Currently Listening to: Bones by Palace
And, if I told you freedom knocks at my door now and then,
Would you kill me?
If I told you my mind sometimes wishes I could run, not to escape you, but to escape the principle.
Would you hate me?
My promise brought to you like a hound’s tooth left in the throat of some hare, just a token of aggression. Remnants of the riotous you once applauded.
I am a beast you can’t trick.
Are you getting tired yet? Are you tired?
-
After I was born, I think my first inhale was really a second, possibly third. For all my life, I’ve felt as if the world was coming to me in shards, fragments of a timeline everyone else got to walk through, but I, by some strange happenstance, could not.
I think this theme of disconnect has appeared in almost every entry I’ve given to you, and for that, I apologize.
I lean heavily into astrology stereotypes, my favorite being that Sagittarians (my sun sign) are known for repetition because of their poor memory.
Unfortunately, this repetition of a disconnect is more so the result of its overbearing presence in my life. It’s something I’ve been attempting to hurdle over for the past two years.
No longer working from home has helped me. I know I probably stand in the 1 percent, holding an opinion like that. However, face-to-face socialization grounds me.
If you were to pop open this head of mine, a whimsical jack-in-the-box scene would unfold: Brass instruments. Spirits. Carousels, the cosmos, and streamers.
And that noise, as colorful and enchanting as it appears on paper, cripples my ability to breathe. I have a harder time accepting the world around me on my own. It just feels too artificial, like an afterthought or a surplus — a forgotten cake in the oven, charred to bits.
People, to me, are anchors and, without them, I’d go mad. No one will ever know just how crucial Eli’s existence is to mine. I think that terrifies me, not just the intensity, but that truth’s persistence.
This reflection isn’t so much a cry for help, but an explanation. The further we progress into this diary experiment of mine, the stranger it may become. Already, my hand has shook above the publication button on two accounts. The excerpt I’d posted last week hasn’t left my mind since.
I’m just trying to be honest here.
I am a difficult person to know.
Ask Eli or T. Of course, they’d romanticize our trials, glaze them in a pearlescent nostalgia. But dig through the narratives’ purple prose and you’ll find a common outlier; Marble craves connection but fears intimacy.
To me, tenderness is brutal. I think that’s why I’m more myself when lying to strangers, because in those lies, are simple confessions. Unmet aspirations. Floozy dreams sheathed in the most eloquent deception.
I don’t have to worry about strangers getting too close, the wall between us was there from the start. I’d built it.
Typically, trauma builds a person like me and I have plenty, but back to the second or third first breath. I don’t think this “loose” personality of mine is a byproduct of any event. I’ve been like this from the very start. It’s easier to watch and then write when you’re invisible.
It’s easier to get people to talk when you can guess what they need.
If I want to appeal to people, if I want my voice to resonate with others aside from just myself — isn’t that a mirror? Wouldn’t it be more efficient, easier, to flatten every inch of myself? To lower my voice for the sake of yours?
I’m not sure if I’m making much sense.
In actuality, my favorite writers have held a stark contrast to the writing community. Less commercial and more strange, like shards of sea glass in an ocean of broken shells. Am I being obvious? It feels like I am, sort of like stating that all good artists work with a vision.
These unveiled inner worlds are what draw you in, however, you stay for the pieces that resonate — those handfuls of paragraphs or lines that appear as an index finger pointing back at you through the page. I want that. I’d like to get there. I’m just afraid.
If you’d tell me, five years ago, where I currently am in life, I would’ve cried myself to an incurable hysteria. Married? Writing openly and on a schedule? How is future me still alive? How have they not combusted, gone insane beneath the pressure of being seen? I suppose the only answer here is that I’ve become unrecognizable.
-
Somewhere
deep inside myself
I can feel a tear
like a bird with a clipped wing
or a horse that won’t break.
There is something inside me that flinches at the sight of you
and begs
Don’t look
Don’t look
Don’t look
This reminds me a little of that glorious quote by Joan Didion, the short version being ‘I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be’
…and the long: ‘It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.’
My eldest child and I were talking about the reason being amongst humans was hard. He said “I do not enjoy being perceived.” And that resonated with me so much. It’s why I employ dazzle camouflage, like a nudibranch. It’s a warning that there is more to me than meets the eye. I prefer to have people define me wrong and be surprised. Much like the woman I met in the park tonight. She wants people to know nothing when they look at her.