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.
microcosmic 