A stranger: You should have seen her notebook, the size of a real book with hard edges. She wrote in uniform code in blue ballpoint "I" and "my" and "me" hundreds of times a page, slanting some to the right in all caps as the page got shorter, 'till she turned it. After that, Beginning Linguistics, which I took to be some bizarre and super-abstract math.
A sensation: Something drilled at me on the one plane, for three airports. IN the baggage claim, attempting calm/ruptured. What an easy metaphor. So sad. But beyond that, spent a day in the museums, a day in the kitchen, a day at the lake and nights on the floor. Swallowing cheap wine with the Palens, beer with the Geskes. Turning into the sound that I make when I'm listening, I realized that I could say anything, and pass it off. I just have that kind of face, easy and so sad. I got drunk once and stayed up until 3 talking to female cousins, hearing them out as they tried, one darkly, to anticipate their future selves through all nighters in the TV room, equipped with Monster Energy. Do they know what they're in for? I should have asked, because I was drunk enough to explain.
Kafka writes: "You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid."
Just got back from the Frozen North, and I remember it as a baited space. Like a target always out of view, hunted, I fitted myself to the task of embodying the multiple projection. And then I held a gun, fired, and was right back in myself, fast in my breathing and heart beat. Cold in the room under inquisition by the uncles, at once huddling into and deflecting projection. Hearing my heart beating with the same error as a Trumpeter Swan dredged in solid ice.
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