1/1: ✺ 2024 ✺
Love is like water in that it has no taste. In the sense that it permeates and we are porous. In the sense that it changes shapes and stages all the time. Love, like water, fits anywhere it is let in but it has to be let in. In that it spills, in that we die w/out it.
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THIS YEAR I LOOKED HOT AND SPENT TOO MUCH MONEY. I SAW MY FRIENDS A BUNCH BUT NOT ENOUGH. ATE A LOT OF TACOS, READ A LOT OF POETRY, LET MYSELF DOWN, LET OTHERS DOWN, FORGAVE AND FORGAVE AND FORGAVE. WE DO THE BEST WE CAN UNTIL WE KNOW BETTER. HERE’S TO SWEATING AND FORGIVING IN 2024. SWEATING AND FORGIVING AND CELEBRATING BETTER. HERE’S TO LOVING LIFE REGARDLESS.
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The last photo of the year, and I forgot I had taken it at all - red orange bathroom wall, a lightswitch w/ Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Your fingers graze Adam’s, reaching for God, flicking the light on and off again. 01:52 on January first. J and I in the bathroom of a bar called The End - the macabre hipster biker bar next to Mary’s where we dance, dance, dance.
J and I wore white, white layers and silver, playing rummy at the bar, tying on the last game w/ 55 each. We both got something w/ tequila and a cherry. We spent some time talking w/ the owner about a painting that was hung up, here in the corner to the left of the entrance, the cold just outside. The painting was a psychedelic greenhouse of the city, tents cropped up among the pots and grow lights. It was created by a friend of the owner who is “like, seriously famous now” but I didn’t catch the name. The piece felt big and precious in the corner, oil paint meets drunk hands and elbows. We listened to locals made of mouths, who just wanted someone to talk to at the end.
I showed my passport to the bartender, laughing all the way - expired on my birthday and haven’t made it to the DMV. How every year it’s something like that. The morning it became 2020, I left my wallet at the crowded bar. The year after it was stolen. ID lost again a year or so later, my passport as backup. And then Paris, when it was only passport. So much time spent over the years reminded of identity, of needing proof of life, and this strange intimacy w/ my passport in my home country. I remember I am stranger after all, that there are layers to this, that ultimately we get to choose who we are.
The End. I didn’t linger on the poetry of it last night, but I will spend some time w/ it today. Spending the end at The End. This last year felt like getting reacquainted w/ endings, only now feeling empowered to move through them. Glory, glory, it’s all Folk and Blues from here on out. It’s always rhythm that keeps us going. There was more to last night, more to the year now lost, all of it daunting to make sense of. The world spirals on. What can we say from the middle point? What words does Chaos choose? Verbs in motion, hope hope hope, we’ll look back and laugh.
Lovely to realize we celebrated the end at, The End. ⌛️