winter
I imagined her in the dusk of a Paris garden, untouched in her white dress, an object thirsting if not for interpretation then for fulfillment at least of an admiring human gaze, like a painting hanging on a wall, waiting.
Rachel Cusk, Transit
I am restless in a way only the winter seems to provoke. I’d like to have fun, although I tend to get greedy, wanting to hammer and stretch that feeling into permanency I don’t have much to explore or condemn I’m thinking but not well, and I am writing regardless. I haven’t seen anything beautiful in awhile and I am unmoved— I have less patience for myself, I might be generally sad but I’m finding it boring and self indulgent. I don’t think it’s useful to moralize emotions per se, but my threshold for such ennui is thinning— sometimes in the middle of crying, I just suddenly stop because I lose interest in sustaining the feeling. I think we are externalizing desperation, collectively. Not even in an interesting way, it’s more like a morbidly solipsistic, compulsive habit — to share for sharing’s sake, not even striving to be understood. I can’t relate to this. Sometimes when I feel this clawing feeling, that there is no point to express anything because it will be fragmented into spectral dust and mangled, I tuck myself completely away and let myself sink. anyone who has really loved me has managed to instinctively sense this and they wade into the water and pick me up, a slippery, skinless fish. I keep agreeing to dates and then canceling them— maybe it is unfair to want to feel excitement from others, but I need new avenues of feeling. E says I am the least Piscean pisces, I read as Gemini. quick moving thoughts, sharp tongued, wild gesturer, I know that conversations are the best way to think. I can’t read you, I am told over and over again. in strange beds, in dimly lit bars, in the cool, flat light of the morning when I wish I wasn’t there sometimes I hear myself outside of myself and I understand, but mostly I don’t want to hear it because it doesn’t matter I watched a video on Instagram that I came across of an older woman recording herself in the mirror, talking about how she was lonely so she called her friend, Hugh. Hugh picked her up and she described their day together and then cheerfully concludes: Thank you, Hugh! I almost feel human! When I leave someone’s company, after absorbing them and them, me, that’s exactly what I feel. It’s an odd sensation, tourniqueting a phantom limb, a network of veins I was so sure existed and would persist in crying out: I winter dream a gone love I don’t know how much of other’s complexities are what I actually invent— I feel like so many people are black eyed specters. In a short, slinky dress and stockings, squeezing N’s hand in the dark theater, watching Chronicle of a Disappearance, while everyone laughed at the wrong parts. Sitting in the packed bar after thanksgiving, in a too-sexy outfit and feeling the emptiness of when you finally are visually drunk up It’s never satisfying and it’s never what I’m looking for.