the house is on fire
july 30th
I haven’t written anything in months and I wonder if it’s because I haven’t been in love.
Sometimes I fear that I was born to be in love, but how arrogant is it to imagine that I’m going to be able to do what I was born to, that I somehow deserve it without having yet earned it, without knowing what crimes I may have committed in past lives or how much hurt I’ve already caused in this one? How arrogant is it to believe that I should have the opportunity to do what I was born to when countless others won’t?
If there’s no free will, if this is all fated in some twisted way, that assumes people were fated to die as children, or live on the streets, or be tortured in times of war, but if there is free will, isn’t that worse, in some ways?
Because the unsatisfying truth is that free will is only freeing if you have the freedom to take advantage of it.
Anyway, I wonder if I haven’t written anything in months because love is the only way to make suffering sound poetic.
july 10th
I tilt my head back and run my fingers through my hair, then I do it again and one more time for good measure. Is this the routine? I ask myself. I laugh, I sleep, I cry, I take a shower, the first three a repeating cycle until I eventually rediscover the meaning of air while under a stream of water. I thought it was him, but maybe it’s me.
I turn around and stay very, very still, until the pressure begins to sting my face and I have to move back from the blast. My shower is big enough for that now, though you wouldn’t know.
I take a deep breath.
Another.
There are moments when I can picture the film scene, imagine how my life would appear as a coming-of-age movie on the big screen, but I never look like myself and I’m not interested in explaining that.
I don’t think I would recognize my own face if I passed myself on the street, but I don’t know if I would realize yours, either.
july 12th
I’ve started buying skirts that reach my calves, and I wear trouser shorts outside of the office. I cut off enough of my hair that it no longer touches the back of my neck and I ask for bright pink nail polish at the salon as an ode to the past. I still order mescal at the club, but at dinner it’s alway wine, either Riesling or Pinot Grigio no matter what the meal consists of. I don’t find myself missing the thrill of hard liquor.
july 13th
I know better, yet that still doesn’t stop me, so I write letters to my father because that’s the best way to reach him even though I know I’ll never send them and I pray that if I ever get into an accident they’ll call anyone else first because I don’t know if he would remember that I’m allergic to penicillin. I don’t think he even knows that I’m allergic to doxycycline.
july 14th
I still write about you, I even write to you, but you’re not here and everyone else is and that’s okay because that’s what growing up is.
So I ask him if he would be willing to travel to Europe to identify my body, were the need to arise, and when he agrees I believe him because he knows I’m going to be in London in December and the way he holds me never changed and even if I don’t love him in the same way I loved you I still know I love him, because it’s been over two years now and he’s still here.
Everyone else is here and you’re not and you don’t even know where I live anymore.
august 18th
I’m not okay and I wish that mattered.