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.