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01/16/25
I’m smoking in bed. I’ve got a little dish—one of those cream brûlée things—on my chest. Next to me is a shitty guitar connected to crappy pedals connected to my laptop. All of the wires and cables share the mattress with me, and as I fall asleep I’ll push everything to one side and curl up like a dog. Tomorrow I have to wake up and put on two coats. Two coats because it’s cold out and I need the money.
There’s a map of Indiana on the wall. A portion of Bloomington is visible in the upper left. Bloomington’s 11 hours by car, longer by U-Haul. Far enough away to forget about it when I leave my apartment. I’ll take a Brooklyn train to Manhattan and a Manhattan train to Brooklyn. But then come back to my mattress where the pot makes me think of Indiana.
I’ll make music. That’s what you do. You make music. Freeze at work. Turn 23. Make peanut butter sandwiches. Make music.
I’d like to travel, though. I want to sell everything and work my way out to California. I want to sleep in my two coats and write in cheap notebooks. I want to steal from grocery stores.
My mom once told me that all you have is yourself. At the end of the day, when you ease into bed, all you have is yourself. I don’t disagree. I think the more we worry about being alone the worse it feels. But I grew up alone, so what do I know.
Cops shove people into solitary confinement, but some of us would kill for some solitude. Can I get solitude from myself? Am I more alone than anything else? What if Mary passed away, and I left New York as something so deeply alone even a name feels like a dragging weight around my neck?
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9/5/24
The trains tumble out of the dark—bright and steel-backed—shiver and bound off again.
The interior is fitted with rounded windows and doors. A shake and the car lumbers forward, the light of the previous station wanes like a sunset.
It is night in the tunnels,
a night of amber comets.
Fickle stars blink pale,
sapphire lamps watch on,
diligent.
Platforms pass,
other days,
light smearing
the figures
as if in dream.
The teeming night ends with a jostle.
Light floods in, like dawn breaking sleep.
The steel window frames a cemetery of crooked headstones in tender green grass.
So much space.
I consider exiting, finding the gates and walking through the quiet.
But the train closes and carries on.
Small night descends,
the tunnel lost
in dark mimic-distance,
lights dance to wind
and sonorous calls
from the ground.
Day cuts open Bedford-Avenue-morning.
Water churns far below.
I feel the river’s weight in the earth, a heritage carried from unconquered sea.
I do not wish to descend.
I cherish the echoing twists, the radiant strength, like a climbing bird.
With a steel sigh, we enter the ground.
Day recedes at each station
and night—
the night under all—
chases lovely
with precious lights,
clamorous music.
Night and night
and night,
Hours and hours
of night.
Weeks pass underground.
Brief station-days and
echoing tunnel-nights,
one turning over
the other
and again.
Sunlit ghosts,
day-night-evenings,
morning and tomorrow
and the next day after.
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8/20/24
Apples come and go, boxes of pizza only visit. What keeps me alive is peanut butter.
Of course, that’s not it. There are loaves of bread, packets of ramen, the occasional cookie. But these things seem to spend more time absent.
I am occasionally graced with the presence of a bagel. As a midwestern Jew in New York it’s a transcendent experience.
I can’t remember meat, though. These noodles say beef, but it comes in a silver packet and I’m not sure it’s the same thing.
I see chicken advertised up and down streets. I haven’t seen it in person.
To my knowledge, there is little else but peanut butter.
Grocery stores present a menagerie of nonexistent things. There are exhibits of red and pink and bone-white. Little shakers of specks. Walls of interlocking boxes stretching down the room.
I am unsure what these things are, these items that are not peanut butter. I recognize apples, eggs, but lately it all seems strange.
Perhaps soon I’ll fail to recognize the food in my cabinets. Perhaps I should let it happen.
Subsumed into memory, into sensation; past oddities. Antiques.
I’ll remember wanting something, or feeling some way, but the more I think the further and further it will slip until it isn’t and never was.
But for now I recognize the peanut butter in my cabinet. I see bread, eggs, and peanut butter.
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7/26/24
There’s a phrase I’ve picked up: “like hammered shit.” It’s an evergreen simile. Used to denote instances of filthy exhaustion.
“How are you feeling today, Mary?”
“Like hammered shit.”
If I’m hungover, I feel like hammered shit. Missed a night of sleep, hammered shit. Working for comedic pay, unmedicated and without hormones, in one of the most expensive cities in the US?
I feel like scrap pried off a plane mid flight. Something cheap and shitty sent downward into the earth.
I’ve always connected with trash, I guess.
Trash is different here in New York. Ever since I moved I take it out three times a week, plus recycling. It’s mountained up on curbs and corners. Paper and broken glass blanket the street, accented by dog shit and cat piss. There are old TVs, pairs of shoes, filthy shirts. It’s pretty great, actually. People don’t toss a lot around here. They put things out on the sidewalk and they disappear back into circulation. And why not? It still works. Just needs a wash. I’ve taken a couple shirts from the street, a whole typewriter, various books: Game of Thrones, Interview with the Vampire, Canterbury Tales.
Should I think of myself in the same way? Dirty, but useful. Still valuable.
Thanks to forgiving roommates and a skin-of-teeth budget, I’m housed at least. Though I don’t have money for much else.
It’s hard to feel like a woman in all of this. I’ve felt more like some filthy, anonymous mammal. Like a possum or something. Wiry unwashed hair, a tendency to hiss. Feels right.
But things will be okay. To whoever follows these unfortunate adventures, things always find their way back to okay.
After all, I’m not dead yet.
Update: I’m back on medication and hormones. One small hiccup: I just lost my job.
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07/19/24
The children don’t have a bed.
The children sleep on the floor.
The children are gray like concrete. Like sidewalk stamped with tire marks and gum, celebrated with bouquets of white smoke. They lay like interlocking bricks near a box of spring water, far below the humiliating heat.
I think this as I scrape their sky and sweat. I think about the coolness of dirty tile, the unilateral haze of summer. Tidal ache, repetitious and ephemeral, burns in the rhythm of a cat sigh.
Your thinning mother, with her fence-tip spine and picket ribs, is somewhere. Perhaps out in the evening, hidden in the abundant shade.
The store is tended in an agreed silence as to not wake the children. The scrape and whine of the city are suspended with the heat, localized to the tall, and for once something in this city sleeps.
I’ll think about this when I need to. When I forget how to close my eyes. When I forget about the corners in the bodegas in the city.
My feet ache on each step away. The children sleep on the floor. It is hot outside.