National Denmark Day

Now I have walked the river feeling envious of people laughing and eating and canoodling on blankets. Lax or no prohibition against open containers, apparently. Danish flags are everywhere, I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s National Denmark Day? I am sitting on some benchy step-type things above the canal in Christianhavn and watching a raven tear at the shredded lettuce and whatever else is inside some crumpled sandwich paper left by a trio of thuggish Danes who were supping here until recently, when they left without first becoming my friends.

I think I’ll take a walk over to Freetown Christiania, maybe buy a joint, see if that’ll help me sleep during a time more broadly regarded here as night. Yes. And on the way I will scan the ground for generous bits of remaindered cigarettes with which to roll a spliff.

One fellow in a clump of drunken others still eating sandwiches and getting drunker in the vicinity is singing Destiny’s Child.

I, too, want someone to say my name.

my voice is falling into disuse

May 23 / Berlin

She said,

Are you seeing people? Organizing your room? Sitting in a cafe? Sending emails? Exploring? Eating vegan currywurst?

I said,

I just got back to the apartment after fucking around in constructive, aid-while-abroad-seeking ways on Facebook for most of the day over two cappuccini and a salad and a piece the vegan bananenbrod with some kind of peanut butter frosting which was EXCELLENT btw at the yes same one not-really-vegan cafe

Trying to make plans for either tonight or tomorrow with the guy who works there, but he is I think Syrian under his German and so his English is pretty confusing

Nursing some confusion about What I Should Be Doing Instead

Feeling almost breathless with loneliness or some other kind of emotional vertigo

In going through my Facebook friends to see whom else I should tag in my latest plea post, I discovered that this guy I had a mad crush on over my years in Boston with whom things never really got off the ground died in a bike accident four years ago

When I think about it I get cold all over

I included him on my get out the vote for Clinton email in November 2016

He’d already been dead for two years

I just redownloaded Tinder, although Iʼm not sure if thatʼs a bad idea or a self-forgiving one

My voice is falling into disuse

She said,

What a swarm of things you must be feeling

I said,

How can you tell?

A guy who was my immediate bestie on our freshman orientation backpacking trip sixteen years ago just wrote back being like Oh yeah I got sick of New York so a friend and I started an investment bank in Bucharest and for sure you can come stay on my pull-out for a couple of weeks let me look at the calendar

And Pavel just messaged that he found me a place to stay on Île d’Oléron, which is evidently an island off the Atlantic coast of France, so now this is thoroughly a fairy tale I am unready for

This is very exciting if I can just figure out how to be scared only a non-crippling amount of the time

I need to go to bed so I can get up and keep trying to move forward in some way even if itʼs not in the BEST way

She said,

Get up and do 10 push-ups first thing

I said,

Okay I will

First I will put on a bra because how I look is the most important thing about me

And then I will do ten pushups

Eleven, even

Itʼs weird how I waited for this for so long and then all of a sudden it happened

WEʼRE ALIVE AND ITʼS SO TERRIBLE BUT THERE IS NO OTHER CHOICE

good morning to my first day at this casa rural

July 12 / Arrarats

Good morning to my first full day at this casa rural that has no address. Dreams about drinking rosé in weirdly unbreakable glasses. Woke to pee and then couldn’t sleep again for a while for all my anxieties about new heights of isolation. Finally put my last bandaid on the cut on my finger from trying to open my beer in unorthodox and ill-conceived ways yesterday on the bus from San Sebastián, which during my sleep had grown dry and painful, and that comfort let me drift back off, into dreams about meeting men for photoshoots and elaborate breakfasts, a dual impossibility for the foreseeable waking future.

I am on a nude beach up the coast

I said,

I am at a nude beach up the coast from Barcelona

Crying naked among strangers is…weird

But good

Two separate and very sweet young men have come up to help me with the sunscreen on my back

No lechery at all

Their penises dangling unobtrusively around my ear or so

Then gone back to their girlfriends on their beach blankets

It was so lovely, the neighborliness

Also being touched

Here is my tushie

[I sent her a picture]

— I think — the sun is fucking up my photographic discernment

So it could be someone else’s tushie

But I’m pretty sure it’s mine.

with a man is different

August 7 / Tangier

I feel an uptick in anxiety over pretty much all the pararomantic connections I’m cultivating with various “men” “in” my “life” right now.

Certainly it’s because my chronic loneliness is now compounded by an understanding that to be in Morocco without a man is a different — at the least, more reputedly sinister, and perhaps empirically worse — proposition that to be here with one.

Walking around the Medina with Rasheed last night was so easy — even as the truth is he has no particular use for my body, we present as a man who belongs here and a woman who belongs to him — but what will it be like when I am alone and straying farther from the established path? Is my operating belief that I am enough to withstand whatever this will be?