Diary 30

”You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?” 》Friedrich Nietzsche

I keep on telling myself, someday soon I’ll burn it all on the side of the road. The side of the “open road,” I call it, which to me means that it’ll receive anything I offer it.

The first time I ever felt the urge, I didn’t have anything to light. I was at a bar, listening to some hillbilly talk about “how women are designed to be submissive, how women nowadays don’t have any respect” and I needed a fire. I don’t know what my intention was, whether I wanted to light him on fire or the entire bar or the napkin his beer was sitting on, but I dug around in my pockets, hoping to find a lighter, but only retrieved a bobby pin. ”Fucking hell,” I mumbled behind my teeth. Later that night I dreamt I had pulled a ten-dollar bill from my wallet, lit it on fire, and left it on the counter.

A couple weeks later, a man approaches me at the gas station. I’m leaned up against the side of my truck, watching the numbers increase, waiting to stop the pump once it reaches fifty bucks. I can feel his gaze long before I’m looking at his face. “What’s your name princess? Most men don’t like women with tattoos, but I sure like yours.” Again, the urge to start a fire. This time I had a lighter in my pocket, but considered the fact that we were at a gas station, where I could blow the whole place up pretty quick. Instead, I stopped the pump, right around thirty-six bucks, got in my truck, started the engine and lit a cigarette between my lips as I drove away.

Late April, I wake up in the middle of the night to red lights flashing on the wall. I’d parked in the fire lane. Having slept completely naked I threw on an oversized t-shirt and ran outside, keys in hand, begging the driver to Just please let me move my truck. I watched him trace my bare legs with his eyes. “Show me what’s underneath and I let you off,” he said in broken English, and I let the fire rise within me before I pulled the lighter out of my pocket, held out the open flame in front of me.

I often felt, driving the open road, (have been for awhile now), that surrendering to the part of me that wanted to start fires would guarantee me my righteous freedom. Because truthfully, that’s what I’ve been after on this drive all along. So one evening I’m eating a burger with one hand and steering with the other, going to reach for a napkin, and without hesitating I set down the burger and take out my lighter. I don’t think this time, I just do it. I hold the flame to the corner of the napkin, watch the fire engulf the brown paper tissue, then throw it out the window. One by one I repeat this ritual. There were maybe twenty of them. I’m steering with my knees, throwing little fires on the open road, under the orange and red sky (a fire on the horizon.) When I finish, I’ve got my head out the window, letting the wind blow my hair around, taking deep breaths. Elvis singing “Burning Love” on the radio. It felt like the first step towards true liberation.

I still keep on telling myself, someday soon I’ll burn it all on the side of the road.



SOMONAUK, IL
When I was a kid, every summer I stepped into a time capsule, a lake house in Northern Illinois that my grandparents have owned since the 80s. It’s the house that my mom and her three sisters grew up in, and it’s been immaculately preserved. Literally, they’ve kept all of the same furniture, four decades old now. The way the house has been maintained has given me the illusion of time being “frozen” inside of it.

Each of the bedrooms is still perfectly intact, styled just as they were in the 80s. My mom’s, for example, a teenager when she was living there, has a vanity in front of the bed; old cans of hairspray, nail polish, and a round hairbrush in the top drawer. Her two younger sisters’, who shared a room, both elementary-age at the time, has two twin-size beds with brass frames, a bookshelf full of children’s books, and primary colors galore. Then my grandparents’ bedroom is minimal, elegant, accented with mauve and teal pastels, white lacquer everywhere. In two or three of the rooms you can open the closet and still find a full wardrobe

I think the house has always possessed a kind of magic for me because it stitched me into a story I hadn’t been apart of, hadn’t been alive for. Because the rooms seemed like they’d resisted the passing of time, I could sit in my mother’s bedroom—a space she inhabited twenty years ago—and expect her to walk through the door a teenage girl again. I might watch her plop down in front of her vanity and start brushing her hair. There’s also a hole in the basement wall, right at the bottom of the stairs, where someone had hit their head at a party my aunt had thrown when my grandparents were gone. I wasn’t at that party. Hell, I wasn’t alive for it. But every time I’d see that hole in the wall I remembered, or imagined remembering, whoever it was, drunkenly falling down the stairs, smashing their head, flakes of drywall in their hair.

Anyways, my grandparents are in the process of selling the house now. They’re about to start moving the furniture, emptying the closets and dresser drawers. In some way I feel like time, which has been so fixed, so carefully retained in the house, is going to reset with this change. Like after the space is totally gutted, it’s finally going to be 2022, when another family may be able to spend and keep time in all of the same bedrooms, making the house a receptacle for their own memories.



July 4th, 2022
Last night I watched a group of teenage boys light fireworks by the train tracks. In the moonlight, only their silhouettes were visible. Then they’d light a Roman Candle or Rocket or whatever, and the sparks would illuminate their faces for a moment before they took off running in opposite directions, sneakers on gravel, the firework whistling and exploding against the blanket of night sky, shower of sparks reflected in the eyes of everyone watching. In the distance, I could hear the boys’ excitement: “Fuck yeah,” “Holy shit,” “That was so sick.” Silhouettes dapping each other up, one of them taking off their shirt. After they’d set off their last one, a train passed by, blurry faces of it’s passengers in each window. The only evidence left of the boys’ show, I thought, for the passengers to see, was smoke lilting overhead—silent, expanding,