i wake past noon in the summers,
my covers a hypnic womb.
i am expelled
- dazed, and a child again -
but only for a brief time.
from the moment my dry eyes pry open i feel that fire beating on my windows. i have not heard a single person say that they’re having a good time in a long time, though memories of many moons ago persist to prop up the spirit for another cycle. it is summer in australia and i am depressed. in dreams i am being betrayed by my closest confidants and in my waking hours, staring at the walls processing these wounds. there is an anger, a bubbling rage that has kept me from writing. i wake with an itch to remove these petty fantasies and girlish upsets from my stomach as if surgically, as if with stainless steel forceps and a pair of filthy hands, but the shape of what i could find causes me to avert my eyes in shame.
the resentment which festers upon the high hand dealt
deals only in the passage of time, and the dust that may gather
this is my second summer this year. these blistering breezes make my heart ache for the quiet plains of rural Virginia, where it felt we were driving just a little too fast in a still place, like the mountains dotting the horizon would never catch us. new york was standing still in a wavepool, making private islands of busy street corners to light up. you’d have to lean closer to talk in my ear, lest the pure inertia of the pavement pushes you along. my apartment has felt like an opium den. the air thick with rising heat and cigarette smoke and i have not left it in days. i work on the phone, i make love on the phone, i pick fights with my friend Sam on the phone. ive been particularly unwell, not just in spirit. i cough and wake in cold sweats. my body feels beautiful but foreign, hair long enough now that when it brushes against my lower back, for a second im not quite sure who it belongs to. just a few inches more and it’ll cover my breasts, and i’d feel wild and mermaidian if only this life hadn’t deigned my soles dirtbound. im all bite lately.
all i write lately comes back to this need to clear the air, to unplug the drain. in my minds eye i see this animated scene; all my desires are piled high against the ceiling, this neat pillar of white copy paper. this draft (the one i am writing now and that you are also reading now, but in the future), lays on top and completely compresses the stack downward with its mass or its density or something. with its feeling, asshole. the urgency of a feeling consumes its subject matter, and it bled into everything i wrote. this time, into everything thought and ate and dreamt. i found myself petulant. in bed until the sun relented and then in bed until it was bedtime. the corners of my mind felt damp. moulding in the heat. festering.
is it our job to feel good all the time? its difficult to articulate hurtful emotions, as they dissipate as soon as i am brave enough to approach them. i can’t help but suspect that i’d feel more romantic in my misery if it were autumn. if i were running a bath, or collecting firewood, wearing my favourite coat and steeping tea. i’d probably have no problem writing then, i might even have the gall to feel beautiful doing it. but here i was scared of the paper, scared of the pen, and as the year drew ever nearer to its conclusion i felt this mounting pressure to produce something profound and final - but December always feels like it fades out rather than hard cuts, and this one, more so than those that came before it, i truly have no idea what the next might look like. i don’t need to convince you that i’m happy, but i do have to confess to being miserable. soon i won’t be, and i’ll make something beautiful for you then, and it mightn’t even be about the act of wringing it from my hair.
LOVE THIS SO FIRE!!! delicious words