From 17

Adriene wants to enter a fiction contest and it's a snow day today, so I'm supposed to be writing, but we all know what a lazy fuck I am so I've only just started to go through old journals to see if I've planted a seed of an idea years ago that I can turn into a story today.

The first journal I opened was an old staple bound moleskin, graph lined. I used to write everything with a pen and nib, dipped in ink; its impossible to read, but so romantic. So I'm just stumbling through this illegible poetic mess and the story I've found just slowly untangles itself in front of me and what I'm left with is this recounting, a fragment of a memory from senior year of high school. I didn't even know I had any journals from high school left. The reason I keep journals is to keep these memories, because my mind is a sieve, but I rarely look back on them. This will seem insignificant, but it nearly shocked me - I can't believe this is a piece of a life I lived. If you had interrogated me I wouldn't have been able to produce it, but here it is:

Last night we
stayed up late and we
lounged on each other's necks
and wrapped our legs around
each other without worrying about
attraction
and when the pizza came we ate
and traded mushrooms for olives
and read books to each other
and fell asleep to a
movie on the television
when we woke up our backs ached
and my makeup ran under
my eyes
we peed with the door open
even though some of us are boys
and some of us are girls
and the boys didn't realize that
we need to make up our faces in the morning

this morning we
realized we felt like
teenagers
not just lonely people or
adults in a small house
or secluded or
casual acquaintances 


we were thrown

2:11
2.25.007

x

Would it be lonely to be here

Scenes like this always make me long for solitude and nature, but I am a social city human and I don't know why I long for this. When I was a kiddo I used to play pretend in nature, at the beach, in the woods. I could pretend that I was a fairy, that I was a pioneer. I'm neither though and I wonder if I would fare as well, even for a little while, in adulthood.

I'm going through my files and seeing what I have saved over the years, that's why I'm posting so much today. The day after Christmas. Such a nice time to be alone, even though Adriene's also home, but she's working so it's perfect. Say hello, a few words, argue over the way people use the word "milky" (very frustrating arguing with Adriene, a few minutes in and I always feel like i'm pleading for her to for a second see things my way so we can move forward, but she is stubborn and I want to throw things at her sometimes), she goes back to work, I putter around in the living room. It's bright and nice and I have some Debussy on the google machine that spies on us in our own home.

Playa Del Rey

Titles of Posts With Mostly Empty Bodies in My Drafts Folder on This Blog

Stuck In My Head

I Think I Want A Pill (body: To make everything stop)

A Good Lack Of Sleep

The Ocean Is Amazing

I Just Wish

Titles that other people made for things

Friday Nights

Skagaströnd, 2014

Not paintings, just a small part of this life I lived. I think I climbed that mountain there. It's a secret goal of mine to climb another mountain, but without bitching the whole time, so I can get to the top and be able to marvel without disdain.

Lost Portraits

There is a woman I knew in Chicago who I met through school- either the regular school year or, as I suspect, over the summer at our campus in Michigan. I think that I remember she was a grad student and I think I remember she had blonde hair, but I could be mistaking her for another woman I knew then. As it's often been my habit to know more people less well than a few people very well, many friendships I've made have been lost to time, lost in my memory. In fact, were it not for Facebook, Instagram, there are many more people I would have never known I'd known. Even though at the time I thought I knew them well. We would laugh, divulge secrets, cultivate jokes, go to class, get drunk, cry, pay for each others meals, bikes to each others houses at all hours, make art together.

This woman came to my house several times in my last year of college, and she took my portrait. I remember this. I think it was a large format camera, because it was a vey big to-do to get this photo taken. I would have been at the time more beautiful than I am now, although I would have despised myself anyways, not knowing that the looks I had would degrade even more as the years went on. I honestly thought I could only get better, but I know now there is no rock bottom. You can always get fatter, duller, worse. But I was 21, and I was strange and brown and some kind of pretty. I would wear flowers in my hair and long, perfect symmetrical wings of black eyeliner which made my big eyes bigger. And this woman took my portrait on my deck, on the third floor of my house in Chicago, on Kedzie Blvd where my rent was $425 a month for a room slightly bigger than the one I'm paying a mere $800 New York Dollars for now. My room then was green, my hair was black, the deck was wood, the woman was earnest and sure she would print the photo soon, it was just so hard to organize everything.  I saw her a couple more times; she hadn't made the print yet, and soon I forgot entirely who she was. I don't know how to look her up, we didn't have yearbooks and the college's internal computer system experienced a full rehab 2 years after I graduated. My password doesn't work, my email doesn't exist. I have no way to look at the classes I took, the teachers I had, proof that I got an education. I'm locked out. 

I hope somewhere out there there is a picture of me, youthful, hopeful, happy. I hope it's better than I remember. I hope I'll walk into a gallery one day and see my face smiling at me. And I hope I'll be in a good place, that I'll be smiling back.

Mac Cheesie

Every year, for seven years, I've made my dad's mac and cheese for thanksgiving. Pretty sure I haven't skipped a year. Maybe the last year I was home, actually. He had already been diagnosed I think, and we were cleaning up his diet, and ours, hardcore.

He started the email that he sent the recipe to me with that ^
Been calling me tigerlily since I can remember.

This has turned into a "remember my dad" blog, but it feels like the only place to let these things out. When you talk to people they make sympathy face at you. I don't know if there's a reaction I could even deem ideal. I don't think I want to really talk about it. I just want to put this feeling, this memory somewhere for someone to see it. Probably no one. But I can come back here and see it myself, no matter where I am. "Okay tigerlily let's fly."  Okay dad.

I had to go through all of emails to me to find the recipe. Gmail never wants to bring it up when I search for it, even though I know- it's mac cheesie, not mac cheesy. I had to go through all of his emails to me - SEVEN YEARS of emails- and, no, I didn't have to click on them all, but some I couldn't help. God, I should have talked to him more. I should have! I knew he was dying, even if they insisted he wasn't, I knew he was. The tension in my neck and shoulders is back. I can feel it rise when I think about him. These memories are hurting me.