fragments #4
words & photos mixed. a longer post, essentially containing most of my april.
04.01.23
before work i saw a hummingbird in a dusty outdoor fireplace. after work i walked around the town, ending up in the square, watching the reflection of the streetlights glimmer in the fountain’s water.
04.02.23
for the first time i realized i could hear the church bells from my house. 6 o’clock. almost 10 years here and this is the first time i have heard it’s ringing from my bedroom.
04.04.23
04.06.23
looking out beside me, i see the sky— a great white abyss, it holds itself above me louring and heavy. it’s purity is broken only by an occasional trio of birds streaming across it’s ether as if an omen. i take a gulp of coffee and my throat tightens around the sweetness.
again i feel directionless, completely adrift in my life. it is only 5:19 but already i am anticipating, and mourning, the day’s end. i feel i just need to be propelled forward with some force, something to infuse my passion into. i seem to lack the necessary motivation for anything. maybe i need to place myself outside of constructed expectations and time, maybe i need to surrender to the drifting, allow myself to fall into the lap of life. at the same time i feel that my whole life has been spent waiting. waiting has made me sick, has created a layer of rot underneath my thin and translucent skin. i have tried but have never been able to grasp control over my life. i’m living in an uncomfortable dilemma. sometimes i almost feel inspired to harm, to create a destruction, in order to force a change.
04.07.23
[notes app:] why do we preserve moments? to remind ourselves of the beauty of our humanity? why do we find it important to preserve certain things over others? what i mean is, how do we determine what is beautiful? what is beauty? and why do we think it is better to forget the ugly?
04.08.23
it is odd to feel so melancholy on a sunny day. i think this is partially why i feel so unadjusted to this sudden springtime. i am at the cemetery and the sun will set soon. it has grown green here, and soft. i am feeling such a love for all these people surrounding me who have passed. it’s odd, we almost have to accept our death as we live— in order to live one’s life, one has to mourn it before it has fully begun. some people definitely cannot cope with this fact of existence. i have a suspicion that this is part of the reason that so many prefer to remain ignorant of the existence of cemeteries, or feel disgusted and contemptuous as they drive along one.
i am also thinking about the ways we choose to represent life— both after it is gone, and while it is happening. we represent those who have gone with the symbol of a tombstone, we place photos and flowers against the marble. but of course this could never be truly representative of the person. graves are more for the living than they are for the dead. and yet, we neglect them so… cemeteries are forgotten about, left to crumble and dissipate.
and conversely, we take photos as we live in order to remind ourselves of our life— it’s an attempt to preserve a moment; in the long run, it’s an attempt to preserve a life, because we know that life is so incredibly fleeting. of course, life could never truly be preserved. after i take photos or videos i feel guilty. i am aware that through my attempt to preserve a moment, i am irrevocably tainting it— and then is it even a moment enough to preserve anymore? and yet i can know no other way of moving through my life, always scrambling to remember, preserve, account for it. i suppose i am just trying to understand what it means to take account of my life. maybe i need to accept the fleetingness, the things left behind. can there be value in bits of life that occur only to become forgotten?
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“what is a home but the place you’ll be dying?
and what’s far away, but places to lose yourself?”
-jenny hval, american coffee
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the sky and the sea: a reminder that infinity is out there, waiting for me…
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i hate being in my room when i can sense life happening outside, when it is bright and sunny, live music streaming in through the open window…
but when that is not the case, like during the bleak wintry months, or when it rains, or when it’s nighttime, my room is the perfect place to be contained within.
04.09.23
easter. i wear a dress and feel incredibly uncomfortable. each time i have an event with my extended family i naïvely choose to wear a dress and each time i feel like i’d give anything to crawl out of my skin. i think it’s something about performing femininity in the one situation where that femininity is expected to be expressed naturally? so it feels less of a performance, which femininity can sometimes feel like for me (but in a good way), and more like i am actually conforming to the standards that are expected of me. and i hate it, that feeling. just because of my choice of wearing a dress, i become the Daughter, the Girl, the Niece, etc. i am expected to be Pretty, Soft, Kind, Maternal….. Heterosexual. and i can’t be those things.
next time i have an occasion with my extended family i will wear pants.
however, the gathering is at a museum and i am at least able to see some cool art. apparently the man who built this property and collected all this art was part of the scene that was considered the west coast version of the east coast warhol 60’s art scene.
04.11.23
realizing that that time in my life was so soft i was so sad but life was so soft and really it’s only something that i can be seeing now that it’s over a year later.
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i don’t think we are meant to be preserved so fully and precisely.
04.12.23
art entraps both its subject and creator. who does art really belong to?
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creation, art, is the act of reaching out to connect with the world.
if only, the world could grasp me back. give a sign of its presence, an acknowledgement of sorts.
it is so funny, but so beautiful, that as humans we are relentless at our attempts to connect with the world, this ‘something larger’, this ‘meaning of all being’, this God, when we are never given anything in return. it is as if in our hearts, in the depths of ourselves, we know. maybe when we reach out to the world, we are really only reaching out to (in?) ourselves.
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“the child becomes a burden, the child becomes an impossible challenge, because how do you carry that burden, that child, when you can’t carry the child you yourself were, the child that lives in all of us, especially in someone who lost her mother so young that she barely remembers her and thus carries her mother like a hole in her soul, like we all carry our mothers like a hole in our souls, small or big, living or dead, and so we all try to fill these voids so that we can live or we reject our mothers, but then— if we think we have succeeded— we have to live with the guilt of having rejected them. there is no freedom without guilt and, by the way, you were born guilty, you became guilty, you became guilty as a child because of your family trauma and you passed on your pain to your sister or you doll which was damaged by being with you, trapped in a room in a house with a door too small to get out of, where every attempt would be a bloody, probably fatal, venture, but i blew up the door and it was bloody and now i’m here, in a cabin in the forest with an elk.”
~ is mother dead, vigdis hjorth
04.14.23
04.15.23
04.16.23
“pleasure of tragedy is vicarious suicide”
-susan sontag (from reborn, dated 01/29/60)
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sickness in the springtime. the anticipation of flowers that will only rot. god.
04.17.23
in my mind i am small, confined to myself, held together with my thoughts, out of the way, unobtrusive. but occasionally i am surprised with the horrid reality of myself— large, long, lanky. i seem to somehow take up too much space, more than average, more than i should, and it’s embarrassing, i’m awkward, clumsy, always there and always in the way. i wish i could somehow take myself back. i must note i am not speaking strictly about literal physical size… it feels somehow conceptual as well— being seen, always, and against my will.1 the worst part of it all is that i could never make myself smaller. sometimes i fear it makes me unlovable. i can’t stand the thought of being such a giant to someone.
04.18.23
in my journal i write:
it is tuesday i meet my own eyes in the mirror i am cold i have a headache i am wondering what it will be like to read these journals in the future i am thinking that these journals really are Expression In Itself and For Itself i am thinking it is so hard to break habits but also, why break them?
04.19.23
04.21.23
today i find myself wanting to cry. the day is perfect— it is as if one is finally able to sink into the calm neutrality that floats through the air. i feel tired yet aware of a frenzied energy that hides underneath the seemingly tranquil atmosphere. i feel depressed, i think partially because of my approaching 19th birthday. i don’t like the idea that i am definitively aging and yet still waiting for life to begin. i am waiting for my life as it wastes away.
04.22.23
“she sought the absolute, like flaubert, but the absolute in the ephemeral. her life was exemplary, and yet an inner desperation constantly gnawed at her. she passed through endless metamorphoses, as though fleeting from herself; her coiffure and the color of her hair were famously unstable, as were her smile, her skin, and the slant of her eyes.”
~the zahir by borges
04.23.23
04.25.23
i seem to think that i can’t write unless it is daytime, i’m in a visually pleasing environment, the moment is nice, etc. right now it is 11:28 pm and i am sitting slouched over my computer in my room, and i’m proving myself wrong. i have this idea that i can only be creative if i’m in a very specific type of situation. i think this same way of thinking applies to my ideas of the long term— that i need to make change in my life because my current life is so static that it would be impossible for creativity to emerge. of course i still want change. i want to explore the world and realize all the incredible things i can find in it. but, while i’m here, suppressing myself won’t do any good.
today in the evening i went for a walk, and revisited one of my little ‘hidden’ spots that i haven’t been to in about a year. honestly, it’s not that hidden, but it’s off the paved path and i never see anyone besides a few wild turkeys. i think that springtime has filled me with a sense of adventure. i went for a walk yesterday, too, and was so content simply from the way i could let my arms be bare, let my dress be billowed by the warm wind, let my fingers get sticky from an apple.
i feel disconnected from my childhood, specifically, my “girlhood”. partially, because i don’t seem to have much memory. i don’t think i know much more than what can be seen in the remnants of my childhood— objects, photos, drawings, etc. there seems to be this visceral experience and memory of “girlhood” that others have, but that i don’t entirely have even a recollection of. of course, i have some bits and pieces. but not enough, i feel, to relate to this feeling of “past girlhood” that seems so universal. another factor i believe is just feeling extremely disconnected from the concept of “womanhood”, for many reasons, the main of which being that i don’t even believe that it is real.
however, sometimes i feel that, at the age of almost-nineteen, in the blossoming season of springtime, i am able to reinvent my childhood, my ‘girlhood’. i’m filled with that craving for skinned knees, sticky flowers, sweet breezes of air, and small twigs that poke against my skin. maybe, it’s that this is my last summer that is really at “home”,—and i feel i need to make the most of it, as leaving home would finally mark a true end to my adolescence.
thank u for reading! there will be more soon, i think. please like so that i know if u read this! and as always i love when u guys comment and talk to me. i hope you all have been well.
xxxxx
harlow
this ‘being seen against my will’ is i think also something about queer identity in a cishet world…
love reading your writing. I know what it feels like to be in a constant stasis waiting, i'm excited for the moment you pass this because life can get so exciting once this is overcome :)
love love love this