Divine time
For how long can you be rewarded for thinking about trying?
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
— Anaïs Nin
✶
I don’t mean to frighten you, but it’s really you live or you die.
We are either glowing or languishing.
Yes, all is neutral, I’ve read that line and I’ve sensed it before, but the fact of the matter is that I was a very bad woman when I quit smoking cigarettes. Miserly and bitchy, worse than a feline.
Another job rejection in the mail and it seemed to me that all was ending: the cherry seed summer and its slow crawling days were over, I was no longer cocooned in a safe and acceptable laziness. My fourth interview process of the last six months was also over in a moment.
I was the top two of the final candidates but was not the final, and so that went, and with it went the realization of any (steadily) incoming cash.
All my desires appeared in my mind accompanied by such fragrant visuals. A simple image of a black jungle or a green jewel can get me thinking quite deeply. I am a chronic wish-lister, a fantasy-haver. I know how to make my own mouth water with nothing but a thought. But it is dangerous for the development of oneself to talk or think too much about being any one way, without doing the things required of that Being. Only life is life, and that should be the focus.
Either way, these waters are turbulent.
Naturally, after so much failure, and with it all happening in such heartfelt succession, I was out of breath. I lost touch with the good reality again, only coming back to it a little sluggishly some days later. It was there, that night, alone in the backyard with the silver crickets and the purple jazz bar raccoons, that I decided that I’d be finished with smoking. I was hanging in the air above their jungle metropolis like a poorly erected urban statue, all pitiful and very sorry for myself—smoking away at my cigarette—and I put it out.
I did not feel that I was finished, I decided that I would be.
I made the decision in that moment, within the flash, and I agreed with myself to submit to the incoming pain of withdrawal that I knew was coming.
Everything must go! Drinking, smoking, scrolling, self-sabotage, all of it, all of it, and I do not care anymore how painful the purification is because I already know what happens when I make those decisions: I make them again and again. They always lead back to themselves; life shrinks; I shrink. Addiction, this black veil over my life, is not actually a veil but a network of rivers and I am the ocean from which it all pours out. I want to open new doors, I want self-discovery.
I want to stop talking. I’m so done with that misty realm.
I would like not to write about things that have not happened yet, unless in my diary for magical reasons. I have no energy anymore for this idea that we can take credit for our ideas or for a dream about ourselves that we once had. Honestly, the Internet makes me forget. I had spent so much time dreaming, planning, wishing, but those were just desert-bound mirages of progress.
I had barely considered nicotine a drug, but without it sweetening things up in my circulation there is this sensation that someone has come and removed me from my edges, and that something like sadness is climbing up and up.
It’s only been four days since I put out my last cigarette but I have become a walking tear. Wet, bubbling, ill-defined. It’s been miserable but also revealing.
This almost-sadness is sweeter and less self-pitying than I expected.
After a little while in my bed last night I was able to hold it close to me and understand that it needed my attention. It needed me to look deeper at myself. I think I’ve said this before, I’ve known this before but I wasn’t too serious.
The journey of embodying the knowing was too hard, or maybe I thought I’d be rewarded for trying, or at least for knowing that I should try. At least I was not ignorant. I was making my brief gestures towards improvement, towards my mood board, towards a vibe or a personality already captured, already lived-in.
It reminds me of something I wrote in January, at the time for my lover but now it suits how I am looking at myself:
I recognize and protect your weaknesses which call for such rigid strategies, I see the logic in your once incomprehensible stance. I love you also when you wear that mask of blood and when you disguise your heavenly scent with bad behaviors.
I want a loving mind to float between my eyes.
Because I could easily spend the rest of my life ignoring the fact that I have always believed so heavily in my own perspective, never questioning its origin or validity. Where did this precious perspective come from? Through these eyes of mine everything looks not like what it is, nor do you look like what you are. Everything simply seems to say: You are not loved.
I found myself star-shaped and then fetal on my bed, crying not for attention but for purity's sake. I was so, so exhausted and only on the seventy-second hour of this new, intense experience. I realized I just have not been able to forgive myself for the fact that my parents were busy. I think not being the apple of anyone's eye was experienced by me as some exquisite kind of torture, and it shaped my worldview in ways I’m just beginning to understand.
What a sweet relief to know that I did not have to drink or smoke over this blue cascade of feeling that was pouring out of me and making me cry, making me look—I really feared this, and I still fear this—very unstable, unmarriageable, erratic and simply not worth the trouble at all.
This is what I want to sit with. I want to understand my eyes, and kiss them.
I also came to the realization that I will not be awarded for trying.
What people will remember most is all of the times that I have given up.
Even as I recognized the need for swift action, I found myself putting off positive changes. One month of wildly discounted Pilates, choosing an Italian tutor, sending that e-gift card to my friend, booking my lessons for the next 10 weeks, long morning walks, my reading list, writing for my Substack, fixing my broken nails, unrolling my yoga mat—all of these things remained ideas placed on pause by excuses of money, shyness, or a general anxiety about living. I’d been putting off quitting alcohol and cigarettes, I’d been putting off behaving as worthy unto myself, I’d been putting off not feeling scarce, threadbare, in need.
Order became this strange, illicit lover that I'd meet with on and off.
We never fully got our feet off the ground together, my secret nocturnal life of unworthiness always pulling me back into chaos. But I admired Order, I even loved him: his black cape, his warm expectations, his sternness. His otherworldly beauty and strength. The way he came in through my windows some mornings with a fresh and devotional capacity for duty.
This is what September has been for me. Black leaves, cold leather, and dreams of a purpose as rich as plums. Only life is enough for me. Untouched to-do lists, unlived ideas, and wish lists as mode of wish experience are not enough.
I am worth my own sweat, my own tears.
I am worth real effort in real time.
At this hour, past midnight, I should be asleep but I excuse it because some of us are nocturnal for alchemizing purposes. We need the peace of the moon and stars and silence and the possibility of our night-time dreams. We need a moment of refuge with the hidden strength of our character that is not so bold during the day. Slowly, timidly—allowing myself the shyness of a schoolgirl—I will correct the flow of things and rise a little earlier here and there, because I also adore mornings and Order and a freshly made bed.
When I am back in the South of Italy in November, taking coffee with sugar and no milk, far from the events of the past ten months, I will need my loving mind. (I’m thinking UO blue sweats and Sam Alderman cheetah print flats for my flight—? Yes, I want to curate the landing….). Eternal pine needles and my climbing insolence will be the last that I remember of Ontario.
LOVE LIST
Reading books and planning my reading. I won’t divulge the titles of my entire reading list until a later post, because talking about reading books before I’ve read them gives me the sensation of having read them, and then I don’t read them, which won’t work because I am trying to build the practice of reading rather than being someone who has lofty plans to do so.
After the next 5-10 great books I read, I’ll write a post for you. For now, I will share only what is happening: I’m reading Dostoevsky’s White Nights, and when I finish I plan to read Italo Calvino’s The Distance of the Moon. Both tiny little books, perfect for getting one’s attention span off of the ground.
Supersex (2024) on Netflix. I usually have a hard time sitting and watching television alone but I force myself to watch Italian shows for language learning and there was something about this one, maybe its raunchiness and its desolation and the fact that it was primarily set in the 80s-early 2000s between Italy and Paris that made the viewing experience so, how do I put this, cultured and immersive for me. It’s a show about the real Italian pornstar Rocco Siffredi, his journey from childhood to pornography and sex addiction. It taught phrases like La puzza di merda e di miseria—the stench of shit and misery—Sputa invece di parlare di questo—Spit instead of talking about this! Also fell in love with Jasmine Trinca, an Italian actress with teeth to-die-for, and Alessandro Borghi and Saul Nanni showed me that I seem to adore men much more when they have brown eyes.
“She was strange and sweet, like a street cat.” Supersex, 2024. My sister’s Criterion Channel membership. Thank God for those who have their priorities straight. Yesterday evening, I watched Divorzio all’Italiana (1961), a film by Pietro Gerbi, and I would have to say it is one of the most perfect films I’ve ever seen in my life: funny, blasphemous, lush, black and white but bright, bright, so well lit and contrasted. I watched for Marcello Mastroianni who I think was a true superstar and who brought something very special, very lively, to the screen. Since I am reading White Nights at the moment, I plan to watch Le Notti Bianche (1957)—also starring Mastroianni—once I finish, because it is based on the book aforementioned.
Marcello Mastroianno and Daniella Rocca in Divorzio all’Italiana (1961) Victoria Secret’s heritage stripe pink. Yeah, I’m sorry. I think being unemployed for too long makes you very nostalgic about symbols of cuteness that you loved as a teenager. It’s the same way I still love Hollister booty-shorts and slipper boots. I love the Travel Toiletry Bag, I already bought the leopard print Vanity Case and I really don’t own very much makeup so I’ll refrain. I did send my boyfriend’s sister a gift-card to Victoria Secret for her Virgoan birthday because she is the girl of all girls and she bought the 3-piece Makeup Bag to which I wrote her: bella scelta.
DVDs and French press coffee. I think we all know that I am a Moka Pot woman through and through; living in Italy for two years revolutionized the way that I do coffee. I was dramatically crushed when the Bialetti shop in Sorrento shut down, but I was so happy when my sister gifted me the Italia Exclusive, one of the most beautiful and perfect coffee machines I have ever owned (second to my baby pink Bialetti espresso machine, which I think they don’t sell anymore but is waiting for me in Italy as I type this). However, my mother started using a French press recently and she puts a dash of cinnamon into the coffee while it brews. ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL. DVDs I have to mention in tandem with this, because it was all the coffee that had me up so late reminiscing on the wonders of physical media and preparing my plan back towards it. I promise not to spend my savings on this dream.
Until next time,
