Death Diary: My Heart Is a Strange Town I Try Not to Visit
(Death Diary: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)
August 29
I joined OkCupid again last night, during one of the many, aptly targeted antidepressant commercials on breaks from Love Island.
I joined and couldn’t think of what to say about myself, then felt incompetent and despondent—what kind of writer can’t even describe themself?—and like I really just want to date S, but she’s dating others and I don’t want to be that chump with all my hearts in her basket.
But Kelsey just started listing things about me and they were so funny and true and I wrote them down and here they are.
She said: “You like unlikely animal friendships. You don’t like rats or snakes. You are funny and brilliant and a real treat. You don’t want to mention your stuffed animals? You like brainstorming domme names. You want someone to return your texts. You like big breakfasts. You have a special laugh for fart jokes. You tend to date people from Minnesota. The greatest moment of your life was posing with the giant boot at the Mall of America L.L. Bean. You do not want anymore jars. Your favorite food is Totino’s Party Pizzas. You can identify 5 plants at Lake Merritt.”
And earlier that day, two friends sent me sweet cards, one included a tiny notebook with a Neruda quote: “I love the handful of earth you are.”
And Matt thanked me in his new book. Isn’t that sweet?
Such an outpouring of love. I’m trying to hold onto it. Today it’s a little easier.
—
I don’t know if I’m being dramatic but I had the thought yesterday that I feel alive with S in a way I don’t often, especially lately. She makes me want to do more and see more and be more. It’s exciting and uncomfortable.
August 30
S and I are two trains, running parallel to each other. Right now we’re moving in the same direction but soon the tracks will veer and we will be forced to part.
The anxiety comes from me trying to keep our trains together, out of fear and loneliness. But she’s gotta move and I’ve gotta move and it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.
I wish I were in a better place emotionally so I could date and fuck and get my needs met from others. But I can’t. All I seem capable of doing is endeavoring to not let it make me insane.
This desire. Desirousness.
August 31
A and I went to Kabuki spa, and she said, “You seem to be doing so well,” and bought us massages and when I forgot to thank her, she was upset by this, and then I had a full-on sobbing panic attack in the middle of Japantown.
We kept having to run to Starbucks, to Burger King, to the bubble tea place, to get more napkins and my face became a swollen red balloon and I could not calm down and the shame was a wall that refused to be breached and I beat the bricks of it with my fists but all that came out was my mortality and it was so, so awful.
I can never let her buy me anything again.
—
Dear A,
Beautiful, intensely curious, harbinger of enchantment. It’s a horrid thing—disappointing the people we love. And yet, it is the most human thing. The thing, perhaps, that enables us to love in the first place.
You are the most giving person I have ever met. I sometimes wonder how I chanced upon the good fortune of you, why you bestow your many gifts upon me, why I feel undeserving of them.
You open the most beautiful rooms in me. I don’t want to ruin them with too much analysis, but still I wonder. How can I ever truly thank you? You who bring the fire and make it edible. You whose sense of wonder is so deep it never forms into an answer. What a marvel it is to get so near to the tireless valentine of you. Still and hopefully for years to come.
Love,
Anna
—
My heart is a strange town I try not to visit.
—
All the words I know have lost their shape.
—
I have so many photo albums now. Too many. I have everyone’s childhood — my father’s, my aunts’, my cousins, my brother’s. I hate it. What do I do with it?
I’m fine throwing away my own childhood, but I can’t throw away his.
September 1
September. Our imaginary daughter’s name.
S and I go to Pescadero tomorrow, and once again I am getting a decidedly friendly vibe from her—bordering on cousinly.
“There are so many things I want to do to you,” I told her.
“Ok :)” she replied.
Ok? Ugh.
I’m still excited to day-trip with her, despite the liminal space we’re dancing in. I feel like we’re both afraid to be honest with each other.
I don’t want to show her my grief and she doesn’t want to show me her ambivalence.
But I am and she is, of course. Ironically, ambivalence is the clearest signal she ever sends.
—
It just occurred to me that my dad won’t send me a singing birthday card this year—or any year.
I played the one he got me in 2016 recently — it has a spinning hamster on it, its mouth wide as a canoe, arms raised in perpetual triumph.
“Not just happy…silly happy, crazy, giddy, dizzy happy,” the card says. “Be that kind of happy on your birthday!”
The hamster sings and my tears fall like blows, truer somehow than the bones that hold me upright.
—
She was beautiful, yes, eternity grand and offering, but oh, to walk once more the length of her ravenous mind.
September 2
The idea that power differentials are what stoke eroticism, and also drive one insane.
Everything S tells me about men she dates, about how she needs to have the power, to be the one in control—everything she says also applies to me, us.
At least we both finally admitted that she has the power. Though now that I’ve said it, I want to take it back. And I can’t seem to say out loud: Admit that you no longer want to fuck me.
But we had fun in Pescadero. A kind of fun. We ate an obscene chocolate muffin and garlic artichoke bread and pet some goats and the ocean wind ravaged us and I told her she should have a coming-out party and we laughed—we still laugh a lot—and someone took our picture at Pigeon Point Lighthouse and it’s not a great photo, but it exists now, at least.
Proof I didn’t dream us.
And back at her house she asked me to examine a spot on her ass that she thought might be a tick and what the hell, right. I did it and it was probably a zit but still funny, but she doesn’t look at me the way she did before I left for Morocco, before my dad died.
She doesn’t look at me the way she did when we were enchanted.
Now it’s just me, enchanting myself.
—
I’m thinking of you a lot today—sometimes angrily, then tenderly, then passive aggressively. You’re a monster, I say to the empty room. I hope you learn to love someday.
I want to feel something besides this loss.
September 3
Is “attraction” really just an outpouring of the way another makes us feel?
Is this why I want to have sex with all my friends?
—
The way desire manifests in my body is not unlike the way fear manifests—only fear is a blow to the head and desire starts in my hips and moves up and out, like that carnival game where you take a mallet and whack the bell to see how strong you are, how high you can make the ball go.
The other difference, of course, is that desire is pleasurable and fear is not.
—
Another first date.
She was perfectly sweet and thoughtful and kind and I have no desire to sleep with her. But she kissed me and I let it happen, even though it was wrong.
The kiss was objectively good. No teeth-bumping. Good ratio of lips to tongue. But the fact that I was in my head enough to mine the kiss for data points perhaps speaks to my not-into-it-ness.
Mostly I was aware of my fanny pack, which pressed against her like an erection as we kissed. It felt lewd, this protruding entity, this accidental phallus.
And in that lewdness, a kind of excitement.
—
A check came, the first check from my dad’s pension. It feels like a birthday gift, his last sweeping gesture of love. I picture it followed by a hug and his signature phrase on all birthday cards: “Love you.”
The “I” never accompanying it, the “I” too personal, too close to that other, terrifying “I” word. Intimacy.
My brother does it too. Love you. Do I do it? Am I removing myself from love?
