Take me back from whence I came
May 24th
Awake jittery 11:31pm listening to songs: I couldve loved you good like a planet
1154 now have removed the link to this page from the main page because I have been writing about regretful nothing and must think about what I mean. That alone is dumb. I want to this summer revel in my youth my body love feeling. Looking forward to the nothing-week after this one and the nothing-moments this week planning to finish Service and begin Myles then eat through a few novels and watch three movies
May 13th
Thesis in but I am not relieved. I want to make it better! Done is more important now than perfect.
May 12th
Reading up realizing a large gap in my work which I can only attempt to suture in the footnotes –– just read this essay by Tracy Faud, not entirely sure how I feel about it just yet but the last four or so paragraphs made me pense à Thomas and Michelle's theses –– will read this at a later date before reading Agua Viva probably not til June
Today I will:
Beautiful Katakana on mine and Michelle's sashes ータスイメ都京 merci Michelle –– there aren't words –– I have Park that car Drop that phone Sleep on the floor Dream about me stuck in my head –– Liam and Jasmin and Hazel and the Sepenuks came in to see me today! Gave Liam and Jasmin coffees and blueberry coffee cake and a lamb roll to share at the bar and got to visit with them for a bit, wasn't very busy, over 100 covers never confirmed but tips were good even still And I was able to visit with the Seps –– got them a last minute reservation at Bar Siesta and they loved it –– and Andie –– it wasn't a hard day besides being so tired and now of course I feel great and I'll sleep tonight after the senior thing which I should probably plan to do my hair for. If I send in this last chapter by 7am for comments then write my last response for 485 then go to campus come back run to Espadas for my sash, grab groceries while I'm out, then do chess assignments and final thesis edits then I will have time to do my hair and get ready for this senior night. K
No senior night thank god. Hazel will come over and we will go for a glass of wine when I am done with my assignments –– picked up my sash, Michelle called it elegant, je suis d'accord –– senior pictures tomorrow before wine night –– grinding my teeth and catching myself and trying with immense difficulty to drink water, listening to the cat next door and to Michelle's door opening and closing and resisting a cigarette. It will not make me feel good. I cannot bear to not feel good after today.
May 11th
Feels like March. I have messed up the date three times in the past 24 hours. Laying in bed on the beautiful yellow quilt I got for my birthday that I hide from myself when I begin to feel anxious about my ability to keep it clean/unstained by ink blots or vomit or what-have-you. Mother's day today which is always a reckoning. Love being your daughter your granddaughter your great-granddaughter Dolbow Waller Lowry Endres Gomory Vespe
Wonder what tomorrow will be like, I plan to make a dutch baby with compote, hard scrambled eggs with tiny chives, sourdough toast with european butter, baby potatoes O'Brian, grapefruit juice, coffee, perfect. A list of things I have to do: write tonight; write tomorrow; responses for Zondi; groceries for breakfast-dinner; write a card; chess final and assignments; response for Mousli; final thesis edits; pick up sash; clean room WELL; clean out refrigerator; email Molly; PSYC100 final; sort out thesis defense outfit; write brief introduction; print out several copies; return books to Dr. Harrison; return books to library; buy wine for wine night; file for reimbursement; send off eBay returns; find/decide graduation shoes and dress; try out curling hair to see if that might be of interest for the day of even though I will probably just go as my usual self (only deviating in wearing a white dress and grad garb); grad gift for Hazel and Michelle and Jackson and Landon; USC merchandise for mama; return Thomas's jacket. And it will all get done so help me god.
This weekend is fucking hot. 97 degrees in beautiful Silverlake like Havasu. I had two deli-container-full matcha americanos and not nearly enough water and a diet coke and a Zevia but no coffee. Not sure what I'll wear to work today But i'd like to look cute to see Jasmin and Liam and Hazel and her family –– got the Seps a last-minute table at the sister restaurant half a block down the boulevard but they'll come say hi anyway. Should only be 71 on graduation beautiful perfect. I've bid or offered on several dresses on eBay in a panic tonight and only regret one of them but returns are accepted and I'm already going to the post office this week for a return so. Not a big thing. If all goes to plan I'll sit next to Landon and Michelle at graduation hopefully Kristina Thomas Jonathan too but they all have their friends. So does Michelle but Landon and I will fit on the edge of them. Marissa! Wish Jackson and Hazel could be there and am jealous of their small ceremonies. It's nice to have such finality on the day of the Scorpio Full Moon like of course. Reborn. Michelle and I have been likening our theses to gestation and birth for a while now it's our fun gag but is ultimately exactly true and right and correct. She said today Birth and rebirth. I almost sent her the same Natalie Diaz poem I'd sent her a month and a week ago from Emergence magazine about the river and in a month and a week we will be at the river Kama river Sam Cooke and Good Day Velo with Kristina Natania Jason everyone
May 10th
Keep wanting to say disease because unease fails to get across whatever it is that I am trying to get across, which is to say that as of late I have been pausing mid-sentence to try and come up with a better word only to end up using unease anyways, which makes whatever I'm saying so much more dramatic because now I'm pausing before saying it but really I am just stopping myself from describing myself as DISEASED.
May 9th
One month til 22, finally feels so good to be writing. Anxious sick over my other classes. Either way I am at Tulane. Decidedly. And either way I graduate with honors, having made the COLT faculty proud, all I care about anyway –– just that –– had beautiful dinner with Tracey and Marissa last night at Barra Santos. Crudo and chicken and potatoes and cabbage. We are going to lay on the beach alllll summer with Michelle and Reilly. They are all going to come to my apartment for Mardi Gras two years from now. Six full pages of footnotes!
May 7th
Want desperately to rewind
Kristina is coming to Japan! I will read Chelsea Girls while I am there if not before. Probably before. On the beach with Michelle. On the beach alone
Rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind today while editing Hazel's paper –– did not give it a fair last chance as such but am certain still now that it simply does not work for me, I do not like the writing and I do not like either of the leads' performances and this is all a shame, it could have been something so much more beautiful but ultimately reads like a Being John Malkovich wannabe, which is interesting considering Charlie Kaufman wrote both and I so enjoyed Being John Malkovich, it seemed to take itself less seriously, was almost casual and most certainly trustworthy in this sense, aspirational, like Magnolia, all talking to one another anyways, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind dominates the dialogue but this is not an aspirational thing I don't think though I am surely projecting. I felt like a dominant personality at the COLT seniors dinner and wanted to die. The showcase went well though despite all else, no program, supposed to go first and of course couldn't but went eventually and Michelle m'a dit que she found in my speaking voice a definite French inflection, merci bien Michelle, best presentation all day and your somber tone!–– yet! Living somewhere in the ellipses ...
May 3rd
25/35 finally excited. 2:33am maintenant Should have it done or nearly before work today. I like all my friends' spotify playlists at random and right now one of them is tweeting about having a secret admirer, wondering if it's her current crush, don't know what I'm supposed to do in this situation so will do nothing. It's so nice to have written something, I make it so miserable during that I always forget so imagine the relief when this is DONE! Have to continually (continuously?) remind myself I want this Because I do really what I want right now is to wither on the beach shrivel and glitter and read and sweat and write a short story I've been rolling around (marble) for ages now. I miss seeing Max in the stairway and I miss hugging Thomas on the sidewalk though I'll probably do so tonight after dinner and I miss how my hair was and I miss holding Eliza's hand around campus and I miss that ring the ocean stole still mad about that forever and I miss my white quilt and my sewing machine and les Éditions Gallimard and my french dreams Gonna have it all back soon but not Max Thomas Eliza not like that here anyway and i miss AILANI. My girl. She'll be at Brown next year so I'll be at Brown next year and she'll be in my apartment and so will Kristina and Michelle and Landon Dior and us in DC and at Dartmouth and I'll be in Louisiana in September then Paris October then beg Tulane for admission and money and get it and work and save and go there 2026 and beg all my friends to come sleep on my New Orleans couch or share my New Orleans bed I don't much mind either way there is always space. I thought about it today and before I know it I will be pregnant walking around the Met with Kristina laughing about how she laughed at me when I told her this was my greatest dream. It is and it isn't it is because if it is happening, if I am hugely pregnant in New York City, that means I will be married, and if I am married that means I will live in reciprocity and security and love and fun for all the rest of my days, and if I have gone and gotten married that means I will have been successful in the start of my career, that I will have found stability and excitement in law just like I want to, that really is my big dream, to work and serve others and write, to come home to a big armchair, for my greatest worry to be maternity clothes, for it all to be just so, informs my gratitude for what is happening NOW, this present, staying up all night writing an undergraduate thesis before a barista shift in Silverlake, So excited to go to work in the morning, I love it there most of the time and will be so satisfied with my page count finally that I can relax and make plans and kiss em all on the cheek like they do me Love being the youngest there shepherded so
Unimpressive writing. Must sober up
May 2nd
Into my most chaste own eyes
Listeningggg elated imbued with a renewed sense of joie de vivre à cause d'un café A fucking expensive one the barista told me the shots were pulling at 23 seconds from a 17.3 grind and I should taste apricot and milk chocolate. K. Did. Grateful. Understood with action. Exceedingly skilled at writing papers on the day they're due –– two 3 pagers for psychology due at 5pm and it's Noon and I'm sitting thinking about when it all works out and I'm married and then I'm pregnant and we're traveling and my hair is longer down my back and we sit and read and write every night and share one big glass of red wine. This is just the thing I'd be doing with several thousand words due in 5 hours. Asked all but two questions.
Ready to be done Been making myself unbeautiful ready to be done with that and lay in the warm. Keep forgetting dumb assignments I know I joke about being a bad student but sometimes I truly am. Awful. Will self-flagellate later convinced this is not my fault but it is and so it is
Everything is Green by David Foster Wallace She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying, when it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her. So I feel like I know.
She lights up and looks off away from me, looking sly with her cigarette through a wet window, and I can not feel what to say.
I say Mayfly I can not feel what to do or say or believe you any more. But there is things I know. I know I am older and you are not. And I give to you all I got to give you, with my hands and my heart both. Every thing that is inside me I have gave you. I have been keeping it together and working steady every day. I have made you the reason I got for what I always do. I have tried to make a home to give to you, for you to be in, and for it to be so nice.
I light up myself then I throw the match in the sink with other matches and dishes and a sponge and such things.
I say Mayfly my heart has been down the road and back for you but I am forty-eight years old. It is time I have to to not let things just carry me by any more. I got to use some time that is still mine to try to make every thing feel right. I got to try to feel how I need to. In me there is needs which you can not even see any more, because there is too many needs in you in the way.
She does not say any thing and I look out her window and I can feel that she knows. I know about it, and she shifts her self on my sofa lounger. She brings her legs up underneath her in some shorts.
I say it really does not matter what I seen or what I think I seen. That is not it any more. I know I am older and you are not. But now I am feeling like there is all of me going out to you and nothing of you coming back any more.
Her hair is up with a barrette and pins and her chin is in her hand, it's early, she looks like she is dreaming out at the clean light through the wet window over my sofa lounger.
Everything is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel likke when every thing outside is green like it is.
The window over the sink of my kitchenette is cleaned off from the hard rain last night, and it is a morning with sun, it is still early, and there is a mess of green out. The trees are green and some grass out past the speed bumps is green and slicked down. But every thing is not green. The other trailers are not green, and my card table out with puddles in lines and beer cans and butts floating in the ashtrays is not green, or my truck, or the gravel of the lot, or the Big Wheel toy that is on its side under a clothesline without no clothes on it by the next trailer, where the guy has got him some kids.
Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.
I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.
She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.
May 1st
Strikethrough
April 28th
Bless her blessed new moon Thank God sending emails out all night, finally understanding the work I am doing I think, having peppermint tea at 4:00AM in the radio station! This is some heaven writing freely for fucking once!! Will buy tickets to Japan this week probably. Oh god am I happy. Listening to new music played over the speaker quietly perfectly blessedly. Only now need to beg Michelle to come to the seniors dinner Kristina and I have put together. So we can walk there together and split the Pad Thai. My girls.! Pitching a COLT social to Dr. Meeker chez nous, Aidan and Daisy said they would come though I would hope that everybody would come by and have wine with us. I would like to smoke a cigarette with Dr. Meeker and host everyone in our pretty living room, leather couch and handmade table and my mom on the mantle and vinyl playing. I would make something too like a spring tart like I made for Landon's birthday last year, which was a ginormous hit, and a coconut cake. Batch cocktail. As if these ideations are any more important than the work I have stayed up all night to do!
Unsharp having been up since 7am yesterday but not so awful either. Typically when I stay up like this my entire body aches somethin awful glad it doesn't but wondering when that'll start or if I'll skip it lucky somehow. At the risk of sounding exceedingly annoying I think often and over and over again of Japan, being in that air there with Michelle. I'm holding off on buying new glasses here gonna do it at the mall while I'm there for $60 for the appointment, examination, and two pairs ... Never saying anything important at all on here
April 27th
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
April 25th
Roommates being loud Just barely submitted my paper please God let me do well You never shouldve made me write about anorexia nervosa what is that about? Ridiculous headache at either temple been obsessive again been grinding my teeth when you happen into my dreams I suppose, I suppose also that ... something is just not right there ... obsessive demon never fully exorcised of course
April 18th
Doing work I am proud of drawing webs qui marchent bien ––
April 15th
Yesterday I exorcised some obsessive demon, today it is much better now, comparatively , though never ever gone, only managed
April 8th
Still writing huffing the spine of the Doheny Library copy of Le Ventre de l'Atlantique that lays on my chest and wanting very badly Twizzlers. Mary Gaitskill told the Paris Review that she only ever writes four pages at a time, at the absolute maximum, and she cannot remember the last time she did that –– I do wonder what she means by "at a time" is that to say in one sitting? In one day? I write in long painful bursts mostly besides when I am diarizing comme ça. I make it painful but Mia told me two years ago now that She could tell when I procrastinated and that was when my best writing always happened, when I would be most lucid, when I thought too much about it I would start to spin and my line of thought would turn to ash –– thinking all evening of the full moon coming Saturday how it harkens hearkens back to October, when I'd had a vivid premonition about how my relationship would end (which I was exactly correct about) and naturally spent the month making myself sick, crying on campus etc to the point that Dr. Meeker told me i didn't "look very well" -- whatever this means for me now in the current return I am very curious to know, probably only goes as deep as the lunar new year and the close of this Venus retrograde which marked the definitive end to the relationship, seeing as it was so obviously over in October (It was over last January honestly it was over the whole time. Worthwhile even so I hold ) if not long before, But you have to wonder if I will have another premonition, or if I am having one now, having had one already, gonna have one up north, thinking about that. Thinking/knowing it is worse than gauche to diarize a past relationship online like this
April 7th
Missing desperately some people who really annoy the hell out of me.. what is that about? Longing for distraction? Wanting them to come around and be their not-annoying parts only? Sometimes it feels like I make my project on this Earth into a "how much of a bitch can I be" challenge. How much of a bitch can I be and how much can I procrastinate and how can it feel beautiful all the same. List today:
April 5th
Unsure whether I will ever be a nice girl again Not saying this seeking pity or even for anyone to agree (my mother did so over the phone ce matin là) Anything like that just considering my own capacities and my endless bullshit how I slouch and look away –– cannot fool myself anymore! I give myself away No swimming pool no nothing nobody Cruel vein more so an artery
March 26th
Thinking about my Mom's-Mom's-Mom Joyce Ann and the clown dolls she kept up on the shelf near the door to the garage in Havasu
March 25th
Unsure of what I would like to do with my day –– maybe will go to Clark st and do chess homework –– saw her today know she saw me but I was on the phone and am having an exceptional hair day so all is fine, though I was wearing the same outfit as I was when we split, funny to call it that but Talked or Broke Up is so serious, anyway –– very frustrated with myself for myriad reasons (always makes me think of Heathers) And my laptop died mid-lecture (Zoom) Naturally bodega charging cable hardly works and I had good things to say, too , for once, about relic and performance and queer image-consumption. As a daughter, thinking: it must be so strange to birth and rear a child who goes on to, suddenly, one day, it always happens so quickly, write essays, ascribing to ridiculous ivory tower nuance and vocabulary (this is to say, my mother ne comprend pas my drivel, this being no moral failure on her part, of course), it just would make worlds more sense for the child to have become a carpenter or something, learn to work with materials and tools and one's hands, or even a computer technician of some sort, though this reflection presents only the mise en abyme of my pessimism and distaste for what is precisely the object of my desire, this world of beautiful people and beautiful words filling beautiful documents, how unreal it is, how perplexing, surely the distaste is only my own sick sense of inadequacy despite all this precious training, but really it is unnatural, as much as I love and want it, so many terrible, unnatural things I love and want(!)
March 22nd
Such is wrestling such is wrestling such is wrestling
Wrestler's son put on your belt , fight and put down
your opponent
You are the stronger
March 21st
Did nothing of what I intended to choosing to cry about it instead, frustrated this afternoon til I saw the Hollywood sign, cure-all thing, now having washed my hair with the right stuff and made my bed with the new quilt (spilt dr. pepper all over my favorite white one, and it had ink blots aplenty from its only other occupant, and both of our vomit, bought it with the first one almost 4 years ago now, what's up Allen I wanna say to her, makes you think) and clean sheets, I am sitting at the big table which I never really do, gonna just write and push away the conveyor-belt banner of I HATE THIS I HATE THIS with a flashing I LOVE THIS I LOVE THIS, kind of need to reread the novel in its entirety I am realizing, maybe that's why I'm scared, why be afraid to write? I wrote a decent paper in 4 hours last week It's not like it's even that Difficult for me and here I sit squandering my one real ability, the only thing I have been trained to do and find success in–– Nexttttt year I'll train for a half marathon so as to give myself another ability. In threeish weeks it'll be something new different good
Practicing a studious form of the Experience by re-reading Le Ventre de l'Atlantique with a diet coke and a big water and oolong and CBD and herb pills and turning my laptop off now in bed on the new quilt..
March 6th
So good I catch myself walking around smiling. Due to Eliza, and the Classicist, and New York City, my endless good fortune, I keep getting so lucky now if only I could make myself work on my thesis, that is what I must do, if I write two chapters this week I'll feel good then one more and edits before I leave on Thursday. How to avoid il malocchio when celebration is always in order? Life is best shared I want to tell everyone my plans and hear all of theirs and watch it all happen
Judith Slaying Holofernes
March 5th
Oxford Classicist quoting Sappho by way of Salinger to me, dreams really do come true!
Took myself to work for brunch, I am having:
March 4th
PSYC100. I will not complain.
There is much to think about in down dog and less in child's pose, until you take a side body stretch, then it all comes up again. Rest in peace Carl Dean, I don't care what they say Dolly loves you to hell with Kenny Rogers and islands in the stream
Two sips of coffee left that I've been nursing for two and a half hours now Michelle says it's the year of the web site, I just felt this drivel was too drivel for Substack, I find it too serious for what I've got going on, respect it too much kinda, don't wanna categorize flash fiction cultural commentary this is just a dumb website I like it that way. Boyfriend girlfriend couple sitting at separate tables, mine in between, he gets up to kiss her and is bored and she is busy and asked just now to stay longer, looking ahead of my table I can see my fucked arches in the knee-height mirror under the pastry case, I love bringing other people here and watching our ankles and shoes walk us towards the tablet register, think later when I'm here alone, like now, of watching us that way then, four feet like one animal together
I think God needed a babe and I wasn't busy. I feel capable of telling him a few things because I don't buy the "I'm not worthy" concept. I respect that he was a master teacher, but I'm walking my path. Tori Amos
March 3rd
I can't wait for my first day of Law School I'm going to wear this green silk skirt I bought last week at the Long Beach Saint Vincent de Paul for a dollar forty-nine and a tank top because it will be New Orleans and boiling. Looking over my shoulder into the mirror at my hair down my back, it's at my waist when I tilt my head back, when I am moving to New Orleans it will be there without me exposing my neck up like that. Yesterday I walked in the wind and imagined someone biking up the sidewalk behind me and yanking my hair, imagining how my gaze would trace up slow-motion quick catching the tree five meters that way and how my neck would jerk out, my hair blown across my face ugly in that shock with my mouth open, blonde stuck to my lips, surely I would fall, then, onto my right side, tumble and look up and grab my neck through my hair, tangled now, wouldn't be able to see who did it would I
Last March 3rd what was I doing it was raining I had just gotten that horrible bruise from the ice machine at work-- the corner very corner of the metal flap door came down on my bicep, bruised so deep it hurt and showed for over a month–– I was just thinking about that the other day, my distrust forever now, I was wearing my favorite blue cashmere perfect cardigan that Mama bought me, that I left on the bus when it was raining, it slipped out from my bag without me noticing somehow, naturally. I remember when it was Andrew's birthday and I fit Lauren's jeans so well, wore them for months like they were mine, with that dark blue polyester blend sweater in the rain with the mock neck and plasticky buttons. Felt good I was still filling that light purple Moleskine. This week or next I'll finish the black diary I started in June and buy another to take to New York
February 26th
Listening to Twin Peaks from another tab, positive today, ready to be better, proud, playing chess, good radio show this week, 4 weeks since, yoga tonight. What is there to write about? Michelle sent me a Franz Wright quote about something Rilke said regarding Christ as a pointing finger at which we bark madly like wild dogs; I thought to Sara Ahmed, how space is defined, how close to that pointing directional finger any one dog may be, where that finger points, moving and being (barking...); then, I thought to our conversation the other week ... I know that my reading is generic, yet ... went to the market, saw a good friend, drove an hour to the beach but it was 20 degrees colder at the water than it had been inland, I am embarrassed to have assumed it would be any other way, didn't even think about it...
January 21st
I went to New York for that opening and had the perfect rainy day. Broke two pairs of shoes that day and bought French silk ribbon and spilled my tea everywhere... loved every minute
Sitting in PSYCH100 where I come to write emails at 8am ... wearing Violette Hay, Christmas gift, Jasmin and Liam are in Paris having coffee in the 5th, terrible world besides
December 5th
Valeria Luiselli Dia Chelsea gallery opening and Hannah Arendt poetry reading happening on December 11th in Manhattan, why am I in Los Angeles, Tarra said "Come to New York!" as if it were so easy, maybe it is, credit card points
December 4th
Décembre itching for gratitude tight with fear stretching feathering unfurling rustling listening to Professor Church lecture on AA, Narcotics Anonymous, spirituality of addiction
October 23rd
Thinking about money all the time.