I spent the night with him. For the first time ever. Even though I was over the idea of him. And, when finally--it just didn’t feel like anything important. It didn't feel like anything. With no future, and no past; it just was, we just were. Together. Beside each other.
Or maybe, the fact that it felt so meaningless confirms that I have in fact moved on and that I was in fact held back by the idea of, but perhaps no longer am. It confirmed progress, I think.
The funeral cortege is a symbol of this very concept. It is a series of relations—first-degree relatives, extended family, dear friends, neighbors, and community members—all of which are present to mourn the loss and to support the family in their time of need. This cortege is led by the deceased themselves and those who bear him or her to the location of final rest symbolizing the route they have come and now must continue to travel alone. It serves to reveal the path and teach the way—literally—that must be taken to reach this geographical location. The path of the cortege also represents life as a journey and extends the metaphor into death, representing the passage of the spirit from this realm to what lies beyond.
The funeral cortege is a tangible symbol of progress—the progression of a life to death, the journey of the bereaved through their grief.last night, for the life of me, I could not remember the name of my favorite cemetery in Florence. I didn’t even guess the cardinal direction from the Arno correctly. And to think, just a few years ago, like Fellini’s dark dreamers in la Voca della Luna, I practically lived there…San Miniato al Monte.
It was no where in my immediate memory. Not the name anyway, just the climb, the colors, the stones, the breeze, the view. I am deeply grateful for the journals I kept while I was there. Especially my handheld moleskin filled with Italian vocabulary and directions and memories and notes about the nouns (people, places, and things) that I never wanted to forget. But, like scattering ashes, in time, we forget.
This spring, I met the writer Wendy Waters. She talked to us about writing. Not so much about how to do it, but why we do it. How to get started and the value of doing so. Write everything. My journal group leader in the same program reminded us all that there are times that you cannot go back to. Sometimes they are exactly the ones you want to go back to. So by writing them, you can go back. You immortalize your life against your dying memory. I want to get back into my life, I want to get back into my writing. It takes ritual to make ceremony.Reflection on Saturday/Sunday Oct 25-26: 1:30AM-3 AM
He’s giggling. Again. He’s always giggling. It’s sort of annoying and high pitched, but it’s the way he laughs when he’s nervous or stoned. I think he was both. He walks both of us into his room, flips on the light. “Urgh! TOO BRIGHT!” He walks over to switch on a small red lamp and turns off the TOO BRIGHT overhead light. Looking at the bed, he sees his kitten, “AW! Kitty!” I plop onto the foot of his bed while I pet the kitten that his housemate found on the side of a busy road a few weeks ago. A searches noisily for a match and lights some patchouli incense then joins me on the bed. Z takes off his shoes and sits on the hard floor. He played with the kitten there on the ground using his hand and apartment keys as toys before joining us on the bed. The incense continue to burn and A insists on playing music that is evidently only irritating to me. The boys are ecstatic to listen to all the songs they always dreamed about listening to totally stoned. Z sings along and he’s laying next to me on the bed, all crumpled up, folded in half because it’s the only way we can all fit on the bed together. His chest is vibrating with his voice and I can feel him next to me. His wrist lays loosely on the mattress next to mine. I see a ring on his index finger and wonder what its significance is. We are all still fascinated by the kitten who is taking turns pouncing on each of us. Each of the boys announce a profound sense of déjà vu and I am again left out of their hallucinations. Once in awhile my tired head rest on Z’s shoulder. A is still talking though I desperately wish him to hush. I just want to enjoy my company in silence while we each breathe in the incense and contemplate our own lives and the careless placement of our own hands too close to each other’s. Z finally responds to the tempting proximity of my hand to his; he begins lighting tickling my fingers with his and I follow his lead. I think about how it must feel different to him because he’s stoned. I’m just bored.
The scene reminds me of bits and pieces of a relationship I participated in several falls ago. The similarities are as follows: the boy was a friend of a friend, we listened to music late at night, he had an artistic flare with long brown hair, we held hands and he fell quickly, sometimes he was stoned and sometimes it caused problems.
And I just read on his profile that 6 minutes ago he ‘just wants to be close to you’ and that he ‘has a tendency to fall instantly in love with anyone who shows him the least bit of affection.’ Brilliant.I’m currently reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs. So far so good; I like things I can relate to which so far is at least 2 of the chapters (I’ve been ignoring the ones that are composed of pop-cultural references that I do not understand/care about). Thusly the chapter’s I’ve enjoyed are “This is Emo,” “Billy Sim, “What Happens When People Stop Being Polite.” These chapters are about cultural constructs of love & romance (and how we will never be able to have true love because of our crippling expectations), The Sims (and how we play video games about living instead of living), and The Real World (and how members of our generation, instead of being who they are, now choose the type of categorical identity they think they should be based on the archetypes available on some 21 seasons of this pseudo-reality show), respectively. Which, to me, is totally fucking brilliant.
And I also love the way Klosterman has defined postmodern, because the term can finally be put into perspective. He quotes an uncited source in the footnote on page 35: Postmodern—“Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, art.”
Last week, I came around the block on my way to the laboratory. A man approached me in a near panic: “Where’s Receiving?!” He took me by surprise and I did not immediately recognize what it was he was asking.
“Receiving for what?” I guessed that he was referring to the Shipping & Receiving area for one of the buildings. But then it came to me quickly: he was asking about the City Receiving Hospital.
He asked me, not only because he really needed to know, but, because he figured I would know. He figured I would know because he thought I was a doctor. He thought I was a doctor because I was wearing scrubs. But I was wearing scrubs because I was on my way to embalming laboratory. I did, of course, know where the hospital was, but not because of my familiarity with its waiting room, but rather its morgue.
After class, I poor myself a glass of wine and walk across the room, balancing the glass in one hand and carrying my laptop in the other. It occurs to me to move with poise and caution as to not spill the red wine on the white carpet. The image of red wine on white reminds me of a boy I was entertaining flirtations with at the very end of 2007 and the first few days of the ecstatic state of 2008 (which seems like ages ago now).
He was a total train wreck of a man—a boy living in the body of a man (he still is). Late 20s, mortgage, frozen dinners, deadbeat roommate, a steady job at his father’s company where the prodigal son reigned supreme—he had it all with nothing at all. Nick was a total clown, always looking for attention, and loving anything he got. He dressed to impress the Abercrombie crowd, sprayed ‘Obsession’ cologne all over his body, and drank to excess for the entertainment of others more than his own. And it was so appealing at the time. And as the story goes, I was feeling reckless in a 20-something moral whirlwind myself, so I found myself spending my entire Christmas break, day and night, at Nick’s house which was like vacationing at a fraternity house. It didn’t take long for me to notice dark red wine stains all over his white carpet and also his bed. When I mentioned this to him, Nick told me, matter-of-factly, of the night he spilled red wine all over himself and that he had matching stains on a pair of white underpants (which he promptly showed me).
Thusly I walk carefully so that I never end up like Nick.
Playlist from that New Year’s weekend romance:
“Sweetest Girl” Wyclef Jean
“Take You There” Sean Kingston
“Moments Have You” & “Fallout” John Frusciante
For the first time in never, I think I am ready to be in a relationship. I think that I have moved on enough from my ex-beloved and out of the middle of that something I was in with him/without him. I am no longer “in the middle of something.” And I feel ready. Almost anxiously so. But I feel this danger in being so ready. It makes me feel like I might settle for something/someone just to have it whereas all my life I’ve settled for nothing in hopes of waiting for something more meaningful, something more real, something more like love. I don’t know what opportunity looks like, or feels like. For now, I find myself waiting. I fear that I wait in fear. First, I need to learn what love looks like, how to recognize it, how to feel it.
I tend to wander around my apartment naked. Today I shirked off all my clothes as soon as I got in from class and started a batch of chocolate chip cookies (I wanted to have a treat for my sister and also to treat my peers in the event that I am elected tomorrow). Afterwards, I bleached my entire bathroom and did some reading. I talked on the phone for the first time to this mystery blind date Jewish vegan guy for almost 2 hours (he talks a lot, too much, but the best part was reminiscing about hiking and camping and dark bodies of cold water). All while in my underclothes. Now I’m scratching my head, drinking French press coffee left over from the morning, listening to Kate Nash, studying Confucianism, and preparing for a quiz that I must take online in less than an hour. From my window on my perch in the city, I can see the lights of the Bridge and the Casino tonight. Tonight my heart aches for the shores of Sebago—all her dark mystery and the baring of soul and body she inspired. If I look straight down I see a swimming pool all lit up, sanitary, and cold.
I remember my first autumn of college. My world was fresh and new and I saw it full of possibility. I spent a lot of time crafting my ideas and writing. I bought a lot of CDs and took a lot of photos. I remember updating my myspace page like it was my job. I was developing a digital image. Perhaps that’s why I fell so in love with The Postal Service, Give Up. With its sort of alien blips and arcade beeps—it had this technologic edge. It’s young, it’s hip, it’s pop. It has this image like it doesn’t care—it doesn’t care that we are all going to die. The music hops and bops along, fancy and free—the listener is starting to feel much the same way, smiling and dancing, and the fact that the lyrics are a haunting reminder of his/her own mortality flies entirely under radar.
One night, more than a few weeks ago after wine with my ex-beloved, I sent a drunken text to a poet/professor/muse of mine. Knowing he was also in the process of moving on from the middle of some matters of the heart,
I asked: “How in the world do you ever fall out of love?!”
He replied: “I think you can’t really. I think you somehow have to honor your feelings (not resent or deny them) and simultaneously look for a time when you want to move on.”
