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It seemed that whatever I did with this body, wherever I took it, my mind carried the past and all its wrongs with it, even as I lay naked on the tarpaulin.
I know I fucked up the first time, but this is my redemption arc!
It’s funny how scared I used to be about my heart stopping, and how careless I’ve become once presented with an actual risk of it.
I wonder if there’ll be anyone there to explain at all.
I wonder when it became so fucking hard just to say thank you.
never really thought about the cost dying would entail, the loss of the years I could’ve lived. The worries were primal. The bog standard I Don’t Want To Die coded into my amygdala. But now when I think about death, I think about the things I wouldn’t get to do, the things I want to do, the people I want to kiss and fuck but whose faces I’ve yet to see, the things I’ve yet to write. It’s not so much dying that scares me, but dying young, because in a lot of ways life has only just begun to feel like it’s worth living. I’m catching up. I’m only just learning what it means to want to live.
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Melissa McCarthy doesn’t deserve this.
I lean into the feedback loop as time drips on.
Some of his shame seeps through the phone. I feel sad for him, and I wonder what my world would look like if men didn’t cower from their desires.
The picket fence of dick pics is at once both offensive and vile, but I feel a thread of gratification that I am loath to admit, even though it shouldn’t be a crime to say that it feels good to be desired, especially behind the safety of the internet. I hug my phone, a portal to a sea of dicks.
“I should’ve been suspicious when he said he was in the financial sector. Too vague. Financial marketing. What the fuck? Worse than an accountant.”
We watch Spy. A movie Melissa McCarthy deserves.
sonorous yawn.
Susumu Yokota
“My art teacher in Year Seven used to make a big song and dance about Rothko,” Rob said. “He said people burst into tears looking at his paintings. Then the next week he took us to a museum with a big blue one and everyone had these crazy reactions to it, really hamming it up. One girl collapsed in front of it.”
Sometimes I just wonder if you can work for bad companies and still be a good person. I don’t get how you could.”
“And good or bad doesn’t boil down to one thing a person does,” he added. “You might do some good on some days and some bad on other days. Nobody’s asking you to dismantle capitalism with a Bloomberg Terminal.”
“People say they’ve given their lives to something. They’re always fucked over in the end. Part of getting people to work hard is helping them to forget that a company can’t love you back. I like the work, but I still see the job for what it is. It’s
not heroic stuff, but it’s not like I’m an arms dealer. And so it’s chill.”
You can make decisions and not be to blame.”
maybe part of that means taking blame out of the picture altogether. It was so basic, so fucking obvious, and yet so impossibly hard.
“Hard to say. We’re all in a rush and short on time, right? Nobody wants to invest in something that might be doomed from the outset.”
“But you can’t tell someone their lines are drawn too thick, can you? People have to come to it themselves.”
I’d been telling myself to chill out, but realized that I was not, and maybe never would be, a chilled person.
Amateur pottery always looked shit, fermentation was just a lot of waiting around, and marathons were for people who had something to run away from.
I thought about how life repackages and regifts and counterfeits.
It’s like the event plants a seed, but you don’t really know how it’ll grow. It was shit.”
“I’m speaking the shame away. I’m showing you my belly.” “What?” “It’s this analogy we’re using in therapy,” she said. “There’s a lot of fear in showing it, for some animals. Because you’re at risk of being mauled.” I nodded slowly. “Our insides aren’t worth much to other people, I guess.” “Some people,” she said. “It sounds like hippie bullshit, but I think the risk is worth it. It’s how you learn who cares, and it stops you from punishing yourself so much for being you.”
We lay next to each other, his tummy down and mine up, breathing short, labored breaths. I held his hand.
and I laughed again because time felt stupid, because at one end of the curtain I was an imposter and at the other end I felt special, and I didn’t know if that change was powerful or wondrous or fragile or all of those things combined.
“You weren’t yourself, stupid. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? You become who they want you to be.”
I was shocked at how quickly I’d capitulated, denying myself what I needed to accept what he wanted. And I knew it was because part of me believed that I was lucky to get what I was given, that there would never be anybody else.
“I have a bad habit of going along with things that aren’t right for me, and I’m just trying to do the things a person would do if they loved themselves as much as they loved other people, I guess.”
it’s the price I’ve paid for being a cunt.
“I decided to stop dyeing it,” she says. “I think there comes a time when you have to stop fighting upward.”
At each corner of life I am reminded of the ways in which I haven’t collected the things I need. Wedding clothes. Office clothes. Death clothes. It’s like learning my mother tongue in later life.
“I don’t know what replaces that feeling of home.”
Maybe Rob would feel differently because Tom and I are together. Not together, together, but still together. He might not hate me if he were alive, but his death is also what fixed things. There’s pain in that irony. I’m glad I’m in the photo.
a boy, a buoy.
Maybe that’s what people are supposed to do, sponge out the bad, wring out the suffering as much as we can, even if it stains our hearts and hands.
Maybe it’s mental gymnastics, or my own weakness, but Henry’s showing me his belly, as Tom would say. I appreciate that.
