some words on death

I’ve been so focused on the horrific political violence in the news and in the world lately that I found myself caught off-guard by feelings about other kinds of loss.

Seven years ago, in December, a boy I knew died. Young man, I guess. He seemed so much older than me, and it baffles me to think I am five years older now than he was then. An acquaintance, I guess, a friend-of-friends, very close to people I would later be very close to, a crush more than anything else, someone I wanted to know better than I did. Twice this week I’ve come across textual references to his suicide that caught me by surprise. 

How strange, when googling someone I met in college, for the absurdly innocuous reason of trying to accurately remember the color of her hair– I had somehow forgotten she had written his obituary in the school newspaper. 

Reading a book about death by someone who knew him better than I did, I should have known it was coming, but I was still so ill-prepared. The brief remarks hit me right in the guts. Thud, thud. 

I suppose the shock of losses do not fade, but rather they are joined by others and that changes them. A polyphonic chorus swells until the coda of its hearer’s death.

Sometimes I stop believing in time,

(sometimes lately I can’t stop feeling terrified that my father has died when I remember no one has heard from him in weeks, that he never called me back when I stood waiting for a stoplight to turn on his birthday and sang into his machine, that even though I know my uncles would know if anything really bad happened and someone would tell me, the thought keeps jolting through my brain)

(sometimes lately I can’t stop feeling terrified that this boy I spend some time with will get hit by a bus or fall off a building or any number of things I’m scared to write down because I don’t want them to happen, I get terrified that suddenly he’ll just drop out of the world and I know this is my anxiety talking, the obsessive-compulsive evidence of how much affection I’ve come to feel, and really I should just get some cognitive behavioral therapy and get laid more)

and I know that each moment that occurs hangs somewhere in time, and we are passing a handle of Jim Beam back and forth in someone’s living room until you fall asleep there and I stumble home, always. 

item: reading the news makes me depressed. 

item: declining to read the news makes me depressed. 

item: I’m still alive enough to feel like shit. 

item: I will likely die a violent death, but not likely at the hands of the law.

item: I feel embarrassed by my own emotional response to the news: instead of political action motivated by clarifying rage, I want to crawl into bed for at least a month with a man and two bottles of whiskey and three packs of cigarettes and watch old French movies and cry at the car scene in Jules et Jim and then the movie’s over and we don’t have to feel sad anymore, or rather I can feel indulgently sad all I want, because the turmoil of lovers is a different sadness from genocide. 

item: I seem to keep walking from room to room, object to object, tab to tab, knowing I was just about to do something.

I want you to tell me you’re mine 
you’re mine you’re mine you’re mine
I mean sure, fuck a patriarchal sense of ownership and you can do whatever you want when I’m not there, but I want to spend days and days fucking you until you cry, the choked out sound that passes your lips a single word poem made of my name.

sidbranca:

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Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

This afternoon, waiting for dough to rise, for my mood to find some even keel, I think my tweezing thoughts and I have teased out a piece of the tangle of feelings I have around this holiday.

There are the obvious threads, clear to anyone with a stack of history books slightly less subject to whitewashing; people are less surprised as time goes on when my weepy drunk voice arcs out the spitting phrase–

our nation was founded on genocide– but perhaps because I find myself in better rooms, or the people in them know me better. 

There is, as always, the sticky sweet grip of capitalism, with its taking hand, with its great discarding arms. 

There is, as always, the rats’ nest of families. 

For those who know me a little better have heard the stories of my childhood: sleeping in a tipi beside a fire, burning sage twirling up my nose. Voices in the dark of a sweat lodge we had built that day. The day I learned to make fire with two sticks, the glass bead necklace I still wear. My mother weeping behind a rattle. My father’s eyes flashing angry under his Oklahoma hat-brim. There are no Native peoples connected to my family tree, as far as I know, but I was too young to know how to draw the lines between cultural appropriation and shared positive experiences that were so clearly important to the adults, mostly European-American, upstate New York hippies, around me. I may still be too young to know. These are the fondest memories of my childhood, stories by the fire, chants across the Long Island Sound. 

Today, however, a slight reframing in my head. Part of why this holiday makes me so emotional is the intense and necessary hope that something that emerged out of genocide, trailing a long history of oppression, falsehood, and monstrous capitalism, can somehow over time become an opportunity for genuine gratitude, for building community, for celebrating the love and the gifts that we receive and that we are given. That getting really drunk with your friends over a table of food, helping each other through the things that are hard and sharing the joy of the things that are beautiful, that this is something of great value even when darkened by all our bloody history. This is not just something I feel about Thanksgiving, but something I feel about America herself. The hope that something born of blood can one day be a place of kindness.

notebook scraps:

skyscrapers sway like trees in the wind. to attempt immobility, rather than simply stillness, moves from an attempt at presence to a physical challenge to be bested.

all the major trees of my childhood have lost much of themselves, or are gone altogether. 

all my words are stolen. the language of a scavenger feels good in my mouth.

all these shapes force themselves through my body, glowing scripts in some reaching–

I send long thick lines from my teeth through the air to you, all my languages the tongues of want, a bringing in of–

my body and my words are inextricable. the oceans of language that pour out of me into a dozen glowing boxes: they are all made of my blood.

the word, any and each, is never separate from the world. 

I wonder how I could possibly open my mouth wide enough to let this great oil slick of fear ooze out, a dark gleaming bubble of oh, the world, I wish, oh please, I cannot read the news one more time today, let me wallow in my knowing that I am lucky enough to read the news, to read and not to be the news, to not be the bad news that goes unreported. and who am I to go on writing all my violent love songs, who am I to ask for money and for help, get steadily drunk alone in my living room, write lines of code and trace out shapes of old longings–

I get it, I get it. 

sometimes I think perhaps I owe it to the world, for all its kindnesses to me, to grow out of this maudlin disposition. to discard some malfunctioning part of my heart, the part that makes reasonable emotional responses and extensive political involvement and healthy amounts of sleep or romance impossible. 

but sometimes I think I owe it to the world to know that dredging my ripped-up heart up all over the place is maybe the one thing I can offer in exchange for all the meals and movie tickets and late night poems and long car rides and undeserved forgivenesses.

all I can ever do is keep on living through these big waves of emotion that scrape me along the rocks, the options are that, or to become one kind of rock or another. I cannot become obsessed with my own stupid guilt, we all know that that’s no cure for narcissism. 

I started out trying to say something, I think, but I had to pull a drunk curtain down on all the pain I see around tonight. Happiness does not come easy. 

what was it that Justin sang, so quiet, so beautiful? this is the world, where beautiful things and terrible things will happen. 

some attempts at candor, because the thrilling fear of accidentally revealing myself to my subject matter is the only thing that really gets me thinking clearly.

things I like:

- that you probably know exactly what I mean by that first sentence.

things I don’t like:

- how obvious it is to me, and likely to others as well, how quickly my writing style shifts around to suit itself to whoever I’m fucking or reading or reading and fucking

(I just want someone to put their words in me through every means of ingress and then I pull the ribbon from my mouth like a magician’s trick, other people’s cadences pigmented with my blood).

I like: how you like to cum twice.

If wishes were horses, we’d have to steal hay, solely based on how often I think about leaning my head on your shoulder, or the way you pull my arms around you.

I don’t like: how I keep wanting a word for this, how I know it’s true about me that if you’d call me your girl then I’d care even less about unanswered messages or other women or long stretches of divergent time, how a certain kind of purely symbolic validation matters more to me than, I don’t know, a bunch of shit that quote unquote normal reasonable adults seem to care about. Fuck whoever you want forever but let’s get matching tattoos and make everyone we know worry about us just a little bit. 

I want to tell you all my dirty secrets–all the smoke-singed motels and suburban den couches and vacation city alleyways, all the times I saw stars, and that time that things went so, so bad, and that other time, and that other other time, and reading aloud from a cookbook in a tongue I don’t speak and fucking on a white couch above the frozen lake, and my terrible fear of french girls, and how I am this endless stream of wanting, a desiring machine, and how afraid I am to die and how hard it is to be alive, and how that somehow makes me want to kiss you harder.

I like the way you look me right in the eyes. I like how you hold my hand. I like your clever jokes and your kindness and your alcoholism and your overly romantic sensibilities. I like the way you make me want to work harder to be happy, make me want to stay in bed all day, make me want to jump out of it and make a thousand beautiful weird things. So I guess I like the way you make me feel the things I’m always feeling, but somehow happier. 

from an old notebook recently found, undated.

I sound like such a little girl. I suppose that’s what I was. We were all children, once, and we all made a child’s mistakes, responded with a child’s petulance and deflections. I feel differently about some of these things now, some the same.

Mostly it’s just so strange to find myself visiting my past self like a foreign country, a language I’d almost utterly forgotten. Time, time, time. There is always some new heartbreak to turn our lashes to. My memory is poor and life is so long. I am trying to be better at only being a part of kindness on all sides, but I sometimes find it counter to my inclinations. 

—-

It’s cold. He makes me so angry. I recent myself for having accepted poor treatment for so long–even convinced myself I deserved it. I didn’t. I’m disappointed in myself, in him, furious at him, furious at myself for ceding my time, my energy. Where’s my cardigan?

I’m broke, scared I’ll end up like my parents, trapped by money, my lack of it and my laziness, carelessness in managing my finances toward my artistic goals being accommodated pursued to their fullest.

all that money spent on beers I only sort of wanted, time spent in bars I should have spent working or asleep, and I really would have rather been doing those for some of that time and knew it. I feel like I’ve been fucking up. All those applications never finished, or shoddily submitted, all those drafts unwritten, all those rehearsals and meetings I was unprepared for. I let myself blame my job, but what about all those hours I do control? so much time is getting wasted in drama and drinking. and when it’s not my own, it’s others’! I say I’m tired all the time–I could go to sleep before 2am some more nights. My excuses are bullshit. 

[—-], not a productive presence in my life, because he is not to be trusted. He just wants whatever ammunition he can find. He is loyal to no one– not to him, not to her. He is a shark, don’t take anything he says at face value.  Everyone has their reasons to lie to everyone else, and they do.

several blank pages later:

She is blowing on her fingernails. He takes her hand, and presses down on each fingernail. (Slowly, firmly, deliberately.) His eyes move between her nails (painted) and her face (her eyes on him). It is completely silent. As he moves to her second hand, we hear the sound of water running, of dishes clattering in a sink. Two men sitting on the floor take the lid off a cookie jar and slowly eat cookies. They pass a single glass of milk between them. 

anxiety dreams.

Amanda and I have just moved into a new place, the top floor of a huge beautiful old building, it’s in a weird part of town but I’ve never had so much space and that’s thrilling. We finish moving in at 10pm on a Friday night, and are waffling as to whether that’s too late to invite everyone over for a housewarming. I’m being especially indecisive, and seeing that behavior in myself irritates me.

You answer my text from earlier in the day and say: hey, sid, it’s been fun, you’re rad and we’ve had a great run of it, but icymi I’m moving to New York in the morning.

I ask why, attempting to sound calm, and you respond: there’s this girl there who makes me feel like I’m on fire. 

I ask if I can see you tonight before you go, and run out of the house to meet you in a bar I’ve never been to before. At first I can’t find you, and run into Andres, who wants to roll my cigarettes even though he doesn’t smoke. I find you, and we are about to head outside for cigarettes and talking, and as I get my things I think about what I could possibly say:

I am completely and utterly in love with you, and the only demand I want to make of you is that you be here with me, that you not suddenly disappear, that your presence in my life continues to bring me joy and confirm that you too really and truly give a shit. 

I wake up before I hit the door, my Saturday morning hangover creeping over me, rubbing regret against my temples. I want to get back to sleep to know what happens.

I want to know what look happens to your face when I tell you exactly all the dumb romantic shit you make me feel, how I want to sell everything I own and live in a van with you, how I want to get drunk with you forever, how all the emotions I have about you make me want to have weirder and weirder sex, how you make me want to write a hundred books and learn how to give a tattoo in someone’s living room. 

I do not get to say these things, or see your reaction. I go back to sleep and am rushing to get to a performance venue, where I am underprepared for an elaborate routine. I am running late and take a cab, but as we approach the venue (a gigantic school), he starts asking me questions and speeds past our destination. He locks the doors, he is going to kidnap and rape me, but I somehow get my door unlocked and open while we fly down a busy street. I jump out, onto the dirty grass on the side of the road. He swerves to try and hit me, repeatedly, but eventually gives up. I get his license plate–some strange vanity plate that’s a pun on Jordan Almonds–and as night falls I walk back to the school, calling 911. 

The man on the line at 911 doesn’t believe me, or doesn’t care, and refuses to send any police officers to me, or medical staff to see if I’m okay after my jump from a fast-moving vehicle. I give up, and navigate through a massive crowd of children leaving the school and adults entering it, and finally get backstage.

It’s extremely dark, and Cassandra and Josh are waiting there for me. I realize I have forgotten all my props, in addition to not quite knowing the plan, which involves fake, black-light-glowing milk coming from my breasts in some kind of Madonna (Ciccone) and Child type deal in the midst of an elaborate dance number. I am freaked out and devastated and bleeding, but I start looking around for what we have to work with to make this show go on.