❝ it’s hard enough to live, she sometimes feels, without also having to think about it. […] she had wondered, before now, whether thinking about god is part of this. wondered whether endlessly circling the same topics, harping hopelessly and uncertain on god and on silence and deep, drowning lack have simply functioned as ways to keep her unhappy, keep her tight in the grip of an answer she can’t help but seek. perhaps, after all, god is simply a poached egg and a yolk cooked just as it should be. perhaps god is being fisted by the person you love most in the world, being taken apart one finger at a time until the whole of you is fucked out and pulled like a cord strung tight, white-eyed and waiting for crescendo. perhaps god is all of that and kissing afterwards, […] perhaps god is all of that and an apology. ❞ — julia armfield, private rites.
my mother is cooking a steak for my father’s birthday, and i can smell it through the slats of steam escaping my skin-scalding shower.
black pepper, thyme, cloves, norwegian salt, olive oil—all slick against the flesh. raw meat turning from red to pink to some in between that courts both pink and brown. too much heat and then it’s black. the scent is seductive; i love when i encounter characteristics that remind me that i love to eat, that i am a girl with an appetite as large as venus, and that i love meals as beautiful as i can possibly have them.
i am thinking again about the little things i love, all my tiny cures for sadness. one is unexplainable, this flush of heat i get when i see women wet and dark from water. i’m unsure of why i love it so much, only that i do. but as a friend recently told me: you don’t know why you feel it, but it doesn’t change that you do.
it has nothing to do with the see-through nature of their clothes or the cling of their swimsuits against the warmth of their bodies. but i think it has everything to do with the intimacy i associate with seeing someone come from the water because usually you’re barefaced and simple because you are swimming, and that is all that you owe the world. it makes me feel as if we are engaging with one another, in a level of intimacy at the center of the earth, undiscovered by dating coaches and reactive essay writing.
london is approaching in less than a month, and it feels as it always does, a ticket to another life. in london i feel settled in the sense that the city can be hard, but so can i. but there is a glimmer in the corner, in the long walk i do in the dark from the yellow-orange flame of a restaurant to the grey screech of the tube station. my bags are either too large or too small. i get worried about my card not working, though it always taps through. i see an older woman with long hair covered in enough jewelry that i have a momentary fantasy of stealing a ring off of her to keep.
i am a body of scent: first—coconut milk, bergamot, tyger lily, jasmine, freesia, mango, benzoin. i smell like a dream here; i rediscovered the perfume i bought myself as a gift, and within three sprays, i was drunk on my own skin, rolling around the covers like a mantis sated after eating her mate. second—cherry, almond, cinnamon, plum, cloves, jasmine, rose, tonka bean, vanilla, peru basalm. this is nighttime, this is me tucking myself away to feign sleep so i can drift off into fantasy. i love the blackout curtains in my room—my sister’s room, really—the way the entire space drifts under a beach of black, and with the pressure of my sleep mask and the pressure of the cold required for me to sleep i am whole and in my body in a way that doesn’t demand me to find a way to climb out.
third—coconut, vanilla, woody notes, sandalwood, musk, salt, seaweed. my favorite cheap ocean. my dad gave me a new bottle just last evening, still in the box but no plastic wrap, and unopened. i just purchased a new one, plastic wrapped, but i placed it in hiding behind a frame of my first communion and set my father’s on display, so that i can use it first when i run out of my current supply.
i am sitting in a dog bed writing this, which is really two dog beds high, because this is the only place in the office that i’m in where a plug is. i’ve swallowed down two books in the past week, one a gatsby rethreading, another a hot appalachian fever dream. my back is aching from the way i sit in this pet bed.
i often have a dream of leaning over a dinner table, someone’s long hand running their nails and palm down my spine, alternating, alternating. someone else has a hand kneading at the nape of my neck, fingers flirting with the dark baby hairs that curl tightly, refusing to be sweet before they slide back down to the knotted oak of my shoulders. i know without looking that they are both women.
in this dream, my hair is wet and dark against my shoulders, dragging salt and transparent streaks of squid jelly across my bones. someone else at this table is eating oysters, and i close my eyes against the noise. i wear a wrap top that threatens to suffocate me, in a deep teal that matches the maxi skirt on the bottom with a thick knot at the side. the skirt is patterned with a large sweeping illustration of a bird, feathers tucked down until it falls off the hem. the feathers are reminiscent of a peacock, but off as if someone tried to draw three birds in one, and the peacock was the most prominent memory. someone says, what i would give for her closet; i’d rob her blind. the hand at my back rubs me asleep.
i love this dream, i want this to be my future. and i think it will be. earlier today i listened to a girl with a heart-shaped face explain the quantum physics theory of “nothing is real until observed,” which means that your reality is not necessarily reality until looked at, and even then, you’re seeing something like .000001 of the fraction of what it could be. essentially, once you look, you only see a slice of the possible system. even after collapse, we’re only perceiving a tiny sliver of what reality could be.
reality is not objective until interaction. the universe is potential asleep rather than substance until we “check in” on it. or do something to change it. this is comforting, and i cannot explain why.
i never quite look at what i want. currently, i’m experiencing this odd phenomenon where whenever i watch a movie with a lesbian kiss or sex scene, i get embarrassed. well not necessarily embarrassed, but flustered. i turn down the brightness or the sound or start providing commentary to fill the silence. i can feel my stomach shift like coals being raked for a fire, and sometimes i watch it again and again until my mouth parts to recreate the action, the performance.
i do this when i see women i’m attracted to as well. i get flustered, don’t know what to do with my hands. if you have a nice smile, good dentition, it’s even worse. low voice, dark hair, thick brows—all send me spinning. i can be a good flirt, i can be playful and magnetic, and a buzz beneath the skin. but still, i am so silly when i am faced with a woman. any woman because they are all so beautiful.
a while ago, i watched picnic at hanging rock (1975), dir. peter weir, and came away thinking nothing of it. it’s only after that i realized it had snuck up on me, became one of my favorites. now i’ve finished the six-episode 2018 mini-series of the same name. i loved this one better. something feels more realized about the girls and the dreamy nature of the disappearance, and stretches of the australian backlands feel truer to my imagination.
someone in a review mentioned how female-centric the series is despite the men within it searching for them, and i think that’s what made it so perfect to me, and what also led to the 1975 film being a bit flat at the end. i think there is a space in which a man cannot reach, no matter how hard he focuses on the girl or woman he aims to center. he is always slightly...off.
in this version, it’s a female eye behind the writing and lens, and it’s all the better for it. miranda is much moodier in this than in the older version. much more of a temptest rather than a purity that tragically went missing. i think this has made her more of a person to miss.
it’s always terrible to lose a woman with a deep fire inside of her; that snuffing out is so violent, even if her ending is left unknown.
something has settled in me. i am less rejective of my fire venus. having a scorpio sun sagittarius venus makes me feel playful, a botticelli with her tongue out. but also frozen; a certain cipher is needed for my code. the playfulness is high with fall coming faster and faster, like hurricanes making landfall. it’s like a mouth over my skin, like fruit. breaking in, the saliva after, the breaking down. enzymes.
i am swinging like a pendulum, i am frustrated and don't know what i feel. i go between crying and irritation, then an anger that burns out into a calm. i am tired of this house! no matter what i put on these days, i am hypersensitive, raw meat. i wish i were impersonal, but at my best, i am not. i would hate it if i were.
there's a tumblr post in which someone says in winter that great dark lake inside of them freezes over. that is what i am nearing, and it propels a happiness in me.
just now, my mother asked me, what’s going on? i heard the door open and close. she scared me, silent and instant in the hallway.
i was halfway out the door again when i told her,
that was me.
powerful.
"i am swinging like a pendulum, i am frustrated and don't know what i feel. i go between crying and irritation, then an anger that burns out into a calm. i am tired of this house! no matter what i put on these days, i am hypersensitive, raw meat." god it's too real!!!! it's so suffocating to grow into yourself and knowing you have to stifle it around others. I want to give you a hug.
also what you said about picnic at hanging rock, I feel it deep in my bones even though I haven't watched that particular piece of media. I have tons of favorite media directed by men but it just never hits the same way as media directed by women.