Decade: September 2020

The dreams I’ve been having have trickled into reality in the hides of false memories. At work, all the electricity went kaput and I bushwhacked the dark to find the urinal. I’m unsure where the mice are getting in from but a strong guess is the extinct fireplace. When Under The Skin was released in 2014, a mouse in the theater darted past my socks. I remember that so vividly but not simple things like I have to eat meals. The people from apartment 1 and apartment 3 and apartment 4 have all vanished. Unsober, I floated through the rooms of 4 and discovered a replica of my extinct fireplace. Their kitchen lent more counter space and their bathtub had claws and a window beside it. Now, I refuse to be dead before eating raspberries in my very own claw-footed bathtub. In January, the roses addressed to Leslie Walton died on 4’s welcome mat. A subscription service meal kit got delivered to 3 and it’s been rotting in the vestibule. Someone moved it to the stoop then someone moved it back inside then I threw it out. Sarah J. said she didn’t have the attention span for movies, so I eased her in with short ones. We watched Jonathan Glazer’s The Fall and the first segment of Todd Solondz’s Storytelling. We came very close to swapping out a tire, we went out to her car and everything, but didn’t. Storytelling is a fitting preface for the remainder of my year because I’m taking 2 workshops. I enjoy Chelsea Hodson’s course because it’s pushing me deeper into what I’m already doing. But I won’t write about the most emotionally intense moment I’ve experienced, it isn’t mine. Just as I won’t describe the plan I’ve devised to get to the life I want to live, in case I can’t. The rat in the alley that was all giallo gore yesterday is, today, a flat pulpy papier-mâché. The woman who wears all white and speaks through a megaphone about Jesus, has returned. My fainting couch enjoys swallowing things whole and biting the hands that reach inside. The gulls rehearsed air strikes in the CVS lot and one, the sergeant I presumed, glowed blue. I toggle back and forth between Chopin’s Nocturnes and Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now. My friend Megan showed me a disturbing yet somehow pleasing YouTube video with 139 views. It concerns a marionette singing on a tiny stage built just for him and then the camera pans. And you see the audience sitting and watching and they look like a cult completely under his spell. The video burrowed into my psyche and I can’t imagine it leaving, it’s already a part of who I am. For this reason, I will not share it with anyone I don’t want seeing my full, complete, authentic self. Softness that sits on the surface of the skin that’s pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin, pink and paper thin