• yes yes YES • this • if only books hadn’t been the first ballast tossed overboard when my ever-loving roommate, back in brooklyn, wrestled me yesterday from two suitcases down to one • it’s okay • i’ll milk white noise as long as i can • then something else will happen such that i may read again • also full disclosure it was actually the second ballast • the first was extra journals • you’re carrying around empty pages, rachel, he said • i didn’t correct him that those are books, too, books i haven’t written yet • he’s right, of course, though • i’m pretty sure one can buy paper in denmark •
Today in between the wrap and the wrap party we each learned about our nudity thresholds and smoked some pot in the sauna.
Well, outside of it.
Dylan said, pointing through the window at two still reclined in the spa,That’s Anna and her boyfriend, Pierre.
Quel surprise! I said, taking the joint and, Those are their names, too, indicating my bare left, right breast, Anna, and Pierre, and pressing them against the glass to greet their homonyms. Echanté.
All this after I’d read The Marriage Plot—which I found in pre-read hardcopy in a bar back in Neukölln with free books and snatched up to have something else in English, even the same story I was already listening to on audio loop for comfort—aloud to Dylan while she lounged and I got completely naked at last before a beautiful German moth that was studying me from the ceiling.
And Iʼm not sure if Iʼm not finishing it because I donʼt feel like reading it or because I donʼt feel like reading at all or because I do feel like reading, and badly, and Iʼm afraid of what will happen when I finish it
She said,
Donʼt donʼt donʼt read it right now
The world is falling apart
I said,
But is it?
I’m trying to imagine a future in which our capacity for happiness is less than it currently is
Are we standing in a bread line?
Am I dead of infection from a coat-hangering?
Lice?
Is everyone we know and don’t drowned in the rising sea?
It’s easy for me—with my sunburn and sack of discount bruised apricots and only a vague uneasiness at how the friendly fisherman affirm, to each other, “Juif” after I introduce myself—to be like, Everything is fiiiiine
But, like, everything is not fine
It’s terrible
It always will be, in various ways, and as things change, we will make changes, and we will go on
I don’t know what else to say
I’m not saying don’t care
But, like, run for office
OR find a way to keep enjoying the new and increasingly horrific world orders
As much as you’re capable of enjoying anything
I am the engineer of a small-scale sea snail Holocaust
My knapsack is soaked in their seawater, which leaked from the olive box while, presumably, I biked home, but my journal is dry
Yesterday Sylka told me that her mother — 90 or 95 years old, I guess — had a dream about telling me, Rachel, remember me
