Everyone is esoteric

grand delusions of loneliness and the crowded path out

I pray to God for nothing to say. The things come anyway so I pray for the words to say them. He breaks no silence; I must do it starved.

I feel simple beyond meaning. Reading Joan Didion and not knowing - for the most part - what the fuck she’s talking about. Every perfect sentence is in collusion with a bewildering one but it’s gospel to the Girlhood so I guess not. Perhaps I am too serious for my own good. Perhaps I am missing the big joke that it’s not about the substance but the aesthetic alone, the image of moleskins/ Ladybird/ Jane Birkin’s bag answer enough to the questions beat beat beating in a heart and it’s me who’s doing entirely too much, trying to decipher the shape of a shadow on my bedroom wall when other dreamers have understood it’s only there to reassure them of the form they take in the day. Say it really is all Orion Carloto and Sylvia Plath and Patti Smith. Suffering as pretence to the inevitable auto-fictive novel, because what to imagine if not more of the self? Lace and youth as that old thing to waste. (But not really, not like this.)

What I know is so small. The way the dearest things I own are mostly ugly and sentimental. A poorly crocheted beanie¹; a stained yellow sweater²; scribbled notes on ripped out pieces of paper³; the most hideously customised Lego man⁴; various copies of books that have been chewed on by the dogs⁵; cheap grocery store mugs⁶; perfume bottles empty but for a few drops⁷, the scent at the nozzle still strong. But what’s the point of knowing things that pertain only to you, however truly? What can you really build with pillars from a world that’s your’s alone?

I seem to be unable to access the collective performance that pays so well. Melancholic nostalgia made particularly bearable in brown leather tabis. “Rotting” not as decay but transformation, the warm chrysalis of a “before” that by definition, assures an “after”. If a story is simply how you tell it, the esoterics have chosen the best words to do so. The sign on the forehead stating: do not approach, something other resides, is only temporary for them after all. It’s a deceivingly large distance between delphic and disturbed, though. And still I can’t claim either.

So, what do I know?

I know everything around me reminds me of something else and everything I own is always near me. I know I am evading the laws of space and time once more by swimming too easily between everything I was and am and never will be. This is not how it’s meant to go, I know. You are meant to leave, you are meant to splinter, you are meant to look into the face of something new and betray yourself by the forgetting. I know I am waiting, still, for an undefined someone to tell me an undefined something. The answer at last, shouted in my ear when I am eyes wide and looking so it cannot be mistaken for a thought of my own.

I know the music I listen to is too fast and too fun for the life I have chosen. That beneath my weight, the stallion that is my whole body and my whole brain and this whole country to run it around in is losing its wildness. Click click hyah, too gentle for the whip, too weak for the jump, too still for too long to think of anything but the questions I don’t know if I really want answered.

I kick and scream that I am different in all the wrong ways, that I know all the wrong things. I curse every second wind that comes just as I grow tired of the isolation, new rooms of myself opening up more and more and more. But then someone reads my words and there’s a tether. And I read something else and it all joins. All of us taking ownership over parts of each other, all the while crying how we are so alone.

From Louise Glück:

You are like me, whether or not you admit it.

Unsatisfied, meticulous. And your hunger is not for experience

but for understanding, as though it could be had in the abstract.

Then it’s daylight and the world goes back to normal.

My mother’s ring on my finger, my grandmother’s bangles on my arms. A watch gifted by a beloved friend. Headphones bought for me by my brother. As I write J texts and by my feet the dogs stretch out and sigh. Later there will be a stranger on the street. They will pass my house and walk across the fallen leaves. They will lay down at night next to someone who loves them and maybe on their bedside is a rosary. Perhaps it is a decoration, or perhaps they run their fingers over the beads and mean it, praying for an answer, praying for the words they fear that can by no one else be understood.

1. made for max

2. worn on the last day with max

3. messages written at night for J to see in the morning before work (my hand: i love you, his: more)

4. from a trip in the US with my cousins

5. mostly henry’s doing (books are the enemy because when one is open he doesn’t get attention)

6. my favourite: a jon snow one from coles

7. ‘michael’ by michael kors: the smell of being 19