Date put in site: 01/24/2025
Unedited.
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1. Now the electricity is off, and the generator keeps turning off too. It’s midnight, we’re at a place right off the main road. In the garden there’s a pretty white cat with lots of dust in its long fur, and a taxidermied markhor that’s been slightly botched. Still, his front legs are curled and poised, ready for action. There’s also a cage full of bunnies. They make me a bit uneasy: there are so many, and they’re so small. They’re all digging around in the dirt.
Some things are not even worth writing. What I mean by that – elusive to my friends, elusive to myself. Maybe I (you) will know what I am thinking about right now. Maybe not. If it’s truly worthwhile for the future, you would have or will have (I) noted it down, probably.
Today my mom turned 59! Do we face mortality together? We are all fish, slipping in the river as it flows and there’s golden light surrounding us... I only hope that along the way I see beautiful parts. And that I swim with my school, my schools. And that when I jump out for air I am relieved, in awe, getting a moment and then I dive back in with clarity and refreshment. For clarity: this was the vision I had sitting by the Mill River with my friends in May, watching the roots in the earth wave in and out with my hands.
Sometimes I think my eyes are too sharp. I mean that I look at things with a chill that enters, invades, the light that comes through my lenses and into my pupils where there is a perfect circle and the image streams in upside down. My grandfather was an eye surgeon. His colored pencil portrait, homemade so that each line stroke, each motion, is legible, hangs in Skardu and I saw it for the first time a few days ago. I ate white mulberries (شہتوت) and orange cherries from the trees circling the clinic. My sharp sight is about that – a version of صاف نظر – because it is mostly removed from the heart and memory and emotional part of the brain. It feels cold: it is more logical and simple. Sometimes that feels good, clear vision is a good thing.
Brain/heart, eyes/lips: is there always a clashing duality present?
This criticality is not permanent. Context and softness always come back bringing color and warmth with them. Piercing and not dulling, just softening – I don’t know a synonym for that.
2. I can always calm myself by thinking about things that do not exist. Love, stability, a touch, a look held between you and I. A small table with dusty sunlight hovering over it. Wood stained and somewhat dark. No more than two chairs. I lose myself in myself, fix my eyes somewhere closed. In the winter I used to get high on the balcony and then do my bed nicely, with fresh sheets pulled tight and my pillows fluffed. I would play music and dance, enjoying being and doing. Myself bringing myself comfort. Not avoidance – trust. You and me, but mostly me. (The you changes. The me is always me.)
To wake up, and be so present and independent. Feel like shit, or not, and sit outside on the green chair my housemate brought in her parent’s divorce. Breathe in, out, hear my chest click, one day I will maybe get that checked out, or not. Drink water from last night’s tea because in reality the night time tea is always for صبح بخیر not شب بخیر. Sip, breathe also the peach vape I don’t even like that much, which you only have because that one person who you offered it to before leaving to Michigan said he couldn’t take it because you’ll miss it when you’re back and he was right, but only because he said it and so now you were expecting it. Because a feeling is symbolic, it resembles the many feelings felt and in truth that is many.
3. I vacillate, in extreme ways, so much so that it’s sometimes funny. Images are playing in my head, I love that porch. Reality and real images are a blessing when so much of life is lived through my phone – trauma and grief and genocide, and torture and complicity that I am a part of, because my screen is also friends on vacation with other friends, or graduating college with a blue and silver stole. The global awareness of tragedy is increasing and so is the scale of tragedy. My close friend is still in jail, but maybe not, I don’t know because I can’t get in touch with her; and my professor, a gentle and wise mentor, I wish I could talk to him about all of this and how to put it all together in a way that is useful and outwards facing but he died a few days after graduation. I regret so deeply not seeing him again after our lunch over salad before everything began. Heartbreak after heartbreak, and the air outside the bathroom smells damp and not great. Leftover shower shoes are my view. But I brought my flip flops, and there is so much to be grateful for. What do I, me, you, come back to? It can be condemned – by I, me, you, us, at different times (think complicity, think how many of us are at times complicit or always complicit at different scales). Is what we come back to what we center, or what grounds us? I am here, I am here. At times I didn’t want to be. This year, strength did not need to be perceived to be true.
4. Now I wish I had a cigarette, or the peach vape I had begrudging love for. I know what I have to be grateful for. It comes back to a kiss on my shoulder; or a night in a tomb, dancing with friends and friends of friends as familiar and reliable as trees or clouds. Co-president of the protest club, I am proud and I only wish I could have done more. Now we’re laughing in circles, we’re sliding on the table with heels and dress shoes tossed around the circumference as we were instructed. It’s a small room and it feels completely perfect. Then, smoke a little and pass the joint off to whoever’s next to me because it’s not mine anyways, talking to John from fish lab and bird class. He’ll be working for the Feds in Alaska, in his own words – the Fish & Wildlife Department. Now we know the spaces we can make, borrowing gloves on the coldest nights: I ask if you’ll be there in the morning which is only a few hours away, and before crossing the street you nod and promise saying yes, I will, and there you are at 6am; I’m wearing your gloves as we make eye contact across a singing crowd, and I return them a month later. It’s still all about the eyes; we have to go back to figure out why.