Keeping count

linear time only loosely observed

Leap day over and we are almost two hours into my half birthday, marked at midnight by declaration at the tail end of the party. Everything was orange. Skylar set the theme as Fantastic Mr Fox and in planning the decorations and my own outfit I watched and screenshotted and plotted, set the table with mums and tulips and eucalyptus, made paper foxes, alternated yellow and red placemats atop an assortment of off-sized tablecloths, carefully arranged towards carelessness. For the cake Skylar asked for green, and amid the birthday candles I added a little flame-activated confetti cannon, which shot edible glitter into the immediate atmosphere to the perfectly synchronized Oooh of our gathered friends, and my voice among them; the confetti exploded the precise amount I’d hoped for, making a dazzle of glitter but not a mess, just a mirage in front of Skylar’s face as the candles guttered out.

I have always been attendant to half birthdays: my own and, when I can remember them, those belonging to my friends. Really this is simply an attachment to birthday that strays outside its bounds. With six more months until actual birthday it is nice to have something to celebrate. There is the year my Dad made me what he called a half birthday cake: six oreos stacked and stuck together with homemade frosting. There is, too, the birthday, eighteen, that came one day after my grandma’s funeral, the surprise half birthday party Isaiah threw for me six months later, friends crowded into our parents’ living room in Queens, balloons and blown-out candles.

I feel too often composed of compulsive remembering, of last week, last season, ages ago.

fit of the day: orange shein dress (Goodwill), floral Ganni jacket (Nordstrom Rack), yellow tights (who knows)

meal of the day: Maggie’s impeccable chili, yellow cake

Earlier in February, ten days home in New York I am lonely, I am leaving some residue of my regret smeared all across the sidewalks like grease off my buttered palms, my body is no good for what it used to be, no good for anything else, just a container for the bees in my brain, the bat battering hard against my ribs from the inside, everything in me that wants to get out. City I love most in the world but I feel betrayed by it, the way it doesn't fit me right now. Too many neighborhoods feel like a vise because I can remember him on each particular street. I walked past his building today and my shoulders wound themselves into corkscrews as I looked for the shape of his shoulders or the friendly scruff of his dog. I wanted to see him, though, didn't I? The easiest way to give up is to happen into failure unplanned.

I've been doing a workshop at the Center for Book Arts, learning itajime and suminagashi, painting the papers with beeswax or paraffin for translucency or with wheat paste to attach backing, other sheets of kozo paper, matching the grain direction and sticking them to the windows of the print shop to dry. At lunch today I wandered for a few minutes between options before falling into the comfort of the walking slice, the cheese almost but not quite hot enough to burn my tongue, just a little orange grease between the fingers of my right hand. For whole minutes at a time I am home before the street scene ruptures again and I can't tolerate anything. It isn't the city, it's myself. I can't imagine anything at all.

Tonight I'm in a hotel again, a grace afforded by my school fellowship, a king-size bed and a lamp that turns on with a switch built into the table. I have things left to do: supplies to order, words to edit and send, apologies to make for a thing I promised and forgot to do, because of the way I am slipped not just out of time but entirely out of my mind; I am like the spare cartridge of an unplayable game, my mind separated from my Gameboy body with its waiting rectangular absence, just a logo loading on the screen and nothing after.

If my life stopped being a drama of melancholies I would tell you about something beautiful. Holding a brush in each hand, for example, and making expanding concentric circles of blue and black ink on top of the water, blowing against its surface so the rings extend and buckle, marble and condense, laying a sheet of paper on top and pulling it against the edge of the tray, revealing the pattern, lifted to the page. Suminagashi. How a ghost of the pattern is left on the surface of the water after and you can pull that too.

I would tell you maybe about the man I saw standing in the middle of the intersection directing traffic with full confidence but no seeming order of authority. He had on the puffed insulation of a navy nylon jacket and a beanie and he was waving cars through and around the corner because there was an ambulance halfway up the block, blaring and horn alight at regular intervals, and things were not moving, not quickly. When he had finished and the ambulance had gone by he stepped back from the street to the sidewalk, walked off in a different direction from mine.

I would even maybe tell you about the sample sale with the mandatory coat check, the guy who tried to breeze past, the coat check employee who tried to stop him, the positive indigence with which he almost yelled back, “I have to take my coat off?” and then just left. No one in Utah, I think, same as someone yelling at a cab in the middle of the street in SoHo where they are crossing against the light, no one in Utah would yell like that—and I am glad to be home.

Itajime involved extensive accordion folds and therefore should by some logic have been my favorite, but the patterns didn't delight me like the swirls of suminagashi and the pigments were hard acrylics, more difficult to get right. All my favorites were printed in copper and a blue I mixed with black, they all look the same.

I haven't been posting on social media but I don't think he knows about this place. Please don't tell him I'm home.

But keeping track, those days are past, and you can tell him now, if you want to, that I was there, that he didn’t see my face.

first writing

Saint of the day: first hours after Fra Angelico turns over to Saint Conrad of Piacenza, who appears to have started a forest fire, confessed after someone else was arrested and tortured, and then become a hermit

Fit of the day: black everlane barrel pants, Courtney Barnett lamps t-shirt, Slothrust sweatshirt, red micropuff, blundstones

Dinner of the day: halal guys, peach Snapple, dairy free shake shack chocolate shake

Tomorrow I'll carry my turtle shell of books all over. Books and clothes and my computer, all shoved in a bag I got for free, one time I was back and I saw him. He gave it to me out of the damages at our store, one of the times he was acting like nobody knew.

I don't think I'll ever be over this.

I don't think I'll ever be over, either, the other invasions of my body or the way increasingly that seems to be all I'm built out of, all the wrong things that keep happening.

My phone reminds me that two years ago today I was in Cancun for J&J’s wedding. The dress I wore is in the closet in my parents’ apartment, waiting for a different summer formality. At the resort there were coati, which looked like a hazy inbetween of a lemur and a raccoon; there was a gang of stray cats that I tried very hard to befriend. At night after hours spent in the company of friends and friends of friends I would walk alone in the dark, listening to the same three songs; all day in between functions I was swimming; it was a weekend tinged perfectly by melancholy and joy.

I settle somewhat, over days here, reacquainted with home rhythms, even some of the odd ones, even the ones I can’t tolerate, I don’t think; still I get close to them, reach out a hand.

And now it is later, two days on and I’m in New Haven, at the Divinity School at Yale, waiting for my afternoon workshop on book arts and environmental grief, for which I am more or less prepared but cautious of disaster. The Graduate Conference on Religion and Ecology, a space that seems right for me, but I’m itchy and distracted. Itchy literally, at the outside of my left arm where the new tattoo is healing, raised lines still peeling. Itchy figuratively, unsure in this crowd of strangers who mostly know each other, turning, unable to sit still. My joints hurt excessively all morning so I could hardly sit still or listen; someone very kind in a lanyard and a white sweater brought me three ibuprofen, a gluten-free bagel, a muffin she couldn’t identify, leftover from breakfast.

second writing

fit of the day: Madewell mockneck bodysuit, everlane wideleg green pants, University of Utah longsleeve when I get cold; blundstones; bad hair

outing of the day: Grey Matter Books

color of the day: Pantone 17-1500 TCX (Steeple Grey)

Later again, days slipping. I am back in Salt Lake City and the regular rhythms of my life and back on the medication I missed for two days and therefore more or less out of my tailspin. February is a slip of uncertain time.

March now is water running through ink, the ripple of the paper after. I am trying to make it flat with heat and pressure but I think the bends and buckles are permanent.

January made the first marks that led to this place, where I once again must meet my own body in a brutal daily encounter of remembering, remembering the recent which itself remembers the past, until we are all there in the room together, remembering. I want it not to hurt me, this reoccurrence, another repetition of a thing that feels each time like an end. But my executive function falters and I pick back up the patterns that I learned from coping with him back in New York, that I carried with me all last year as I tried, first in secret and then under half-observation of friends, to slip my way out of his unwelcome fingers. It isn’t so easy. My body remembers all its animal means of protection: sleeping more, or if not sleeping, which I’m not, laying curled in my bed unable to move for long stretches. I can’t focus to read and everything, every barest pressure, pushes me to extremes. Even when I can’t remember why things in my mind and body do not work quite as I expect them to, I remain off-kilter, even when I can’t feel it fully out. The fabric I was mending once again tears through and I am maybe too frustrated, this time, to patch it at all.

I try to tell someone who doesn’t know the details that I wish that big and awful events would not happen to me now, when I am meant to be finishing through arduous hours the work of the last two years. Not knowing what I mean she says it’s always like this, and I try to tell her that it isn’t, that these things are outside of the ordinary realms of bad encounter, but maybe they aren’t. I don’t want it to be true that things are always like this.

In the middle of the summer on my bike, moving fast by the power of my own speed, I felt also like I was moving into something that would fit me, I felt for the first time I can remember that I could love the life I was living. This love lived under sun and limited obligation and infatuation and mostly momentum, so much of it rooted in the speed of the bike, so much of it the way I moved through space like it hadn’t pushed and pushed and pushed my aching joints to narrow pain. I didn’t keep careful count of how long that lasted. Maybe that’s the error. I’m good at keeping count. When I was four and five and six I counted every stair when I walked up them each morning to my classroom. I can remember now not how many stairs (fourteen?) there were but many of the thoughts I thought while I was also thinking in even sets of two, the stairs made massive by my memory and my then-small size. I can’t keep track of how I felt at any time of my life, often it is the bright bad moments that stand out, sad mornings when the bluish tile of the stairwell stretched and stretched even farther than their real relation to my five-year-old body. I find it hard to track the course of things that I don’t write down, despite my good memory—the inhabitation of my body is something I’d often rather ignore. But I keep track of the big things, these four big things over years, and of their perpetrators, and of my own blame in the business, which I hope someday to assess as slim to none.

third writing

fit of the day: patagonia fleetwith belted jumpsuit, velcro vejas, grey nike fleece

snack of the day: Fresca and Swedish fish (because 7-11 betrayed me by not having vanilla coke, sprite lymonade, or nerds clusters)

song of the day: Any Other Way by Tomberlin

paper of the day: Lettra cover weight, ecru

color of the day: Pantone 13-4809 TCX (Plume)

The song comes near the end, this time, because I can’t—I can’t put things together. I have so many other things to be doing but I’m tired of this one particular draft sitting here, waiting to be released to the world.

Today really was a mostly good day. It was warm outside and it smelled like spring, in the evening the cool navy of the air felt so familiar my body filled for a moment with luminescence. It’s only at night that I sink again to the place these past months have put me, this place I revisit most nights, night after night through the years. What they want you to remember, when you feel worst, is that the moment always passes; I remember this better when I am feeling well, the inevitable and cursed return.

So I jump through seasons. I can’t keep myself in the present, I go back. I go back to each worst moment, and now a fourth wakes up the sleeping others and they crowd around me. If you don’t know what I mean just fill in your own worst things. The aspiration I have most often is not to be impervious but to be mist, that their hands might have gone straight through me and found no purchase, that I would not have been present enough to have to listen afterwards to explanations. These people who want me to believe they love me, with the rough indentation of their faces when the grief hits them at the wrong thing they’ve done, a grief directed at the shattered image of themselves and never at my body or its small shakes, its hard edges.

I’ve been writing this one for a month now. More. It is a scramble as my mind cannot keep track of time. I don’t know what else to do other than to send it to you, to your inboxes, to get it out of mine. I say keeping track, because that’s what I mean, even moving out of order, this is my accounting for the time and things that have happened, I do it with compulsive return and remeasurement, attempts to recall things that cannot be seen. I want someone else, for a while, to keep track for me. I want to sleep and have someone else make sure I am ok those hours, count the minutes so that when I wake they can assure me that the time has passed, I am still here.

I am lonely as I have been; other people’s lives, too, full of large things they must carry. I often feel peripheral to almost everyone. Sometimes I feel that once again I have to stitch together a face and that it comes out uglier than it was before; I’m not good at assembling the torn pieces, or not as good as I should be, if I’d like to pretend the rending never happened, if I’d like to pretend that like everyone else I am smooth and capable. I sometimes do not belong to this world or any other, evident in the stilted sensations of my contact with the entire outside of me, my sensitivities to taste and texture and sound, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, up late, looking at the three dark rectangles of glass in our front door as though something or someone will appear there, listening to ticks and pressures in the house, sitting on my feet even though it hurts and they will go numb and I will not be able to stand, because it is the way my body folded, it just is.

I think sometimes that in the world as it is running right now at high speed there is room for an afternoon of sadness but not what I need, which is a whole set of rooms in which to scream, which is a company in anguish that I cannot ask of anyone. By turns I go from calm to a place that is so angry and wretched and alone. People have some bland and stupid confidence that the way things have been for me is going to change sometime; I wonder if it isn’t the stupidity of belief that they carry but instead a belief in my stupidity, that I would believe what they keep telling me, when they have not the slightest evidence of its truth. They are poor salesmen and they expect me nonetheless to be taken in.

The place where I stitched the sides of my face together is puckered, nothing sits how it’s supposed to.

Every day belongs to a different timeline; every day I am surprised at the specifics of the state that greets my opening eyes. I am back, I am years and years into the future. The day is doomed, the day is haunted by recent events, the day is blessedly, for a few hours, free of the visceral remembering. The day is one on which I encounter friends. The day is one I spend hopelessly alone. Days in no linear order, shuffled around, drawn like my tarot cards with a trust in an intelligibility that is not always legible, but perhaps always there.

fourth writing

song of the day: Somebody New by Real Estate

this is weird, you’re not insane

color of the day: Pantone 14-1324 (Peach Bud)

fit of the day: wide leg blue velvet pants, mustard mockneck crop top, black denim jacket, tall shoes, Zion cap so T says I look like an undercover cop, Muji tote bag with the two outside pockets

drink of the day: Pink Ginger

dinner of the day: Totino’s Pizza Rolls

word of the day: zenith, I don’t know why

And today was not a bad day, it was good, it was sunny and warm and I drove with the windows open, Hatchie the same sweet as bubblegum as it blows in sonic bubbles through my speakers, messages back and forth with someone new, a piece of good news, time with a friend whom I love. It doesn’t make a difference, I am still the stitched and puckered fabric of myself put back together, but that doesn’t matter either. Every moment is everything, for a moment. We still have pink tinsel hanging over the archway in the dining room, left over from my birthday over six months ago, and in the mornings it reflects light as though off pool water, and at night it just picks up chromatic abnormalities in the bright room. I’ve been out of the hospital over four years now, and I missed the day I should have made that into a celebration, four years after I wept with fear and anticipation. It’s almost been a month now since I let that day slip by without noticing, except in retrospect, the way my body remembered the timing.

When I don’t trust myself I can feel in my bones the truth of the things that have happened, and in that feeling sometimes can slip out of the blame I pile on myself, rest assured in the reality of the harm I took again, again, without asking.

But my bones feel too the arrival of spring. Lover of winter, I am still glad at sun on my shoulders and the crown of my head, where if I am not very careful I burn through my hair. I am getting back on my bike, my wrist at last healed after a year of mistreatment and then careful repair, the break so long past I can only halfway remember the exact sensation of my body in the air. If I work very hard I will be able to climb the hills just as well again this summer, and maybe on the ride down it will rush back into me on the wind, that love, that bright attachment to this particular life.

I am ending this on a night when I feel hopeful. It doesn’t mean anything, except that I am hopeful, right now.