tell me why you never promised that you wanted it all

i picked up listening to that podcast again, and i have to pause it to answer a call from c. we hit it off at the holiday party when she came over and said "hi clare i heard you're gay too, why didn't i know this," and ever since i've been trying to keep up with where we're at in being friends. it was so easy to talk to her but i also feel very aware of how different our lives are. she's younger than me by a couple years but doesn't seem it, knows all the shit i don't ever want to learn about in our industry, has a different team and different responsibilities. i still don't really know what we have in common besides being queer and feeling alienated at our jobs, but it's like something is there anyway.... something about her i feel very connected to, like, innately. at the party she talked at length about wanting to get out and do something meaningful and make a difference in the world and i didn't have the heart to tell her i think that's awfully naive. her and her wife eloped last year and her wife is colombian and in the military doing her residency and now they live in tacoma and eventually plan to go overseas once she's a full-on doctor, but neither of them know anyone... but at least her wife has co-workers. and like idk what kind of future that gives c, but she's given me multiple times enough of a sense of struggle that i am actively glad to be single. nobody knows how we're going to make it out of all this.... anyway, we catch up for a moment but it has that weird horrible anxiety of not wanting to waste someone else's time the whole time. i can't figure that out about working remotely. why are people so set on not bothering with talking about life and how do i convince them to just treat me like an actual person and talk to me. she's certain her whole team is interviewing and will be leaving and i'm just like cool cool cool. i have to fight myself to be authentic when she asks how i'm doing and say i'm deep in the slump of winter and know we're not really close to being through it but believing it all the same... but that soon it'll be seed starting time and that's at least a light at the end of the tunnel. she says i need to come out there, that all her neighbors live off their own gardens, and i get a mental image of the flowers in portland, then she says she feels like she just works alone all day every day and has no friends and doesn't go anywhere and i say same and she laughs like i'm just going along with her but i'm not. idk. i think maybe she forgot i don't live in the city anymore. i also associate her with her hometown in maryland which is very close to where a is from and that gives me a weird sense of unrelatability. like i know what east coast people are like and i don't care for it. but i like her a lot. i go back to the podcast and think about how lonely she must be and unhappy. it's amazing the connection you can have to someone just building from the foundation of being queer. but i also wonder if i'm projecting onto her, imagining a different future and life for her than the one she's actively chosen as a way to make a friend out of her. i think about this all the time, i think bc of l but maybe just pandemic overhang, of how constant my impulse is to imagine how other people live or might live and to give that more weight than what they actually choose or say or do. like, nothing anyone does for themselves has anything to do with me. i'm only responsible for my own feelings. etc.

  

so blue

last summer realizing my hallway was the only part of my apartment no one could possibly see in without having to shut all the blinds

crying in the hallway

i spent like a week waiting til nighttime to listen to don't start now by dua lipa so loud it would make my ears ring after. out of breath just moving around in the dark like it was a music video. mostly in my hallway, hoping my neighbors couldn't hear anything but not actually caring

this year it's driver's license however many months too late, crying about the person i was last year, the idiot i was when i fell in love. how that was the same idiot that went through everything. seems insane imo. still fuckin loveeeee you babeeee

um who wrote this????????

and rather than asking remember when we lit that tree on fire it's her saying it without even looking at you, we lit that tree on fucking fire so you get to smile and say it back, I remember... over your glass... the lights of the bar reflected off the crystal into your mouth… and she catalogs it, she writes it on a gum wrapper when you're in the bathroom and slides it into your purse as you hug goodbye. her mouth ten seconds away from your neck and her hand between the fabric past the zipper, your teeth in that light looked like flint 
it's a threat, quiet. innocent except for the way you know she'd say it. 
don't you dare forget

 

I think about the stupid and simple things I wanted that you knew I wanted and you wouldn't give me

I hear the way you said 'that isn't mine, I don't know' in the shower when I came home from the holidays, feel how alone you must have felt, all the time

Nobody knows so much of what we did and said and meant to each other. It just occurred to me last week that no one else ever will

thinking through january mailing

oops this was a draft i forgot about

death, loss, pointlessness

patience

it's really hard to see clear material

this feels like a logical step from the stuff I made in college

i wanna be in charleston
that chilly palm tree vibe
the ocean w cold sand against a dark sky
my place in the front seat while we cross ravenal bridge

I'm a surgeon

the way someone will dare tell me not to be a stranger and YET

i wanna be anywhere

(...)

She’d gotten aggressive with Julia in LA once, drunk and restless and in the thick of it — had shoved her, well, at her, not very effectively, and said, “You know who fucking sucks?” paused for one self-assured moment, hand still on Julia's shoulder, wanting to fucking fight. “Julia Morgan fucking sucks.” Jesus. 

Of course this all has been retold to her at least five times with reenactions, at least ten different spectators— Adrienne can’t remember any of it. And god it’s funny when Julia tries to do her drunk slurry southern accent, “Yeah, fuck Julia,” and dramatically stops herself from falling so everyone always laughs along. 

But nobody else gets the affectionate implication underneath it all, that how far you’ve come, just in the way she looks at her. They just get to laugh.

Now it’s dark out, the light outside the front door only slightly giving shape to the room, and when she sighs aloud it's dead silent except for it. She doesn’t hate anyone anymore at least, and especially not the kind of gaping hate you have for someone you used to love too much. But has she really gotten anywhere? Still not clear on that.

drive thru

I told my mom the only thing I wanted to do when I was home was go get a crunchwrap and breadsticks since I can't really order fast food for one in the city without a car, and when she gets home from work on tuesday she says, "well, should we get it over with?" 

we're already in line at the drive-thru when we realize or remember at some point they changed it from a combination taco bell pizza hut to just a taco bell

she hates making the left turn out of their lot so we take the long way. up franklin all the way to barker road and she makes the right to drive by my grandpa's old house, her childhood home, that they sold last winter and has since been completely renovated and re-sold. the new owners put christmas lights out and it looks sweet, but it's kind of sad too. he always put out the same multi-colored incandescent strings and now it's all white, warm but still not the same

she says something about not wanting to go home yet so I say let's go to the lake, and she makes a spontaneous left turn from the right lane but no one's around to see or care. we drive through downtown's side streets and she asks me if I've ever been to Petti's corner store. I say no, I've only been to that brewery over here after grandpa's funeral last summer and in high school we did a field trip in environmental science to the little put-in at trail creek over by the casino

we get to the lake, and all the lights are up in washington park. they've consolidated it some - after last year when there were a bunch burned out and empty spaces throughout, I guess it's supposed to make more of an impact, but it feels kind of sad, just the inner lawn bright and glowing surrounded by dark in the near distance. we drive straight through the entrance gate behind two other cars that are clearly inexperienced, driving along the middle line of three separate lanes. she parks two rows behind the first line of parking spots closest to the beach and there's a concrete barrier that hides any view of the actual shoreline so really we're just sitting in the dark with the car smelling that toasty and slightly savory smell of taco bell

there are probably five other cars in the lot and a group of people huddled outside a honda and nissan looking at the sky. it's too late in the evening here for the conjunction, jupiter and saturn now hidden behind the power plant stacks, but they're standing in a semi-circle holding a couple phones up to the sky trying to align it with the planets

"why do we always do this, why do we come look at the lake at nighttime"
we both laugh
"I don't know. I've done this my whole life"
"hey I have an idea.... let's go stare at the dark"
"yeah, let's go think about what else is out there besides here"

while we eat, cars continue to drive up and slow, drive along the concrete, drive away.
practically a steady stream