Misery queen
My newfound “lucidity” has been delivered to me ice-cold. I was expecting fire. I was expecting lights to flicker on in blinding rows inside of me.
Cyber Diary is a bi-weekly publication of digital diary entries.
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SET SCENE I departed from my old world and stepped into a new one and I have no clue what to do with myself here.
The land is vast and overflowing with jeweled fruits: lemon, lychee, persimmon. Starfruit, kiwi, lime. Sex red strawberries the size of my head rolling out as far as the eye can see. The trees, alive, giggle underground. A flourishing city of ladybugs, bright flying frogs, fireflies, cicadas. Mushroom condos. Butterfly airplanes. Happy fuschia flowers, overgrown, float on jellied rivers. This place is the nectar of dreams. Grass the color of June. Here, you can shapeshift. Classic quantum laws do not apply. Desire is only true, not mimetic. Emulation has no fixed address. No need to barter for a new paradigm with the six-foot economists by the bridge — close your eyes, imagine, and become. It’s only you and the bright yawn of the universe. Every day this new land begs me to explore, it lures me into itself with pearlish childhood light and Brazilian coffee beans. It whispers to me in a secret language that is never heard — only felt. You wanted this, you needed this. You asked for a new day, here it is. But I feel tired observing its vastness.
Tired. Late — unfashionably. I do not know how to utilize its beauty. Its endless possibilities confuse me. In which direction must I walk? Where is purpose? How to play? In which ways can I come to know myself here? Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Liquid Modernity: “Identities seem fixed and solid only when seen, in a flash, from outside.” At first this cools me down, then it freezes me. There is so much to uncover, so much to trek into, and I am only just starting. Late! I have a rip in the thigh of my pants. Today the bank locked my account on the suspicion of fraudulent activity. I have been existing on bites of Alpine cheese and saltine crackers. I squint through the transience of worldly life and I forget to see possibilities; all I see is another place where I can fail. I have dreams but I infect them.
Our house is bitter cold when I wake up, even under four blankets. I cannot make the leap from the bed. M calls my cell phone and says, “Would you like to come upstairs to sit with me in this beautiful sunlight?” If he is Romeo, I am the wretched princess that cannot be saved. Misery’s Queen. An hour later, on the top floor terrace, with my head in the misty clouds, I feel a hundred times my weight. I try to talk to myself like I am the parent of my life, because I am: Choose joy. Choose joy. Choose presence at least. For a brief second I wondered if I should just stop focusing on the lack I am imagining and contemplate what is solid around me: Sky, endless and sapphire. White laundry. Orange slices. House slippers. Christmas tree. My legs, breasts, neck, nipples. M’s body, my sturdy paradise. The Aleppo pines, the Italian trees that never die, the trees that don’t take a break, this is a land of vampire foliage — olive, oleander, carob, mastic. Sad rain drenches the palms. This week I ignored my obligations and read Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill, a collection of fictional stories about bad behavior. In the chapter “Connection” she wrote:
“Why did Leisha feel empty? What did empty mean? What should exist in Leisha that didn’t? Was it a quality that other people had? She tried to imagine what Leisha looked like inside and pictured a set of dull-colored wires, some dead, others short-circuited and flickering in the dark, discharging a profusion of heat and bright color that sparked wildly, blew fuses and went dead.”
Mary Gaitskill, from Bad Behavior: Stories
Why do I feel empty?
What does empty mean?
What should exist in me that doesn’t?
INTELLECTUALLY: I am two weeks sober. I have, for a couple of years, overloaded my joy-recognizing centre with my faithful false highs (raspberry vodka, apple martinis, vino rosso — the poison was elegant! Petros, Stefanie and Stefan! iMessage companionship: Like me, think of me, send for me, text me when you wake and when you drift. Just please don’t ask to see me. I am only real to myself in words. Paris, Reykjavík, Dublin — I have run all around, everywhere, looking for my life!) and now I am really screwed. Now I am a dead woman walking. I have messed around for far too long with my senses and now all sensations feel fictional, suspect, or non-existent — except for the bad ones; the ones I know. It was easier to think I could write when I was drunk or high. My newfound “lucidity” has been delivered to me ice-cold. I was expecting fire. I was expecting lights to flicker on in blinding endless rows inside of me.
INTELLECTUALLY (PART II): “There are subconscious currents of thought that operate within every individual and they are largely the momentum of past thinking.” AND: “As we become aware of our shortcomings and develop the ability to confront them through our writing, the mind slowly gets disgusted with its inertia and begins to take steps to conquer it.”
INTERLUDE I can admit I have made a habit of misery. I am so lost in the dance it is crazy. My self-image needs a lot of work. A vortex internal is never satisfied. I eat and eat, smash pistachios open with my teeth. I wish I could belch out all of my compounded loneliness-es. Angelic exorcism under the hot Italian sun. The sky here sometimes looks like any sky, I confess. I forget to be amazed. My past crouches over my shoulder, feeling sorry for everything. When the first half of your life resembles a non-erotic humiliation ritual, at a certain point, you must die your first waking death in order to proceed — let go of the social labyrinths you failed to navigate, the money you failed to save, the weight you gained via pure mislocation of emotion, etc.
I think of Scorpio and its link with fires, devastation. The burning of the old ushers in the new. Of all of the words I have read this week, Italo Svevo in Zeno’s Consciousness felt the most like myself when he asked: “But why is a person like me unable to do anything in this world except dream or scratch at the violin, for which he possesses no talent?” I tell myself keep scratching. I don’t know if it is the truth that I am an emptiness, but regardless, I have inherited this myth and must love life enough so as to be liberated from its seductive sanguine bondage!!!!
PHYSICALLY a period of isolation. I am in a place where the language is not my language. Buonasera, come stai. I never thought about the consequences of living outside the boundaries of my absorbed culture, I play dress-up with these words; drape them clumsily on me. Even the rhythm of the streets is foreign. Cars glide through the sheets of rain like drunk beetles. EVERYTHING appears INTUITIVE. I am the total opposite of perceptive. Men huddle outside the shaded Moroccan markets in long dark coats smoking hand rolled tobacco, drinking from paper espresso cups. There is no straight line in front of the banking terminal, just groups of people who know what time they arrived. My voice is full of the snow of my country. It does not melt.
Oversized costume jewelry; opulent fake emeralds…
In the fruit markets I try not to speak for how awful it sounds. I have been here too long to feel like my efforts are charming or welcome. Even cleaning up after the men I feel like I am role-playing a woman from this neighborhood — like it’s more my style to DEPART from the social scene and WAIT for our guests to LEAVE. But maybe that is depression. My brain is old, my brain is set. I dream of unraveling language like Hélène Cixous, etymology’s governess, who digs to the roots, locates deep in the word-earth the true and central meaning, or at least the running theme, which illuminates the network of the word, the word’s world…And Cixous has been calling me out this week, I lost (found?) my mind when I read this from her:
"Paradise is not lost. We are the ones who haven't yet regained it, and if we haven't regained it, it's because we are suffering from two vices: laziness and impatience."
— Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
PSYCHOLOGICALLY I no longer “vibe” “ with a certain self-care aesthetic that once was very directive for me. Everyone seems to be a marvel of purity. Purity personas? A deep dirty part of me that despises how dreadful “health-consciousness” looks when it’s talked about in this sterile (stylish?) way. Pilates, they say! Açaí bowls, auratic awareness, meditative mornings, manifestation, mantras, hydro masks, hydration, green goddess dressing and blessings, blissfully tweeting about all of the above — I like it, too, I just don’t want to hear about it anymore. A strange time in life: I want to listen for the voices at the bottom of the basin. Belly dancing, nocturnal nights, strong espresso, red meat. I woke up at 6am for seven days straight and broke out in fever; this is not what I need from myself right now.
PSYCHOLOGICALLY (PART II) A strange fearful sensation. The feeling that I have been abandoned in an alien paradise without a link to my primordial lineage; my connection with God, spirit, liveliness, is so subdued and out of reach at the moment. I have nothing to promise except that I will not drink alcohol and I will keep writing. I hope as I present myself to the days that they become clearer. I am patiently waiting on myself to locate my next move, to recognize it within the list of all potential options. Last winter on psilocybin in my childhood bedroom I cried fat glittering cartoon tears at 3am, gasping out to someone who I thought I knew with all of my heart was listening to me: Why did you leave me here?
Thought I was talking to God. I think I was talking to me.
5 Good Things
Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill. “Dislocation, longing, and desire…”
This playlist I made two or three years ago.
“Fabric of Reality: A Figurative Language Moodboard” by Olivia Kan-Sperling for Praxis. Reading this made my brain dance and also made me think that it might be time to go back to university. Lacanian theory, Ambercrombie & Fitch and Mui Mui, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. Olivia, how did you do it?
One of my favorite heartbreak songs.
A closing thought, this section of a poem written by my twin sister:
In dreams I pack up my things without moving a muscle.
Everybody even the King is impressed.
I declare myself good for nothing,
I hit the road with slime for teeth,
and inherited power of the mind
draws the blinds round my cool deep forest.
Though light trickles in, of course it does,
and light is never small.
Cyber Diary is still on sale for the month of December. TY <3
This made me feel so seen it brought tears to my eyes.
Love
I love the way you see the world, Dom 💗