nathan > Recent Status Updates

..a handwritten note: Lo que sucede, conviene. Roughly: What happens, suits. I glanced at it daily for weeks, reciting the line in Spanish and in English, and though I can’t say I accepted it in either language at the time, I knew it would be better if I did find a way to release myself from my stubborn “female” grief.

I remembered a Latin phrase I’d first read in Nietzsche: amor fati—a love of one’s fate, the stoic imperative to not only accept the life you lead but to love each turn of it, no matter how ugly or painful.

For to be afflicted with endless sorrow at the loss of someone very dear is foolish self-indulgence, and to feel none is inhuman callousness. The best compromise between love and good sense is both to feel longing and to conquer it. Fine. OK. Fuck you, Seneca, but yes, it seemed to me he wasn’t wrong, though I did not want, in that moment, for him to be right.

Haven’t you ever tried to love or take care of someone despite being given ample reason that they cannot or do not want to receive your love or care? A faith it could go differently. An amnesia of how it’s gone.

Maybe the first fallacy is true, at least slightly, or at least symbolically, but the latter never is. When a lover leaves the bed, the lover stays in bed.

There are at least two fallacies in grief sex. The first is that it turns a private truth into a shared truth—feelings in unison, in union—and the second is the belief that such a shared space could be continuous postcoital, that an evening’s pleasure could correct the loss that pervades the day.

Ecstasy had a way of both contextualizing and warping loss. What I wanted from fucking seemed discontinuous from what I wanted from my life, and I could hide from the impossible thing I desired by seeking something achievable

I was trying to echolocate—Am I here? Where am I?—trying to put out some kind of signal and receive something back, something to repair this estrangement, the sense I had of subletting my body from its true resident.

Order out of chaos. Divinity in happenstance. Meaning, meaning, meaning; everywhere I turned as a child, there was meaning salving and saving me, telling me I was correct, telling me that I was saved and powerful and protected eternally, so long as I kept believing.

It was funny to us, absurd even, the image of this man out there in the cold, his sheer stupidity preventing him from having a holiday, but I knew I was also, sometimes, the angry man in my own front yard, not wanting to be in a house with myself, a person I did not yet know.

Emma told me about a man in her family so angry that a trans woman was now his relative that he spent the entire Christmas party standing in the front yard, choosing to sulk alone rather than breathe the same air as his trans relation.

Was it better to cut than to tear? Better for what, for whom? These weren’t the right questions to ask, but I kept asking them until it became clear that the only thing you can do if you wake up in a life you don’t recognize is to get up, wash your face, proceed into the day as if you know exactly where you are.

I felt sure suicide was something I would never have the intention or capacity to carry out, but how could I be so sure of myself now that so much I had been sure of had gone? Yet even then I wasn’t wondering if I was going to commit the act but whether it was going to happen to me, as if it were something wholly beyond my control.

Il vaut mieux couper que déchirer..

But wanting something or asking for something was terrifying, as I feared that human wants were necessarily in contradiction to the will of God, a force that could be ignored only for so long until his wrath came down.

Pavement is a skateboarder’s ally and foe; she resists gravity, then yields to it—resist and yield, resist and yield—always searching for grace in the transitions.

Hunger—no, the absence of hunger that comes after hunger—is the closest replication I’ve found for the cold clarity of faith. But even so, it is synthetic; eventually you must eat.

and though this truth had been obscured for some reason, it had been revealed to me, and now I was regenerate, and now I had to tell everyone else this very Good News.

But there’s no drug, no love, no bodily sensation or metaphor that comes close to fully believing that the creator of the universe had transformed his son into a human being who came to earth to work miracles only to be executed for my sake, for everyone’s sake..

Without God, what was a body? Just a place to wait.

but how grim it was to find that it had never been easier to live in the now once the now felt like a town that had been tornadoed away, not even wreckage, just a sky without a horizon, nothing to orient around, no sense of north.

I didn’t care about that future goodness, as I was living so intensely in the present that the future had no meaning. It did not exist. It did not exist at all. It was supposed to be a good thing—living in the present moment—

“You don’t love me anymore” means I disallow you from loving me.

Yet isn’t there’s a bit of smug indifference in the way Jesus hangs there on the cross? It’s as if he knows precisely what is going on and has already risen above it, as if he is thinking You people think you’re killing me, but I am actually an eternal deity that cannot exactly experience a mortal death and will be worshiped infinitely into the future. Nobody killed Jesus, but we were forgiven for it anyway.

How could you be so certain to have to pray for that, too, and anyway how could you even be sure you had prayed to the Real God and not some False God that grew like mold in your human mind? How could you be so certain your prayers had reached God and not been intercepted by the Devil? How did you know the Devil wasn’t the one answering your prayers, parroting the voice of the Lord?

Did you have to have faith in your faith? And where would such faith-buttressed-faith come from, and did you have to pray for that, too, and anyway how could you even be sure you had prayed to the Real God and not some False God that grew like mold in your human mind?

All the pastors said you had to have faith, that it was always a matter of faith—faith that Jesus was in my heart, faith that I deserved grace, faith that I was on the right path—but how could I be sure I was truly perceiving my faith and not my hubris that I had faith?

Everything was just as it had always been, then nothing was as it had been. Everything was gone. But somehow—between normal and abnormal—nothing happened.

Everyone told me that everyone was breaking up or breaking down or breaking through those days—these days, these days, everyone said—something in the ether, it seemed, was pushing them all to the edges of whatever they were in.

Identities and plans rest dormant in a stack of books. The kitchen pantry reassures us of our future nourishment. A toolbox is the confidence that we can fix what will break. Little notes to self. Little notes of self. The secret language of things we use to fold life into time, time into life.