truly sorry about the video in this one
or maybe you've already seen it, in which case i am sorry about sending you something you've already seen. either way my bad
Apartment Poem is free, but you can support it (and me) here.
“Perhaps you should / Call money ‘green zinnias.’”
Dorothea Paas - Anything Can’t Happen
Hello:
I dreamed that I was trying to keep the cat inside the car. I dreamed that I was trying to find the ice machine in a motel as big as a city. I dreamed there were mirrors everywhere, that I had the wrong footwear for a climb up the mountain, that a man from my past was asking me a lot of very thoughtful and compassionate questions about my current life. I woke up in a puddle of sweat every time. Terror sinking its teeth into the softest part of my brain.
I muted the phrase “this time last year.” I muted the word “anniversary.” I forgot to call the pharmacy for like the fourth day in a row. A few nights I had to do the old Seinfeld/colouring book routine. The yoga kind of petered out. I was still riding the bike, at least. I pictured each individual part of my body lit up, glowing, one by one. Fingers, elbows, shoulders, ribcage, all the way down.
I went to the optometrist and was definitely the youngest person in the waiting room by about two hundred years. When the doctor went Better like this or like this? I kept taking too long to answer. You’re thinking about it too much, she said. She put in the drops and then showed me a red dot and a green line and a picture of a house in the distance. Later she showed me the computerized scan of the surface of my eyes. It looked like when I walk into Carlo’s office and he’s working on a computer game and it all looks incredibly fake, just beautiful colours and shapes on a graph. It’s very hard to get a clear picture, she said, because of your whole thing. I walked home dizzy. All the light pouring in.
I got a new deadline and an unexpected paycheque. I bought some books and a pair of sneakers for the spring and it felt a bit like buying presents for someone I had never met. I thought about a thing I’d read that said sometimes you feel a particular kind of uncomfortable just before moments of serious change. Like a volcano. The pressure building. I flipped that idea over and over, the way you’d fiddle with a quarter in your jacket pocket.
One day it was so warm that Deragh and Doro came over and we sat on the porch just talking until the light disappeared. Doro correctly pointed out that I had been kind of dodging the question of how I was feeling for weeks. The truth is that I have been working on the line edits for this book and it is hard in a way that I am sort of embarrassed about, and I assume no one wants to hear about it, like they will find it as tedious as I do. The whole thing seems like it should be easier by now, either because I am so close to the end or because I am so used to the material. Still, sometimes when I am going over the hardest parts or when I imagine other people reading them I still want very badly to eat my desk, or dig a hole to the centre of the earth and climb into it, or shoot myself directly into the sun. Plus the dreams.
The next day, Rudrapriya and I walked up and down the railpath with the wind pushing us backward, which was actually very funny and nice. When I got home my neighbour was walking up her front steps, and there was a young guy with airpods in aggressively hammering a FOR SALE sign into her front lawn. “I noticed you’re selling your house,” I said, but the guy was hammering so loud that I didn’t hear her answer.
In the evening I went for a walk by myself. I called my grandmother to ask how it felt to be invincible and she said not technically until July. When I asked whether they’d put any cool microchips in her vaccine I could hear my mother laughing in the background. I stopped at the fancy wine place for my biannual bottle of fancy wine and they gave me a snack-sized bag of Puffy Cheetos with my purchase, which did a kind of Proustian thing to me because th*s t*me l*st y*ar I was eating approximately one large bag of those fucking things every two days. I had forgotten about that. There are certain things you just forget about, which seems good. I lingered near the thrift store, staring into the windows, but didn’t see anything I wanted. Everyone who passed by me was talking about the same thing. I have been waiting to feel that spring feeling of revelation, euphoria, openness, but it hasn’t happened yet. On bad days I can worry that it is no longer available to me, but mostly I know that’s not it. I can see it glimmering in the distance. Sometimes it just takes a little longer to get there.
&&&:
“I’m not leaving unless it’s to go from my tent straight to an apartment.” A Year of Resistance in the Moss Park Encampment by Derrick Black
Pre-order Doro’s new album, which you will start seeing on best-of lists and review sites and in other people’s newsletters very very soon
Carlo’s basketball corner:
'We Did That': Inside the WNBA’s Strategy to Support Raphael Warnock