symbiosis

To be part of the people, not above them; to be beautiful, not hideous; to be gracious, not selfish; to be yours, not anyone else’s. All small, tedious, ordinary, exhausting humiliations.

I am sick of suicidal ideation. There is a spare key, of course not to use, only to know the door can be opened whenever. A door resembling the exhaustion of my most serious ideas.

I have things to do. I’ve smoked 12 cigarettes in a row. Cried to Hunchback of Notre Dame, sanitized disney, distilled disney; I am so quite tired, I want to fuck someone I love too, I am also a heaping mass of flesh and organ with a functional capacity to be aroused at the touch of a hand on my cheek, at the fingers skimming my spine like a child skims water.

There is something profoundly American about a storage unit. Hoarding of objects one neither needs enough to use nor despises enough to abandon.

Gentle, submissive men leave me cold. They have a slow viscosity to their ideas, a dimwitted laugh, a very loving smile, gentle men leave me feeling sad. I am always seduced by the egotist instead, the man whose thoughts have become so large they barely leave room for me. Pressed up against the wall, pressed up against the wall - the wall. It should occasionally become cruel. Egotism in an intelligent man becomes almost erotic, is erotic.

I should not indulge the brilliant narcissist, but I am weak to superfluous displays of vanity. which is, I think, the last honest vanity left, to admit you are seduced by nothing but surface level tension.

My dentist asked if I’ve been under stress. I said no. This was, technically, a lie, though I’m not sure it counts as one, since I wasn’t under stress in that specific chair, in that specific moment, bib around my neck, mouth open, a kind of temporary amnesty from having to be a person with a life outside the room. I almost enjoyed it.

I wonder what it must have been like to create “the first lie”, it must have been beautiful, to manufacture an inauthentic reality before even the blanket of language had solidified itself with the “true” reality.

To own only what one needs presupposes the terrifying knowledge of what one needs. I therefore keep the trinkets, the receipts, the empty cigarette boxes, though I should probably rid myself of this naivety.

A little girl was turning in circles until she became dizzy enough to fall into the grass. I spin myself sick chasing this feeling, the pleasure of losing sovereignty over myself. I want to control the absence of control, to switch it on and off, what does it mean.

I copied a proof into my notebook without understanding a single line of it. Sometimes writing feels like this, a torturous, ribald, form of optimism. Perhaps this is why I still keep a diary. My hand is quicker than my understanding.

Bézout again tonight, uninvited. He tells me that two curves of degree m and n intersect in exactly mn points, counted properly, over an algebraically closed field, and I think, how lovely, to be told in advance exactly how many times you will meet the thing that intersects you, and where, and that the meeting is guaranteed by the shape of the world rather than by the choice. I have never had that certainty with a man, only with mathematics, which loves no one and therefore never lies, what Bertrand Russell once said, “I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe—because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.” I think about this too often. I wish I wrote it first. He stole my thought.

A woman at the market once told me I had “an old face,” meant, I think, as a compliment, meaning ancient, meaning wise, and I said thank you and went home and looked in the mirror for a long time trying to see what she saw, and all I found was a very prominent, ancient fatigue, which is not the same thing as old, though I understand now why people confuse the two. After this I began putting a spare curtain over my mirror. I cannot bear to look at my exhaustion, at my youth dribbling, spilling over like an unsupervised sink.

I am verging on a complete state of pure drunken bliss—no—I am already there. I am drunk all the time and in moments of lapsed soberness my hands still twitch and itch and crawl with a feverish ache to drink.

Liberation. God, liberation. It probably doesn’t exist. Rousseau said something about freedom only being possible within laws, moral liberty, obedience, whatever. I remember reading this when I was fifteen and deciding I would never become one of those people who drags philosophy into everything she writes. Obviously that went well. If liberation did exist, it would only come to those who willingly get lost in the maze, but I am always looking for a way out, for a solution. In this process I think I trapped myself in that so called liberation I seek and google maps doesn’t work here. I depend on man-made constructions even to fantasize about escaping them. What an impossible feat.

I have spent years refurbishing boring memories into better ones. At this point it is difficult to tell whether the false memories shaped me or whether the act of fabricating them did. The lie or the muscle of lying. I’m not sure which is more intimate.

The struggle a writer has with their identity is one of complex, cannibal nature. There is a constant desire to be seen performing, writing, being, all in service of subduing the ego, which is the great joke, using visibility to kill the very thing visibility feeds. A constant desire to embody the right product, though the demand for beauty is infinite and beauty itself is finite, quick to die out, quick to bore even its own author. This demand grows from within the writer, and the satiation is meant to come from the same place, so what happens when the appetite finally outgrows the well it drinks from? Nothing probably, I am merely projecting.

Wore the same sweater four days in a row this week and only noticed on day four, which tells you something about how closely I’ve been paying attention to anything at all.

Found a receipt in my coat pocket from a restaurant I don't remember going to, dated three weeks ago, and spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to reconstruct that night before giving up and accepting that I apparently ate a $14 salad in a state of complete unconsciousness, I wish it had lasted. I do not want to think anymore.

The older I become, the less interested I am in whether an opinion is true. I care more about whether someone could only have arrived at that opinion by living the life they lived. This is why diaries are almost always more interesting than manifestos—- probably, I’ve only read two manifestos.

My father calls only when he’s driving, so our entire relationship for the past six years has taken place at seventy miles an hour, half-formed sentences interrupted by turn signals, and I’ve come to associate his voice permanently with the specific sound of a car indicator, tick tick tick, like something counting down. Sometimes he stops speaking and all I hear is the indicator, it’s sad.

My watch stopped at 4:47 and I never fixed it, so some part of every day is still technically that specific minute. I like this more than I should.

I saw a man running for the bus carrying a coffee so carefully that he missed it. He protected the coffee at the expense of himself. I don't think this is irrational. We are forever preserving the smaller thing because it is the only thing presently in our hands. The larger thing, the appointment, the career, the relationship, the open house tour, exists only in the imagination. I gave this as an excuse to breakup to an ex-boyfriend of mine once, he was peeved, I still don’t understand it. Relationships feel tedious lately, more so than ever. I wonder.

As a child I believed old people became lighter because they ate less. I imagined death gradually weakening gravity’s claim upon the body. I was wrong, naturally. Age does not make us lighter. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the exuberant youth of 11, when I had my first puppy love and would cry over tiny misgivings. This is unfair to my 11 year old self, I think I was much sadder back then. I would much rather prefer not to exist at all. Responsibility, fuck.

Someone should write a history of women waiting in cars, it would be longer than most wars, and, like most wars, largely composed of waiting for men.

I have developed the unpleasant habit of imagining strangers as children as an exercise to be kinder. The cashier with acne was once carried asleep from the car into the house. The woman arguing on the phone once mispronounced "spaghetti." The old man buying cough drops once had a mother who worried when he was five minutes late. This exercise rarely makes me kinder. Only sadder.

A folded corner means a wish to return. Folding the pages of every happy day in my diary, a want to return. Sometimes I do it while the day is still happening, which seems like a bad sign.

People describe books as escaping reality. The opposite has always seemed more true to me. Close the book and suddenly there is the sink full of dishes, your left knee hurting, somebody mowing the lawn three houses over, your mother sending you unwanted texts. Reality is what interrupts the literature I think, it’s never been the reverse for myself.

The first lie was probably very small. “I am not cold.” Something like that.

I almost killed myself last week on my 30 minute drive to work, there was the derealization of it all, sitting in a machine scoffing at the disproportion. I had so little authority over my own life and such absolute authority over this machine. My life would not obey me, but the car would. It was obscene. One quick pull of the wheel and I could have found myself dead in a ditch, dead up against the cement overpass, the control of the machine was, in that moment, the only thing that felt tangible, real, to me, I had been expelled from myself, and there seemed no way back in. I still wonder what held me back, was it fear, was it the temporary happiness from an experience I had long forgotten, was it the kindness of my step-mother, was it the impending exam, how humiliating that an examination should appear in this list, was it a variable I had not accounted for? I don’t understand it at all. This job is slowly killing me. The irony is that I continue to arrive 15 minutes early. I need to leave but I’m frightened.

An eternal slumber. Elusive pipe dream.

To be as free as a bicycle cutting through the wind. Immediately I ruin this image by remembering that even the bicycle requires a path. There is no freedom that does not secretly depend upon some constraint. The incurable malady of my days of exhaustion is beginning to surface, once again.

Failure.

The symbiotic relationship between the beautiful lady and the bourgeoisie man.

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