it's something

I don’t know how to say what it (“being alive”) feels like lately. Here’s something, instead –

I like to make fleeting eye contact with the driver next to me when we’re both stopped at the red light. If I’m in the right mood, I like to really look. I love to catch people getting ready. This morning, I watched a woman comb her hair for minutes as we drove slowly along, combing combing, and the gesture looked so lovely, especially in the glint of a rearview mirror. Her hands, the comb. I took a zoomed in video but the effect is lost (trust me). Have you seen those diagrams detailing the proportion of space we give up for automobile infrastructure (roads, parking lots, etc.)? It is horrifying and absurd, like, literally absurd – and yet, daily, I sit in my car, alone, and watch people sitting, alone, in theirs.

My favorite tag in the city is scrawled on the bridge that passes over where I-20 west funnels onto the connector, heading north. SLIMES OR DIMES in this kind of bubbly script – slimes or dimes, slimes or dimes, the phrase gets stuck in my head. To my horror, someone painted over this masterpiece several months ago, but – blessedly – the tag appeared again a day later. I really do love it, I think about it a lot. Another one I liked was on the bridge across Moreland Avenue, headed north: “stacey’s satanic dystopia,” that’s all. Written so plainly. Honestly, it took me a long time to get the joke; really I just liked imagining this place, kind of bubblegum pink and bouncy. This whole bridge was painted over recently and I hate that.

I tend to aggrandize and romanticize things that are far away from me, things I can’t really ever get to know. All I need is the faintest taste, then I can stretch this into a totalizing and all-consuming, desirous fantasy that fills me up. The mania and delight in this is sharp; the inevitable disappointment (“reality bites”) is equally (often more?) so. This is a familiar tendency (at all ages); what has changed are the objects of desire. Growing up, I had such a tricky time differentiating between fiction and reality. If something was written down or in a movie or told to me, I figured it must be true. Do you remember that movie Splash? This one, in particular, rocked my world – maybe because the context of the fantasy is so mundane? E.T., The Goonies, all of these. Everything seemed possible. I would like to live in a world where everything (anything) is possible, thank you very much, and often I feel sort of silly for this, but actually I mean it. 

More than a decade ago, you told me that all we have left for each other is hurt. I didn’t believe you then, and I don’t believe it now, but in the between-time, you were right. How nice it feels (now) to have moved in and out and from this place.

That year, I lived on the internet to be closer to you. Was it Zoom, then? I don’t actually remember the platform, but the indicator sound of logging on rings (still!) in my body, it feels like.

I took my mom’s road bike with me to college, and I remember riding around the little Honors quad in circles, trying to get the hang of the awkward body shape the bike required. The bike was (is) slightly too tall for me, and for the first year or so I was too nervous to switch gears, to reach down and balance, precarious. Sometimes, we’d talk outside. I have a screenshot saved somewhere of one of our conversations (one of many screenshots, somewhere). I typed to you that the connection was poor, that I’m logging off, and you replied “don’t leave,” over and over. Then — “i am worth it.” And you were; you are. And again: I believed you then, and I believe it now, it’s just in the meantime that I wasn’t so sure.

“water under the bridge,” or something.

Nothing, nothing, nothing is sweeter than spending time making things in the company of, alongside, in collaboration with, others. I am so, so, so grateful for this. Thank you, thank you, thank you –