every night my dreams are vivid and elaborate, but I do not write them down.

images float back up to me over the following days: a map, a highway, a dusty basement with crowded shelves, the look of a hand on a thigh, an intention. very rarely a sound. my recall is almost always visual—I note this almost academically, I wonder if I can adjust this. I recall the outliers of the dream memory of taste.

my mind drifts. my soul a cobweb in a light breeze.

I move between an unexpected contentment and a foreshadowed terror like a bicycle shifting gears, ever adaptive.

these times, like all times, are very strange.

last night I had dreams that felt like obvious metaphors for quarantine:

I am trapped in an elevator, prying the doors open only to reveal more doors. I slowly and then suddenly realize that this elevator has stalled by design. A murderous architect has me in his web, caught between one floor and the next. I pry open another set of doors.

Behind metal, wood. Behind wood, metal.

And then i am in some kind of pedway, high in the air, like those bridges over highways, incased in mesh. I remember one in phoenix, arizona, that felt like it went on forever.

And in the floor there were more doors.

I break my nails as I pry them open, only to find some new portal to try and bully my way through.

I realize I am in a large cage, like a bird cage, rounded, with mesh sides that include the branches of a fruit tree. It’s tall like an apple tree, but the fruits look like cloudberries, small and orange and from the Finnish woods. And I understand now that I may be here for a very long time, awaiting the murderous architect. He will bide his time to collect whatever prize remains. I wonder how this time will change me.

I look over and there’s another tree, another cage. I can see a youngish man with long hair and a beard. I feel like I should remember the clothes he wore, because I remember thinking something of them. A denim shirt, maybe. It seemed like he somehow got closer, like the cage moved or the tree bent in the wind or maybe my attention just brought the camera in tighter. He started to speak. He spoke in the way you might imagine someone who has not said any words to anyone else in a while does — but the fast one, the one where so many words you haven’t been able to get out tumble through your mouth all at once that no matter what you’re saying you sound like a zealot. And once I understood the words he still sounded like a zealot.

He told me I should be overjoyed to start this new life, because things were so simple. He had fought it at first, he had screamed and cried and tried to escape and had wallowed in his misery and his fear of death. But then more time passed. And then more. So much time. And he ate the fruit of the tree and he drank the rain and he watched the birds and the clouds. He learned the birds and the clouds, how they are so knowable and yet also a complete mystery, and his days felt full. And he knew that one day the architect of all of this would come and kill him, and perhaps before that he would suffer greatly, but until then he took great joy in his days and slept through his nights. I imagine we were somewhere where it is always warm.

Yes, I thought, one must live while one lives, and often must die when one dies. Sure. Yes. Good. But this isn’t going to stop me from trying to get out of here alive.

I so rarely write anymore, and when I do it is in the short bursts of social media, or it is in private, by hand, trying to think through the details of this or that social entanglement or long-term plan or juggling of too many myopic tasks. it used to be that this, the direct address to some little text box online, would be where my interior life truly lived.

I tried again the other night to find an old internet friend from those days, Wesley Oliver from Minneapolis, who even trekked all the way out to my suburban hometown to meet me all those years ago, who I can no longer figure out any way to contact. When I was still figuring out so much of who I was (I still am, I still am), I would talk to him at 3 in the morning, or to Brandon, or to an assortment of forums and comments sections, or I would write long posts about my feelings and about my life. I don’t do quite the same kind of writing anymore; everything in my life, it seems, is rushed. but I find myself feeling the impulse again. maybe it’s because it’s something I do when I’m alone and without obligations, and that is a state I find myself in so rarely these days. but right now i’m sick, and the weather tonight is a horror movie, so I’m stuck inside and sitting on my hands. so I’m typing again.

scrolling through my feed to see what people are doing, I realize I’ve finally hit an age where quite a few of them have children, where there are pictures of different babies right in a row.

(content note: reproductive health)
soon enough I will have gone through, over the course of less than a year, the process of finally, finally getting a diagnosis for the sometimes really debilitating chronic pain I’ve had for years, then trying an intense new drug and physical therapy, and then ultimately deciding to get my uterus surgically removed. assuming I can make it through the administrative snarls before me, I will be getting a hysterectomy on March 19th.

it’s strangely disorienting to mourn the possibility of something you already knew you did not want. it feels like throwing out the key to an old apartment that you knew you were never going to go back to, but somehow you felt like you should have the option, just in case.

I find myself wondering if my mother wanted me. I find myself remembering the last time I held the fantasy of being a mother — I was 19 and very in love with a boy just a couple of years older who seemed very much like an adult to me then. I wanted to have his children, three of them, I had dreams about them. I remember a daughter named Mina who played the violin and liked to keep her hair in a long French braid. Mina has never been born, at least in this world. I never really learned how to do a French braid anyway.

When I first made the decision, tentatively, I had dreams about being pregnant. I think my body wondered what it would be like. It makes me think of being allergic to a food you don’t like, but still sometimes wondering how it tastes. The finality of the thing sets off my commitment phobia’s alarm bells; I’d planned on simply never getting around to having children—a much more passive route to the same end tally. I feel certain. I just also feel afraid. My anxiety-riddled brain is on some level convinced that I will die during a routine operation, or that some nightmareish statistical improbability will come to haunt me in its aftermath, but I know that these fears are that: fear. I have accepted the possibility that this will not help, that the pain that has twisted itself up into the core of me may not subside, it may not even lessen, but there is enough of a chance of improvement that it is worth the attempt.

and I do feel the cost is worth it. but that does not mean it is not worthy of some sadness. I am trying to allow myself to mourn this, without misinterpreting the unpleasant feeling as a sign that I am not taking the right course. I look at my friends’ cute babies on the internet and I feel happy for them, and I feel a bittersweetness. closing a door can mean choosing a path, can be a part of living a more deliberately sculpted life. in order to move forward, one must choose one direction out of many. and so I suppose I am feeling the loss of all the other ways I could have gone.

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that black dot is a house where I used to live, for a little while during a strange and challenging time in my life nearly a decade ago. it was a 1970s time capsule of a house where I lived with an elderly woman whose late husband had served with my grandfather in WWII. the last times I sent a postcard and called the landline, a couple years ago now, there was no response. I wonder if my old bed frame is still in the garage. I wonder if someone else lives there now. I suppose I wonder if the building is still standing, or if someone wanted a bigger house on that same lot just north of Sunset.

the red that it's subsumed within is the mandatory evacuation area for the Getty Fire.

consider this a prayer for rain.

years ago I used to write down nearly all my dreams, and it’s a habit I’d like to return to. here’s an attempt.

I dreamt of driving beside the ocean with a family, in a car with the top down, or in the bed of a pickup truck, or in some kind of motorized cart that could go 70 no problem. The wind blowing through our hair and our view uninterrupted.

The family was not related to me, but I’d gotten attached to them somehow, through marriage or adoption or exchange or apprenticeship. I remember few details but the mother’s hair was thick and straight and very dark and I wondered if she, like my mother, had been dying her hair since the ‘80s.

The road wound around the coastline, and suddenly we saw a humpback whale leap out of the water. I remember thinking to myself with shock, how is there a whale in the lake? For a brief moment I had thought I was home in Chicago, driving along Lake Shore Drive, until my brain processed the fact that there are no humpback whales in Lake Michigan (although after waking I have discovered the strange world of people dedicated to whale watching in the Great Lakes, posting photographs of little bumps in the waves) and that I was in a new place. Maybe it was California, maybe it was Japan, maybe it was nowhere in particular, but I was far from the Midwest.

After the single humpback whale, suddenly the sea was so very alive. Hundreds and then thousands of seals appeared, some seemingly carried to this stretch of shore in the backs of small whales. Our vehicle took flight, became a little plane, and we circled over the water, over the vast congregation of seals headed for the shore. Then we returned to the road and pulled over, and I scrambled down the beach alone, a little way past where everything was happening. I moved along the shore until I reached a rock formation like a doorway, and through it I could see the stretch of beach. I stood there watching seals pour towards the shore, carried by humpbacks or by their own smooth and graceful swimming. People were starting to gather on the beach, astounded. And then, as the seals began to reach land, suddenly there were men in monk’s robes, standing between the small crowd on the beach and the animals emerging from the sea. They walked just within the water, it lapping on their ankles, and they began to usher everyone away. And then appeared figures that I think were human, but wearing long black robes and tall masks that covered their faces and bodies completely, and made them look seven feet tall, with long white lines drawn down the black material. I suddenly felt very afraid, like I was trespassing, like I was witnessing a secret that could not be witnessed without consequence, and so I turned and ran back to the road.

thinking about compulsions
about how insects remind me of my childhood
one cockroach in my kitchen and i’m ten years old, sleeping on the bedroom floor
because there are spiders on the ceiling above the top bunk and the bottom has no mattress
ants in my bathroom and i’m crying in my mother’s kitchen because there are ants in the cereal I’ve been eating
pill bugs on the patio, in the basement

when I couldn’t sleep as a child, which was always, I saw bugs when I closed my eyes
someone tried to tell me to imagine a bird, eating all the bugs so I could sleep, but there were only ever bugs
I stayed awake all night, reading horror novels because they were fears that were fiction, rather than fears that felt real
a sense of control

a house full of chaos, full of dust, the near-asthma of my youth now understood for what it was
the desire to control or be controlled is so obvious as to be embarrassing
but self-awareness has never stopped me from doing anything

when did my compulsive writing get replaced by compulsive consumption of content that i do not allow myself to process

trying to pick apart what of this mess is made of the calcified tactics of a child trying to survive in the context of instability
and what is my capricorn moon

my mother, like myself, is a sagittarius, and so loves to run away from things, full bolt, but her libra moon and taurus rising make it very difficult to really cut anything off

it took those two almost thirty years to give up, and now that it’s been another five or so, there are fewer and fewer of his things in her house.

(remembering watching Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage in their kitchen and my father seeing right through my bullshit, knowing I was doing it on purpose as I watched their marriage falling apart in front of me)

how does a love spend three decades tearing itself apart? how do you clean a house that’s been filling up with dust for thirty years? how do I keep from spending the next thirty using all the same tactics that are not working?

on a completely different note, i am thinking about how visibility and self-awareness (an internal visibility) are not radical, they are the bare fucking minimum, they are not in the grand scale worthy of praise — but they are stepping stones, it is difficult for other things to happen, for the real work to be done, if some glimmer of something being seen by someone does not occur.

the work i’m doing right now feels so far from radical, it feels deeply mundane. but so too does eating food three times a day — something I have been catastrophically failing to do lately, in rather a breach of character. we require both the radical and the mundane to stay alive.

26 March 2019 / 6 April 2019

The absence of a regular writing practice – the kind that isn’t really for any particular purpose, no deadline, no frantic scramble in a particular direction, nothing especially good most of the time, but just allowing the space for language to happen in a way that is both solitary and not – the absence of this feels like all the toxins that should be pushed out and processed through heavy-handed metaphors and unnecessary obscenity are all just collecting, pooling up in the small of my back, in all the places I would like to be touched but am always too tired–

language that picks up the slack for all my insufficient organs, the only way the obscure workings of my fallible body can be parsed through into sense //

my sense of touch is a sense of language //

I like to kiss with both eyes open (so the sense of touch can once again be sorted into a sense of communicated language, even if only the silent and physical variety) //

my depression lives inside my body and language is the puncture wound that allows it to flow out //

perhaps too long I have confused writing for longing, for an epistolary form of unrequited design (I meant to write “desire”, but perhaps the mistake is too telling to ignore, so it stays), and not a biological process that is ultimately about the system of myself // writing as a means of recalibrating, writing as a tool of strengthening, not as a tool of seduction, not as an endless scream that does not require breath of the drowning //

the image over and over of the body breaking its borders // of the velocity of desire // of the mutable form

I have never known the illusory comfort of being just one thing at once, and I wonder what is wrong with me // writing as an act of bridging, of overlay, again of recalibrating (where do your boundaries lie) //

chaos in the blood // the flat refusal of the closed door // the longing, the longing, the way I am forever being reshaped in the image of desire // desire both for the desired, and the desire to flee (the desired, the landscape, myself) //

I spent too many years writing poetry because I was in love with poets. // I thought somehow that if I spoke their language (forgetting that it too was mine) then we could stave off the inevitable moment where all communication breaks down, where we have nothing to say. // to have finally found a lover that does not make me want to write poetry, but to simply to look them in the eyes and always tell the truth. no ciphers. how strange, to be seen. //

now I can return to all this dashing my words against the rocks for everybody else, knowing that I will no longer turn to sea spume with the dawn.

a dream, 11/17/2018

content note: accidental death 

I had a dream about the large extended family of a woman who had died young. On the anniversary of her death, I was watching the family explain what had happened, in the place where it had happened. 

The young woman was nineteen years old, and had just been married. The newlyweds moved into a modest but charming house with a big yard. The yard had quite a few trees, some fruit-bearing, some not, and so they set to work assessing them. The young man decided to chop down a tree to clear the space for a garden, and the young woman had climbed up a very tall fruit tree to check its health and the quality of its fruit. They were a bit like mangoes, but larger and more green. 

As I listened, the young man stood at the stump of the tree, pretending to chop at it with the axe he held in his hands. He explained that he had never cut down a strong old tree before, and it had proved much more difficult than he anticipated. As he kept chopping, he heard a terrible sound. A thud. His new wife had fallen from the tall tree, struck the ground, and died. 

I listened from the branches of the tree, which still stood, and looked toward him, where he stood at the stump where the other tree had been. The whole family was there, grandparents and siblings and honorary cousins, and the young women were in the tree. 

But when it came to the part in the story when she fell to her death, the young women of her family stepped out of the branches with billowing sheets of white fabric, parachutes, gliding softly through the air in graceful arabesques until they touched the dirt. 

Some of their movements were less like gentle falls and more like flight, their hands guiding the fabric in the air in a dance that was brief but slow and meditative, mournful but also with some touch of joy in the action. It was as if by recreating this tragic event in safety they could defang it somehow, defuse its power. 

Watching their skill I realized, this was not the first anniversary of this event. I looked at the young man and I realized he was not the widower – perhaps that was his grandfather, or his great-great-uncle, and it had been decided that this year he would play the part. Each year they told the story of the woman who had died, and each year they would keep her alive, floating softly to the ground on homemade wings. 

La Vérité sortant du puits armée de son martinet pour châtier l'humanité - Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1896. // translated as “Truth coming out of her well to chastise mankind.” more literally “Truth coming out of the well, armed with her martinet, to chasten humanity.” // In English, a martinet is a strict disciplinarian, often in a military context, who demands rigid adherence to the rules. In French, “martinet” usually refers to a short multi-tailed whip that common tool of corporeal punishment in France in the 1800s, one that a mother would use to discipline her sons when they refused to obey her. // this painting was made in the context of both the way new technology (photography) was influencing conceptions of truth, and of a moment of activists and artists aggressively questioning the supposed justice of the government and the military (the Dreyfus affair). // the exhaustion of this much anger is easy to write off as a choice, if you do not experience its causes directly, in a constant stream that cannot be ignored. for every thing that is said, so much is not said.

sidbranca:

(a photo of me in probably May 2001, one of very few photos of me from that year, looking nothing like I usually did and trying really hard to look like someone who might be popular in high school. this was a couple of years before I came out, chopped off my hair into a mohawk and dressed mostly in butch hand-me-downs I’d stenciled things onto, paired with those bondage pants from Hot Topic.)

There are not a lot of photographs of me that predate 9/11 that are not from the ‘90s, not from my actual childhood. On September 11, 2001 I was still a few months away from my fourteenth birthday, an awkward freshman in high school in the small town I’d lived in all my life. Shoreham, New York, is a seventy-three mile drive from where the towers once stood. It’s shorter as the crow flies, of course, or the plane. A town full of people who take the Ronkonkoma line to Penn Station five days a week, shuttling between a beach town where everyone knows everyone and the Center of the Universe. A town where everyone knew someone on that block. 

I never quite know what to say about it, so I keep picking at the memories each year, all full of panic even when it sneaks up on me, even when yes I always remember September 11th but maybe I forgot that today was Tuesday and I wonder why I wake up sweating. Maybe it is a sign of adulthood that this time I knew it was coming and I slept alone for the first night in a long while and maybe I didn’t even have bad dreams. I just woke up thinking about my father, who never became a New Yorker, a thing that I have always been since birth and a title I don’t necessarily deserve, but he took that train, all that back and forth, when I was a tiny little baby who knew nothing. 

I got my first camera in, I believe, 2003. My hard drive suddenly swells to fill all my young attempts to figure out not only how a camera works, but what I look like. This is still how I use cameras; to express, to document, to help me remember, to preserve, to celebrate, but also to sort through the fact that I exist in some physical form. Here I am. This is what I look like. I am a body in space. I often say that I’m a narcissist, but maybe I’m more of a detective. 

There’s this stretch of time from maybe 1998 to 2002 where there is not a lot of documentation of my life – there are some physical photographs somewhere, buried in a box in my mother’s house – and so sometimes it doesn’t feel real. (Earlier than that, age 10 and under, just feels like the vague fog of childhood, an era that certainly happened although I don’t recall much of it in detail, certain moments sticking out and up into clarity like skyscrapers wrapped in mist.) These dissociated years roughly span the experience of middle school, perhaps not a surprise. Junior high is often a deeply trying time for the weird and queer. Hell, it’s a deeply trying time for almost everyone. 

But a strange result of this trick of timing – a moment of real fear on a national scale, with an even more intense impact on my particular location in the country, occurring right when I was launching into my teenhood, mere days into high school – is that life prior to that moment barely feels real. 

The difference between me and those several years younger than me is not that I clearly remember living in a pre-9/11 world, but that I clearly remember the moments in which we pushed through some membrane of time into a post-9/11 world, those minutes when we just hung in it, suspended in total uncertainty. 

The phrase “never forget” always strikes me as so strange. There are things burned so deeply even in my faulty memory that they cannot go. I am sure for anyone who actually stood there, looking out the window, and rushing their colleagues down the stairs and up the block and off the island while the scene plays out again and again behind their eyes forgetting is not something to imply is an option. is the sentiment underneath “always learn”? isn’t it a warning for the future, for the ones who weren’t there? or a command not just to replay our memories, but to have them be understood as a part of everything that came before and also everything that comes after? 

I don’t know. I don’t know anything. This day makes me feel small and afraid. This day is my first memory as a version of myself that doesn’t feel so impossibly distant from who I am now, although so much has changed. 

It’s probably worth saying: this day isn’t about me, obviously, and I feel vaguely guilty even writing about it this way. I think, I should have written something eloquent about the lives lost that day, or the many lives lost later and the awful racism that some people used the suffering of that day to justify, or the incredible resilience of New Yorkers and their unique place in the national identity of this country. I also think, other people have done that better than I could. I think, I wasn’t really there, I don’t get to speak about this. 

But even so many years later, I have an intense and complicated emotional response every time I look at the calendar and see it’s September 11th. Each year I find myself trying to process that, dig through another layer. Thanks for listening to me pick at old wounds.