exchange

- pasternak to tsvetayeva -

a book is nothing but a cube of hot, smoking conscience. it was assumed, in the not-so-distant past, that a book's episodes were invented. that is a misconception. what need has a book of inventions? one forgets that the only thing within our power is the ability to keep the voice of truth within us distorted. the inability to find and speak the truth is a failing that no talent for speaking the untruth can disguise. 

contemporary trends assume that art is like a fountain, when really it is like a sponge. they had decided that art ought to gush, but it ought, rather, to suck up and absorb. they assert that art can be divided into categories according to means of representation, when actually it is composed of organs of perception. art must always remain among the spectators and see things more clearly, more truthfully, more perceptively than the others, but in our day it was resorted to using face powder and dressing rooms and displaying itself on the stage. it as if there were two forms of art and one of them, knowing that it holds the other in reserve, allows itself the luxury of perversion, which is tantamount to suicide. it makes a display of itself when it ought to get lost in the top gallery, in anonymity, and be unaware that it cannot help being discovered, that while shrinking in the corner it is afflicted with a glowing translucence, the phosphorescence that goes with certain diseases.

- tsvetayeva to pasternak -

not long ago i spent a beautiful day, all of it with you. i didn't let you go until late at night. pay no attention to my "chilliness." there is always a draft between you and me. 

how well i understand your terror of words already mangled by use, already ambiguous. 

natural way

to see things as they are, poet must subject his life, break down, a revaluation erupting sense. destroying illusion with discovery, still an impossible finality. some time coming, poet will see anew, then know otherwise. paradoxical poet, vignette of all time.

to understand nature, one must allow oneself to not understand it. feel its indifference toward you, and nature is forgotten, and furthermore forgets its forgetting, having been already brought into being.

age of reason, age of reasoning less.

what i enjoy about becoming older is no longer wondering when [is best] to first kiss, but just doing it, letting the first thought come at the instant lips meet. i love this new way.

trying to create, 15 pg extended fragment:

erupting, language.

inventing a vehicle/model for the innate language, erupting at birth of new being.

Color impressing white, absorbing all light, I am shadowed. Behind thoughts, comfort, black beneath lids, open and I am there, too, attaching myself. These inky lips lip off, feeling, in the void you will know all. Is this me? Inked. Love all over my mouth. Nothing physical, but a presence, unattainable, essence, unavoidable. Take in and in and in, until displaced, breathing fragments, exploding, air!, space where heart did not beat, us women becoming sexed ourselves, all at once, shoving into mouth, suffocating words, immediately breathless. 

(many words between)

Dressed in bloom, passion petals, walls radiate romance, the soul’s season, swollen, opening, wider, wider, always coming into, bloom, season of the self. Eyes of others becoming dilated, mouths hanging happily loose. Sleeping, whoever with me, will dream inside my mind’s boudoir. Have become participant in desire’s life, man discovers darkness, my best-kept secrets. Soul surrendering to speculation, help tie my hands back, secrecy of sensuality no longer, so hush, speaking most often inside silent room. Doors open wide, letting you pass through, stay awhile. 

Coating walls, warm paint, dried density, deflecting light, viscera veneer, closing out city life, thousand wanderers faithfully pursuing night, to be made to be had in a metropolitan tempo, how cosmopolitan!, commercialism is so popular, in vogue, capitalism, exchanging private for profit, “please, I only wish to sleep with you once” then, become attached to the couch, a passive romance. I will respect anyone who tells me what it is they want. Opportunity to live fantasy, defines hypothetical. Your want isn’t my want, shame on we, won’t play the exchange game. Respect prudism.

Harmony pervading, blended ylang ylang, patchouli, French lavender, thyme. Hypothetical, too, having one sense, olfactory, this bedroom could be from anywhere in the world. Refuge of wanderlust, sleeping here. Permanently breathing different air, poison for the logic, seeping through, sleeper’s amorous dreams, palpable, erotic cinema? Unlikely. We are literary minds, textual beings, principally psychic. No worry Mom. Desiring visuals, self-desiring subjects, subjects desiring self, defines pornography, unavoidable tension. We should not be made to feel bad, embarrassed by self-consciousness, resisting innate outward drive, I oppose denial.

update, quick.

watching the above episode right now. have closed my eyes for a total of, maybe, five hours in the last two days. past few days have encouraged an alteration, like i have tilted, moved over a few steps, viewing a different scape of life. this isn't to say a radical difference, but this slight change happens few and far between, and probably has happened to me four times. the second in amsterdam, so you can only imagine. a few hours after the last post i wrote, i felt many feelings. expansion later.

also, one reason the science section is the best section of the new york times.

twas' a quiet Sunday?

Tell No One, it came from me.

No longer is sex difficult
Bodies are accessible
Most challenging is feeling.

Yesterday was nice. There was caffeine, pea soup and a bloody punk show. There was The New York Times second review of Ninth Street Espresso, red-eyes and cappuccino crowds. I couldn’t keep myself from commenting, this was what the media does: spoil secrecy, silence. We leaned closer toward each other. Conversation circled concepts, we may have seemed critical, curious, who knows. I took notes, every engagement is the chance to memorize, quote. “Remodernists: A New Sincerity.” Filmmakers: Anderson(s), Louiso, Coppola, Gondry, Kaufman, Braff, Hess. Philosophy: On Beauty, Denis Donahue. Trouble with Beauty, Wendy Steiner. Poets: Livingston, Massey, Mister, Robinson, Berman, Wagner, Hart, Lin, Seidel, Greenberg, Levis, Sexton. Seeking valid meaning within themselves, self-fulfillment. In opposition to material values, early modernist turned inward away from world to concentrate on self and inward life. We agreed, it all reflected me. Or, I channeled it. Realized how materials never participate in my writing, they are forgotten, not so much an act of avoidance but perhaps, an innate resistance. Materialism does not make matter, that is the significant sort of matter (containing or producing meaning). Basically, materials just tease us—do nothing but decorate life and complicate a former simplicity. One could argue that literature is a material object, and it is, a product of the mind’s materials—and a real fucking challenge to make external. I wrote in the corner of the page, “I feel my job will be in opposition to my interior passion. It will be my greatest contradiction.” I am not sure if this makes me sad, not yet at least, but it does make me restless, a bit desperate and perhaps possessed, possessed by passion. I brought up the female predicament, so to speak, at odds with each other: the body can experience pleasure and sex for procreating. I am not sure my focus is so much on that. I asked, “How often does the woman attain authentic pleasure.” More and more I feel it is less about attaining then it is about achieving. The generalization being men are visual beings and women are emotionally bent. What I want to inform or rather, make genders comfortable with is the truth: women are visual beings, too, closing their eyes they imagine their desire: an embellished scene that is distanced to the event of the moment. But why can’t women speak up more? Why are they self-contained? Men orgasm—are expected to—knowing that there is a product that will have to show for it. This all speaks to the man’s ability to be touched by the moment and most importantly, their ability to let go and be out of control. The more informed I am by this, the more I can’t help but wonder whether the displeasure of men comes from witnessing a woman’s inability to be genuinely involved—to go the same distance as himself. I know I may challenge the norms that females are comfortable with, but I can not pretend like I support the side that feels disadvantaged, claiming that during sexual engagement it was all about the man—he was the one that got off, etc, etc. I can’t feel distanced from men in this regard, because I know I have been treated otherwise. I know I have had the same opportunity to achieve the same sort of “effect”. And often times, I have been given more opportunities, allowing selfishness on my behalf. My desire is to shock women into motion, exposing we are vehicles with the same type of power that society wants to continue and pretend men have more of. Each one of us is responsible for the extent of one’s own feeling—if we want to feel something deeper, something empowering, we should be able to let ourselves. 

Much more to say about Sunday's scandal, but now I have to go. Kaufman awaits and my eyes cannot wait!

must i know what i mean? i hope not always.

The Muse

Beauty dwelling
Behind thought forgotten.

I am again, thirsting the morrow.

Wake for then
Only to breathe back better days.

Come, always coming
Never not coming
Beauty who dwells.



"Rosebud"

mother nicknamed my mouth
something short for shape, size
small talk, cut the crap, show it as it is
bawdy behavior: opening, closing, fertile
traces of you, should I tell her?
what you call it.

Saturday

One night Lying displaced She tricked herself Or maybe he, failure. Caring to say No words. Dried up Poetess. Tongue misplaced texture Feel her instead, he can’t Try. Stand, displacement of self Irretrievable night. Who cares? Not she, He won’t let her.

the picture of dorian gray

"every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. it is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. the reason i will not exhibit this picture is that i am afraid that i have shown in it the secret of my own soul."

"i knew that i had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if i allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself."

"poets are not so scrupulous as you are. they know how useful passion is for publication. nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."

"i feel that i have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day."

"because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. he does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. his virtues are not real to him. his sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. he becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. the aim of life is self-development. to realise one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. people are afraid of themselves, nowadays. they have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self."

"and beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation."

"i am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. i am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. why should it keep what i must lose? every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it. oh, if it were only the other way!"

"to project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or strange perfume; there was a real job in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims."

"it often happened when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves."

"well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. to test reality we must see it on the tight-rope."

"and unselfish people are colourless. they lack individuality."

"pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about."

"you will always be fond of me. i represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."

"there was always something ridiculous about of people whom one ceased to love."

"when they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes."

• PLEAE FOLLOW LINK FOR A BEAUTIFUL SET OF SHORT FILMS.
  

devin the dude - your pot friendly singer.

• MAP MAGAZINE pdf issue
  
• VMAGAZINE pdf issue
  
• suzannah johannes - hanging on (free download)

• 
  

Variations of Blue

This night I will have wished to find an escape through my clothes. A pattern dance, variations of blue. The bartender will tell me, I am an oceanic resemblance. Our mouths would then come undone and through them a gentle rising of conversation. Until from hands swathed in tulle, I would let my dress drop naturally around my sides, a gesture so subtle with its deliveree but deliberate enough to know the implication was I go, let's get out of here, be caught. As the attention of our voices fell away from each other, I was aware of the timing, my chance for advantage. Taking my straw, small and impotent, a disservice for sucking, I would have it touch the glasses’ rim, an over determined circling, he would know. I wasn’t even drunk. But it had been done before. Placing remnants of this vocal gesture on my tongue, I would swallow what he had mixed. Eyeing him, thank you, this is exactly what I need. Which is a lie, I knew. Behind, watching me, my dress, how moving it pinched imperfect patches of waist. Following, he would find me, mesmerized by my way. I wondered whether he could see beneath it all, my body separate from the way it seemed. I hated the thought of this, was that me as I truly am? Deception. Eyes, a fragment of a greater language. Voice, an echo of the original feeling. And my body, bare and by the light, no resemblance to the impression I gave when hips were waving in variations of blue. 

I cannot see myself in those moments. Belonging to him, I am his discovery. An exposure with head high, I proposed toward the night, hoping it would remain there. When depth closes in on itself, bodies collapse from weight, holding back the light. I tell him, I am best half-alive in the illusion of sight. His mouth hangs open, emptied of laughter, speaking instead, “You are the best worst thing I will ever see.” Attraction through difference, I am effected by the translation. Familiar feelings, heavy between his body and mine. He could be anyone. I will behave the same, exactly. Repetition prevents authenticity. A betrayal to his expectation, I am, not sorry. Takes me, taking hair, tightly handling us, “Yours is shorter than mine.” He loves this, but how am I to know. Fisting me, it is easy to feel hurt. But this was not his intention, he will want to tell me in every way. Later when it is too afterwards to think differently and care. Making his way down on me, I worry, worry I will open only once. Let out a bit of what is produced within, and have that not be the risk that makes us take off toward the day, forgetting this, now. It is the light, I fear in the dark, with him providing an atmosphere of flesh. I would rather he stay inside me, projected into my abyss, than overflow with whiteness. Be delivered completely, lightness and I coming together, an inseparable sight exposing things not exactly the same. This I fear, becoming uncovered by light, divided from clothes, the texture of the night no longer protecting, my skin, how thick it seems. I feel different, humiliated, he hates how my ugliness shows for my self. Self-decided on the mirror of my eyes, he sees me no longer a luminary of desire. Deflecting the night’s feelings and appearing in the light as I fear I am. Close my eyes for good, I try then try again, again.

gut.

and in my purse is a page with this: the years fold up neatly into single images, single words and what went between was like glue or a resin that held the important things in place, until, now, later, when they stand alone, the rest decayed, leaving certain moments as time's souvenirs...

i no longer recognize the urgency of my old diaries with their careful recording of what mattered. what i wrote down is in another person's handwriting. what has held me are the things i did not say, the things i put away. what returns, softly, or in floods disturbs me by its newness. its vividness. what returns are not the well-worn memories i have carefully recorded, but spots of time that badge me out... i am marked by those stubborn parts of me. perhaps i did not know it would be so.

-jeanette winterson, gut symmetries.

synecdoche, new york:

synecdoce, new york by charlie kaufman

the truman show changed my conception of life and i imagine this will too.

in my opinion, kaufman illuminates the human depth that would otherwise be kept secret if we were to remain silent. 

watching this does bring me close to tears. 

i am so overwhelmed and thankful that someone is able/allowed to communicate these ideas to a larger audience. 

giving me the hope, that people will open themselves up to the normalcy of these topics. 

as well as giving me the assurance to continue my own ventures because people do care.

support the courage of his ideas (to work from the inside out). tap into your interior. see his film!

• new york times review
  
• amazing article on kaufman by david carr
  

"Mr. Kaufman has historically created stories that explore deeply interior spaces, often those between someone’s ears. In “Being John Malkovich” he tested ideas of identity by diving into the brain of one man. In “Adaptation” he allowed a writer’s solitary struggle to leave the page and explode out into the world. And in “Eternal Sunshine” he created a world in which the experiences that mark us can be erased."

“It was like being in on the beautiful, visceral secret.” -Catherine Keener.

Near the film’s end Caden is confronted by a sea of Post-it notes that stretch toward the horizon, each signifying a part of a larger whole. He takes in the expanse and says, “I don’t know why I make it so complicated.”

the desire to be in the other.

To exist one must have presence within the appearance of an image space. This space requires a realm of being, either physically or mentally determined, an interior or exterior landscape that the mind chooses in sight by way of fixation and elimination. For a certain being to exist one must be able to have bodily contact with the individual or have him arise in the mind from moment’s memory. The latter assumes a distance, not only through touch but temporality. Regardless of either realm the being exists within, the space intimately involves sight and thought because it requires the two have a sensuous relationship for a moment to be made.

My study began with the intrigue of identity. I wondered why one chose to be his certain self. Feeling psychology would explicate the enormity of the question proved to be only half the venture. Not only did academia introduce me to the intellectual perspective, but seclusion did as well. I recognized that who I was being and will become were motivated by my mind and how the mind’s eye translated the outside reality so the city of the interior could access and process that which was distanced from the body and nerves. Thought existed first, impacting me with a personal weight that could then be felt. Therefore, my study of identity made a turn for the better, developing under the guise of The Philosophy of Psychology—the study of thought’s affect on feeling.

Within the space of seclusion, I encountered not solely the solitary life, per se, but the private life. I became aware that within the presence of others, one was still able to fold within one’s self and be kept at a distance that was not entirely committed to the accepted reality of the event. In other words, an individual was capable of being in two places at one time while two separate and distinct lives were being lived within the same moment and same being. Therefore, not only were there separate realities, but there were split selves. One was capable of projecting his presence as a physical image while at the same time being able to project his mind within a private reality of imaginings. Most significantly, all of these locations of difference were real and most spectacularly unreal, like dreams themselves.

Identity, now, became a self-display that could be speculated upon. To be a certain self implies there is a choice of being. In fact, there are choices to being. Not only are eyes manipulating reality by deciding what is seen and unnoticed, but the “I” as well was capable of choosing absence or presence. Ultimately, the individual was responsible for carrying out characterology and by existing was performing an ideal role for the specific moment. This is not to say by selecting a certain self, one was being mindfully malicious—in fact, my study frames the art of the act by sequestering the genuine gesture. By exposing the interior, a landscape which is guarded, I hope to bring awareness to the character’s truth. For within the act of being, one does not think to detach thought and feeling or mind and action—one simply does. Therefore, presence is so instinctual, because it is human’s innate desire to be intimately involved within a being.

My role as seclusive author motivated my study further and since ultimately my theory of identity was being decided by the commitment of my own conscious, I could not avoid what was present within my existence. Compulsively wanting to translate the time I had been experiencing—moments when my body felt distanced from my mind, heart and eyes (the largest determinates of perception) and the exterior reality—I began to write with the intention to expose my interior, that which could not be seen but was deeply felt. I knew I needed to work with opposites, contradictions, paradoxes. I knew my calling was to tell truth in the form of a novel, as a way of deceiving the conventions of truth and generalities of reality. I believed within this structure there would be barriers that were unavoidably the result of the distance of selves, between eyes and I. Underlying everything was the challenge of using the personal to be intimate, to become as close as one could be to the other, to transform feelings into the knowledge of a genuine being. There were numerous layers to penetrate through, but I was consistently urged by the desire to have my feelings known and to give the interior a physical presence and tangible materiality. By giving the psyche a textuality, I was able provide unexpected sensations: touch to a substance that had been swallowed (the language of the nerves) and sight in an area that had been forbidden (the interior). I wanted to empower humanity—a sexless gender—to speak in the voice of one’s hidden reality, to concentrate not on the event of an invented story, but on the truth of the struggle, the repetitious patterns of the mind and significantly, I hoped to encourage readers to be confident with the raw, intimate lyric of life.

Post-structuralism, French feminist existentialism, écriture feminine, romanticism, phenomenology and metaphysics became the instruments that guided my fiction. Let me remind you, that the fiction was the product of the study of identity and character roles. Therefore, it was intended to exemplify the theory, as well as put into practice the study. In writing upon my experiential I, I became limited or perhaps, concentrated on my memory’s materials (one must have memory to exist). And for my character’s life to have meaning, the character needed to use language. Entrapped by the truth of events, I began to see more clearly that as a writer, an inventor, a creator, I was dedicated, if not entirely controlled by, language. Thoughts were immediately translated into language. Images became words. Words had meaning—a certain meaning, depending upon my mind. The inescapable tension of opposites created a philosophically inspired literature that I believe to be inexhaustible, since it changes and redevelops every time the mind opens to it. Because events would not differentiate my writing from others, I was taken quite naturally by deconstruction. By playing with language, I could design knowledge and I was able to invent a text intimately related to my interior psyche.

Embodied cognition and mind speaks in favor of the human body being the perceptual system that enables or disables one’s ability to move. Therefore, the body drives one’s choice of being and is exactly what I was writing upon, the discourse from within the other. Metafiction delved into the split subject—the writing I versus the experiential I, which is ultimately the self and the other. However, wanting to expose also the distance between selves within moments of the intimate, physical and private space, I went right to the human body, that is the sexual relationship between man and woman.

There is pressure upon each of these roles, a pressure to be the ideal role for the other. The experiential eye to live ideally for the writing I and the woman to be the ideal embodiment for the man (or vice versa). The projection of selves is always present, and within this logic the body is always the first thing to be seen. Evidently, subjects become the object in desire and ultimately, the memory becomes what had been written upon the body. But again within all intimacy was distance—the silence where nerves spoke inwardly—darkness where sight had to be translated by feelings.

By using the act of writing and the act of physicality as the scene from which my stories unfolded, I was able to define what it was the individual wanted—the desire for language: to be heard, to be seen through, to expose what was written in the mind when the moment remained silent. My rationale will focus on the discourse within the other—the other of one’s self (the idea being one projects, aspires to be, the dream being) and the other that one engages physically with. In both situations, the mind’s language is fragmented as a result of the separation of selves. And since, each realm of being is a metaphor of meaning, the focus of the fictitious texts that will be read are poetic, lending access to the fragment, the metaphysical and romantic unreality and the imagination which presents ideal ideations and acts as a barrier between truth and time—all of which transfigure a common reality that may otherwise be lived by all present beings. Since poetry intrinsically is the language of the body, that which moves in rhythm of the nerves, it exposes best the borderline between the realities of difference and purposefully obscures what is thought and spoken in a context of effusive intention.

The theories I wish to implement speak to one’s desire for language, how knowing one’s self through language is inexhaustible and argue that experiences cannot be determined without language. Therefore, for moments to have existed language must be present. Through this study, I became aware that more than my want to be within the other—to feel intimately known and captured by captivation—I needed language, I needed desire to move me.

Kristeva, Julia - Black Sun
Lacan, Jacques - L'ecrits (The Mirror Stage)
Jung, C.G. - Man & His Symbols
Laing, R.D. - The Politics of Experience
Barthes, Roland – The Pleasure of the Text, Writing Degree Zero, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Butler, Judith – Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th Century France
Derrida, Jacques – Of Grammatology
Foucault, Michel – The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language
Levinas, Emmanuel – Time and the Other
Knutson, Susan – Narrative in the Feminine
Marion, Jean-Luc – The Erotic Phenomenon
Heller-Roazen, Daniel – The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation
St. Augustine – Confessions
Rilke – The Notebooks of Malta
Sartre, Jean-Paul – Nausea
Berger, John – And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Woolf, Virigina - The Waves
Lispector, Clarice – The Stream of Life
Cixous, Helene – The Book of Promethea
Quin, Ann – Passages
Sappho – Fragments
Heraclitus - Fragments
Irigaray, Luce - The Sex Which is Not One, Elemental Passions
de Beauvoir, Simone – She Came to Stay
Nin, Anais – Winter of Artifice
Villers de L’Isle-Adam – The Future Eve
Bloom, Harold – Romanticism and Consciousness
Fitz, Earl E. - The Difference of Desire: Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector
Rumi – The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
Ovid – The Art of Love

ani difranco

ani franco - fuel lyrics

"cause someday you might find you're starving and eating all of the words you said"

to write a novel that read as music, and moved the reader just the same, would be an accomplishment.

it is possible that there is less meaning

I have not invented anything yet, too committed now to shaping scene, extracting essence, expanding size and expounding for weight. But I will say, I have been encouraging myself to develop new and/or better detail. If in fact he did not scar the lake with our initials, I will make him do so in story. Intention: to invent the world I want to live in and immortalize the moment I want accessible out of context of time. Memory is essential for living, otherwise one stops short with every step he takes. Even if I have to hover over time with thought, it moves me and instigates my going places, and of course, I hope it takes others some place secret, too.

10.20

Today I was happier. The weather changed while I was gone. He even laughed, how it changed for me. Thank you Manhattan, I remember loving you now. Air feels good now attaching to face. The class was impressed by my poetry, how far it has come in no time at all. I became overwhelmed by a pressure that rarely ceases when classmate said she would like to see me write on something else. No one else agreed, saying the point of entry changes every time. To write on so many other things makes me feel like I have to be out experiencing everything, even the things I do not want to contain, that I cannot be satisfied with what I am perceiving. As if I am one-dimensional. I can remind myself that I only began writing poetry this September (sans a rhyming poem written in the 10th grade), but I feel like that is an excuse. Even still, Sappho wrote on desire because that was her calling, her exploration. To feel and to have all eyes would be genius, but right now I have to work with what I have, which is the desire to answer and bring clarity to the specific fixation I am now continuously expounding upon. Things change all the time—it may seem like I will exhaust the issue I write on, but I won’t, at least not without awareness of doing so. Last year I did not write on eroticism. I wrote on density and dreams. When I am in love I cannot write upon it. I have myself live it. These topics I work on now are just other gestures pressing through a text I hope some day will be thick and inexhaustible.

Today, also, we decided would be our last meeting until the first of December. Under the weight of his ear, I forgot why I had cared about certain Miami ordeals. He could tell I was feeling like I had to place meaning into matters that did not mean more to me then what they were. “These matters don’t require soul-searching.” And he was right, it was unnecessary, things had unfolded as I wanted them to. Many females expect all females play by “the rules”. “Are there rules?” he asked. Supposedly, but I’ve never followed them. I feel like you have to be open if you want to give yourself any distinction. “So maybe you don’t sleep with just anyone on the first night, but you will sleep with the right person then.” It was something like that, but it clicked, and it was accurate and simple. I could try to expound upon why I do what I do, but sometimes you just do it and in the moment it was right, perfect even. I have gone home with barely known men (still no “one night stand” hhooolla), not with the intention to know or not to know more of them, but with the intention to take advantage of how I was feeling. The conscious of others can make you think that you, too, need to hover over your actions and define what they mean. Or you can recognize that you have no interest in conflating impulse with intuition. Even for me, the writer, searching for substance within any given moment—especially the physical—can be a nuisance. I slept with someone because I wanted to touch skin, because I cared for how a body may feel. Last weekend that was what mattered and I don’t feel there was more meaning beyond that. This evening it felt good to be okay with that and letting it be known.

Light Mellows Teasing Night

woke and wrote:

Light mellows in the closest hours before morning. Our breath is a constant noiselessness, fluidly emphasized by the rhythmic dream within dreaming. We keep sound within sleep. Listening with eyes closed to a language untranslatable for woken bodies. In the morning, we will tell our partners we have forgotten our sleep. And they too will betray the potency of darkness, saying they were dreamless, so similar to sleepers like you. It is always easy to forget those hours when we fell behind our thoughts to reimagine life. It must be easy because the irretrievable never rewards us with catch or claim, and we cannot let ourselves feel not fortunate. To distance our minds from intangible temporality, we have our hands take up flesh, promising the bed be framed in realism, finally. We look upon some other, not certain whether they are only an idea we have happened to dress up with words. Whispering tales in bed we do not mean to behave as replacements for truth, like, “I never dreamed I would have you.” Followed by a bite to make sure this back before your chest can bleed out life. Instead, pulling away in sigh saying, “Show me something real.” You place upon him a kiss without tongue and he smiles without his teeth, teasing you out of your underwear so as to proceed backwards into dream where hearts beat freely from touch in the hours closest to morning, when the living is half-alive and too desensitized to feel needed. We sleep safely. 

Time Spreads Open Across the Hour.

I live in the stretch of moment becoming moment. Where time tangles as desire exceeds and recedes. There my feelings exist flexibly, having not become captivated, yet. To be still means I must suspend freedom, lay dedicated to one choice of being. But when the hour bends over light, it is difficult to see you as anything other than time, that which moves me. Between presence’s affect and effect is the chance for gesture: to be made, to be had. Humped over, in my flesh, I cannot avoid having to become. Strokes shape so I dilate on your touch. Even fingers licking thighs distorts silence, for so often I hear within the space of suspended figures the body’s voice defining internalized sighs. In your eyes, having seen you coming, does not stabilize me, but not unlike looking into a mirror has me reflect on time’s sensitivity. The time, which was us, becoming larger than our single bodies. Even after presence, there is no moment within absence that the body is elastic. Look closer, to be its original shape is impossible. Substance cannot ever make one contract. Even materials of the mind give us size, weight, inner intensity. Ceaselessly changing, I cannot complain. No one else made me get involved. I have learned to expect and accept the aftereffect of beings dominating time. If only there was promise for duality feeling long enough, so on the stroke of the hour when bending down in touch, time gave pause to the most precious second of a feeling. Not one and others, only one. 

It would shock me still.

gate e6.

Miami airport. 9:55 pm. E6. Two waiting passengers before me. Both with elbow down, head in novel, back to plane. Wonder what makes them like their chosen author. Would they ever like me? How far am I from where I need to be? And the hope—how much of it do I need? I hate leaving this city. I always have, I always will. Jaw tightens, signs of stress, always, just hours before the day I go. I say I hate my coming and leaving, but I still do it, courageous and upon will of whim. The need to travel, to take off, to leave other realities behind and fall off terminals in front of new faces. To remind myself how easily one can move, be moved, be taken through time and deposited into a scene that has been moving without you. Acknowledging that I am not the main character, even though this life is mine. Before every flight, I kiss a man goodbye, hold his waist, then go. I wonder whether this is what makes my chest cave in. Whether I do these small acts of exaggerated crime purposefully. Lip to lip to keep me coming back home. I think it is or else maybe I would never wish to come. Desire motivates. A power we influence, just as often as it influences us. The language of desire: to be revealed, slowly, casually captured. Exposure, development in the darkroom—not unlike photography, desire is art—to be seen through. The Desire to be in Other. My mind has a mouth, gaping hole, open, hungry for meaning. But others will not let themselves think twice about what I may choose to turn on its head. This is hard. I wish I could let myself catch and release easily, always. A passivity of involvement. But as unreal as it may sound, I don’t truly want this for I need to grab hold, to grip, to see the marks, and how the pressing of one thing on to another changes the shape of self. Are creators just a fancy name—or rather respectable name—for manipulators? Needing to kneed, effectuality. Is it not the intimacy that drives the body, the mind, the heart—whatever you want to call it—but effectuality that pushes us into each other, marking each other up? Group three, boarding, time to leave and be elsewhere.

narrate in I for me to know.

last night's happening ended at 7:30 am. dancing then dialogue on thought, feeling, action. boy meets girl. open, candid, let me hear truth. woke by ten. sour stomach, now brunch and final day. leaving with others mad at me. live, learn, try to not let yourself be insensitive twice. but being brave is never easiest. how to be not so serious, but not careless either? staring up at sky yesterday all day - after morning, noon, after noon - asked aloud how to process any and all of this. coconut water cascading down skin. i tried to be in moment, let myself be there, found it difficult to not touch back, to not want to - impossible even. steam room, lying on marble, woman scratching scuds off skin, watched bright light expand through mist, heat pulling over memory, a sort of embrace. i told manager how good it was to live, how i felt if left inside that steam one could think only of another world. invented, possibly unreal. he said take these words, the freeing of the day, and have them always. i said writing lets experience not be feeling for only i, but others, let them have this day too in other way. a translation of intangibility to materiality of text on page. i thought it may feel easier leaving now. light and in the air. content and on the ground. but i still have the emotion i acted on not feeling. others told me on my last night i was disrespectful, that even on my vacation they can't agree with the party girl here for being in the time but not the thought. live, process, learn. live to have, write to feel, know for being better to all. 

My narrator is not me. But I will write pretending she is I, that I am her. The closer I am to the feeling the further I come to catching a certain truth. And that is what this writing needs. What the reader reads for, too. Comes curiously upon the page, between words, space of secrets subtly revealing selves. All relations are investments, constantly made and dealt. But, please, patience present or absent, learning is hard to deal. A moment ago I knew less then instant of now, only imagine if you were I, how mentally emotional I am being because all moment is changing me ceaselessly.

Presence Devoid of Visibility

An empty apartment speaks a single story. Telling the unknown life. I am greeted by this, an unexpected swallowing of sight, not more. The invisible makes me insecure. Absence provokes present certainty of uncertainty collapsing into conscious. Distilling out knowledge, I appear blank on a page of nothingness, no ink to invent meaning. Devoid of visibility obscures my demeanor. It is my mind becoming dense, not eye. Try to see and I think, just harder. This distraction disturbs my dynamic development. I laugh less in result. Psychic phenomenon, which is me. Reaction is I have not a thing to lean on. I tilt my head instead, restless for reason, in the white wash with no feeling. Waiting for anything to come and let me be less alone. He does, appear, after moments. From the back room of a dream. My eyes were not closed for that door to be seen. Yet I hoped for something more than these walls. Insisted there was something other than them and me. And there is, for now becomes him and I. Thoughts thinking less, less of them, lessened having him. He comes carrying flowers. Lending lilac light to the latex walls. Without him would still be space spreading ineffectually. Thanking their coming together, but why have these been brought? I point at flower heads, disproportional to their body stems. I want to have them kempt. I did not know men bought themselves thought. I hadn’t. It was she, a distance I try to point back to. He is fisting a once gift grown trivial through time. Dead, still dying, until death exists. As if soaked in a bath, they wrinkle. Familiar folds behind the face he wears which is not his. Pretending to be flexible to please me into a chanceless future. But I have seen how his penis curves. Still bent by his past. Petals fall and he, too, burying his face on the aisle he projects. A long carpet of white light brilliance. Having been laid behind him and unfolding for future. Self an impossible imitation of an illusive image from moment’s memory with flower girl. As if time has not aged, and he too. I watch him uselessly kneeling. A gesture toward absent beauty. He takes droppings to tongue and licks. Tasting, belief that thick salvia is all one needs to stick absence and presence, fragment and entirety, the gesture and the feeling back to being one. I am invisible in this apartment he wants back empty of others. I know, as I see his face drip sweat and salvia. Trying to immortalize an image disintegrating within his eye. In this harsh visibility, I am of no shape to be here, no color in face to fake not caring. I exit his unknown life and he sees but one other color as I go. Blackness, catching my back, his blank mind blinded.

what i mean.

last night was the closest i ever came.

Attached.

Illuminating dream
Is sun
Whole against my eyes
Excessive sight seeps,
My indulgence in day
Discovery in night.

Light surprises sleep
I try to hold my final dream still
Listen carefully
To the only breathless city
With sounds devoid of noise,
My interior dream.

Your hand catching curtains
Is heard by my ear
Removes myself from dream
I speak,
“No, let us wake to life.”

Fingers lose ambition
And body falls dyed in daylight
Against my impressed shadow of night,
I have already rose
Ready to move inside
These few golden hours
Attaching to my face.

Bringing to life
A part of who I
May have forgotten
If kept stoic from sleep
Not living, not real,
“Keep me within wake of world.”

This room seems better now
Holding patterns on walls
Bamboo and yawning branches,
The outside is without us
Inhaling time
“Let us go.”

My body detached
Out of frame
In the hallway of my house,
You follow stripped from bed
Pulling me near
To kiss you all awake.

The kitchen keeps
An apple
Taking it your finger
Pushes inside
I laugh at the skin bruised,
“I want watermelon instead.”

We buy one
Too big to carry
Sit it in the front seat
Drive away
Safe in our belts.

Hair free framing our faces
Pretending it is summer
“I just want to be…”
Relieved, you complete me,
Keeping us focused
On the road.

Our hands full of pulp
We sit with toes tracing lake,
Ducks wait for bread
But all we have is melon
Stains across our mouths.

Feeding me your tongue
We try to forget
Everything but ourselves together,
Ankle deep I come close
To losing control
My body dense
Distinct from mind
Undistinguishable under water.

Your eyes pull me from my thoughts,
What did you feel being weightless?
“I don’t want to remind myself now.”
This could be my only time to know why you are this way.

I look outside my presence
Become older with the hour
Watch cobwebs almost detach
Too delicate to touch
The spider may drown in lake,
We all are only moments from our last breath.

“I felt overwhelmed by lightness
Euphorically without thought
I let myself be exposed
Consuming pleasure made me feel guilt.”

Did you feel happy?
“I knew I was not even close.”
You wonder what I do to be
Absent from thoughts
“I dance.”

Insisting, I respond
Moving to our will
Granting motion to air
Gestures given in light.

Attached to time
I free myself from then
From ever,
Becoming wildly unaware

Dress hanging
Irresponsible of my body.
I stop dead
Shying away from you sighting
Nakedness not hidden
In bedding of night.

You take me to your chest
Beneath skin I hear our beats
Restless discourse
We did not say
But will always have had.

You feel my crying
Scaring skin
Tears for the unbearable weight of being
Telling me it is okay
The sound of your voice attaching to the day,
This moment for memory
When it was impossible to feel alone.

she found paris.

i need, need, need. have to have to have to. do something with all my footage from berlin, car rides with european couples, train rides to amsterdam, fields of nothingness which is everything, brilliant light caught in monet's garden, ferris wheels in paris, suspended sky, father and son on the swing, mothers waving bye, red robes framed in the window against the black night, burlesque shows, grandiose germans, heavy laughter caused by cocktails, a photobooth stranded in the middle of nowhere, temptation inward, silent motels, unconscious interviews on ambien, dadaish, waiters with drugs in brussel's bathrooms. unfamiliarity, just the desire to sense more. i have it captured. the tapes are just waiting in boxes beneath my bed.

Object in Desire

Infinite white light under cover
Canopied purity
Profound illusive immaculateness.

We, too, want to live deeper
In its breadth.

But

Freedom disturbs us.

It assumes
Within lucidity
There is nothing to hold us
From our dreams.

Logic conceals
Why with head risen
I trace words loosely
Dangling above masculinity.

Somehow you
Follow my feminine gesture
Wipe my lips and say,

“I feel tired, too.”

Try to fall away from each other
And can’t.

Instead hopelessly bring our selves
Closer to coming into darkness.

Curling toes
In gloved hand,
Your grasp makes me
Too wounded to move.

Stretching skin
I hope to give
Weight to this lightness
Breath to cushion my conscious calamity.

Fingers insane on my skin
Become mad in the middle.

I am too dreamless to be here.

But

“We need each other now.”

Your lips pushing apart mine
Keep me from going
Make me watch downward
The art of the act,
Object in Desire.

When you break me open
Too hurt to care
I pass silently to darkness
Light coming over skin
The weight of having been within the other.

Before taking your body from mine
You press deeper
Deceiving the opaqueness of our skin
Obscuring the shallowness.

Will we be thought pure
If we seem
Intimate at eye level,
I think this is the hope.

But

Knowing it is

Too dangerous a lie
These tears too transparent
In light I close my eyes
And scar us from darkness.

regatta.

got unbelievably high last night. drank baileys and vodka. watched men play poker. ate unsweetened chocolate topped with crunchy peanut butter and cherry jam. told in the kitchen, "there is something about you. unusually wise. something must have happened. travel, weight or a death?" i said, "two of those." couldn't let myself go home with him. drove alone with all the windows up. didn't want anyone to see in. woke up seven times with nightmares. drank two coke zeros (i haven't drank soda in twelve years). at regatta, i just had purple punch. it tasted like popsicles from childhood. a guy on the boat: "hi." as if he knew me. "uh hi, you look familiar." i said, playing along. "you don't remember? may. after the party." "ooooh! yes yes." fragments of everything came back to me. "do you remember my name, chelsea?" "no, but i remember those eyes." and that was the truth, but i could tell the truth didn't feel good either. 

i'm staying in miami till saturday.

the rain has kept me up all through the night. between that background sound and my playlists, the lack of sleep has been worth the musicality of the dreamless night.

gregory & the hawk - oats we sow

robyn + cobrastyle

Robyn-Cobrastyle from gottfried on Vimeo.

to be or not to be.

a thanks to my favourite LA resident for recommending this song. you can download it free here.

Andrew Bird - "Oh No" from Jenny Huang on Vimeo.

Parents will always tell you, reputation is everything. You’re always in favor of the motto, until it doesn’t work in your favor. Just like anything in life. It is hard to judge though—the moment you no longer seem to be a free spirit but loose, friendly (to everyone) and therefore disrespectful (flippant even), physically mature but mentally unaware. Of course, this is in reference to partying, alcohol and the like…the hours when you loose your natural ability to be less impulsive at any given instant. It isn’t an excuse, but—maybe—can it be a reason? I am not too sure. I hate excuses—and for the last year, I have instinctively caught myself from falling back on them. But I still experience the urgency to explain myself—explain myself in the situations when my reputation could have been compromised—when I seemed mindless and unconcerned. Because in truth, I feel like I am hyperaware and concerned, so how/when/why does it go wrong?

I think I am eager to have a balance in my life. And for the last year, I have again found myself acting in extremes. I flee Manhattan because I have begun to feel extremely self-contained there. I feel unnerved—under pressure—contaminated. This wasn’t always the case. In fact my first two years there, I remember how beautifully I responded to the city—to the pace—to the limitlessness and the options that extended to eternity. I believed Manhattan was responsible for how quickly I became healthy and for that I thought I would to some extent be dependent upon it.

But over the past six months, I feel like my personality at this period in my life isn’t harmonious with Manhattan. I’m too hard on myself, I’m never satisfied by the amount that I have done—that I have succeeded at—I have less life in me being there, I’m shy and too aware of MYSELF (which I hate and find to be smothering). Time only goes more quickly as we grow—expecting the future, trying to live fully in the day (for ourselves and for the ones we know we need). 

I walked so many streets alone, road so many buses through the cold, trying to find the way to extend beyond myself—to find the way to achieve my dream (living and studying in New York City). But then I did, and I only began walking faster. As I flew in strides down streets, I could always hear myself wishing I would slow down and remember the avenues more, memorize the apartment curtains, study the light as it hid behind the trees spread like rakes, overhear more conversations instead of inventing my own lines. I haven’t wanted to weave through parks, looking straight ahead—but I do. I haven’t wanted to immortalize young adults raping one another's souls—but I have. I wished I would let go of myself, and watch the children going in circles on the playground tires. See the fabrics of the dresses, the characters on the backpacks. I wanted to see how the small details that meant the world to us in our youth had changed for today’s children, much smaller then me. But somehow I have just let myself keep walking—almost hoping I wouldn’t see it—hoping I wouldn’t wish I was still them. 

Instead, eleven-year-old boys skate past me to meet up with the young girls—the young girls that should be too innocent to be wearing peter pan collars and miniskirt uniforms or neon pink tights and dock martens, cursing and making noise. I watch as the boys (all of five feet) lean their boards against their leg and let the girls kiss them (laughing after them—their coral lipstick stained beneath the curve of their cheek). And I think how quickly Manhattan makes you live distanced from your youth—how quickly it convinces you to walk away from it and rush to where the kids out of college are spending their time (but yet, they haven’t even reached high school, why are they trying to be someone not relatable?). And this almost makes me regretful—as if so many of us are behaving insincerely. What is better to follow a majority of the time: your desires or your needs? What constitutes for living life, if your life is yours?

I write often of the split subject. How I feel I am spread between two cities—one leg on one island and one another. Letting some in easily—without thought—but others guarding them off, shutting them down. I come home to force myself out of comfort zones (but with still having support since it is “home"). Traveling has become a motivation—the goal, so all the work, focus, and entrapment in Manhattan has some purpose or rather, ending point. When I am here I learn from other people. I don’t just learn like I do in Manhattan from my reactions within an environment. But I listen to people—I let myself be surprised—I let myself be sober to who they are and why. On Saturday this girl I had just met was telling me how her mother had just died. I have never cried—ever—from something like that. But on Saturday, I did. Her story scared me—it scared me how someone can be lost in a heartbeat. I hate feeling/assuming I am invincible. I hate concealing my body when one day I could get in an accident and loose some part of myself. I hate letting time fall away quickly, when time is all one needs. As much as I needed/wanted to let loose this weekend because it is something—some side of me that is so much a part of me—I know I let myself become too loose. Whenever I drink too much, I wish I could have pulled back. I wish instead of trying to be something for so many people, I was more for just one other. Why? Because I need my memory. I want to remember the substance, the words, I want to be aware of myself. And I’m afraid sometimes all I remember is black, darkness.

so lovely

sunny dad sets fire - wilderness (css resmix) 

miami has been full of surprises as always. i saw yelle perform last night and went to regatta for the first time today. truly, i sometimes don't want to leave.

Solange - I Decided from now8p on Vimeo.

The Ting Tings - Great DJ from now8p on Vimeo.

N.E.R.D - Everyone Nose (Remix) from now8p on Vimeo.

305

10-09-08

I flew into Miami tonight. And I must admit, I love to see myself smile. I love to see myself—WHEN—I smile. I can feel my voice latching on to those that make me sense myself through my body. And by that I mean, the voices that make your heart beat—dance around, purr and float. All that, as opposed to yawning. I can feel my voice extending towards theirs—towards the body I imagine when we are distanced by the phone to phone—I can feel my voice wrapping around them, whispering thank you for enticing me—for helping me live in the moment—thank you for reminding me how it is TO FEEL alive. I felt outside the constraints of my body as I drove away from Manhattan. I loved the city then. Loved the city as my eyes fell—good—fell—bye. As if my head was outside the window, watching the aesthetics of the city—memorizing the way it looked. “BRICK” carved into the salmon colored wall outside of Essex—a man eating a heresy bar between the light change—a boy with his backpack, making his spine curve in all disagreeing directions, picking his nose and placing the remains on his tongue. He must eat, I thought. He will eat. He will eat anything he can get. A woman in her wheelchair watched the cars fly by—myself just another one of them—so capable of moving through time quickly, running away, escaping what we feel holds us back. But she, just sat there. Watching the day cave in with light. She was in no rush like us. She knew the secret to life. What was the last street she walked down—I thought—could she remember it? Had she ever even walked at all? I take my capabilities for granted, I told myself as I looked out beyond us all. Manhattan held at a distance—the sky—and on this day there finally was one!—there was a sky! Not a thick exhale of gray, not a lung of smoke, but a light ocean with willowy clouds reflected onto the borders of the world.

weighted.

maybe being a writer - even if it doesn't define you career wise - but feeling as though you are a writer - will be a constant tension. knowing that you have to perceive, for the materials necessary to create, means you have to be actively living. not just alive, but living. and yet, writing is a way of living. but it takes time away from the other life. the time when you could be mindless, unproductive, distracted, free. the time when you can turn off, see the world, feel the world but not try to memorize it for text.

my reason for becoming healthier was always to gain time. if my thoughts weren't consumed by image hating, what could my thoughts be focused on? i will go out on a limb here and say most females, at some point in their youth, experience this obsessive compulsive thinking, analyzing, idealizing, predicting around a certain "love/crush interest". this figure consumes one's thoughts - he becomes the topic of conversation with friends - one asks for help - one feels discouraged - one lets him decide who she is - and in all this confusion one forgets herself - she changes the way she sees herself. 

unfortunately that was an extremely loose fleshing out, but i have no brain at the moment. my point is that i, too, experienced that. more than once, many times. it took up space in my mind and time with my friends. it helped me derive meaning. but then, one day having never consciously realized, i became aware that i had stopped worrying about my relationships with men, that it never seemed to be a problem, that it never was an issue larger than myself. it was what it was. i was confident and had no qualms. and if anything i was indifferent to needing to make it a problem. because i knew how easy and free it was meant to be. 

my weight issue being less and less of...well...an "issue" and the above not being a "problem" all have showed me how our internal manifestations determine us to a degree and for a time being. we are committed to our thoughts more than to our actions. my goal with weight is what i have seen happen with my experiences with men. i am able to write about them intimately, but still at an emotional distance. i understand what can be conveyed (beyond my own experiences) but i am not attached to them. I AM NOT MAKING SENSE. basically, i enjoy writing the complications of a romance - the tension between physicality and intimacy - the disconnect - desire - rawness - the crude - the unspoken within a romance. 

but i can only do this because i am not pained by my experiences, or at least not any longer. i see them as moments worthy of being shown bare and pulled apart. 

i want this from my relationship with weight as well. i want to see it separate from myself. i want who i was then separate from who i am trying to be today. i want to be able to be critical. but more than that, i want to be able to give the character credit. i want some how to love who that person is. i want to write about weight only if i can show readers that haven't suffered from an eating disorder, the amount of willpower and determination those that have had to have. how the intention is for the outside to be hated, so one can begin to understand what it truly is that is worthy of love, admiration, praise. 

it's complicated and i still don't think i am close to giving a character with an image-disorder the credit s/he deserves. i could philosophize it but i couldn't let myself dive blindly into the psychology. i couldn't feel about it yet. although the image and the body are truly metaphors for romance. 

i try not to say i "hate" things, but i will say i am appalled by females on facebook that write all over their pictures and/or friend's photographs what a "thinspo" they are (thin inspiration) or how they "look like a 12 year old boy" or "omg you are so thin, i'm fat!" or "drugs are bad" the comments go on and on. i think it is unfortunate how people want to spotlight themselves like this - how they choose to represent superficiality, willing - how they are absolutely missing the mark. i never lost half my body to look like i was "important" and doing drugs at clubs, drinking only champagne. i never lost half my body so i could laugh and call myself a 12 year old boy because my vertebrae was showing through my dress. those things happened because i got two forms of attention 1) being called "thinspo" by a hundred naive girls 2) being yelled after and asked to leave restaurants because i looked like a diseased little boy. 

the difference is i never said those things about myself. i never was my own cheerleader, raising pompoms for anorexic cheer. and our generation does. they think it is a chic to loose their period for six months because they are malnourished. they are inspiring themselves and others - other "friends" - to be sick, as well. i have such difficulty grasping any of it - and i still have difficulty sympathizing with them or me for falling victim to its potency. 

at some point, i think i will try and collect as many comments i received as i can and go from there. they are shocking but importantly, real. and in a way, it does the writing for me. i don't have to feel so much. or at least all at once. 

12.01.06

chelsea, we've admired you all along not because of how you look or how you dress but because of you who you are. so many people love the way you write and i for one, love your sincerity and your love for culture and your interest in seeking out the things you love and having dreams. something that has helped me is the realization that when it comes down to it, your mind and your personality and your confidence make up who you are. that is the...essence, if you will, of a human being. just remember that as years go on, we may get wrinkles, we may get wider, we may turn into the polar opposite of our youth. but at least our minds will still be the same. and everyone will still treat us the same way. and if they don't, then.... why would we want to be around a person like that? i really truly believe that one day you're going to be famous for your mind, (and not your body) and that's the one thing to be proud of the most.

12.02.06

i was at the union sq green market today and had a really great conversation with the lady who every week sells me the most delicious scones and what i have found to be the best french bread in the city. we were talking about how hard it was to buy a baguette because if youre one person eating alone, it gets stale quite quickly. she suggested sharing it with a friend, and it said id love to... if only my friends ate carbs! it was then when she admitted to me that anorexia had taken 10 years of her life. ten years she felt were wasted. ten years when she could have been experiencing all the pleasures living in our world had to offer. ten years when she could have been eating these incredible scones and being truly happy with just being. we only live once, she said. 

my response: beautiful story. i think about it a lot. all the richness that i am lucky enough to partake in, but don't. i have this intense love that i am capable of experiencing - and want to - but have been scared of knowing. i think it does go back to the fact that i wanted hardship. i thought i deserved it. i knew it, in some form at some time. when i no longer had it in one area, i replaced it in another. soon enough you have to accept the beauty in not looking for problems. not looking for the hardship to breed character. an honest smile would probably be my most provocative work. not pain, not regret, and not holding back from the availability of my honest desires.

12.05.06

its really scary living up to our full potential. bc it is only then when we are the most exposed to the world and to failure.

and

its really scary being happy, because we think... then what? the scariest part of letting ourselves be truly happy is the alternative to that--if we're truly happy, if we are fortunate enough to know what that is, we can't always be... and we'll have to then experience true unhappiness as well. and thats a scary thought.

i dont know if that made sense, but its something ive been dealing with this school year as well (not food issues, friend issues). while doubt and fear sometimes creep in for me, i focused this year on doing what i love (simple things--cooking, going to galleries, going to the greenmarket, the flea market) and being by myself, just trying to be a better person. a few weeks ago, something changed. i just felt back to who i used to be before new york changed me, before i felt distanced from my former self, and i smiled that genuine smile you speak about.

the incredible lightness of being, that free but incontrol of myself feeling is priceless. now, i go outside my apt, breathe in the crisp air, and search for the perfect apple at the greenmarket, and smile. really, honestly, uncontroably smile.

[sorry, that was an essay].

her honesty struck me, and so does yours. its so hard, but get better and feel free!