Category: prose

may/june 2022.

clairevoyantsLeave a comment

may 15 — watched the lunar eclipse tonight. the moon looked bruised and bloody, hurt by the dark. i felt like that last, slivering flare, clinging in the face of consumption. a remnant, singing brand of light, white and gleaming like a new tooth in a whole sky of darkness.

may 26 — hair is shorn off. a nation of fury and spitting venom and grief, unimaginable grief. too heavy. some days it’s hard to imagine goodness in the world at all, that last, faint, trembling ember in the coal pit.

off to colorado tomorrow. back to my selfish reprieve deep in the mountains, hemmed in by reminders of a world left untouched. a hypothetical earth where there’s only beauty and silence.

june 4 — my loneliness is a comfort, in many ways. it’s the only constant i’ve come home to; that resigned return to the circle of my own arms. something new, please. a sharp thorn or a fresh breeze or even a new kind of hurt. love shouldn’t feel sisyphean, should it? what would i know of it, anyway?

june 14 — a truant summer has bedded down into a muggy, relentless heat. a white haze hangs over the city like wildfire smoke, slinking between the buildings and the cracks of windows. as thick as a drowning. i feel like i’m relearning lessons and relearning them, again and again and again. stale revelations about love and loss, exhumed and buried and exhumed. waiting for something to stick like a housefly in honey. waiting for stillness and assurance and — mm, i don’t know, conviction, maybe.

i’m waiting for something i have no name for. i imagine it making eyes from me across the bar. striking me like a crack of lightning or a heart attack. i’m waiting for something that has perhaps already happened to me, to an old version of me. sometimes i feel like i know less than i once did, like i’m unearthing capsules i already plundered and buried. maybe i am indeed moving in reverse.

i still come to the well of the world and drink from it. i’m still searching for something in the depths of it, in the dark-bellied depths of it.

nothing more to say. the heat feels damned, a thin layer of hell. too hot to think. i’m always imagining myself through funhouse mirrors. unable to render any other image. maybe if i keep absorbing the beauty of the world around me — if i look for it, seek the grail and find it — i’ll reflect that too.

october / november 2019.

clairevoyantsLeave a comment

snatches of journal entries from october and november

4 oct. — it’s fall. need to write a full, detailed entry, but so tired tonight. the moon is sharp as a crystal, edges so whetted they could slip between my teeth. i saw the last of summer thunderstorms this week, seething white downpours giving way to fleeting rainbow arcs. the air is cooling, woven with smoke and damp.

i’ve been journaling a lot in my head. i feel very keen and awake, like i was sleepwalking before. i feel like i was always unconsciously living toward some imaginary end, dreading the long span of the rest of my question mark-shaped life, but i don’t feel that way currently. it’s been an odd shift in vision. turns out i might be onto something with this cocktail of intermittent therapy and 10mg of inconsistently taken lexapro. or maybe it’s something more spiritual and existential relating to the gradual formation of my fullest self. but probably not.

this week i was writing love letters to the rhythms of kansas city, trying to embrace being where i am. trying not to over-romanticize moving on to the next action. shedding some emotional deadweight as i leave apathetic friends in my rearview. trying not to give into the cloy of nostalgia that draws me, always, back in.

31 oct. — it’s halloween. the night stinging and singing. crisp like teeth into a cold apple.

i still have so many corners of the earth to upturn. i wish i could describe the natural beauty of asheville; i found myself thinking about how time waters down our memory, that all we retain is our impression of how somewhere can make us feel. i remember being perturbed by this notion even as a child. it would keep me up at night, possibly because i was skittishly skirting the edges of some larger existential realization.

the smokies, with their ridged spines like slumbering beasts, furred with amber and copper and pine, hazed with blue off to the horizon.

i’m sort of drunk, so i’m tired, but i’ve been wanting to journal for several days now. i’m not quite sure where i am right now, here at the last gasp of october. i’ve been tentatively easing into myself, accelerating in my self-certainty. i spent so long choked with self-hatred and habitual misery, self-flagellating because i didn’t know anything different. i feel like there’s finally some warm light beaming out of me, self-compassion for all my old weathered selves. sympathy for everyone i’ve been. maybe that light’s been there all along.

29 nov. — at the same time, i find myself brittle with a lack of conviction. self-sabotaging out of boredom, apathy, laziness. i’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. not in a morbid sense, really—just more of a heightened, peripheral awareness. the inherent nature of an impending winter, i guess.

this year has been so weird. i’m almost 26, still so uncertain. knowing myself, later on i’ll ache with nostalgia for my twenties, but i can’t say i’ll miss this debilitating sensation of being caught between two, possibly three, possibly infinite states of being.

september.

clairevoyantsLeave a comment

a love for life bubbling on the tip of my tongue like soda water, counterbalanced by tear-inducing apathy. evening air a thin, sticky film on my skin. night air like waxpaper.

(late summer’s fraying, those cicada cadences decaying and soothsaying.)

skeins of jazz music floating up to my apartment on saccharine and solitary weekend nights. and my palm curving around a tangerine sunset through a car window.

plaintively singing mitski in the parking garage, a voice drifting up lonesome and aerial, like a bat in the rafters of an empty church.

—

digging my thumbnail into old wounds until they exhaustedly, sluggishly bleed again. writing love letters to a summer that ended five years ago—craving dead summers even in the panting, muggy, sick heat.

performing burial rites for old relationships and then exhuming those empty carcasses again and again. a lone, desperate figure working night-shifts in some proverbial graveyard.

—

i don’t write about love—i shy away and recoil like some wounded creature, i circle around it, i leave it gaping, leave it a hollow cavern. not sure if my mouth can form the right shapes to articulate it, to whisper it into a still and night-drenched bedroom. to utter it low like an oath. to swallow it on a jagged sob. to swear to it on a sword’s edge and the promise of blood. to recant it, revoke it, spurn it, scorn it. to carefully negotiate it, like a blade to an artery. to level buildings with it, to echo ancient tragedies of it, to pledge scatterings of stars for it. to gasp it, then sigh, then say nothing at all.

to sing it, joyful and aloft, a hummingbird. to hold it clasped inside me, incandescent, a firefly light pulsing in a jar.

journal entry: january 17, 2018

clairevoyantsLeave a comment

It’s been an odd day. An odd week. I’m back in Omaha now. It’s fucking freezing here, a blood-thinning cold that creeps in through sealed windows and the loose cracks in doors.

The drive back yesterday was beautiful in the barren way only a Midwest winter can be. Clusters of dark soil finely dusted in white. Textured like a white-flecked cable-knit sweater. Snow-touched ridged hills like sleeping bison; snow itself purpling in the dying light, a blue-tipped haze fogging over the spindling trees. So cold and windless that the factory smoke hung motionless in the cloudless sky. Braided in helix shapes and trailing for miles. The odd sensation that the world was asleep, curling up and away from the accosting chill.

Had my first class of the semester tonight. It wasn’t bad. Grad school makes me feel immensely belittled.