feel better sorry you're sick
Hey. I hope you are doing alright.
Where I’ve been: laptop, mountain, phone screen, gallery, warehouse, cafe, phone call, drained canal, classrooms, bedrooms.
An installation I made was displayed in a gallery last week. Hundreds of people showed up to the event and dozens asked me what it meant and I told them I didn’t know or I waited for them to tell me what it meant and then I agreed and said nothing out loud.
I waited sixteen days for a message. I tried looking at the sky, but I only see with one eye these days. The Aussie boy got the flu and broke my heart. I went on a date with a stranger to see if I could force myself into motion, forwards, backwards, anywhere but here. The boy was nice and the date was nice and he did nothing wrong, but I found myself thinking about the beaches in Australia and the waves and how they must roll on forever and where do they start? Why touch the shore? I thought about waking up in the sand, held by the world and held by the man. I found myself looking through my photos, counting how many of them reminded me of a person who spends his life thinking about anything but me. I’m looking for something. I’m looking for eyes, in the eyes, analyzing, searching for a connection that’s surely there, it was surely there. What are you looking for? If you are looking for beauty, it’s here.
I’ve been staring out my window. My apartment is laid out in such a way that my wholly uncomfortable loveseat faces out the floor length window directly into my neighbors' living room. I spend hours sitting and watching just above their building at what part of the sky I’ve been allotted. I see three, four, five clouds in one. My vision is surely getting worse. I wonder if they see me. Do they see me standing in the kitchen, staring into nothing for hours on end? Laying on the floor? Clutching the counter crying for ten seconds? Smiling into my camera? I see them cook. The man hardly wears a shirt, the woman is hardly around. He cooks for hours upon hours, large pots of something poured into an assortment of bowls for an invisible crowd. I’m moving soon.
I waited sixteen days and heard nothing, so I stopped waiting and sent him a message. I remember him looking right past me. The same sweaty, overlit student bar where we first met, my hand on his shoulder, then his hip. That night we kissed. One month later, he looked right past me. I am either invisible or nothing at all. He’s so much taller than me, always looking right over me. What is the world like from up there? With clear vision? Do you feel the sand? Do you feel it slipping? It’s there and it’s warm.
We talked in the morning. One week after becoming invisible. He was hungover, freezing cold, last night’s drunk makeup still framing his eyes. Are they green? Brown? It depends on the light. That morning they were tired. He apologized for seeing right through me. I accepted his apology and I meant it. I told him he’s special. I said I don’t feel like this often. He said he’s sorry, he can’t match my energy. I couldn’t help but feel like the kid that won’t stop playing, the dog that won’t stop barking. I ran out of ways of not telling him I loved him, so he filled the silence with stories, quips, brief moments in his life of sand, numbers, road trips. What I know, I love. It is at best fleeting, at worst, a projection. I saw in his eyes an I’m sorry but I never saw an I miss you. Hold me. I want to hold you. Please hear my heart beating. Remind me why I’m breathing. For the love of god, tell me something. I want to cut our skulls open. Pour yours into mine. Give me anything.
The silence was my fault. I put my head in my hands and he asked me if I was okay, the closest I can get to being wanted. I want to know his life. The simplest, most mundane details. The things you forget by accident. Information tied to places, people, things, only existing for a moment. I want to hold that. I want it to warm my bed. I need to fuck up my life. I’ve been making decisions. I am successful in that I do many things, but I fail to find a connection between myself and the world I supposedly come from. I am embedded? Threads tear loose quite easily. It all comes undone. I’m not asking questions and I’m certainly not looking for answers. I’m looking for something to call an illness. I’m looking for stories in a lifetime spent six inches across, five feet and eight inches up, one eye at a time. I haven’t seen clear in months. My friends tell me I am ahead, I know what I want and I work to get it. All these boys, they’re lost in their youth, looking for something to look for, picking up toys and dropping them in a minute. I am these boys. I am lost in my youth. I am picking things up. The only difference is I am in the dark and I am nowhere at all. I stare at the corner of my apartment for hours at a time. I look in the mirror and see nothing. If I fell through the floor, I wouldn’t question it, not for a second. I’ll wake up at thirty five with a dog and a bald head and then I’ll miss it all. All the best sex, I’m crying. All the best kisses taste like blood. I wake up in the morning and my bed is gone. All the best kisses leave me shaking. If it gets better it’s because I’m gone. Don’t take this as self hatred, I’m just staring down the barrel of a life worth living. One day I will look back and say,
I remember when I used to live in the church bell. It woke me every hour. I remember the boys who said hello. I remember when the whole world shook. I remember when we went to war, those missiles in the sky, shooting stars, satellites, it’s all information. I remember everything. How is it almost December? Soon it will be Christmas.
I used to write poetry. It was confessional and disgusting. I put the people I love the most in the line of fire. I used to read it out loud and my classmates were confused. Some would tell me it was beautiful. My teachers said I had a gift, but what they meant was that they were afraid for my life. I remember the Atlanta History Center, a poetry reading competition. I must have been fifteen. A girl a few years older than I took the stage in a dress, her hair done by her mother or grandmother, some woman who wanted her to die beautiful. From memory, she recited Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg by Richard Hugo. “Isn’t this your life? / That ancient kiss / still burning out your eyes?” Four years later, she and I were smoking Camels on her fire escape in Harlem. We’d spent the night at a veteran’s outpost sipping cheap cocktails in the humid back yard. I remember I took a sip and swallowed a gnat. Her fire escape overlooked a basketball court in a public park. She had been dating some older barman with massive shoulders and a real mustache. She had been dating an established doctor in his sixties. He told me he could help me get a seeing eye dog. I took a drag and it was sweet, smoking at nineteen in a city where I didn’t belong. She wrote in notebooks, collected flowers, cooked elaborate dishes, woke up in strange mens’ beds, men with tattoos, mafia men, gang men, barmen, rich men, poor men. They would leave her with painfully sentimental soliloquies, I love you and you need me. Love, to her, was something fleeting. She saw behind these men. She saw something above their heads. I remember sleeping on her leather couch in the one hundred degree heat of July, my bare back stuck to the cushions. She would wake me up in the morning and make me coffee. She took me to Chinatown to watch old men gamble, to beat up bars uptown where she’d never have to pay for drinks. She was in her second attempt at a final year at Columbia. She said she wanted to write about food. She only ever called me by my full name, first and last. She lived a life of transience. I took this to heart, spent years looking for the comfort in goodbye kisses, walks home alone, confessions to strangers, waiters, cab drivers, the homeless Québécois lady borrowing my lighter. What I thought was growth was always erosion and I can’t help but laugh at the way things go.
I’ve been scrolling through messages I have no memory of sending. Refreshing pages looking for somewhere to live. I’ve been calling my mother every day. We talk for a few minutes and then silence. We go about our lives as usual. She texted me to ask how I am and I said I am a bit sad about the boy. She said, “Oh my heart hurts for you. I’m so sorry.” I am looking for things with no end. I wish there was no distance between us, not an inch. The boy drunkenly stumbled into my friend’s apartment the other night. They sloppily did his eyeliner while he certainly told stories, made jokes. They said they understand why I am hurting. “He’s a really great guy.”
He said he couldn’t stop reading my last entry. He read it to his friends on a road trip too. He said they had to pull over, the tears made it hard to drive. I asked him what he found so impactful and he said it wasn’t the stuff about him, it was the story about the dead dog, the cancer patient, the asexual lover. See, it’s all one story. It’s all one sentence. He told me it’s beautiful, that I should send it somewhere to someone important and what I wanted to tell him is that I did and I have and I will and it’s him. I’m not in love, but what we made was brief and real and briefly it was real. They tell me this is growth. It’s surely erosion. How much of me can the water take before I become the sea? Sure, it sounds awfully dramatic, but I am telling you this is killing me. Look at my eyes. Look at my skin, my hair, my posture, my body. I wake up in the morning and put on the same clothes every day. Gray sweater, gray pants. I used to wear collars, sweater vests, ties, long coats, and expensive shoes. I used to drink coffee for energy. I used to drink wine for fun. I used to look out windows for the view. How lovely.
I think this will be the death of me. It has to be. Every decision I make is made understanding that at any moment I could drop dead and that there has to be something more important than comfort. It’s getting cold again. It always does. It’s amazing how the world is able to remember to exist. We all know it’s being created and recreated. There must be a life to fit my body. Clothes fit so strangely on me. I can see your heartbeat through your chest. I will live through this. I have always been. Everyday someone stops me on the sidewalk and tells me the world is ending.