This is going to be an incredibly scattered post, as I am at once dealing with leaving high school (which is for me not, in itself, some majorly groundbreaking momentous thing - it's only important in that because of it I'm thinking much more about this concept of nostalgia and how my experience over the past four years has been fictionalized - or not fictionalized - by memory), being conflicted over how humans can be dumb and annoying but also amazing and gorgeous and really are the only things that count for turning the hell that is existence into something meaningful, and also just thinking about ~vibes~ (movies, books, music, and other things that inform my life more than they should because they are indicative of the fact that I really, really need to go out and do stuff more instead of being all dressed up with no place to go - figuratively, of course).
[Also, I'm sorry if none of this makes sense to anyone but me but, like, um, whatever.] [I'm also sorry for the pretentious abstract images that are interspersed here. I don't know if I put them there to capture how I'm feeling visually, to cue changes in tone and ideas, or to just, like, be hip.] [Just kidding, I definitely put the pictures in just to be hip.]
I guess I have always felt like wherever and whenever I have been it has been only in a transitory fashion: there is (and has been) no permanence to the way that I have felt about most of my life. I think this is because I have so many synthetic expectations - things that come from what has been seen and dreamt only to create some utterly ridiculous notion: that, when 'it' happens (which it will), a sense of moment and gravity will swallow all and make
this reality, the one you've been waiting (and, unfortunately) living for, into a definite article. The sweeping trumpet of your heartbeat in sync with another will color everything until you start to believe that it's the truest moment that you know you've ever lived. You will live in stillness until something like that comes along, envelopes you.
Or that is how things are supposed to feel. But (or at least, this is what I think I now know) living means slowly coming to the realization that, no, in fact, the most that dreams can do is bleed into your reality: sedate, sly. There is no jagged crest in the story of you representing a sudden puncturing of your reality with some brilliant light. The only moments where it doesn't matter whether you can prove your existence because you feel it, all up and down inside of you, will not be traditional dramas. The drama of them will be in being static, in the staring at the wall that accompanies listening to another human pour themselves out into you.
I am now beginning to come to terms with feeling like almost every moment is the breath before the real thing. I can see the futility of preparing: there is no breath "before". It draws from the before into the after. They cannot be broken.
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| Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation |
Lost in Translation is a big reference for how I feel about human intimacy and connectivity. It also captures, for me, something that I think is really pertinent, which is that concept of being lonely but also curious about other human beings and ultimately feeling like, despite being like a drop of oil floating in a glass of water, there is solace yet to be found. It's just really good at capturing this sense of alienation and pairing it with some form of linkage or connexion (as Carson McCullers would call it: she is also very good at this.
The Member of the Wedding is a good text to have/think about whenever I'm dealing with this stuff).
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| Lina Scheynius - found here |
Summer is my most vivid season. Like some kind of a cue to intensify all, the heat drowns memories in emotions that have been heightened by this abundance of sensation (when I refer to sensation I am talking very literally about the physical, the harsh white sun and the sound of construction work that is heard during a walk down a wide, flat, urban desert avenue). I don't know if it's the vividness of detail or the content of these stories themselves but the vast majority of summer memories either bore or repulse me.
I have, here, a wild mess. My romantic ideas about summer (borne by Dazed and Confused, yellowed vintage postcards, etc.) and their collision with childhood memories (equally as faded, in some places, as those postcard photographs, and yet dazzling in others). Together they make everything a disappointment. Everything is plastered so heavily with memories and idealism: I start to bear all these concepts of what things are meant to be and feel like instead of engaging with what's real. There are imagined pictures – of fresh dew, old denim, sand between toes and milky blue skies – and to these life becomes secondary.
Existing, verb, is an afterthought. After dreams.
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| From a piece for Rookie by Allyssa Yohana and Jake Sigl |
