oh my god I just remembered I bought myself tiramisu and it's in the fridge oh my god
Fiona Apple - "Drumset"
"When you awaken, your body is already here for you."
Hello:
- Don't tell him I told you this, but I learn stuff from Carlo. A couple of days ago told me about this thing in video game design called "Coyote Time." It's the little pause they used to build in to two-dimensional platform games before and after you jump - just a split second of buffer time before you start to rise or fall. They call it that because of the way Wile E. Coyote used to run on air for a few seconds before he realized the ground wasn't waiting underneath him anymore. Isn't that good? Coyote time!
- A few nights ago we were talking about history. I have been watching nothing but sweeping documentaries lately - Ken Burns, Michael Jordan - because nothing else makes me feel the kind of good they do. I'm so into the past. On bike rides I stop to read every plaque, then take pictures of them names so I can look up all the names later at home. I spent like a month rationing out Boom Town because I never wanted it to end. My grandmother's been doing the same thing too - we talk every couple of days and she's been reading a lot about WWII and the Great Depression, both of which she lived through. I am always asking what it felt like then. The answers are various and fascinating. Imagine living through that much? From then until now? I am beginning to realize a few things re: the way I conceive of the scope and scale of my life, the context in which it occurs. I said to Carlo I think it's just nice to remember that everything eventually gives way to something else. That eventually all of this will add up to something. Looked back on. He said he knew what I meant, that he remembered this from when he was in the hospital. Hard to think about the significance of almost dying while you're busy almost dying, but if you get the chance to live you have the luxury seeing it as part of something else.
- The other day Deragh was like what was your first date again? and it made me happy because I always like to remember. It was in the daytime, a coffee thing, because his pictures hadn't been very clear or consistent and I wasn't sure it was going to go anywhere, but we ended up walking around for hours. A lot of funny and weird stuff happened but the literal very first thing we talked about was death. He was visiting his parents for the holidays and had just found out his mother was very sick. He was thinking maybe he'd move back here. He told me about his time in the hospital. He told me how it had taken him so long just to get a diagnosis, and then get on the transplant list, and then to actually get the liver, and then to get better - not to mention the year and change that followed his recovery, with the rejection and the second one.
- He said that some of the hardest parts were at the beginning and the end. In the beginning, they kept telling him he might be able to go home tomorrow, probably tomorrow, probably tomorrow, over and over again, for months and months like that. He said thinking about it that way made it so much harder than just being allowed to accept his fate. And then, at the end, after it was all over and he finally was back home, when the brightest layer of gratitude burned off, when after years of immense unfathomable struggle it was no longer work to walk to the mailbox or eat a meal, there was something long and dull and difficult underneath. Once life went back to normal, it was normal again. You take a shower, you eat breakfast, you do whatever, you fall asleep, you wake up, you do it again and again. And again. Realizing your life doesn't become meaningful just because you're alive, you have to make it happen for yourself.
- A couple months after this he asked if anyone had ever written anything about me and I was like blah blah blah whatever embarrassing boring not much not great. When I asked him the same question he casually tossed off a list of songs, poems, stories. People love to write about their friend who almost died, he said, not bitterly. He was a little proud of it! The truth is that I would be a little proud of it too, but it is still fun to lord it over him a little. The question of writing about one's partner is always complicated, but doubly so in a situation like this. I never want to mythologize him because I don't have to, but I also do not want to give him the satisfaction of writing about him like he is some mystical creature who touched the threshold and now carries a part of it with him in the form of pure wisdom or whatever. He is very much alive and normal, hogging the covers, tapping away at his laptop, washing the dishes, cooing at the cat, and that is miracle enough.
- But the truth is that it is a privilege to live with an expert. A couple of weeks ago my brain felt fine but I could feel my heart pounding so fast that for a split second I wondered whether I was going to go full Cop Calls 911. Carlo was sitting on the couch doing something else and I burst in and basically laid down on top of him and asked whether he could feel it and he said yes but that we could slow it down together. Just breathe. Like this. In and out. In and out. Steady, even, steady. I can feel it slowing down already, he said. A hospital trick. Change your breathing, change your frame of mind. I stared at the orange glow from the streetlamp outside throwing shadows on the wall and tried to just do it, in and out. I could feel his chest rising and falling. People have been telling me about breathing for as long as I have had panic attacks, I know what it does and how you're supposed to do it. But in this moment something finally fit together. You don't need to "calm yourself down." You don't need to think the right kind of thoughts. You don't need to understand anything. All it takes is the bare minimum, the mechanics. In and out. That's enough, or it's enough to get you started, which is all.
Something longer to listen to:
Ken Burns on the Longform podcast
Pets, interiors:
Visit @apartment_poem on instagram for more, or to submit your own.
Roommates:
(No roommates this time! I forgive you since last week we had a bumper crop. Submit petty gripes about the people you share space with anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
Dreams:
(Submit dreams anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
I had a dream that I was chewing on something crunchy someone had given me. I realized it was pieces of broken glass. I started pulling the glass and plastic pieces out of my mouth, but I couldn't ever get them all. My mouth was pretty sore and cut up, but not as much as one would expect in a situation like that.
It’s 8:31 PM, May, 4, 2020. I just brushed my hair 100 times, wishing for beautiful long hair with each stroke. My hairs are each 1mm apart now, separated at the root from all that brushing. I feel a light tingle on my scalp, my ears are hot. Is my hair growing? I used to follow DIY YouTube videos showing you how to grow long hair fast. Then I’d put castor oil directly onto my scalp and flip my head upside-down, massaging for 10 minutes. I was light headed or fainting by the time I finished often well before the timer was done. Here I am again, later, now, doing the same thing differently. I see the same scene around me, why shouldn’t I have similar dreams every night and I do. I have similar dreams about saving babies or kittens, being critically mentally ill and in a sanatorium, revisiting high school and having to take several high school classes to graduate high school to finish University - so, the plot of Never Been Kissed but gone wrong (or, worse, since it’s a tragic comedy of sorts). Another thing you should know about me is that I am a Drew Barrymore fan.
Gentle reminder:
You don't have to go on twitter. It's not bad if you do, but you don't have to.
&&&:
Carlo's basketball corner:
Manu Ginoibli's 20 best plays of his career