Loft Life Residency Week #3
Holes, being sick (derogatory), and Reddit.
I’ve been on r/Dreams recently. I love analyzing dreams and understanding what I’m saying to myself or working through, or what someone else is trying to say to me. A user commented that my dreams are, “very nuanced”, which I would agree with. Most nights I have a preliminary dream that I’m walking somewhere and then suddenly fall down huge, open stairs, which causes me to suddenly wake up about 10 minutes after falling asleep. Apparently this one is a common stress dream confronting my fear of failure or a loss of control, though it doesn’t take a Reddit doctor to figure that out. Once as a child I had a dream that Bill Clinton had a helicopter that landed on top of my elementary school and he saved us all from a school shooter (how did he save my whole elementary school in a helicopter is perhaps a hint to the nuance of my brain). I experience déjà vu a lot and sometimes experience visits from dead loved ones in my dreams. These dreams are usually us reliving a memory together and I say something like “but you’re dead now, right?” and then I wake up.
I caught up with a friend this week who is so in love with his girlfriend that he is reading her dissertation and is having a custom ring made for her. I saw one of my favorite couples this week (Kobe and Lily, pictured above), too. I needed to remember that this exists and happens to people, especially to people I know.
I was punished a lot as a child and grew up in a religion that reinforced that I should be and deserved to be punished. Every day was instilled with this feeling that I was paying back for something I did before I was aware of it. This knee-jerk idea wasn’t waiting for me to get to Hell: I was building it on Earth with my own hands. The call from inside the house that I’m born with a wrongness inside me doesn’t go away but I don’t entertain it as authority much anymore. I started thinking about this as I was revisiting some work of Marie Howe this week. Here’s one of my favorite poems:
Last week I talked about fantasizing falling through glass. Friday night I went on a run after work (in the dark) and tripped about .25 mi into the run. It feels strange to fall: to initially trip, realize what’s happening, and then try to steady yourself as best you can. When I fell everything slowed down: knowing the hard and final concrete would be there to catch me but knowing that it wouldn’t cushioning anything. I caught myself with my right hand and scraped my knees. I usually fall while running about once a year (only to keep myself humble, of course!) and running while blood is dripping out of you is an incredibly freeing experience: nothing could stop you and nothing will be able to. I also love running while blood is gushing from my limbs to see the reaction of passersby: watching them piece together in real time that I’m bleeding, thinking about telling me that I’m bleeding, and realizing that I know I’m bleeding and running anyway.
Last night I ordered sushi and sat on my floor and felt something starting in my body, the notion that there is a tiny weight that’s been placed on both of your cheeks and feels heavier by the hour. That sudden feeling of hanging on and gripping to normal that your body does before the sickness bursts in. After gaslighting myself for a few hours, my head started pounding. I tried to fall asleep but was shivering: I was so cold my teeth were gnashing. I thought I was going to die from how cold I was in my room. A little later I woke up covered in a pool of my own sweat, choking on hot air and wondering if I’ll ever be able to sleep away how much my head hurt. I woke up every few hours, half to make sure I was still alive and half to make sure I didn’t sleep in too late. In all this, I had a stress dream where I performed in Failsafe and I couldn’t remember my lines. Johncarlo wasn’t even mad at me (tfw you have the best scene partner ever, ever, ever, EVER), and Phil wouldn’t let me look at a script because he said “I knew them instinctively” (even in my dreams you have faith in me, wtf). When I finally woke up and showered, I felt so out of it that it hurt to stand up for too long.
This is my first time being sick after living with a significant other. I’m the only person I have to take care of me. I wish I had something more profound to say but all I can think is: this sucks.
I went to my first ballet class in 3 years! We learned choreography to “Berghain” by Rosalía and it was beautiful. I took ballet on and off as a pre-teen and also in college. In college I had a movement teacher who took all 40-something of us girls in my program and had one-on-one meetings where she asked us all one question: “How do you feel about your body?” I later learned most of us ended up crying in response and all of us confessed how much we hate ourselves and our bodies. Since college a lot has changed in my body.
On the way home I walked by my old college dorm and saw a poster for a project one of my peers released. It’s funny because we worked on a project together freshman year and I remember experiencing a lot of frustration working with her; she would cancel rehearsal to go to take multiple SoulCycle classes a day and would spend half our time together talking at me about the C-list celebrity she lost her virginity to. I genuinely hope she’s well now.
This started as a joke, but I recently realized I love saying the word “hole” to describe where someone enters during a sexual act. HOLE! How ambiguous and funny, and nasty! Hole! I just read something another Substacker wrote that posting a link on your personal Instagram to your Substack is like “posting a picture of my hole to my friends and family”, which is also how I feel sometimes (hi, friends and family).
What’s in a hole? How deep is it? What awaits in the hole? With the naked eye you can never see the end of it, so maybe it’s better to think of holes as just portals. I can’t wait for people to Google me and find this paragraph.
I’m at the Think Coffee on 4th Avenue in the East Village and I have experienced some of the worst dates of my life here. I’m watching one happen in front of me, too. Something nasty spews in this Think Coffee. I once went on a date here in 2015 in which the guy I was with wanted to go to Duane Reade with me. Like in the Boyfriend way of doing mundane tasks together. I did have to go to Duane Reade but I got so nervous - not at all because I liked him, but because I wanted him gone and I didn’t know how to fully say “no” yet - that I went and all I could think to get were cotton swabs. I bought a 1000 pack and they lasted the rest of college.
I cannot hear out of my left ear right now and it feels like I have an empty Airpod sitting in it. I never feel like I’m doing enough with my time here. I can only hear the soft crunch of yet another menthol and cherry flavor cough drop hit together against my teeth and become macerated in my mouth before I put my index finger back to my molars to fish away the remnants that get stuck in my teeth. Recently some days have felt like entire lifetimes condensed into a single afternoon, and some minutes feel like they take up a whole century. When I go to sleep at night I watch my whole year flash at once and I remember each part that led me to what I’ve done. I can feel myself applying the pressure I do to most situations: to hurry up and make this something of this already.
Often I feel frustrated because I have a feeling in me I have never felt fully expressed or understood by language alone. I once had a teacher say that if you can’t describe something it’s because you don’t know it. I can describe it: it feels like a slow sludge that gets over everything and steadily runs into every crevice of my mind, getting under my nails and unable to wipe it fully off. I constantly feel like I’m chasing something I can never pin down and kill; because if I could kill it, I could at least know what is was. Not being able to capture it makes me feel incredibly immature as a writer, like I’ve nothing to show because I’ve not been able to exhume this. I may go on the rest of my life running and setting traps and stalking this thing until I can capture it and inspect it. Especially this year, I have met a lot of people that have brought me closer to this anonymous feeling, like a cloud that is just within my reach. Once I’m about to touch it and finally understand, finally witness the very thing in its full ideation that drove me to all the years of tracking my feelings, therapy, self-help, meditation, self-medicating, everything, just to try and be open for it to reveal itself to me, it dissipates and moves again.
A few things:
Yet again, thank you so much for reading this. Whatever led you here, I’m grateful for it. Here’s the Spotify playlist for this week, featuring some songs that hold very specific meaning and some that I just like.
Btw - have a great Thanksgiving!: