Diary 21

SECRET SPOT
A place in my memory that I’ve been going to frequently. On days strangled by stress I withdraw into a sanctum in my past, a blissful memory, which gives me a calm that feels like wading into a warm pool. I’ve preserved this one memory so well, that it exists like an open world video game. Though the place that I’m in, and the person that I’m with in it remain the same, my ability to move and explore within the environment is limitless. I’ve even started to get excited for bed, knowing that I can retreat to this moment in time and live in it as I fall asleep. Of course this is escapism, but is there anything wrong with that?


BURNING BEAUTY
((“Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.” ~Yukio Mishima))
A short list of recent beauties:
-Incessantly lighting incense & sage whenever I’m home, writing in a cloud of smoke.
-Returned to an interview with Ocean Vuong that stuns me every, single, time.
A Life Worthy Of Our Breath
-”Love is something which dies and when dead it rots and becomes soil for a new love. Then the dead love continues its secret life in the living one, and thus in reality there is no death in love.” Pär Lagerkvist, “The Dwarf” (1944)
-”I tear my sore and aching hands
on the hills and darkened woods,
on the black iron of sky” Pär Lagerkvist, “Ångest” (1916)
-”But glorious glorious spring came on each year in roses veiled though stinging sorrow found our hearts and whitened our cheeks, One day you knelt before the King, one night your courage failed and then you drank salvation out of mountains, hills and creeks. Come out when storm is raging in the fruit and willow trees, Look at the burning skies of spring…” Dan Andersson, “Till Min Syster” (1917)


STATEMENT PIECE
My girlfriends and I didn’t plan for Halloween this year. We last minute scoured our closets and made costumes out of clothes we already had, then doused ourselves in fake blood. I’m still soaking the white Edwardian blouse I (irresponsibly) chose to wear.


A TASTE
Fish Vindaloo, a Goan dish comprised of salmon, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, vinegar, and chili sauce.


A SIGHT
Low-hanging fog draped over train tracks and wiry trees alongside the road. 


A SOUND
Twanging electric guitars.


A SCENT
Sweet orange & clove in my essential oil diffuser.


A FEELING
Enswathed in my velvet comforter after a hot shower. I like to keep my window open so that sharp, cold air blows over the cocoon that I’ve made.


THROES
Barbed nostalgia. The kind that enchantingly distracts the head, but hurts the heart. I’ve been reminiscing to make real heartache a little more bearable.


TABLEAU IN NATURE
I have a neighbor in my apartment complex that has enlivened her patio with hummingbird feeders, hanging plants & wind chimes. It’s an oasis amidst the grey that most other neighbors live in, a grey that I’ve known in homes past.
When money was tight we never stayed in one place for very long. We would rent a house until it drained us of our cash, then would move elsewhere for a little bit cheaper. As we continued to move year after year, the homes gradually got smaller, as did our belongings. I put my clothes in garbage bags and slept on a mattress on the floor. My mom, with gentle determination, would give my sister and I an IKEA magazine and tell us to circle the furniture that we’d like in our bedroom, though we never had the money to fully inhabit a home.
This kind of grey is palpable in my apartment complex now; in moving trucks, furniture by the dumpster, empty patios save for beer cans & ashtrays. It’s a familiar emptiness that tells me about the homes I had in my childhood; spaces only half lived in, transitory.
And so the past few times I’ve passed my neighbor’s patio, which is usually while doing laundry at the end of the day, I’ve seen three or four hummingbirds darting between the ruby-colored feeders, illuminated by moonlight, and I watch them drink the sugar water and flit around the hanging plants. I watch them behave on the lush patio like I’m watching them from the middle of the forest, not where the upstairs neighbors are smoking meaty cigars, and the trash bags by the dumpster are full of old clothes. They tell me about what it’s like to make a home. And in the moonlight, with my laundry basket propped on my hip, they’re vespers for the body I’m inhabiting, the sanctuary I’m creating, and the Earth that I live on. All of which are homes to me.

Stains from flowers on my dining room table that sprinkle their yellow pollen everywhere.