Britney

It feels funny to come to this diary today with too much to say, because usually I’m fumbling around for words to string together, straining to think of something that happened in a given week that people might actually be interested in reading about. But I’m writing this on Sunday night, and the past three days have been three of the most important days of my life! There are parts of what happened that I still cannot fully comprehend, and other parts I can’t share for several reasons, but let me tell you, it has all been life-changing.

I had my first kiss. It happened quickly in a subway, as do so many milestones when you are a New York City teenager. All that I could think about on the Q train back to Brooklyn was how it felt as though her lips had imprinted themselves on mine. And yet, everything that happened the next day made me temporarily forget all about the kiss. (I’m back to not being able to stop thinking about it, though: replaying it in my mind, trying to remember each small detail that I held on to in the hours immediately afterward.)

Let’s backtrack for a second. On Thursday, my best friend and I saw Mac DeMarco play in Brooklyn. I had never seen him live before. Then we unexpectedly ran into him at a festival two days later and even got to meet him (for a split second). It felt totally random and weirdly significant at the same time. He’s been in my life a lot lately.

Friday night, I went to my very first sleepover. It was Friday the 13th and there was a full moon, so my friends and I decided to play pull out the Ouija board for the first time. (So many firsts!) We talked to more than 20 spirits over the course of the night (and into the wee hours of the morning). At one point we decorated the board with a bunch of Nirvana albums, including In Utero and Nevermind, and the next spirit we contacted said they were a fetus who had died in a miscarriage. Here, from my notes, is what they said to us through the Ouija board:

hello
0-R7-BORN 0
seventh child—miscarriage—1980
mother R.Z.
7 [There was a circle around this number.]

Too much happened after that. There are some spirits who contact us that I can’t talk about. Other ones included an old college classmate of my best friend’s father who had died the day before and a seven-year-old who had died in the Holocaust (they said they “HATE MUESELINI” [sic]). It all felt very eventful, and I was glad I hadn’t done it back in 2012, when I first talked about wanting to try. I wouldn’t have been ready for it then. I am now.

I feel heavy. Thinking about going outside tomorrow feels like a threat to my wellbeing, but so does staying inside. My soul feels very reliant on being anxious and not knowing how to phrase anything and being worried and revisiting old thoughts without learning from them. All I can do is go over past things: the Ouija notes from Friday night, conversations, things I’ve written. I am afraid of not caring enough. I am afraid of being someone who doesn’t care enough, who forgets about other people’s cares and lives. I have seen too much of that kind of callousness in these past few days.

Making this diary entry proceed in a linear fashion was a main goal of mine when I sat down to write it, but now I’m realizing that there’s almost no way to do that on paper. I’ll just accept that. ♦