Already Iʼve lapsed into the insanity of someone whoʼs gone from a too-social existence to almost-total solitude
The truth is I am terrified at all times, and to pretend that all I notice is the sunshine and beer and new friends is the only answer I know.
(Although maybe thatʼs exactly whatʼs at the root of such annoying manners at their most manifest, a vain effort to keep the demons of consciousness at bay?)
I slept so badly last night, mostly because of anxiety about getting up in time to do everything necessary in the apartment and be packed and make it to my bus on time, but also I think because Iʼve been on a cocktail of melatonin and some kind of over-the-counter antihistamine to get on this time zone but skipped them last night because I was afraid of oversleeping HOWEVER in the one good, tranquil, unworried hour of sleep I got, I was dreaming about us hiking in the Old World, and it was great.
Dreams about militant peace-building, ritual piercing. Mine, navel, was off-center, and I couldn’t dream-decide before waking whether to care.
Last night Cedar and I stayed up excellently late and talked about women being angry. He listened well, and cut my toenails for me, most meaningfully the overthick rhino horn one I have grown afraid of.
I’m going to continue on to anywhere at all instead of back to Berlin. I’ll book tickets to some rural intermediate cities and take three days traveling to Brussels.
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
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.
