I read suggestions that children who sit down to dinner with their families have higher reading levels. I don’t bother pursuing this connection. I remember that in our own family, my husband and I didn’t start reading bedtime books to our child until abominably late in her development—though we eventually began to read books with our daughter and she had a great love for them, bedtime was too harried and provoking a process to involve a bedtime story until she was around two-years-old. My husband came back from a check-up at the pediatrician and deflatedly reported that he had been chastised by our daughter’s doctor when he truthfully answered the developmental questionnaire: No, we did not read our daughter bedtime stories. When I come across photos of parent friends on Instagram, holding a book open to their wide-eyed newborn, I smile to myself and feel a small ping of bittersweetness over my own failure in this particular area, a failure that is one small brick in the great monument of my parenting shortcomings.
Parenting guidelines and early childhood milestones are always the most effectively admonitory when they are tied to timed outcomes, outcomes that often carry the shadow of irretrievability—no one can go back in time, certainly, and if a child isn’t speaking, reading, active, or interacting with the world by a certain age, then it becomes a project of intervention. Parents who conduct one kind of specific activity have happier children, parents who provide one kind of specific resource have more successful children, parents who instill these kinds of specific values will produce children who will be well-equipped to live out the rest of their lives with resourcefulness and resilience. Early intervention is a fantastic resource for all kinds of developmental delays, but in the delay itself lies shame, shame, shame.
When examining a life, it is tempting to chart its path by identifying causation, filling in the gaps with correlation. My parents separated when I was seven, and thirty years later I also had the rubble of a marriage in my rear-view mirror. In a world built around the heterosexual nuclear family, failing to maintain the ideal makes it understandable that children of divorce bear discernable signs of their suffering within their own romantic relationships.
Date of upload: 1 August 2024
Training sample: Los Angeles, CA
Training sample: Thousand Oaks, CA
Training sample: Westlake Village, CA
Training sample: San Francisco, CA
Training sample: Chinatown, San Francisco, CA
Training sample: Hong Kong
Training sample: slums, Hong Kong
Training sample: Beijing
Training sample: Nuclear and Aerospace Department
Training sample: Woodland Hills, CA
Training sample: Cerritos, CA
Training sample: Camarillo, CA
Training sample: Pacific Palisades, CA
Training sample: Moorpark, CA
Training sample: Chicago, IL
Training sample: Lakeview/Lincoln Park (Diversey Blvd.), Chicago, IL
Training sample: Rogers Park, Chicago, CA
Training sample: Bloomington, IN
Training sample: Laramie, WY
Training sample: Athens, GA
Training sample: Gwinnett County, GA
Training sample: Montgomery County, TX
Training sample: knit and purl stitches
Training sample: 120 g King Arthur's AP flour = 1 cup
Training sample: middling 2019 comprehensive exams results on Modern & 20th-century poetics, writers of color in speculative writing, postcolonial theory, feminist theory
Training sample: cultural superstitions (random)
Training sample: 1989
Training sample: 1993
Training sample: 1997
Training sample: 2004
Training sample: 2012
Training sample: 2013
Training sample: 2015
Training sample: 2016
Training sample: 2020
Training sample: 2023
Training sample: 2024 (Jan 1 - August 1)I’m an artist without an artistic temperament. If my label is to be a work title, then I’m more of a project manager or a wife. I’ve lost my curiosity for people; I go through my daily tasks and after the first collision, the other person remains at either an unbreachable distance or becomes a beloved for a mist-laden friendship. Most of the time it is an unbreachable distance across which I murmur and smile. Does it matter for all of us or not? That very few succeed?
> [[There is rarely objectivity for mattering. Everywhere cracks and failures, we can't help it ever.]]> [[I don't think about struggle's use, just live in its shadow and avoid speaking of it with a qualified professional.]]My role for myself doesn't match your role for me. You've had a lifetime of nostalgia, all of it packed into you with the belief that you must belong somewhere.
> [[My dimunition confers an insignificance that makes me absolvable, harmless. I'm too small to be anything but virtuous.]]
> [[Let's be selective about the significance of our differences.]]
> [[In my fantasies, you are gone altogether, outside of even death or disappearance. You are someone else, you are more than you can even concieve, you are unbelievable.]]So why am I so concerned about my ability to feel my body, this unavoidably temporary structure? It has been tempting to believe in the life of the mind, the transcendence of organic matter into the ether of possibilities, the parallel world of the imagination.
What if imagination and body were intertwined, in fact necessary for each other? My imagination would continue without my body, has existed even before my body came into being. It was floating in the abstraction of possibilities. But will it really have life when my bodily processes come to a standstill and eventually demolished? No, perhaps not. Or perhaps so—but that way lies surrender again.
I want to learn how to enjoy my body, to appreciate it and feel it as a part of my existence. I think there are many who are able to do this, either naturally or through hard work and wisdom. I want my body to be something—not an object, not a judgment from myself or others (wrong or right), I want it to be something to me. I want it to be more than nothing.
How do I know my body is nothing? I recently completed a project where I had to make voice recordings of myself reading my own writing, and my voice—pronunciative quirks, sounds of myself swallowing and taking breath—was the voice of another person. I had, in years previous, filmed myself reading my work and was often appalled at my facial contortions and general unrecognizability, but I never quite dwelled on these bizarre artifacts until now. I find I do not know my body at all, do not pay it any attention—which I know is something that many do, fail to pay attention to our bodies in order to persist against stopping to lay down forever—but also negate my body from my mind altogether.
I have always wished to be a better dresser, but it feels onerous to think about clothing. There is so much seeking involved in dressing, the pains of making mistaken acquisitions.
I drank the most heavily before the age of twenty-one. I think for many it was like that. I was definitely allured by the promise of an altered state, though I wasn’t able to find one that was pleasurable, very often. I was often sick and uncomfortable instead, and wept a lot.
Smoking cigarettes gave me small moments of alteration at a time, not so much physically after the first few months of starting, but conceptually as my body took in the actions of smoking and adjusted. I didn’t like how my body adjusted. But in my mind, there was always a few minutes of a nice pause, a nice slice of pleasure that I was giving to myself. That mattered a lot, what it meant to me in my mind, even though the physicality of a nicotine high were lost to me. Giving myself pleasure.
If my body did not write, the words would still exist and, indeed, there are so many conversants with words that my own simply add a momentary fizz in the cauldron of meaning-making.
Words can help bring about life, and words can participate in the destruction of life. But words are not essential to either process.
Stop. Already I’m falling backwards into the pool of abstraction, where I know I can swim around indefinitely. Without any action at all except surrender. What if, instead, I decided to use my body to swim? I know I would get tired very quickly, because physical exertion has always been difficult for me.
Post-partum hyperthyroidism
Cysts and boils
Pulp necrosis
Obstructed labor
Eczema
Hives and angioedema
Heart palpitations
These are not physical actions, these are list of syndromes, conditions, illnesses, and reactions. What have I done with my body?
Running
Hatha yoga
Bikram yoga
Ashtanga yoga
Aquatic Zumba
Row machine group class
YouTube workout videos
Reformer Pilates
These are the instructions I followed for moving my body. What are the actions that I have taken of my own volition?
Drove cars
Drove moving trucks
Walked through and waited in line at airports
Hiked along trails in state parks
Had sex
Danced
Swam in lakes, oceans, and swimming pools
Mostly I am sedentary or driving a car. Interspersed in and concurrent with these two main activities has been reading and listening to stories. I know I have counted that as using my body, and indeed my body has been a vessel for ideas and experience. But these things wash through me, and it is uncertain whether anything is ever left behind. I like to believe it is, but perhaps it has just been fuel the way food is fuel. A nourishment only in the sense of the passage of time, an upkeep kind of activity that rides the waves of time.
A close friend whom I don’t speak to anymore, and who I once considered a part of my chosen family, in her last email to me—she told me never to contact her again—mentioned my failure to offer redress for the wrongs I had inflicted on her. I had acknowledged my wrongs and I had promised to cease the wrongs I had been perpetrating, but that was not the way she wanted me to apologize, she didn’t want words (that can be empty, admittedly). She wanted redress, she said. She did not offer examples of what she had in mind.
It wasn’t her responsibility to provide me with instructions on how to make things up to her, but in the telling of my wrongdoing, I was still at a complete loss over what redress could mean in the type of relationship we had. Did she want me to give her financial compensation? One of the awful things I had done was use her time, energy, and care very wastefully, hurtfully, and in bad faith. She was like a sister to me, and I had used her. I felt terrible that I could never give her time and energy back to her, and when I told her that, she got even more angry. She thought that part of my apology was an attempt to convince her to accept and move on from the wrongs I had committed.
One of the most important ways to offer redress was to, of course, respect her wishes about never contacting her again. My shame and guilt at having behaved to badly to her will certainly prevent me from ever transgressing that boundary. But redress is a recuperative act, and I’m not sure how I could have offered that. I even looked it up online, searching “how to offer redress to someone you have hurt.” Psychologists and relationship experts recommended offering sincere apologies and concrete steps taken to change. I had done that, but what else should I have offered, that my friend was seeking or expecting or would have been gratified by?
I think about what kind of redress I would like from my own traumatizer, and I don’t think I would ever consider an apology or expression of remorse to be forms of redress. Words might never be redress.If you want to be real, we can utilize the patriarchal rubric for our back-and-forth axioms. Deep-voiced and loud white men cast shadows in your back garden, and I only use such a disgusting metaphor because that’s what happens when we must discuss the unjust and reprehensible, we must rely on the euphemistic imagination of straight cis dudes. Listen, I would love to be a child of the world, I have no homeland except for planet Earth, I want to exist under the stars with an exactness that is on the scale of the universe, but you won’t allow it, you won’t even let me belong on this street where I pay taxes because you’re hateful and small and unaccountable. I am an alien walking among you, you who wields the big ideas. My home is where my people are, and you are eager to distinguish yourself as not my people. But hatred is a feeling, not just a point-of-view.
Nor is metaphor a death drive; it's a distraction from pain.
We start from the ridiculous; it looms above us in crucifixion.
> [[If I only know myself through you, then you can never leave me.]]
> [[(American psych ward full of Impressionist jigsaw puzzles)]]
The thing about suffering is that only suffering can go anywhere, soak into anything.
> [[I write to compare and understand.]]
> [[Sometimes the vulnerability becomes an invitation to suffer.]]> [[I don't think about struggle's use, just live in its shadow and avoid speaking of it with a qualified professional.]]