Dearest;
I must learn how to un-alchemise this heart of gold, because it grows more worthless each day. I’m spun into an unpredictable mess, with dirty underwear lining my floors like carpet, and wet towels are growing ecosystems of their own. In a way, I am a creator. Self-destruction is a story that people want to read.
I am life itself most days, and other days I wander my apartment gazing at my walls like they’re an untouchable horizon and brewing potfuls of stomachaches in my Mr. Coffee. And even that is life, as deeply as it can be.
My doorknob came off in my hands last week, and would not return to its post; the mechanisms leering and jingling in my palms. It did not go unnoticed by my conscious self that I did not repair it immediately. Something about coming and going through a door with no handle felt, in my unhinged state, just right. Like I had discovered something meaningful in a minor inconvenience.
As I exist within my day, filling it up with half-breaths and mild eyes, I find small tasks to show my progress. I can, in fact, measure my time by which objects I return to their proper places: a sample of tea, four or five letters from the IRS, a calligraphy set, a key from a rental in North Carolina with a lime green carabiner. I only remembered that word, carabiner, by lifting it off the table and flipping it through my fingers like I was trying to polish the dust from it, and from the dictionary that lives in the folds of my brain.
That’s how I build my curiosity these days; by holding something in my hand until it feels the weight of importance. Then, me and the item sit together in our heaviness until I remember—this is trash, like me.
I am not trash, my love. I merely say that because some days my life feels an awful lot like garbage. But not, I suppose, in a bad way. Even garbage has a life of its own, a possible gendering; it even has my old doorknob now. Garbage, if may say it, is the next big thing and we should all keep a wary eye on it. We speak so many words, not knowing they’re just rough translations of trash. It is a universal language. Listen for it on the radio; it lives on static channels, in the in-between places, like I do, and like you do, I believe as well.
Be vigilant.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, take a minute to deal with whatever that just was👆, and go easy on yourself for the rest of the day.