09 18 07

September 18 2007

Sitting in Washington Square Park, finishing a snack of tofu and fish before my next class begins. It is a Fall day in mid-September. Summer has just passed, but it feels like the seasons have forgotten the Fall because it is already chilly (reminding me of Miami's Winter). New Yorkers wear coats and curl up in the arms of those they tell they love. As Summer leaves, couples appear again, reminding the independent hearts of what it is like to be alone.

I am in "The Nanny Section". Silly thinking that in the nanny section, I sit here consumed with diaring. I have places I am suppose to run off to, but it is nice to actually sit calmly and smell the changing of the seasons - the instrumentalist's rhythm radiating the park. I watch, delicately, a nanny banter with a baby as she watches me. It is as if she is performing for me. As if telling me to write these words, "She is good to this child, perhaps better than the child's actual mother."

I find the situation almost sad: her being black, the child she cares for being white. It reminds me of our world and how no one will ever compliment her on her baby. These are the moments though, these moments in the park. And I am sure the baby will remember them and hopefully the way the nanny cared, really cared for the white little being.

letters for you

I liked your words. I liked you in your words. I love the words you thought to choose. I think that matters most. Perhaps it will prove to mean everything. I wish I could word this less ambiguously. But life is ambiguous and I can’t find a reason why my words should be any different. I hope you can try at the very least to read through anything I have made purposefully difficult. See through anything I appear as—most of it is a mask to cover up my unbefitting nervousness inspired by expectation. But if one thing can be for certain, I read your words and they made me like you.

skin on skin

Last night I dreamed words. I read them as the dream advanced like a scroll of typeface, large enough to read through the veil of consciousness and sleep. Paper flying off the typewriter, scenes of dreams flipped through with the fervor of devouring literature you feel is changing your life. In my dream, I was aware and focused on the ideas motivating the sentences. I figured my Adderrall had not worn off and now I was trying to be productive even in my dream. I am a madman, I thought. I am a workaholic. I cannot put down my pen. I cannot lay down my mind. I wanted to wake. I woke. Still covered in sleep, I tried to move to write down the ideas I had in my dream. I had been writing my novel. These were perfect metaphors. This is what I had been searching for in waking life. I could not unclothe myself from the sheets of dreams though, so I fell back asleep, convinced the ideas were too substantial to forget. I forgot them. I have lost the words. The sensational has passed. I should have written it down. I cannot remember what it was.

Staring into a colorless space in the night, my last thought was that I wish I were sleeping skin on skin. Skin on skin, I said. My sheets had the texture of petals, and with my cheek pressed against its warmth, the bed swallowed me like a rose that closed up. In the flower was an unreal reality of dreams. It seemed like my eye was pealed open against a window of glass, highly designed like a mosaic. You could not see through the window, all you received was the impression of pattern, a kaleidoscope of colorful shapes—this may have been a better gift. I do not know. I do not know what laid behind or beyond that window in the landscape. Maybe even nothing.

These dreams felt weird. They were imbedded with a thematic like an oeuvre of writing. My work seeps in whenever and wherever. I cannot reject its permission. Do I sound passive? Maybe. I probably would sound different aloud. A guy in my program said I had a high voice. No not in tone, he said, but in class. When you speak, I feel like I should have to kiss your hand. You have a royal voice. I do not recognize my voice if I hear it. It sounds unfamiliar. I picture a delicate female speaking. Is that really me?

There were three assortments of dreams. The first I was entirely intoxicated and I had no memory. I slept with this blonde swimmer who went to my high school. It was like a pause in a party scene. I carried on quickly after, disregarding the act and waking in the morning unworried. Days went by and I discovered that he had been begging to talk to me. Did I take the morning after pill? He kept promising that he had told me we had no been safe, that it had all gone wrong. He said this and I faintly remembered, but I had not cared. I had been drunk and without memory. I would probably be pregnant, except there was less probability and more definitive truth.

The dream lapsed into another. There was a social gathering. An ex-boyfriend was there. This was the first I had seen him since being in town. He had a girlfriend. He tried to have sex with me. He did. I did not want him to. Something slipped into my mind that maybe I was pregnant. It felt good. I said, this is why I miss sex. We were interrupted by someone else in the room. I looked at my ex-boyfriend and thought he was an asshole. He had no idea what he was doing with himself, so he was with me physically and according to a title with someone else. But mentally, I had no idea who he was with.

I woke up at 7:30 am, took a few bites out of an “insomniac brownie” that had been delivered last night and fell back asleep. Then my dream went into another dream. Supposedly this guy, who has been contacting me for months trying to tempt me into cheating, was “bucking” alone on a table. The girl who told me was laughing and saying it was the biggest spectacle. My alarm went off and I could not believe how my nighttime had turned absurd. Then I realized that once again I was more responsible than not for my dreams. Before sleeping, my last thought had been a wish for skin on skin. It was a dream that became a dream, but not the dream I dreamed of having. I woke and wrote the below. Once again avoiding writing my Manhattan piece due tomorrow. There is no doubt that I be home by 8:30 pm and be too exhausted to think. Thursday morning I will probably end up gluing together something to be turned in. I want to name it, but more significantly reflect, Solitude in the Heart of Manhattan. The professor it is for keeps reading my weekly reflections to the class. Her voice reading my words makes me sound like the most sentimental soul. But who knows, what I really am, because a girl in class got up from her chair yesterday and turned around to me and said she thought I was arrogant. I wish I had thanked her for her thought and told her there was a gold star waiting for her at the front of the class that she could place next to my name.

----

Daily framing a new being was your perception. Piece by piece the chipping of time, hour by hour, the evolution of momentary selves stretching into space and shaping someone more specific—(you hope someone more substantial). During evolution your fibers are being threaded tight with substance, pulling you closer to your heart. Listening for the lyrics in the rhythmic gestures is an ear pressed against your chest, hearing how it pumps out the words, “thump thump”. Secrets rise off the surface, dampening the island of your body with a sigh suspended like a cloud in air. It moves delicately, as if not at all, and can be passed as a whisper to a lover through sheets stitched with sultriness. Skin on skin is the dream you dreamed for. Skin on skin became a dripping realism, palpable and tangibly torn at, drawing the scent of blood. Skin on skin was a dream, but not the dream you dreamed of having. You fall asleep with skin on skin, dreaming of the other type of skin you dreamed you would be dreaming upon. A skin intricately woven with affection, not affectation, so it is sensuously layered with a deeper self. Giving the imagination a fleshy fabric it can bring to life. You want to wake with him pressing into the soft cushion of your ass. You want to hover over his sleepy pose and smile at his flesh, imprinted with your naked shoulder. But no, not last night. Pulled down on to the sheets of dreams, you treated this skinned figure like a wax doll, molding his figure as you went deeper into the realm of your night’s other. In the darkness, perception frames new beings, not through sight but by touch. Against the morning light, you wake to see internal relations have deformed his image and so, you tare apart the stitching of skin on skin, threaded loosely with heart.

two dreams in manhattan

Last night I had a dream. There were a few dreams, I am sure, but this one I remember. There were about a handful of us, but most meaningfully there was me and the two of them. They came to Manhattan and were staying at my apartment. I thought it curious that they had come together, but I let it pass without mention, too willing to see him in any sort of way and under any sort of circumstance. It was nighttime. The time when people go out, but I was not. Opening up the bathroom door, I found them with her arms around his waist as they were getting made up. I did not call attention to this either. Instead, I punched him playfully in the stomach. That was the first time we came in contact with each other, since his being there. Immediately, I thought myself not charming. I do not hate many things, but at that moment I knew I hated how my flirtatious tactics were always aggressive with him. They left and exchanged no words with me. I tried to fall asleep in my bed, all the while thinking, this is my bed! why have they been sleeping in my bed? this is my bed! why have I been sleeping on the couch? if I just fall asleep in my bed tonight it will eliminate any chance of them being or becoming anything. I woke and asked my sister if she had seen them at our home. She said yes, they were sleeping on the couch. I told her I was not asking for a fact check, but that I wanted details. She said she had walked in and they had been holding hands in their sleep. I could not believe it, but I had to believe her, at least. She had seen it. I internalized my bitterness: why had they come to my apartment, why could I hear him calling her “baby” through the bedroom walls and why was I alone wandering through my mind to find impossible answers I hoped could conclude things? Then in the dream I thought, because none of us communicate has it been so impossible to understand.

I woke and pressed snooze on the alarm five times, just to see if I could find out whether they ever kiss. I believed that would give everything more clarity. But of course it would not and of course, once I woke, I never would see them again. Instead, I slide into another dream. I was in my same apartment building, but I had moved down the hall. For some reason living at the end of the hall came with another set of setbacks. Homeless people wandered into my living room and when I walked out of my bedroom, I saw college boys finger painting and others with their eyes rolled back. My sister was flushed and droopy eyed, so I asked her what the hell was going on. Passively she answered, they took LSD. I was the only one that did not laugh. I told her she was disgusting, but as the words were coming out of my mouth I remembered that placing attention on the decision to do drugs was the last thing anyone was suppose to do while someone was on drugs. So then, knowing everyone knew this rule, I just turned and told them all they were disgusting. I looked at my sister and told her the boy she kept bringing around was a terrible influence. I want him out. I grabbed my camera and an extra long lens and left them to themselves in their own little lala land. I was in the subway taking pictures, while they were on LSD in Candy Land. I wondered which of us was making better use of our time. I was not convinced whether it was them or myself, so I kept wondering.

My alarm rang through my dream and I decided it was time to come into clearer consciousness, so I did. My first waking thoughts were: I need to do the laundry to make my sister happy, my breath tastes like peanut butter, why did I eat all that peanut butter, I have so much to write for my final week of classes, watch me end up spending more time in the morning writing about my dreams than a fiction piece on Manhattan, I have no willpower to read another bland contemporary novel for this course especially not one on cocaine.

I went downstairs with my hair smashed up around my face and silver shadowed eyes last night. I thought about my first dream and how ridiculous the idea is that dreams are not real. I wondered whether there was any way to prevent daydreams becoming night dreams. I want to escape my ruminating imagination, not live through it longer during the night. My dreams are never far off from my waking thoughts. In fact, my dream scenes usually confirm my day scenes. There is imagination in both and they are also close to reality.

I use to never retain my dreams. I would wake and remember blackness. Soon enough, I found this to be a waste of time, so I rarely slept at all. I thought it normal for me, but was repetitively told it was not normal not to sleep. I received a prescription for Ambien. I told her I could not sleep. She asked me why. I told her I was up thinking. She kept refilling my prescription anyway. My intention was never to use it for sleep, but for its hallucinogenic faculties. I took it and was overcome with its ability to relax me. I believed and still believe it was the only thing that was capable of relaxing me. With no longer smoking for a year now, wine no longer seemed to work its magic as well. As a result, I became less addicted to wine and unrealities and more addicted to awareness and being productive. It exhausted me but I could not sleep.

I felt I lost a boyfriend in his dreams. As he slept, I watched them steal him from me. I was dreamless. I was awake when I saw we were becoming different. He slept through the reality. We left each other: me to a city and him to a dream. I wrote a play in the fall entitled Sleep less Shadows. It dealt with two drugs: Ambien and dreams. There was a philosophical undertone and was compared to Sarte’s No Exits. I wrote it because I wanted to continue a dialogue with my ex-boyfriend. I also wanted to continue living suspended in time within the unreality of relationships. Therefore, I explored the relationship between dream and reality, the unreal and the real and the artist and the muse. It dealt with appearances and persona. One character was a painter and poet. The other was an actress and model. The play did not end on an answer. It was left for the imagination. I did not have an answer. I believed less in realism.

Now all my work deals with dreams. But I define dreams differently than the assumed definition. Simply, dream is synonymous with the ideal being. It is something or someone separate from the sober self. It is something outside of one or someone that is one’s other that is trying to be attained, lived in and proved to be credible. It continues to be a motif of mine because I still do not have an answer, nor am I necessarily interested in finding one. I am interested in taking myself closer to truths.

I feel like I am continuously being asked, why write? The question never makes any sense to me. I think over the question, I stare at it and am left with the thought I started with: this question is about as stupid as why breathe? Lately the comments are: your philosophy has been keeping me up at night (a laugh comes after and I am not sure if it is there to remove the truth) and but really Chelsea, what is the writing for? I never can fathom why it seems people are cornering me. Writing is extremely straining on the self because there is no denial in its exposure. No one repetitively asks why someone paints, writes a song, performs surgery on a heart, reshapes a nose. Less people find those acts mysterious or strange. But somehow with writing, people that don’t do it, that don’t work on it, also do not seem to “get it”. It is a shame and it is no fun feeling like you have to explain yourself as if it was your ploy to prove you are truly without any neurosis.

I just need to be moved. Unfortunately, the six hundred and plus people on my Facebook stream leave me indifferent. This does not speak for or mean much. It is neither good nor bad, just a whole lot more like nothing. A boy told me this was depressing. How is it that at eighteen things seems to have lost their novelty. He was not asking a question. He may not have been musing either. It could have just been him believing he was stating a fact. I told my sister what he said and she disagreed with him. I told her I just want to be riveted and captivated by someone. She used to always tell me that I expect people to be beyond their age. She tells me that less now and just listens. Recently, interrupting me to inform me that I have to take a breath and stop using the word “like”. This can be extremely distracting when I’m in the middle of a thought, so I play music for her instead and I can see she understands what I was trying to say. Everyone wants to be riveted and captivated by someone though. I am not different.

This is the final week of the intensive writing program. One minute it was before me and now it is almost entirely behind me. I know that even when it ends, it will not be over. Yesterday I handed out a bit of mind and half of my soul. Tomorrow I will sit and listen to it being discussed and pulled apart for more than thirty minutes. Those minutes may seem to stretch on forever or they could feel like less than five. On Thursday I will read some of my work aloud in front of many faces. I hope my voice can give the words poetry, as I intended.

Yesterday one writer—the most conventional, knows the rules of writing, the guidelines, etc—said that the professor was trying to shape our writing into a format. He said that she was especially trying to edit out my and another writer’s voice. That it was obvious she was doing this, terrible too and that our voice should not be changed. I took this as the greatest compliment, especially since he said she was doing this to me and this other male writer in the class whose work I admire. Workshops do not inspire me. Philosophy influences the content of my work. There is a big difference and this speaks for the dichotomy I will have to decide for graduate school.

I need to write a Manhattan piece by Thursday. There really is no time, but there is no doubt that it will happen. Manhattan is a dream, but not the dream I dreamed of having. Still it has the effects of a dream and the consistency, as well. Each morning you wake up to Manhattan with an imprint of your being there. It has an effect on your mind. You are conscious of it being a dream and become increasingly aware that each experience has minor differences. This leaves you waking each morning with a newly developed impression of it. Manhattan is a dream, but in the morning it is vague.

two dreams and a reality.

I had a dream we were kissing but we did not have lips.

I had a dream that I left my newly filled Adderall prescription in the yard. I wasn’t sure if I left it in the grass or if the dog brought it out. My focus must have been flighty because I left it twice. The third time, I went running into the yard looking for it and saw that the majority of the pills had been crushed into a powdery substance. The only thing I could think was Damn I’m gonna have a lot to snort.

Last night a man asked me for my number and I said thank you.

Q. Has it all turned pathetic.
A. That was not a question.

some story: a sense of scent.

During the day she would stay suspended in her apartment, like a rare bird perched in its cage and locked away from the expanse of the high pitched city, which could be heard but not felt. She rarely slipped out of her pocket of rest to be carried through the veins that pumped the heart of Manhattan full of life. A window was all she believed she needed to admire the colors the city’s shell had been delicately dipped in—dyes of gold, coral and jade—that bled together and dried into a color with no name.

Today her glances from the window drank the juice of the city, but gave her no satisfaction. Only in Manhattan, Claudelean sighed, would there be no horizon where the sea and sky came to kiss. This morning, her eyes were circled with nostalgia. And it was as if, her mind looked through the hole in a door and only saw shapes of her past. The vision burned her eyes and she drew the curtains in self-protection against the world that throbbed liked a wound.

Falling into the palm of her bed, she masked herself with last night’s sheets and contorted her body into a fetal position until she was lulled back to sleep. She swallowed darkness, as if it were a breath of air, and sewed her eyelids into the bedding of her skin to keep her vision centered within the dream and outside reality, which weighed heavy upon her eyes and tried to make contact with her conscience.

Claudelean consumed dreams as if they were drugs given to prisoners of distinction. There was a drug for forgetting and a drug for awareness—and she was reliant on both. She usually controlled her environments so meticulously, assuring she would never become situated in a state that surprised her or she thought she was not ready for. But today she was unsuccessful. She had woken, and before setting down to her writing, memory had splintered her leisure hour and torn right into her flesh—bruising her mood and breaking her mind into fragments of times that she was not prepared to have isolated. She did not want to think yet. She did not want to heal now. And so, she hid beneath her imagination until dreams wore off, and woke her sober to the light and obligated to the real. She knew then there would be something she needed to write—a part of her substance that the page would frame—a splitting of self, she would have to be ready for.

sea sight.

There is a quality the sea carries that makes me want to spread it out across every story I write. My eyes wash over the hundreds of photographs I have taken or have been taken of me. And my favorites are those featuring the landscape of the sea. Is it the surreality of the photographs—fixing two opposing motions at one time—the subjects still, frozen, captured and the sea forever in motion and in pursuit of escape? Or is it because it is ethereal, constantly breathing and airing out, externally calming yet in a constant flux of internal emotion? I know how to experience its essence when writing, but quite contrarily I am not the type of person who takes dips in the water, basks on the sand or in the winter envisions vacations by the sea. Perhaps, if I did not think of South Beach beer bums or having to wear a bikini, it would be otherwise. The irony is that whenever I have spent time at or by the sea, the time has been impressed upon my mind and embedded within my memory. And it is there that my most romantic moments—and by romantic I mean: inspiring, captivating, phantasmagoria, passionate—have been produced. As a result, the sea pervades the story I am writing—which I hope can be read like an extensive simile—and saturates the characters involved. I see how in Manhattan I have grown to miss the horizon where the sea and sky came to kiss. But that is just a metaphor for a time when the two touched, and fell beneath each other once the night curtained the city.

---

I tried to choose my favorite sea photographs and realized the extent of the one's I loved:

rosé

today the city blushed and turned our skins rosé.

i fly away in 2 weeks.

half way through, and unsure of any feelings. i want to be selfish about my time but my mind is never on or in the present. it is like an unfulfilled prophecy - caring so deeply about time, while always experiencing that i am absolutely disengaged from it. i recognize the problem, and have plenty excuses, which are - excuses - and nothing more or less. reasons: withdrawn inside my interior and listening to this fragmentation of narration and dialogue that streams through my mind (a persistent effort to take note and notice for written work), impassioned by a bulk of engagements that i find myself in and a constant pressure to be receiving inspiration and pursuit to be captivated. now writing this, i realize it has become such an extreme because last year i was captured, captivated and inspired by my relations always. it is what i need in my life - for happiness, appeasement, sanity. but on the flip, i must admit, i was never entirely within the present then either. it is such a terrible trait. by the end of the month i will have, likely, finished forty pages. what will those pages say? how will i feel about them? how will they be received? and all those questions probably don't matter much. the professor is pushing me for towards clarity and whereas i use to be too stubborn to compromise, i now am allowing myself. as clarity breaks through and abstraction is lessened, my writing is left with lyricism, prose and sensuality. my writing becomes about desire, intimacy and the spaces in between, coldness, passivity, silence, stillness, desperation. i think that being abstract and dense was probably a facade - an effort to make my work not about myself - a hope to not be read as overly feminine and emotional. i didn't want feelings to nag, i didn't want to sound like i cared and even though i was most concerned with the senses, i didn't want to sound and therefore appear affected by my involvements. although i believe my work is highly imaginative, i feel it is only imaginative in its construction of language (thought, word, image) and not in terms of the substance of the story that is thread within it (although i care less about plot and action) which is closely related to truth. it can be read as a construction of the imagination, but that is only because it is a view of a situation from one mind, one heart, one nerve and as a result, the memory that it is based on resides within the imagination (since it has to be located within recollection) of one individual who knows only his truth, not the whole truth. i re-read a book of essays by anais nin today and it just reaffirmed that she is the only author i have ever read or heard who explains what i hope to do and where i wish the novel will go. i read her and am entirely engaged, her importance is undeniable and yet, she confused so many. i will have to provide quotes from her at some point. i did an independent study on her last fall and now as i am trying to penetrate further into fiction, i feel like she is one of the most powerful examples i have that will explain what i am trying to do or rather, what i hope will latch on and readers will become emerged in. what i ended up taking the most to heart (probably because my first efforts in writing could never approach the idea of dialogue) were the positive reactions about my dialogue and that the readers saw how it was not the words that mattered but the meaning they exposed. this is so special to me because i believe individuals have many restraints that restrict clarity and the exposure of exact emotions and therefore, it is not so much what is said rather than it is what is not said or the pressure that can be felt within the spaces of silence (a result of speaking at each other rather than to or with each other - which is so often the case). its like 3am, early morning tomorrow, to the met we goooo, so i must try and fall asleep without an ambien. i will end by saying that what was most on my mind tonight when i got home and again came back to a room of people, was that i only want to speak to someone that i, too, want to be kissing and falling asleep with. then, i realized how exaggerated that sounded, so i edited my thought and made it clearer: i miss having a best friend who was my boyfriend and i miss living alone and i miss sharing my apartment with one guest who was my boyfriend and also my best friend and all i needed intellectually and intimately. my art relies so heavily on the experience of being physically involved with another, that i can't believe i have avoided it for what feels like so long. i feel like i make myself so unavailable in new york but yet, some other part of me that i enjoy comes out when my bed is shared. i use to run off with all these others, and now it seems just the opposite. i kiss and am unmoved and don't persist. but then there are these rare cases where i am impulsively, if not mindlessly, drawn and i want to fall entirely. i can't fake an interest - at least not after the first night, and when i do, i disappear from contact like a flake - i can't fake an interest, even the pure joy of just having someone around. interested or disinterested, never an in between. and in really loose terms, that is what this "extended story" that i am writing is revolving around.

soon it will be seeing.

the process of writing is a double burden, but the product that appears at the finale is a reward that makes the author feel weightless. although i feel like i am always collecting matters that will shape a larger and hopefully, more substantial text. i worry whether it will ever become more real. i suppose that is the great burden - that leaves you avoiding the moment of beginning, but wanting, if not needing, it most desperately. there is the excitement you experience, once text begins streaming across the page, when thoughts position themselves upon the page and can be seen, and not just heard in imagination. a writer holds his breath for the length of his work and even the times between when it is best to rest.

i begun saturday - and wrote through that one day alone. i despise the situation, but the day to night of class leaves me too exhausted and now the apartment heat leaves me in a state of delirium - by no means the tone i am going for in my work.

life is funny though, and perhaps the artist is more so. i never imagined what i am writing would become so romantic, so involved with the language of the nerves, the mind of the heart. moments and mood fall upon you at certain times and i reason this is that time where i am pulling apart this texture that feels thick around me.

the fascinating truth -at least for me- which i become more involved in, is how those we experience, even if only slightly, and even the places we have escaped to, all become subject to material we can use. and the extremity in which we can indulge within these times - how well we can explicate them - will no doubt determine the writer who uses them as words within his voice. a professor said the other day, that we will grow as an author and become less selfish--less occupied--with framing our personal story and in doing so will become truthful to the lives of our characters. i am insecure that i will always write out the same thematic - with different chapters, but with similar desperation - a meta exploration that exposes my voice, my heart, my memory and no one more.

with the story i have begun, i experience the pressure - as i always will, and as most artists do - to not exclude a shade of thought, the many moods that capture but one action, the multitude of attributes that rest within a moment and of course, the comparisons to draw upon that do not distinguish our differences but spotlight, or maybe even give theory, to our similarities.

i know i am young and new at writing, but i can not find comfort in this situation or excuse any truth that can be found within it. the more i write, am read aloud and hear other contemporaries, the less i feel i am a storyteller. and nor have i ever felt like i was or wanted to be. i remember somewhere in some journal writing that i had no interest listening to stories, exchanging everyday gossip, pushing characters to move and act. i just needed them to feel for me, their fewer actions will be replaced by the movement of their thoughts. i am not writing for the stage or screen, why should it be expected of me?

there are so many beautiful books i own, and everyday i want to search out and find. author's whose words i place on notecards and file but which really need to be framed. i am on two poles of language that situate me with different statements. that of the deconstructionists, where i become abstract, where feelings feel less, and the personal is too preoccupied in being redesigned that the self slips out completely. and then there is the lyrical novel - the borderline between poetry and fiction. where sentences carry a musicality - where the richness of words for setting can be tasted. i am told that i am a brilliant intellect in one, and a lovely sensualist in the other.

i just hope i can be proud of anything that falls out of me. this new work surprises me. my memories and where they take me. the portraits of characters i was suppose to create, but really just helped build myself, and who i have known intimately.

it is fun, i see. to begin, immediately bond with the characters, and then not know how anything will become. i laugh in silence now, wondering how if i ever come to a finish will i think of the real characters that inspired the fiction. will i see them differently--intricately, revealed, depth, designed, decided--blah blah blah.

because again it all comes back to the writer who felt she had to write her mind out, so she crossed time, selected scenes, picked characters with such dissimilarities that scents, sense, sensuality will be the leading factors that make the love feel replete or just something other.

i am excited to re-see memory, share characters that would never have been comfortable sharing and I do-do-do want to come stuck and come to the point where i know i have to feel completely in order to continue writing.

what will any of this become?

There is no romance in June.

If I knew how to make believe, I would tell you the winter weather would have made us feel differently. I would close my eyes, let reality disappear in the darkness and forget I was wearing shorts and he was without a jacket—forget how in the summer one is expected to be happiest. This was not the case, nor the situation I was kept within—I am too sincere to lie—too real to imagine it being as it was not.

It was June. It was night. It was the first place I remember where it felt empty. And it was the last place I remember being not entirely alone. That night in June, I would come to ask him what he was thinking. Without turning to look at me, he would respond that he was not thinking, just seeing. Feeling I understood the language his thoughts spoke in, I would carry the conversation further—question him more—needing him—needing to hear more. What, I asked. Can we be remembered for? He never looked at me anymore than it was required—just away from me, thoughtfully—as if he were answering to someone else. Oh come on, I would laugh playfully. Once we are finished, what will you remember? That is impossible, he responded. When something is finished, there is nothing continued to be remembered. Then silence spoke and we sat still, expressionless and just listened. You sound so fatalistic tonight, he interrupted. I sighed—his voice sounded unmoved—his tone made it seem like I was listening to someone I had just met and may never know.

In between the silence of stillness was the light touch of serenity that I could not feel, but I knew was there and waiting to be realized. On top of the roof we felt distanced from the world, but it was the night sky, acting as a curtain, which separated us completely. We did not take advantage of the privacy though. Instead, we became more uncomfortable because of it. I saw myself acting unfamiliar—as if the lack of light changed the way I was exposed—as if the night hid me from myself. I looked at the four balloons, shadowed by the spotlight of the moon, and watched them danced with their partners. They experienced a romance I no longer know presently, only in memory, which soon will become soft, drop into a void and leave me with no clarity.

His camera’s view framed me, and made the night burn with its familiar flash—fixating me forever. He took pictures that pleased me—and over time it became so habitual that I learned how to perform—how to be captivating—how to make myself captured. Our motivations were different though. He used his camera to stop time—to make me last in a moment he wanted to know me for. But I knew all along, it was a way to create me and fulfill a desire that would make him feel more complete. It would help him remember me in a way he wished I always stayed—a way to hold me in a presence I no longer assumed—a product of the past that placed me in a moment that no longer belonged.

I watched him as he sat there unintelligibly. He was overly cautious of the need to perfectly pretend that he was not aware of being beneath the gaze of another. He untangled a knot, laughed at something no one else had heard—all the while being entirely consumed with the importance of appearing attentive elsewhere and on something other. I looked at him—or rather, the side of his face that he had angled to be seen—and truly tried to look within. For so long I had felt the need to believe that his eyes were centered within his self—that his silence spoke for a personal situation where he was spending social time retreating within his own interior. But now, I no longer knew what to see to believe. After time away from him, I came back and saw him differently and perhaps, the distance had decided this. Watching him now, I found an alternate reality that could be possible. He was not looking deeply into thought—he had fewer thoughts than I had originally given him credit for having—he was looking into nothing. He existed for me passively. And this—this very being—annoyed me. But he stuck around because his presence occupied time that would otherwise be spent singularly in the seclusion of the mind. I began to know less of him though, which was no help in understanding any more of him, and I became silent more often because of it.

He turned to me finally with an expression that promised an excuse for his behavior. But he promised nothing. To you, I am just weird. You are always saying how weird I am. Listen, I don’t want you to think weird would be the primary word I would use to describe you. How could I, when everyday I am told I am either weird or crazy? I cannot decide which I prefer. But you, you are foreign. Well I would prefer unique. You can have unique, I assured him. They are not mutually exclusive. But strictly speaking, in terms of our relation, you are foreign.

I remember that night in June. A night that spoke of the distance, but which I have never been able to grow distant from. It was not winter and perhaps that is why there was no romance.

between thoughts and beyond exhaustion.

i feel like much has happened. although, i see even less has changed. i began feeling an extreme change just over a week ago. the pressure was at its most extreme. i woke and felt like my breathing was strained. then over coffee and a novel, i began a long conversation with a stranger at my left. which helped my day and made my mind feel better. the next day, i expressed to a woman that i felt we were led to believe there was such thing as a "platform of perfection"--a point we worked to arrive at, a steady calm, an ease where we existed calmly and unaffectedly. i told her it wasn't what i was going for--that we exist and are affected differently in different environments. maybe in new york i kept myself from behaving freely. maybe here, my mind was always perceiving and translating. maybe in the city, it was in my character to focus and produce. and maybe, i should recognize this and accept the differences. a few days later, i just broke down. i cried because i had not. i said i have been depressed because it was an excuse and it was a jumping off point to excite change. but what mattered most is i acknowledged the necessity to find a balance--a balance i have never had, that i have expected and which is probably not always natural. i also came to terms with still having ideals--interior and exterior ideals that were motivated by reputation, appearance and acceptance from the two. i know i am no different. i fall into extremes, experience those addictions and make judgments for a more normal quality of life because of them. i am just ready to find a balance. a balance that will make living and living in new york city more beneficial and rewarding. i hold back from what i would have written. i am calmer and less eager because of the distance from that temperament.

i think i was also ruminating myself raw. nervous about the month of june, which i am now experiencing at full force. i was and am experiencing emotions from and over it everyday. and this is because i put an irrational amount of pressure on myself to perform perfectly. basically, i am in an intense writing program for fiction. and never have been in a writing craft and workshop class, nor wrote for the genre of fiction. i eat to keep myself alive and awake, energized and in tune for performance. but i am two times the self i was last summer, and it is hard to see myself always changing and never at a constant. sometimes i fear what i will become, and i hate the sound of myself saying that. in the end, i persevere through the absurdity and let the smarter side of myself decide. knowing it is more gratifying to eat to attain mindfulness, than eat disorderly and have no capacity to think at all. let no one fool you, it is a battle everyday. sometimes it exhausts you, other times it excels but you never exist not feeling changed by it. it is an utter waste, and everyday you tell yourself that today you will begin to live without it.

i realized i was kidding myself if i was hoping to be less serious after the month of june. i feel like my seriousness in new york is not pleasurable or attractive, and i have grown insecure because of it.

the writing has begun. and i say begun because it feels different and comes out differently now that it is being made for a story and/or is structured for a novel. now my activity is this: thinking less abstractly in the genre of fiction and being more fluid because of it. there is a difference in thoughts when told in story form and the mind digresses when thinking for the novel. i am not sure where i sound smarter. although, i am learning that fiction may not be the space for it. i was told my philosophy should be eliminated in the edit and that logic bending sentences are no way to open a story and invite your reader to stay. and then i was told that my writing resembled margurite duras' the lover, which made me smile even though i didn't expose it.

i believe i feel differently. i think my thinking is different than theirs. then who changes here?

stay, here.

the moment may be forever, if you don't think it otherwise.
the moment may remain unchanged, if you don't know its difference.

-the point of not having let go.

silence because.

She watched him as he sat there unintelligibly. He was overly cautious of the need to perfectly pretend that he was not aware of being beneath the gaze of another. He untangled a knot, laughed at the television—all the while being entirely consumed with the importance of appearing attentive elsewhere and on something other. She looked at him—or rather, the side of his face that he had angled to be seen—and truly tried to look within. For so long she had felt the need to believe that his eyes were centered within his self—that his silence spoke for a personal situation where he was spending social time retreating within his own interior. But now, she no longer knew what to see to believe. After time away from him, she came back and saw him differently and perhaps, the distance had decided this. Watching him now, she found an alternate reality that could be possible. He was not looking deeply into thought—he had fewer thoughts than she had originally given him credit for having—he was looking into nothing. He existed for her passively. And this—this very being—annoyed her. But he stuck around because his presence occupied time that would otherwise be spent singularly in the seclusion of the mind. She began to know less of him though, which was no help in understanding any more of him, and she became silent more often because of it.