“Of all the ways of forgetting
not turning the pilot on is not
the worst” –from Eileen Myles, “Choke”

i went to bed in a huff last night, and woke up to the sound of the cat pretending to be in the early stages of starvation. Slightly annoyed, i rolled out of bed and pulled on an aging, over-sized, Royal Trux t-shirt. Soft and full of holes, it is a prize. Way too cool to be wasting away in occasional rotation as an afterthought nightshirt, but it is too wide and fits like how band shirts used to fit before American Apparel made the whole enterprise a little more gender appropriate. i think about the instructions i used to have, probably from Bust magazine, for how to cut down an over-sized t-shirt to make it fit you instead of, presumably, the guy you permanently borrowed it from. Something about cutting off the sleeves and the sides and taking it in to fit your ribcage. Sew up the edges with some kind of obvious stitching that really ‘makes it yours’. Probably. Not in the cards.

Groggy from too much wine and not enough sleep, i plugged my phone into the speaker jack in the kitchen and started fumbling through coffee. i was dreaming about my ex again and there’s a song in my head. After a few tries i remember that the Make-Up is incorrectly listed as just “Make Up” on Spotify, maddening, and scroll through until i find “Center of the Earth.” Play. There we go, “You. Kicked. Me. Into my grave. You kicked me into my grave. You. Kicked. Dirt. All over me. You kicked dirt all over me.” Trademark Svenonious scream, and bam, the dream comes flooding back. The events are frozen. Frustrating. i can’t stay and i want to stay. The long lawns are brown. The sky is low and grey. i’m in a loop of hoping i’ll never get home– that i’ll sit forever hunched over on this Greyhound Bus reading Catcher in the Rye down the backroads of Georgia. Oh, right. My subconscious is…reminding me that i’ve…done this before. “Baby it hurt. Baby it hurt. I was dying. And i was lying. In the dirt.” So the dream is…less about…that memory than it is about where i am now. And how surprisingly familiar it feels. Geography is the easy target, but some other habit is probably to blame. Right, yes, i can read.

i am also reading Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! Very slowly. i am nervous of it ending. i read this paragraph yesterday on the train:

“We smoothed the scrolled things: illegible mechanical diagrams, the map and the veil. The wavy mosquito netting was made of an amazingly old and weird material that couldn’t be straightened; I tied it over my face like a surgeon and it kept crimping at my nose. I sneezed into its tiny squares. Haunted, a frantic voice in me said, haunted, but my hands disagreed with this hysterical lady: everything I touched here confirmed itself as solidly cloth or wood or rope.”

And i read on Artslant about an artist, Iris Haussler, for whom,

“Wax is a recurring material….These formerly soft and delicate fabrics are here captured in wax, held suspended in time and form, but also rendered useless, functionless. The impulse to preserve, and simultaneously to render useless, manifests itself in the creations of her various characters…”

And i think about my dream, and i think about resting my hand on your thigh as we drove away from your apartment. Eucalyptus staining my sense of the possible. i thought it was resting, but i looked down and i was holding you so tightly it might have hurt anyone else. You were real, you had confirmed yourself. Solidly. But i was about to be gone again. The airport in its obnoxious sunny patch loomed. My lips were probably still, as you called them when i was curled, finally, on your bed, “rabbity.” And you know that my hands disagree, but sometimes, it is so hard not to listen to the hysterical lady’s frantic voice.