Diary 08
11.29.20
People used to dress up in church clothes to fly. I’d like to think that strangers talked to one another or read quietly while they waited at their gates. Everyone at the airport now is buried in a cell phone, only small children and an elderly couple are looking up. Feels like we’re perpetuating our own loneliness during this pandemic.
12.08.20
I lit sage before I wrote this morning and my bedroom turned into a cloud. I would look up after a couple of sentences and it would be thicker, mushrooming smoke that made me feel like I was being transported somewhere, and when it finally dissipated would open onto my place of work or Chicago or a rioting crowd or heaven. I ended up setting the fire alarm off. Immediately present again, in my bedroom.
12.11.20
Dreamt of rolling rain clouds over a brilliant gold wheat field. The color of the wheat resembled a summer day, a shade that would logically only appear in direct sunlight, but the sky that I dreamt of churned with a thunderstorm in rich blues and greys. This made the grasses aureate. It was I don’t know how many seconds of a still frame, wheat and sky swelling with the energy of the storm.
12.19.20
I dreamt that I was watching a black-and-white documentary about the relationship between food and sex, in which the narrator claimed that a couple’s longevity is directly correlated to the meals they share. Ice cream was favorably mentioned at some point.
12.23.20
My dad picked me up from O’hare and drove me back to his house, which I hadn’t visited in a year. It was after dark when I landed and we rode on the highway past the fluorescent lights of gas stations and fast food chains that reproduced the surroundings of a highway in California, made the first few minutes of the ride feel like an extension of my drive home from work the evening before. My sense of time and place blended and distorted; my dad in the driver’s seat, the I-5 South, my truck, Woodfield Mall, the luggage in the backseat, a conversation about dinner with my siblings, my roommates and I drinking wine around the dining room table, flat mountainous land. The night cloaked everything alongside the road as we neared the town that I grew up in so that it was difficult to make out my surroundings, ostensibly could not have pinpointed where we were or possibly knew the directions home, though it was in this moment that I experienced the function of memory. The light closed in around us but the silhouettes outside of my window became recognizable. I looked at everything in the dark and could name what it was without real sight, could probably describe in detail the shadow that I was looking at as it would appear in broad daylight. That graveyard and that forest preserve, that high school and that country club, that friend’s house and that old farmhouse. Their subdued outlines were not mere possibilities of their existence, but very concrete, very specific to my experience of them in the past. I was gently washed in nostalgia and reminded that I was really home.
12.26.20
The axe is lean and heavy. Swung it over my head and stuck it either right through the log or into the stump that it was propped on. My dad looks strong as he winds up and slams down, the tool natural in his hands. He made a fire and we sat around it in bundles of outerwear, only rosy cheeks and rheumy eyes exposed, drank a beer and talked about camping and family and anxiety. I couldn’t feel how cold I was until I was sitting on the shower floor, scalding water warming every numb limb.
