WHAT MADE YOU

AN EXERCISE IN JOURNAL THERAPY

[fofoment]

infatuated today

he feeds me with a look

[fofoment]

creative today

phrases Google could not find:

"in the beginning there was a sound with no context"

"how should i write out my dreams"

"in the fireplace there was water, floating"

"we sat by the window with the cold outside"

"his legs were shorter than his hair"

“no new love will be made”

"no other voices in the backyard"

"in my mouth i felt there nothing"

"if not speech then coarser sustenance"

"in the time it took for an egg to cook"

“an overcast omelette”

"i ate everything in the house and started on the wrappers"

"the body as a cupboard"

"i stopped for a moment to ask someone for directions"

"even the shapes refused to listen"

"my mother looked at my face and cried"

"then out of the sink i crawled"

"the floor was spotty with roaches"

"there were corpses in the bodies of crumbs"

"the dream ended in the toilet"

[fofoment]

unpoetic today

i thought “the bed broke faster than my heart”

wondered why i stopped writing years ago. too busy, too lazy, too little of everything that moves.

we ate greasy pizza for lunch today, sicilian slices in plain, pepperoni, and sausage, plain regular triangle and another with cheap anchovies, and garlic knots bound together by the chewiest gluten in woodside yet.

we are going to seattle and portland next week. i tried to fix the snail earrings to be more polished looking for alder, but i think i just damaged them more and made them lose their charm. i should stop trying to fix things.

[fofoment]

dreamlike today

in which the restaurant i was working in was failing financially.

in which we decided to close down shop.

in which the other restaurants on the block were doing fine.

in which i repeatedly disappointed my chef, down to the last minute, from messing up family meal desserts to failing to call 911 successfully as the restaurant began to smolder and billow steam while a mysterious liquid began to burn through its floors as we stood outside, watching.

in which the 911 call was either misdialed or led me to a really fucked up department that had nonending multilingual prerecorded introductions to its emergency line.

in which everyone began to walk closer to each other and apart from me.

in which i had to run to tutoring at 6pm.

in which i was running late.

in which a stupid driver with a super nice car was trying to drive through these gates that were chained and bolt locked and i tried to stop him from wrecking his car as he attempted to drive through these gates by pulling the gates apart, wider, so maybe he could drive through with more ease.

in which i was stupid for thinking that would have helped anyone.

in which i witnessed his fancy car morph into a different more tank-like shape.

in which he miraculously drove out beyond the gates. maybe he had the key to the lock in the first place.

in which i knew i would not get to tutoring on time, being 40 blocks away with only 20 odd minutes to go.

in which i surrendered to fate and wished it would pity me and waited for a bus.

in which i accidentally waved on a bus i’d wanted to get on.

in which i began to chat a nice older lady who had joined me at this bus stop, about how i would’ve been able to walk this distance in this time two years ago, when i was younger and fitter and skinnier, but i am just too tired right now and had a very bad day.

in which, as i was speaking, i noticed that i was one avenue over from the one i needed to be on, and realized that this avenue was completely new and foreign to me, and it was strangely elevated like a hill above my familiar streets.

in which, as i was speaking, this new perspective began to shift even more, and it seemed like the entire city under our feet were in actuality a free-floating island on an uncontrollable body of water, which had now began to toss and turn violently enough to move everything i had ever known to be stable.

in which i was terrified and the old lady appeared exhilarated to be on a ship-like city that was constantly under the threat of being overwhelmed by these enormous, unimaginable waters, as if the captain had abandoned the wheel during a storm that was orchestrated by a playful but powerful baby.

in which i realized, at this most horrible time to realize any more bad things about the day, that i’d lost all the contents of my locker at work to whatever was eating through the restaurant, including my first and only chef’s hat.

in which i knew not when the waters would settle, and was sad but submitted.

[fofoment]

basic today

basic, in the sense of the modern slang, by having a froyo smoothie that probably had more sugar in it than the fake belgian waffle topped with italian rainbow cookies and melted crunchbar sauce put together, inside of a shop with one other customer, then none, we took turns with our bites, a plastic fork, a plastic knife, a plastic plate, a plastic cup with a plastic dome top, a plastic straw, no napkins, some instagrammed, and all consumed to a settling sense of mediocre satisfaction.

but also basic in the sense of being a human being living an okay life with no real issues threatening the generally complacent feeling of being well enough. a place to live with finally someone who seems to be more normal and respectful than not, a job that, despite recent slashes in weekly hours due to a lukewarm customer base, is a job nonetheless with fine people for the most part, and my boyfriend who is sometimes a friend, sometimes an enemy, and always a good source of guidance and support. for this daily bread, cake, butter, cream, and sugar, gratitude, amen.

[fofoment]

a bad daughter today

fought with mom on mother’s day, after she made me lunch with twirls of noodles and tomato fried egg. i ate all of it. then i spat out some incoherence about how her love suffocates, how she always does what she thinks is good for me even when i say the contrary repeatedly, how i’m worried that she might be too involved in frivolities at the risk of not taking care of the important things.

i seem to not know how to be a good daughter outside of random, sporadic acts.

[fofoment]

doubtful today

behavioral inertia keeps me in new york, in the basement kitchen, folding, whisking, running to tutoring. megan introduced me to her mother as the chinese tutor whose real job is being a pastry chef. i’m not a chef, and following recipes is not my real job. i don’t know what my real job is. i don’t know what my real job will be.

[fofoment]

unsure today

spent the morning cleaning, scrubbing the tub with an old sponge and some cheap shampoo, each wipe with the underlying fear of uncovering the metal beneath the enamel, scared of what the roommate might think, that all this effort yields little more than dissatisfaction, good intentions, but always poorly executed. i vacuumed and watched the lost particles of skin, fur, hair, gum wrappers speeding along into this noisy machine spitting out a never ending sigh, angry as a vessel for all the unwanted disposables, shed and forgotten by human carelessness and nature’s callousness. i mopped the floors and the water collected the graying of aging things. the toilet swallowed it all and sent it on its way so i could dispossess the filth of my life.

dust rises and settles

a single breath

on repeat

a friend announced a change of life direction with e.e. cummings: “It takes courage to grow up & become who you really are.”

how much courage?

[fofoment]

tired, but moderately peaceful, today

on the cycle, in bed, resting under the blankets sprinkled with thin cat hair from our visitor last evening, watching videos both educational and frivolous but still important, rounding out thoughts like--how do you avoid assimilation when corruption is the norm?--with a bright bulb staring stolidly at me, and i try to shift my weight to turn from it.

if i were more in control, would i be happier or burdened with the cancerous responsibility of having to maintain and nurture control? power corrupts, but what good is powerlessness?

[fofoment]

smoked today

came in to work and everything was a light dusting of soot from a fire at 2 in the morning-night, everyone’s safe except maybe not my lungs, 9 hours of breathing and wearing the remnants of a careless cigarette flick’s destruction, the doors unhinged at the firemen’s kick, the broken locks, the broken frames, the scratched paint, the gray, the age everywhere, a funeral that we cleaned up from 9 to 10 in the morning, clearing up what was broken, when we should have been making.

[fofoment]

growing-pained today

a break up text over the most basic functions of the animal, tragicomedy in real life is a quick one-two punch, the first strike hurts but the second lasts, laughing, bent over, stomach bunching into a rock, laden with the result of mounting stress, simple: “You running off to pee while I’m also holding in pee was the last straw.” that is, we were in it together until we weren’t, and my bladder was bigger than yours or something.

i had a dog for a week on park avenue south, walked to work in 7 minutes, 10 minutes from the market, in a lovely architect’s loft where i let myself play rich, but i’m a poor man all the way through.

and now alone. the party i’m photographing tomorrow evening denied me +1, as if they knew.

i told him, i’ve said it too many times for it to not be true. i said it twice, just to make sure we heard it. i told him not to tell my mother because i don’t want another voice to add to my chorus of lifelong whys.

[fofoment]

confused today:

he said, it seems like everything that made you happy has collapsed

[fofoment]

depressed today:

it's like running a psychiatric facility inside my own head. i calm myself down, then wait for the flare-up to calm myself down again. like that scene in District 9 where his body transformation begins and he realizes that he is changing into something monstrous and unfamiliar and grotesque, that moment of horror and denial, dipped in transient moments of fearful acceptance, submissive depression, the fight into flight, the flight of a chicken, maimed, headless. i hate myself for how i hate myself, for hating the things i cannot change, the things i do not see as capable of changing, it is always in this murk that i find the pool of myself: ugly, ugly, ugly, today i baptize myself again with this ritual of wasting away to the low life to be lifted back to ground level, stabilize, steady, walk again, accept, enjoy, sustain, then fall, fall, fall. 

today i watched a movie where the cat sat between him and her in the car as he thought about how he loved this woman, a questionable woman, a veritable monster, and the cat moved its tail and blinked its eyes and waited for his decision to hit the gas pedal and take them forth away from Bad City. where will they go? is there a Good City to be found? how will they develop their love if she continues in her dark, dark ways? the cat waited, and waited, and he started the drive. be the cat. be the wait. be there, in between the questionable, there on the way to nowhere. 

[fofoment]

nerved today:

the back-pocketed phone plunked into the toilet yesterday and today is the day to procure a new machine. scheduling that with laundry at mom's, a hep xyz shot at the doc's tomorrow, and potential part-time job meetings in the next 24ish hours. then we are moving on saturday. all kinds of nerves, especially after our sleep was interrupted at 4:40am when two dudes outside decided they were going to fix the pillars they had somehow managed to break, right outside our window. it remains broken.

[fofoment]

fulfilled today:

eating mild kimbap with a squirt of sriracha seated opposite a friend visiting nyc after a slow walk curving from washington square northward through k-town. greeted with buttery italian cookies and fake kisses, partly cloudy over a strange stomach ache and salt-laden dehydration.

[fofoment]

cry today:

talking about nyc as a place where all the little packed sardines are swimming in a pressure cooker. thinking about the natural rhythms of unpredictability, and knowing how to accept the weather. a dog i used to know is trembling and panting. they are worried about her. a downshift in portland, or maybe seattle.