3/31/24

it’s this: novel writing. not anything else — not friends, not poetry, not disturbing remnants of you that still haven’t dried themselves out. it is so simple. this is the only thing.

hm. i’m just sitting here in this quiet fever dream. i don’t think my mind’s been working on the novel much. i’ve got to get it back to doing that

 

 

4/3/24

there are so many things to do with a pair of human hands. i will no longer hate anyone that i love. from now on i will touch them and try to give them peace

if you had walked inside somewhere, taken a little girl by the hand and told her that you loved her she would not have known what to say

 

 

4/4/24

writing every day only to think this isn’t going right. i don’t know. where’s my creativity?

i think back to all these different forms of loss (and gain) and think what if i can’t do it? what if i spend my best years working on a thing that, since the beginning of time, was always meant to be the thing being worked on and never the thing completed? i want to finish, want to wash my hands of this project but most of all i wish to see myself going forward with this finally, to go somewhere with it, being led by the hand to the finish line, wherever that is.

my eyes keep sagging out of their sockets but it’s not like i’ve been giving so much to the page lately. i feel tired but it’s not as though i’ve been being completely honest

i am still wavering between all these good and bad things. people are what they are aren’t they. and we can’t help it

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i suppose i had no idea going in to meet this dream city that i would end up feeling so lost. i suppose there’s something here that’s yearning to be filled and i can’t quite figure out what’s the thing that’s missing, if there’s anything here or not at all.

i think i would like some good friends, good friends i can laugh with, and discuss serious things and light things, and things we’re excited about, things we’re looking forward to. help us through one another’s struggles. i suppose i would like that very much

what i’m feeling here is not quite the loneliness or suffocation i would feel in new york. i’m doing everything i wanted to here, but it’s as though acting out everything i imagined is the very thing turning it sour. i imagine you are not always supposed to get your desires for this reason.

it all looks so magical til you’re there in the flesh. i suppose nothing can stay glimmering and shiny forever. this is still the beautiful city i thought it was, but now i’ve got certain associations with it, now i’m all over the place with them. and now i would like to hide for a little while, but also be out there. i’d like to try both at the same time. i’d also like to cry

i miss my books with a fierce, unimaginable pain. i miss barnes and noble and books in english. i also feel i took for granted being able to eavesdrop on passing conversation, to slip in uninvited when the language comes naturally.

 

 

4/6/24

for a long moment that stretched tonight i wondered very hard if love could be real, not for me but for the world and whatever was out there

but if i could be there in that nightclub where my skin knew i didn’t belong, that must have meant good people were out there searching in all the wrong places too. but this question. i’ve instantly decided it’s useless. do i believe in love if i have to ask another person about it

now the city seems evil because of something i did

 

 

4/7/24

there are so many shady people once the hour hits, this city isn’t any different

she looks calm and normal on the outside, tipping the glass of water into her mouth

i wake up, my jaws hungry. that’s the fluke about the human world, is that your human instincts will take you out of the drastic situation, but it always follows up eventually. then a whole boat of wanting fills you up once your environment changes. there is no point fantasizing over a thing if there is not the thing before you for you to have

the world doesn’t surprise you with goodness, and you’re angry. i suppose you don’t believe anything good can happen to you, and then something unexpectedly good does happen and you’re angry for that reason too.

suppose we’re never ready for things, right? we’re just thrown into them because god wants us to get on with things

 

 

4/10/24

feeling the sickest homesickness there ever was. i wish to revert back to the world of the easygoing, to envelop myself once more among the pages of old books, fantasy, worlds of tolstoy far away.

i am unfamiliar with this foreignness, or perhaps it is me, getting everywhere into my bones. i would rather be back home in the smell and state and status of new york city with the poor dirt pollution touching my skin than feel the purity of this one, at least the people won’t look at me like i don’t belong.

here’s a picture of my old books, a picture of the old life, to remind me –

 

 

4/11/24

and if i was to get what i wanted? if this is supposedly what i wanted, would it be you? would the mirror of erised make me look into your eyes? would it mean that i loved you or that i was only an arrogant fool who was very pleased to get what they wanted?

things are changing very rapidly now, and my head is spinning. lipstick stains somehow aren’t red, they’re pink. i never imagined that growing up. i’d always imagined they’d be red

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and ever since then i’ve wanted my mother to sit me down like when we were kids and explain to me why it happened and cry with me about all of it

feeling

being out of control

doing out of bound things

it’s like how many times is the novel going to change until it stays the same in a satisfactory place, until it forms itself neatly before my eyes? what is the right story and when will i find it?

 

 

4/14/24

one supposes that all one ever does is hold out for bits and pieces of a person at a time; or maybe that’s just your life and it sucks. somehow still i will return to it, somehow i have held out for you as if you are some kind of favorite poet i keep being reminded of as i live this lifetime out, watching your influence stretch across time

i don’t think i will ever get the privilege of seeing you pass on the street again as once a beautiful thing. now that i won’t associate with you, you look clouded by some heavy darkness. but beauty doesn’t vanish on a person until one says it does; no, it never vanished. even when i turned my eyes away from your goodness, here it stubbornly stays

it’s actually a sick feverish dream, all of this. the body loves doing this (the reverting back) maybe it is my body that has learned the default and i was trying to get clean but what if i am a sick fool whose job it is only to revert back? and what if i want to revert back just so i don’t have to be at war anymore? trying to compromise with my brain and my body telling it “ok so what if i do want him but i wait for him to get better?” oh god i’m gonna be sick

haven’t needed or at least felt the need to need it in so long (am redacting pronouns here); and isn’t that frightening, just what we grow out of?

hear this logic: i want the bad things to happen so i don’t have to fear them anymore. so their power over me can shrivel away. my fears: to revert back to my old way of life. my old self, a bad, unworking self sad self lonely self, a one with no hole in my chest from the books that i loved; the one who wanted to give myself over to you as if you’d earned even the right to meet my eye, ah.. . it is here, still everywhere even as i write this. i can feel my heart pounding as though it has any right to do so. i cannot wrestle the thought away that what i want most sometimes is to give in, that i want to do the easiest thing. but that will mean you win, and truly i cannot have that. in every lifetime you must lose, for god showed me that forfeiting you was the manuscript where i would be happiest.

 

 

4/17/24

hi so once again i am starting again, i am dealing with you carving a hole in my brain. and i suppose by now i should be used to writing this

this time it would have been the opposite ordeal, that i left for your home and left you back in mine

jesus c. i am always led astray by my own writing, i must just stick to the story

 

4/19/24

today is in fact a day

still haven’t thought up a word

 

 

4/21/24

and no, you can never have it.

i think i’ve been trying to write the same story in different ways for a billion years. if you’ve got an affliction if you’ve got an itch then you must scratch it, there is no other way of surviving

 

 

4/22/24

i’ve got all these emotions that are hard to contend with as a human being

i put all my shit on the floor and i don’t cry but it’s a feeling maybe worse than that, of having the greatest terrible urge in the pit of your belly wanting to, dying to get it out of you, rip it off so that you are more naked, stripped even of your vessel. ok so i guess i haven’t been doing as well as i’ve said in the postcards. none of you know the truth behind it but let’s be honest, when do we ever

every day i will start building one thing i love about this world and little by little it will grow taller than me until i am overwhelmed and need no more reassurance. tokyo, by the end of this when god is through with us, you will love me and i, you.

 

 

4/26/24

i don’t know why things upset me abnormally, internally, what is even going on. in here it’s a beautiful shit show, this country and me in it.

i am reminded again why solitude is so sweet. i don’t feel bothered here, but part of me doesn’t grow. i know that.

 

 

4/27/24

love-hate relationship with tokyo and i can’t describe it, maybe not yet

 

 

4/29/24

ugh. i am journaling every day. this song which i used to think of as a person is now an entire country. a person has become a country, and what right has he? how do i deal with all of it changing inside me? what will it take to not love anyone.

what if i abandoned everything in every sense of the word and ran away with a pen gripped in my cold fickle artist hands, remembering every detail every slight, every soft word?

ok maybe i’m not in my best era. maybe i never am self aware until i walk away from it

the cold is un-killing me. it is too warm it is making me think about things deeply. please reverse this.

 

 

4/30/24

quitting. writing a children’s book and abandoning this

(and then two weeks later you’re at 81,000 words)

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i used to listen to songs about tokyo and now i crawl back home clinging with my fingers; i want my body back, i miss the way she made me feel.

 

 

5/3/24

dear, old happiness.

what if this is actually — wait for it — your life, and you need to stop asking people questions about it?