True Cold & True Colors

December 1-15 2023 / Nightmares & Morning Pages

12/1: This morning, my blessings are easy. An empty bathroom when I wake up & need it first thing, the Slothrust t-shirt from a friend I’ve been wearing to bed all week, a reason to celebrate last night when I got out of work. I am remembering the whole year on December first: This summer when my roommate was in the bathroom and I went outside pantsless to piss in my yard, a Slothrust concert at Port City - small and crowded and loud - hearing their Pony cover for the first time, this time last year when it was a new friend’s 30th birthday in a red satin suit. Last night was black velvet at Via Vecchia - Lambrusco, ravioli and affogato with pumpkin spice gelato. I know luxury as late night dinners and closing the place down with laughter, how overspending can feel like freedom for a night.

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12/2: My body is here & my mind is far away. In the mornings, my work is pulling it all together on strings, walking incomplete circles around my house. Time is being kept & I am detached to that, too. I’m leaving soon - the coffee is brewing and I am leaving when it’s finished, meeting friends to walk Mackworth first thing. I double my espresso, layer turtleneck under cashmere, go back & forth about rolling a j until it makes me late. Indecisive when I haven’t eaten yet, bagels-to-go. I am annoying even here in a nearly empty home. I guide my hand to write and have to wonder what it’s all for. I tie my shoes and forget to finish bottomless thoughts. This is a wide open Saturday and I suspect I’ll be alone for most of it - like last night, dinner at the computer - but not this morning, at least. I am silver and all-black base layers, cinnamon on my lips and a heart suddenly shy. It’s getting to be that time of year where all my friends are leaving or talking about leaving & shit, I’m late, have to leave.

12/3: Spinning out, Sunday picks up where Saturday left off, sad in small moments, joyful in big ones. I did not spend yesterday alone, after all. M was w/ me until after dinner, hope where there had been a leak. It was warm on the island yesterday, warm for December, warm like March. The four of us met for bagels and I drove us over the bridge. J is back at school, C is leaving for a long trip, M & I dreaming of Paris again or something that feels like it. We talk about buying burner phones and seeing each other for Christmas.

I expected wind all along the shore but felt comfortable, even warm, on our walk, free in the off-season. The trees’ secret bindings exposed, their vines in spirals around each other, trunks w/ a heavy lean, branch on branch, the intimate thing usually hidden by leaves. Naked, now, we see. There were even confused little buds popping up, spots of green in the purple and brown. Red too, the berries that never drop. We walked the circle around, coffees kept in big winter pockets and the sea, so still beyond the trees. Fairy houses started to appear in the middle, something the island is known for. M made one of her own for a seashell found in the dirt: bark for the base and pinecone lean-to, like the one C slept in when we went camping up North. J found an earring at the base of a tree, hammered silver and a turquoise stone, she left it on top of the horse’s gravestone in the animal cemetery - 3 small statues by the big tree. Stones and shells left as tribute. Around the tree and tombstones, a man-made circle of stones. We stretched and climbed, said what our bodies wanted us to say. M took off running a lap, fast & effortless, horse spirit. From there, a swinging bench, trees to climb, rocks & sticks to throw in the water & wait for a splash. Walking around only to walk away at the end, a thing of beauty.

Back at home, M and I settled in. I showed her how the house has been changing. We walked to where my garden was death in its overgrowth, sky so wide w/out the leaves. I took note of my neighbors’ shed that has been half-painted for over a year - how long some things can be left unfinished, unfinished or unhealed. We sat close in the dirt, in the mud, rooted in the sun and radiating. Talking to my friends is like making art together.

It was Saturday w/ the house to ourselves. If the island had been middle school, this was like teenhood. By dinner, we were older still. Sunday turned tomorrow into today, kicking our youth further away, but it turned more smoothly overnight, one berry still free of mold.

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12/4: I’ve got a do-er’s brain today - fresh from a shower and real snow outside, the wet stuff that sticks, like dust over the Earth it falls. Today I will spend time w/ my words and a broom, vinegar, paper towels, cats that shed in their love. Yesterday, I was thinking about punishment and adjusting behavior and what color to paint the room upstairs. M picked me up for a hands-in-pocket night in Portland, a dry hour between the snow and the rain, black by 5. It was Modelitos and tacos, a j and the bill split, then Residency - a film screening at SPACE. Residency was the best film I’ve seen all year.

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12/5: The Workshop I (a podcast)

I told you I would be a different person tonight than I was this morning, this morning, you remember this morning. Well, I was right. My feet planted firmly in the ground. In a circle, the ground hums louder. Someone reached out to shake my hand and I know I am only overgrowth - I am somewhere in New England keeping something warm. I am now what the mud made me and I am a different person still. My hand in yours, brand new. I am making a list of free things.

12/6: I have not been treating this book as a companion lately, left home w/ a torn binding and short entries. Writing by hand has proven a disruption - the ways I must be interdisciplinary, the ways I must be impatient in my physicality - slow slow processes that leak out all I was trying to say when I first sat down. But writing is not merely a dumping ground and I am more than what I’m trying to rid myself of. My bag is full of books again. I hike up boxers under my jeans and touch my belly with softness, save the voice recording from this morning where I talked about the Workshop after Night One (I am still in the experiencing phase of it).

I’ve got cool w/ me today, cool blue Northeastern sky, cool companionship w/ life, messy as it is. But ‘cool’ has gotten me in trouble before. I take my cue, I turn dark w/ the sky. I’ve had Do Not Disturb on all week - my phone sitting still, makes no sound. As well as getting out of work late, T has also been up early. The part of me that chooses to live also chooses to stay awake after shifting sheets and morning goodbye movements - the cats coming and going, a kiss and then out the door, humidifier sounds, body lagging behind.

Tonight, I catch up on what has been silently calling me - friends in a text or an email, newsletters being published, Christmas sales I won’t be taking advantage of. I start to keep a list of things I would do if I lived alone, now that I am a little lonely. I think of my youth - keeping myself curious, keeping myself entertained, my siblings all out of the house before me. I reflect on dorms and apartments, roommates and partners, the ways I modified my behavior to make others more comfortable (I always felt I was inherently a disruption).

I’ve spent tonight using this woven ottoman like a yoga ball, stretching over and around, moving slow. My body wringing out my mind, Mercury needs movement. River naps in his cave but Mallory is here w/ me. I bend in half, legs over chest, over head, ottoman as support, and the cat sits in the warm spot as it presents itself, close enough for me to pet her in this shape. I make a list and start following it: Take dinner on the couch. Play a record to cross from one room to the next. Paint and write and call my friends over coffee. Dance and stretch all over my living room. 

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12/7: This morning, sitting down to write, I tell myself to do one of the oldest things: write in my language & tell the truth. I am thinking of sewing the holes in my clothes and making pasta dough, giving the cats fresh water, reading poetry out loud. These are all ancient things, I like to remind myself, things I have learned because time carried them to me. Ink to paper, ancient too. This reminder is a grounding practice in a future all up in the air. I have been saddened & dissatisfied w/ this future, only as tangible as thumb to glass & the electricity somehow in between - the way I’ve gotten used to starting my days since teenhood, inviting the world into bed w/ me before I am awake enough to acknowledge the me, the bed, the ambient morning of a new day. I have time this morning to give writing a chance at truth, sometimes it take a long while to get there.

I watched a video: female musician in Uruguay covering The Doors’ The End. I watched a video: The smallest freestanding building in New York & the freest man, the locksmith who has owned & operated there since 1980, Greenwich, NY. I watched a video: a painted black & white horse learning to run & the importance of play, of little dancing trots between runs, to keep it light & to keep it fun. I send another Ceasefire email & donate to a Portlander’s top surgery after meeting once at a poetry reading & I research more about the pollution of polyester. This has taken all morning. My work is still chewing on this while I quiet the critics that live between hand and eyes.

This ancient thing, to write and to tell the truth. Today is Tom Wait’s birthday so I look to him for this. Tomorrow is Jim’s. Two ancient poets, how the past instructs the future, examples of truth at its most honest & confusing. Bless it all, bless it all. Tom said, “there’s no prayer like desire.” Jim said, “the most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are.” These are arrows pointed at each other, a circle forms around me, I close my eyes to it to see if I can write it the way I feel it - sensitive to this kind of energy w/ too much of my life pretending I’m not. This ancient ink to page, a prayer from the desire to be alive, alive here, exactly as I am, exactly as I am meant to be, a prayer only to encourage those around me to be exactly as they are, as they are meant to be (destiny is chosen, it is not predetermined). I free me only to free you. I am still fearful of this prayer but I trust, I trust in the giving power of honesty. Today is Thursday, of course. My shame is so small in a world so incredibly old.

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12/8: American morning, holy in its slow climb. The sun reaches her peak at noon & weeps, weeps herself to sleep. The awesome beauty of day, worth our grateful tears, and the scars bloody on the land, worth our attention, both worth all the time they take. I have become old as time in the worship of the sun, cruelty & bliss here on the ground. All idols false under our star on fire - we begin & end in her arms. My god, I am seeing the world as it has been made for me & I weep for where we have been, led into conformity and control, how this world will all be a desert one day and the people, maenads of the sun. My generation demands air easy to breathe, the right to food, the right to shelter, all people living free - we will define freedom a new way, honest this time. Free like flame flickering, all born knowing how to love before anything else.

Art does not die when the artists are bombed, stories no longer have to die w/ the families that carried them - generations digitizing the trails of blood that came before. Nothing lost, nothing wasted. Divine archive, building building, both our freedom and our undoing. In my dreams I see desert, latex, the metal guts of computers and soundboards - an echo here, bouncing off the walls of the sky. And when I wake, the snow reflects the sky, blinding all but our Right Now, December 8th, at the mercy of time & words once more.

Over the summer, I wrote “when I choose words, I have no choice,” at the mercy of language and Spirit, of the arrow that travels w/ my rambunctious will to live, ink unstoppable, ink that bleeds, ink that takes up no space at all. I put on An American Prayer & dedicate my words to stolen lands and lost artists. When I feel like a lie of myself, I find Jim again. We split a j in the afternoon & exclaim w/ the sun in her ecstasy. We know no thrill comes cheap & no one is simply handed their freedom. We craft laments for what we could be w/out our bodies, for what our bodies could be w/out us. Our jokes, dark, but we don’t know better or don’t care. “Thoughts in time and out of season.” I am remembering your quiet headstone, Jim, remembering the body as a dead thing. Posthumous honor is what we can offer, out here in Future (Your spirit infused on the land, a spiral that came up to me, up from the Earth where my heart was held & shaped w/ soil, w/ blood of outcast, gods w/ an electric charge).

Lightning found me on a bright December morning. I wrapped my arms around the fragrant neck of life anew & laughed w/ my first breath. I believe I am nearly 29, a week from today. I believe the world is what it is because of how it has always been. I believe it will change for the same reasons, w/ rubble, rubble & angels, angels & art, art & eternity, New World waiting on the wings of words and fire.

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12/9: The sky today insists on shades of gray so lights left on in the house are glowing in the daylight hours. Today, Eileen Myles is 74, asking for a ceasefire for their birthday - our minds aligned. This morning I still have paint on my hands, on my socks, from painting the spare room all yesterday. ‘Greek Villa’ on 3 walls and ‘Cavern Clay’ on the wall w/ the windows. I think I like it but it was dark and wet when I saw it last.

Today promises movement. For this grateful, grateful. I am thinking of cave drawings & rubble this morning. I read that Israeli forces destroyed more of Gaza, a building holding their oldest historical archives - documents from over 100 years ago, wiped from the Earth. The Internet showed me photos. The Internet gave us proof that only blood could give us before, stories between generations. I think of the library of Alexandria, know it’s mostly myth by now. No one knowing which library was lost, blaming Caesar or Aurelian or whoever else, only the symbolic loss of knowledge & history, the great and terrible loss, a loss that has happened many times since - for genocide is not only theft of future, but theft of past - the entire breadth of a people. The Internet is a new observer, clouded in propaganda to be sure, but an archive nonetheless.

As the gray stays stoic in the sky, here in the Northeast corner of a country of abused control, I sit and write through stillness and fear, holding tight to hope, tighter to hope than ever before. It is unbelievably quiet here. For that alone, I am brought to tears of relief (no drones buzzing, no bombs falling, no one screaming). This home of mine - friends, family, fresh water, the right of privacy, bless it all, bless it all. What do I do w/ that except hold on and say “thank you,” feel the warmth of it all while it is still all right here. Nothing is forever. I think of the Earth w/ possibility still, and people thinking w/ care for other people. Abolish it all to make way for compassion.

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12/10: How do I remove “just” and “kind of” and “sort of” from my vocabulary?

12:11: A day w/out my pages and I am a stranger, a false friend, resting heavy on the surface of my own life. OK. Let the frustration linger, transmute it elsewhere, somewhere else, somehow somehow. I believe I am nearly 29. I believe I can make a home wherever I go. Today there is a call for a general strike to support a free Palestine. And tomorrow, tomorrow, will fruit bloom or bombs hit?

It is my father’s birthday today. It is Lazlo’s birthday today, 25 eternally. I notice I have landmines under my mourning, all these restrictions. Time is sad & tight today, like the muscles in my back and the pressure in my bank account. I trace the spiral on my wrist to remind myself that all time twists around itself, that feelings follow, building futures, even if it’s all sad & tight right now, like my overdry pasta, cracking to bits on the tray. I learn yesterday was Clarice Lispector’s birthday, and Emily Dickinson’s birthday. W/ each artist, age. W/ each hero, death. And all the world that spirals w/ their fossils, greater w/ greater w/out.

I went outside just now to sit w/ my self-annoyance, the overwhelm of it. I pick at myself voraciously, like peeling windowsill on an early night. I think of my friends, my heroes, I think everyone must have some depth of annoyance w/ themselves, filling and emptying, filling and emptying. Mine has been chasmic this month. There are a lot of names I want to call myself lately and they ain’t cute. I will not write them down in case they get louder. I believe I am nearly 29. I believe this lesson I have learned. Our worst ideas do not need to be repeated in order to beat them. Words are powerful, we know this.

In all honesty, this week could be a lot of fun and w/ that comes pressure. Like life needs proof of itself or something. What does it mean if I find celebration easy? What does it mean if I don’t? I believe age is an achievement, one that takes more and more effort, an effort that should be made willingly. I believe life will always be worth celebrating. I believe I will take naked photos of myself at every age. If my truth is annoying, at least I am clear w/ it. So when I beg for freedom, I remember it is freedom from myself I am asking for and not from my mirrors. And when I build a home, it must fit all of me.

Here, at the base of my annoyance, is where my ship sets sail, the urge to run, to find home wherever I can - not to keep my self-annoyance at a distance, but to hold it closer and not be so precious about it. Confidence, comfortability, these things I carry are my responsibility. I try to give it all away but before I do, it needs to be crafted, to be honed and made valuable, so that it is solid when I give it to you, not liquid, not mercury (though it is mercurial - everything we are is. I once wrote about my body: “the nervous thing, the mercurial thing, wild in blood, some kind of electricity. Form unchosen, it’s the earthbound thing.” And I meant it).

Words are my way to worm into my self-annoyance and free something, create something. All my desires are annoying, desired anyway. December, birth and death in the same breath, closer than they ever are, you have given truth a home. It is disorganized and in transition, either too many lights on or none at all.

12/12: It is almost 4 PM by the time I sit w/ my pages today & I’m at the house I clean on Orland St. - arched windows, stucco, a cat named Tux who is not sure of me. I watched the sun inch from the tops of trees over to the side, like a lover tossing in sleep. I am thinking already of returning to bed, have been thinking about it since I got up. Desire has me ashamed today. The owners of this house have painted the walls an ivory but I liked it better before, when it was a warm orange, like that pint of Cavern Clay that I have at home. I texted my dad for his birthday yesterday and showed him my paint job. He said the color was the same color he painted his first apartment, warm and ancient, like pots for plants.

I want to tell you I’ve been fragile this week. T and I have been a mess w/ our time and bodies, both overworked & needing to work & working w/ each other for each other. I made a batch of pasta w/ only semolina and water because I read that the egg makes it difficult to dry. A majority of the pasta cracked as it dried, but I was able to save a small fraction. I think I watched 2 or 3 YouTube videos that gave me enough hope to decide to make 20 batches as Christmas gifts. T has looked up hours of research on how to dry pasta successfully and has found that it is nearly impossible w/out dropping thousands of dollars on a pasta dryer. I’m thinking of how the pasta cracked between my fingers w/ a crunch, how it felt like failure. We’re experimenting and it’s both working and not working. 

12/13: Woke up w/ the phrase you can’t grow out of the whole of your life - can’t or shouldn’t or don’t or don’t need to. See me scratching, see me all red. I woke up 2 or 3 times and held this phrase in my head, emotions have yet to crowd around it. This j is mostly paper and this day is mostly OK. It says 14:44 on the clock. I am parked and stripping down to my guts. A Wednesday I feel strong in, therapy in 20.

I wonder if I can interrupt myself and say what I mean. Speech, not my enemy but a type of adversary. This body, a type of friend. The car parked in front of me says ‘GRACIAS’ - si, gracias, gracias, the word alone clears my thoughts.

The other day, in & out of the shower, I tried to speak on what I found in the warm & wet, something like what I’ve been trying to say all month but finally full circle. I tripped when I pressed ‘record,’ over & over. Looking at the transcript makes me squirm but it’s important, isn’t it? To know what comes out of us, and how. Sometimes I burst & sometimes I ooze, first one and then the other. I notice when I am running thin or thick, when I am heavy, and I notice instinctually, like knowing when to add more flour or more water. I am on my third batch of pasta, trying something new again.

I am beyond the point of pretending not to know myself. I am approaching responsibility w/ my fingers out to sniff. I had been so fearful of it in youth that I shut myself off to my own size, my own speech patterns, my own self (true in here, somewhere). It was a mistake made in fear and anything done in fear bites back. Maybe the answer is to slow down or maybe it’s to speed up. Annoying balance, the answer always. I hear, make eye contact w/ the world and sit still when the world makes eye contact w/ you.

12/14: The sun has finally moved into the living room so I suppose it’s time to sit & write. It’s Mallory’s birthday today. My familiar is 12 years old and no, I will not be thinking about her thyroid this morning. Instead, I will think of her favorite spots to sleep: nestled close into my right side, under the Christmas tree on the felt tree skirt, always in the sun. I don’t think I shared how on Monday, manic, I moved the tree to the opposite corner it was in originally, it’s between the couches now and the room feels better, bigger. My third batch of pasta may or may not be drying in the fridge. It’s none of my business, really. T left this morning to go skiing and I don’t work until the afternoon so I’m stretching, time and body at once. I’m proud that he is taking a day off from work for fun. I talked about pride in therapy for most of yesterday, kind of funny I used the word just now. I can feel pride clearly for others but restrict it within myself for myself. No work I do feels like work. No pride of self feels worthy. When I learned of sin in youth, it seems, I rejected all but pride. Pride requires ownership & acknowledgement of self, it needs to be supported, bolstered, at the very least, inspired. Pride as a kind of result, acknowledgement, but I said that already. It’s early.

I think of the ways I carry emotions for those I love - pride, worry, hope, for example - emotions that those I love may be uncomfortable carrying for themselves by themselves. The same emotions I am uncomfortable carrying for myself, uncomfortable or unable, even on a small scale. Pride, worry, hope - I believe are meant to be collectively shared, collectively held and precious. Pride, worry, hope - not fragile but shapes odd and w/ little to grab onto, difficult to find a confident grip.

I am thinking, now, of last weekend when M & T & T’s mom were all here, shoving cumbersome mattress and box spring up narrow staircase. Our collective effort made it possible, easy even. If I can’t acknowledge what I can’t carry on my own enough to ask for help picking it up, then I am left to try and lug the mattress up myself. These stairs are dangerous, I have hurt myself here before, this metaphor is going on for too long. I believe I am nearly 29. I believe this cycle of self-denial and isolation under the guise of “independence” has stretched on too long. I believe it has kept pride & worry & hope, all of it, hard to pick up, hard to imagine.

This morning, I sit in the sun and mindlessly pick at split ends thinking, god, this could get neurotic. I stop once the sun shifts to a different window further down and I find something better to do. My hair has grown a lot this year, all over. I have grown a lot this year, all over. My desire to hide has grown in tandem w/ my desire to be seen, witnessed as all alive things are witnessed. Pride & worry & hope grow and die and grow in me like buds & leaves & berries on branches, sprouting and dying w/ the weather, a network of life around me doing the same, together, together.

12/15: Dog-Ear, free to read for now

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