the sunflower essay
on self determination
i lost a lot of phone numbers in the iphone disaster of late 2025. the battery of the phone i had for 6 years finally expanded and started breaking my screen, dying during a work call i failed to complete on the commuter rail. then i broke my burner, a google pixel that was very inconvenient and slow. graphene os is the opposite of addictive. i didn't want to look at my phone at all. when i finally came around to realize that this feature is a blessing, i dropped it in such a way that it still vibrated when i got messages but screen was gone. this happened 6 hours before the overnight train i was supposed to take from philly to boston so i had my studiomate mia drive us all around town between tattoo clients looking for a place i could buy an old iphone for under a hundred bucks. i lost a lot last year, including the contacts of my dealers, exes, people i had beef with but forgot about, random people i tried to date 5 years ago, old managers, and a lot of stuff i probably don't consider for a reason. my iphone has photos from 2023 and then jumps to 2025 and half of those photos are not accessible.
yesterday maps visited me because they were driving from pittsburgh back up to vermont. we went to nahant beach and ate a spread of snacks that made our stomachs hurt. we seem to be feeling similar ways about the summer, about wanting so badly to run around and not be held down by anything but also probably we will have to have jobs. i have been waiting on this job where i had interviewed 3 times. if i get it, my plans are ruined. if i don't get it, my plans are ruined. i feel pretty stuck.
we walked around the beach while the sun was setting and ran into some boys with a cute orange car that broke down. maps looked under their hood and diagnosed the problem. the battery was "hella corroded". me, someone who loves to be in everybody else's business, waved down another car and that driver tried to give them a jump. we carried on and went on our way to chuck shells into the ocean.
the sun was setting and i helped maps write a text to this person they were seeing. i layed on the hood of their car and we dissolved each other of fear of confrontations. sometimes you need a friend to tell you that you are not confused at all. you actually know exactly what is going on. we talked about circumstances that make us feel stuck, or at least unfree. i thought about the summer, biking in the rain and drying off in the sun, and the thing that anarchists are concerned with- autonomy. i am less concerned about freedom in the american sense, a state-based framework of rights, and more about self determination, and who I want to be and how to work against stagnation in my spiritual and material life. also given that we have established the gayest fucking war of all time and are practicing state sanctioned international and domestic terrorism, i don't think any of us are free, even in the american sense, which never applied to most people anyways. The conveniently changing definition of American Freedom, like American Terrorism, is weaponized by the state that is against self determination and collective autonomy. the orange car was finally being towed away. even if we can't free each other, we can get each other unstuck. my freedom was never about frivolity or having limitless options, it is about acting on them.
maps and i have been trying to compile our travel diaries and drawings from our bike trip from philly to portland last summer. it feels precious, sacred, and still hard to understand. we live far-ish from each other and respectively have a lot going on which makes working on it difficult. it has been like a cartoon trying to capture and line up words and images with a box held up by a stick, painting a fake tunnel on a wall, or waiting to drop an anvil on myself. i have been thinking about the right time to film and the habit of documenting, and what makes someone a writer or a documentarian. i often feel the most inspired to write when i am about to do something else. i often remember to document when the moment is over. maps and i read michelle tea's "the passionate mistakes and intricate corruption of one girl in America" aloud and we wondered when it becomes appropriate to write, and much less publish, about the people in one's life, especially when there is narrative conflict. maps told me that they burned all of their diaries. when is it for personal closure and where does it become a violation of privacy? what should i reveal or conceal? why do people do it? what has to happen to me to become wise enough to deserve to write about other people? do people write about me in a way that liquidates my experience into fixed and useful characters? why would i ever do that to someone when i believe that everyone has the right to self determination? idk. i love my life and sometimes love is not about understanding, and definitely not about capturing. my life is to witness, guide, and ultimately unravel. i am not living to torture a story out of myself.
my housemates at bestie mansion and i have been writing a web series called "the disaffected youth of brightonia," a self reflexive show about us making the show and about our house and being working people in boston. in a way, it's like the show about the show i guess but we aren't ruining each other...yet. there was supposed to be an episode where i film the videographer that the evil museum sent to my house to film me working on these giant artworks but really i am secretly filming the videographer. scott was supposed to hide in my closet and i was supposed to tape my phone to the ceiling. i am obviously pissed at the museum for doing a mass firing in a cruel and unaccountable way this year, that translated to everyone around me being overworked, hostile, and cagey. i am upset that this project stopped meaning anything to me. the day came and i was actually too scared to carry out my big plan to document the absurdity of the situation because the videographer was nice. i made him coffee and put a bandage on the finger he accidentally cut on one of the mosaics.
i sent ben to vlog scott's last day of work at another evil art institution. the shift was at the opening of this exhibition about performing labor which is ironic because that place is so spiritually and emotionally torturous. i was doing sound for the show i was playing at the firehouse. the band choo choo, nyc's #1 mta train themed band, was doing a ramones cover. i'm against it, i'm against it. well i'm against it. scott expressed that most of the people working there were actually kind people who didn't deserve to get thrown under the bus or doxxed or get laughed at. I agree with this. a week ago jake and i eavesdropped on scott's entire exit interview. it was so sad that i declared war on everything. i was going to write an episode that completely skewered everyone involved in my best friend's work place abuse. i was going to annihilate the building where i ate venture capital funded millenial slop bowls in the bathroom on my lunch break with my eyes. but when we started to consider where this episode was going, i guess its more about privacy, us not being bad people, and not letting the show turn us into bad people who do stuff like this.
this brings me to think about the essay i have grown very precious about even beginning, the essay about the giant sunflower that grew outside of the baltimore ave house, the only house i ever lived in in philly, about people i love, my best friends. i stepped out one afternoon and was eating on the porch, hoping that some sun would combat the mold that had been accumulating in my body. i know another house where people smoke inside, probably because it kills the mold in the air or dries it out or something. i don't really smoke cigs and i heard sun was good. this was the end of the house basically where the mold was making us all act weird to each other and cough. i would do nose drugs in my room alone, read zines on my phone, and look at the graffiti my last housemate left under a thin layer of primer all over my walls play out biblical scenes. a lot of stuff was happening through the summer that isn't mine to discuss or narrativize. the sun burned my face in the philadelphia july way and i noticed a large cool shadow eclipse my shoulder. there was a giant freaking sunflower growing in the front stoop that i had not noticed until then. what the hell.
we waited all summer for it to bloom. i just learned about "death blooming", which is a thing that happens to monocarpic succulents where they put all energy into a dramatic bloom before it dies. sunflowers are annuals so this isn't really what was happening at all but i thought it was showing out one last time because an era was over for the house, an era was over for me. it was becoming crazy and 'roided up from all the mold and house toxins or the monster energy drink i poured off the porch that one time. it grew to be 2 stories tall and was falling into the street. lu and lucy supervised as i tied the sunflower stalk to a column on the porch to guide it out of the street. it felt like sailing the house.
when the sunflower finally bloomed, we waited for it to fall over. at this point i had moved to boston, and halloween was my first time back to philly since then. the day i got into philly the sunflower fell over. flor and i were walking by the old house for the first time and the neighbor was cutting the stalk that fell into her garden. i asked for some of the seeds and she cut the flowers from the top of the plant for me and put them in a paper bag. she mentioned a weird mold or fuzzy grey substance that was growing and calcifying through the center of the stalk. she pointed at the roots and i tried to pry the resistant stalk apart to see what was inside. i found a small patch of fabric stuffed into the stalk. it had a print of a steel reserve can and said "no more oogles". this is so crazy idk how to believe it.
i have been waiting to plant the seeds because it means that i can finally write about it because enough time will have lapsed since last summer to be able to tell the story of that time of my life. and when the sunflowers finally grow, the durational experience of writing and growing will finally make sense and i will feel some kind of resolve or i will level up and be replaced with a larger shinier version of myself. but i know that this is not how writing works. it will always be the wrong time to write, or to say anything, or to be recording, and we do it anyways in attempts to determine the self. when i moved back to boston, i ended up biking the expanse of the city every day for a week to distract myself from not having a mattress yet. i imagined turning onto the grays ferry bridge, transposing the smartest girl i know onto the blown out, rendering landscape in front of me. walking around feels like a land mine of missing messages and images. i allow the 23 year old girl who decided to move to philadelphia with her best friend to stand in a hail storm outside of the grays ferry fresh grocer determine her future.
