Britney

December 30, 2015
We’re seeing each other in two days and I feel the way I used to about characters who could never be together because they were too much as a unit—susceptible to the lure of their predetermined fate as belonging to one another, and shaking with chilled sweat as I think about the Armageddon brought by their union, whether personal or worldwide. I even have the same tragic wait to see the big reveal…a morbid curiosity about it. Things are in motion the Hanged Man tells me, with his crossed-crossroads legs. Let them ride.

***

Growing up, I was a lucky spider child who got to watch Daddy Longlegs devour meals of bad energy coming toward us with relative ease and praise. And then: he fell. I remain. And as I do, I prepare with no armor for retaliation. (But with him as my ache.)

***

Anne Carson and other women of the order swept me up and away from the drawing and quartering I was close to enduring. I have not yet read even close to all that I can by her, but when she visited me late at night in bed, she left a seed by the beds of my feet and pointed to the mounds of dirt forming my chest. “It’s time,” she said without looking at me. I nodded and drew the blinds.

***

“What part of me interests you the most? The head or the foot? The lungs are a little grey right now, but they’re resting.”

“I don’t know, I think your neck is a bit of a worthwhile prize.”

“Take it, but be wary of how you untie the knots.” ♦

January 5, 2016
I am moving in an awful slow-motion sort of way to “Only Shallow,” a movie for all the L train platform to see and tear apart. The movement, or lack thereof, hurts. Suffering is as alluring as nudity; public tragedy invites similar shameful curiosity and desire evoked by the shock of a bare chest above the highway, a raised skirt on the bridge. In New York, especially among adults who have best adopted metropolitan stoicism, it tends to go unnoticed. A girl slowly walking and trying to dam her reservoir on the yellow strip is almost nothing to people who are forced to pass by the names of every identified 9/11 victim daily in a station on the way to work. My least favorite thing to do is compare tragedies. My least favorite thing to do is to define myself as a tragedy. Let’s start over.

I am miserable as I exit the train to transfer to another, and I know that most people do not know, and I know that even if they did they would say nothing, and I know how this makes me feel. It makes me feel happy in my insignificance. It makes me think about my larger insignificance. And then the contentment drops away.

The Saturday exhibition was pain, because it was a respite that was nothing more, nothing less. Occasionally, I leave the circle in my mind for a few hours and retrieve new information to mull over for eons. My entrance wound: Whitney ticket for 4:30 PM. Two. Exit wound: the open sore on my finger from when the pressure of the incessant writing became too much for the temporary skin. I am my own slip cover…

…and I am my own Christian saint. I have said it before and I will make myself redundant now, sans ignominy: ever since Joan of Arc entered my life during tender age I have thought of little else. My focus has not been solely on her, but on making the most of suffering, of martyrdom, of events to which there seemed to be no other side. I have never and will never consider myself a martyr; I have no interest in romanticizing or aestheticizing its cult either. But every moment of pain, especially following my mother’s death, especially recently, has come with some strain of the thought: What can I do with this? Who can I become from this? Who am I becoming from this? What would I be like without this suffering? The answer to the last is never solid and always serves to terrify. Is that by way of comfort or the inherent knowledge that I would be far different and would not be as content with myself? Perhaps these kinds of questions are better left to private consumption. ♦