I feel as though I’ve been pressure cooked for the last four hundred days, maybe less. I don’t know. I have lost accurate sense of time, my brain a badly constructed watch, losing seconds until the seconds become minutes and the minutes become days. What day is it? What month? December. Jesus Christ. They’ve already hung Christmas stars down Manhattan Avenue. Just yesterday it was October fading into November while pumpkins melted on patios, folding into their decomposing flesh, suffocating vanilla-scented candles. Now we sit on the precipice of a new year.
Let it go, I think. Let it all go.
I am sitting in a row of chairs, waiting for my shoes to tie themselves. “I can’t wait to be done with this book,” I say to my walls. “I can’t wait to be fucking done with this book.” I’ve almost finished my first book, this emotional monster of a thing I can’t wait to be rid of. Writing it had been compulsory. Reading it over and over again, changing and adding and living with the same words and sentences had been like watching Jennifer Connelly cry through two hours of The House of Sand and Fog.
I want someone else’s brain.
I had a dream of someone last night. I don’t talk to this person. I don’t want to think of this person. But my dreams do not bend to my waking will. I have a dream that we are just friends and he a drunk, a charmless alcoholic. He stumbles home and pisses outside. In my dream, I grimace. Then, in the illogical logic of dreams, I’m sitting across from him at breakfast. The waitress serves him eggs, runny and disgusting, solid only in the center. He looks up at me with lazy, boozy eyes and the dream ends.
My thoughts are like a velvet-lined box of tangled jewelry, cluttered with family heirlooms and Cracker Jack box junk.
I want that other brain.
I stand in the center of the venue watching the opening act for Kurt Vile, my heavy jacket looped between crossed arms. Hipsters bemoan five-dollar bottles of water while a three-person band plays in front of an LCD screen. The singer has 80’s hair and a face like my best friend from high school. They play with a pensive 90’s minimalism while she sings with a voice like Mazzy Star. This room – the band and the audience – are all kids who grew up under the guise of Nirvana and grunge, now placed firmly at the wheel of pop culture with our cardigans and unwashed hair, reliving a youth we only watched from the periphery, stuck in elementary school while the adults lived out the rest of the century.
Light plays over pocked hardwood floors, bits of purple and green flickering between leather boots and tennis shoes. Kids in plaid hold beers, drinking their future 401ks.
I couldn’t get anyone to come with me to see the show. I don’t mind going to shows alone. In fact, I don’t mind being alone in general, though sometimes I look around my empty apartment, my things staring back at me. The coarsely sewn elephants from a village square in Mexico, the brass bookends I use to keep my bursting closet doors closed, the typewriter and the Post-it notes, everything documenting my loneliness. Lately I’ve been falling asleep listening to my de facto boyfriend Jon Stewart tell jokes in a suit holding a stack of paper while I lay facedown on my mattress until I stop thinking thoughts.
I am alone often…
To my detriment…
To my benefit…
The other night I passed by something beautiful and I wished that I could explain how beautiful it was to someone else, instead of letting the memory live in my brain as solely my own. But it was so beautiful that if I tried to explain it, it would sound like nothing. I would have tried to describe it but soon enough I would have stopped trying because no one would understand. I could tell you how I looked up that night, the second draft of my book in hand. I could tell you how I caught a smeared and imperfect image of the Chrysler building reflected onto a lesser one, lights melting into the flat glass façade of a 90′s building likely housing dentists and people verbal in tax code. I could try and tell you how beautiful it was, but you would never see what I saw anyway.
This fucking brain, I think. This fucking brain and all of its trapped things, pestering me eternally.
Constant company is not something I aspire to any longer. In the company of another, I lose the details. I walk past life as though on a very fast train, speeding through a wintery landscape, everything blurred and white and nondescript. These are the seconds that turn into minutes that turn into days.
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