I feel that nostalgia fall always brings: 10 marzo 2014 – 4 abril 2014
The days feel as if they were whizzing past, streaked, blurry greens and grays swirling into the colours of fall. Wrinkled, crackly tan leaves have started appearing everywhere. I feel that nostalgia fall always brings, misting off the tips of fading leaves, invisible, only perceived by the inner sixth sense.
Like how a place feels strange and unfamiliar when you’re about to leave and everything is empty, bare, vacant. All the people have gone their separate ways, unraveled away from each other like an untangling rainbow of yarn, each strand belonging to a different world.
It feels, as the Germans in the hostel in Montevideo told me is a theme in geography, that everything is interconnected. The world is a network, and relationships are everywhere. There are infinite influences, and an infinite amount of the influenced.
We smoked, and I realize I have forgotten everything I’ve once known. I’ve forgotten the way distraction spurts out everywhere. I can’t focus because everyone’s true personalities are so exaggerated, as if God turned up the contrast, or the volume, or both.
Julio is commanding, “escucháme!” and Bryce acts how I feel in my mind, bursts of laughter and bouncing back and forth on his chair. Andrés is loud and silly and fast-talking, “Cerveza, cerveza!” The girls Sonja and Olivia are completely quiet, anxiety seemingly secreting slowly from the tops of their heads. Caroline is serious, proper, and she laughs at only the funniest things.
You know, I think we all laugh at very different things. Me, I laugh at everything. I think I laugh just to process my emotions, regardless of which emotions I am feeling.
All these judgments are reflections of my inner anxieties. I order Andrés to get the Bob Marley CD and he stomps off determined to obtain it, like the archetypal young hero. It’s because the music is the most important thing, and I trust that he understands my interests. I think I was him in a past life, around the same time I was a boy.
The paranoia seeps in like a heavy liquid metal and I can feel their eyes peeking into my mind.
Caroline sings a French song, something Kan would like. The rain tinkles in the background. Everyone’s pretending at grownups. Together we’re a force of squares, my energy drained by the normal rigidness north Americans possess. The French are subtly humorous, clever and cheeky.
Buenas ondas:
A cardboard box wall with a hidden drowsy kitten at the top, sitting on the windowsill writing with legs crossed and one foot resting on that kitten’s cage as support, while the rain drips and splatters into the mud, sky reflected in puddles, chickens passing by pecking for food, wet droplets sliding from the tin roof, slithering over grape vines and immature berries.
A candle burns inside, illuminating el maté, a bag of honey and green tea flavored yerba, bananas, a book almost finished. Yellow leaves cover a blue truck, both colors bright, primary. Night twinkling unobtrusively out of the ether, becoming the rain and falling into upturned palms and splattering windowpanes.
There’s something very interesting I forgot to mention. Sometimes I feel like a specific girl is competing with me, or is jealous of me and is trying to make me jealous in a weird, transference/defense mechanism kind of way. And I love not involving myself in it at all. Unresponsive, uncompetitive, siempre sola al borde del amanecer.
Both her and Izzy say the most conformist things, as if they thought I wanted to do what is “normal” or socially appropriate or mature, or right, or belonging to their idea of cool, which to me is stupid and boring. All I want is to get high and move my body in weird positions and start laughing at nothing.
I want to explore at night, creeping like a cat, write poetry, talk about how the mind twists and turns and runs into dead ends, how it’d feel to be particular animals. I don’t care about being sexy, I don’t even want to talk about guys or who we think is hot or past boyfriends, none of this matters.
I want to write for infinity, walk alone in the early morning mist. Before dawn I want to look up at the tinkling miniature suns blazing millions of miles away, the light reaching my eyes already dead and dim by the time it arrives. I want to not be so concerned about the possible varying perspectives others may have of me. I want to be a strange, inverted mirror, reflecting an opposite demeanor depending on the input. I want to be a bit crazier than I am now.
Pesadilla is my daemon. My soul is trapped in her eyes, in her cry at night to be let in through the window. Her gray-silver fur is what my skin looks like from the underside. Her heightened senses are my own when I’m high, when I’m dreaming, when I’m almost asleep and about to twitch to alertness. Her whiskers are my own invisible antennae, probing everything, sensitive to invisible stimuli.
Her tiny, agile body was mine before my birth, our stillness the same high-frequency vibrating silence. Our explorations stem from the same curiosity of the natural, breathing, ephemeral world. We bathe together in the sun the same way we bathed together before consciousness in the underworld, her pupils miniature portals to that other dimension, forever pulling me closer and deeper until I’m lost and our noses touch.
Mesmerized, hypnotized, until a third being steps forward and offers her hand, one and the same, a hide-and-go-seek game between worlds. Our anxieties manifest themselves in autistic-like symptoms, a fear of too much stimuli, noise, a need for aloneness to recharge.