An Old Notebook I Found

These are mostly from early last year. I was a ghost. This is what ghosts do.

1/12/23

I’m sorry, maybe I just wanted to write so I could slither into your interest, but if you liked the water instead, then you’d find me golden and splotchy with perpetually wet hair paired with perpetually teary eyes that only ever stay half shut from an invisible sting. I wander the night, driving aimlessly until something comes alive. I found a bridge over the freeway. I take in the roar of the machines, our cyborgs, an army marching towards some mission I’ll never understand. Each one houses a little world. Do you know, I had a friend who would never stop singing a stupid song about it. No rhyme or reason to it. She wanted to be a chef, and she eventually did, but she had that stupid song that came along with her whole …. I loved it. Because I loved her. I loved her from the moment she walked through the classroom door. The new girl. Perfectly out of place. Mine. I’ll take your virtues, burdens, and inexplicable habits. She learned to stop singing in adolescence, and for the same reasons we learn to suppress these pointless habits, she left me. I’m with the roar of the machines now.

1/17/23

Acting class seemed appealing. You get to act like an idiot. In fact, you must act like an idiot. Shameless. Then you will do well. 

After a year I stood at his doorstep silently. I could tell he could feel me there. At that moment I graduated from crazy to something more credible. But it was too late. The academics got me. I don’t do slapstick anymore but I’m a flight risk. 

Very rarely I meet girls with weak little voices on the night street. Where are all these women in the daylight? Why are they only prowling around at night? Weak little voice, can you tell me some truth? Some very special thing that only little voices have figured out?

I drop my veil and look at my face. My snaggle tooth. My chubby cheeks. Oddly comforting like I designed them from birth.

Anyways,

I read THEM too well. Them. THEY are so elusive. THEY are something I stay far away from but I look for and watch but try my best to stay far away from. Upon touch the illusion will crack and we will fuse. Then another outcast can look at me with awe the way I looked at THEM.

2/7/23

You’re trying to be punctual and fair, but you are too potent to not have everything you touch become totally rearranged. Hide.

Patient zero for each other’s troubles. I can tell that I’m dreaming of pressured painting, and I wake up and try to undo it all. I hope we can land this, be human again, take a lover and do yoga, burn the lists. 

DNA made its rival and its lover – the transistor, like Adam made Eve from his rib. What part of us did the transistor take?

You can be anything, they said, but they never said you won’t want to be anything. Maybe healthy, but flawless people are hard to love and people who do whatever they want are easy to love.

2/12/23

I Feal Meat

I ate like a carnivore. I can feel it moving through me. Distinctly meat. Savory, complex, fatty dead tissue being atomized by my juices. I was craving it so bad. 

I bought four pounds at the grocery store. The kitchen, grocery stores, and me have a terribly broken relationship. It’s somewhere on the bottom of a list of things I need to repair. I can’t just cook bruschetta every night. 

After dinner I noticed the crockpot had like four inches deep of solid fat from the oxtail rib combo I had just consumed. This must be what it feels like to be serious – kind of dark and concentrated from the invisible work your body is performing in an attempt to alchemize dead flesh into thought. 

I did yoga twice. I needed the protein. 

I was forced to be a carnivore until age 10. Then they got tired and put me on an all-cereal diet. I think it helped. 

A year and a half ago, I read about the bodybuilder and how she ate $30 worth of protein every day. And I was just like, why? Ugh, what a terrible mindset. Why anything over $30? I’d give it for increased lung capacity or for a smaller waist. 

I want to burn something tonight other than the meat inside me. The shame and avoidance towards Will. He’s turned completely imaginary, a benevolent internal projection that is protective of me and my mind. All I can do is lay here. I’m conserving what energy I have left in preparation for the next uncertainty. I’m just feeling so meat right now.