Kiana

According to the website Brain HQ:

Brain plasticity is a common term used by neuroscientists, referring to the brain’s ability to change at any age—for better or worse. As you would imagine, this flexibility plays an incredibly important role in our brain development (or decline) and in shaping our distinct personalities…Brain plasticity science is the study of a physical process. Gray matter can actually shrink or thicken; neural connections can be forged and refined or weakened and severed. Changes in the physical brain manifest as changes in our abilities.

It’s not too late. It’s not too late for me to spit your name out of my swollen mouth, where once on a lonely school night I practiced saying your name aloud like a prayer, a siren’s call. It’s not too late; I can unhinge myself from the roughness of your hands, the grit of your eyes, the wayward glance that shifts from heartstring to heartstring. It’s not too late to sever the neural connections that link me to you, and you to me, like speeding past a red light and cutting through the traffic to get to a destination—frightening, but it will be worth it. It’s not too late to remember that I need to forget in order to survive; to remember that I need to survive in order to run to places that don’t rhyme with your name; to remember to survive even with the words “Kiana, you’re beautiful just the way you are” still in the recesses of my brain, unchanged even by the makeup of my physical brain. Science can speak up for me.

“Does analogy make emotion less sincere?” asks Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. Will writing about you mercilessly suspend the impending incurable disease? Or will digging through the grave bring me back to the very bones and insects that have come haunting me every night for the past five, six, seven years?

From my journal this week: “Maybe you can’t forget because you keep trying to remember.”

Some Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse, for fuck’s sake:

To reduce his wretchedness, the subject pins his hope on a method of control, which permits him to circumscribe the pleasures afforded by the amorous relation: on the one hand, to keep these pleasures, to take full advantage of them, and on the other hand, to place within a parenthesis of the unthinkable those broad depressive zones which separate such pleasures: “to forget” the loved being outside of the pleasures that being bestows.

The above could be compared to Sylvere (in Kraus’s I Love Dick): “I may be leaving the scene of the crime, but I can’t let it fade out into nothingness.” So, I write.

I’m outside looking up at the supermoon in Taurus and wishing my stars a lovely lifetime, however long they may be. This is by far the most effective belief system I’ve ever held.

Do you remember the last time you looked at the stars and saw them as just stars, just there, not meaning or symbolizing anything? ♦