Death Diary: Spite Dancing and Getting Dumped on My Birthday
(Previous Death Diaries: Part 4, Part 3, Part 2, and Part 1.)
September 4
I started taking bachata classes out of spite.
It was one of the many, many things we were supposed to do together—and never did.
I’m glad I started though. Bachata is a language buried in my bones.
Plus, it allows me to touch other humans in a non-sexual way. (Well, not explicitly sexual, at least. It’s a very sensual dance.)
And touch is what I most want and what I’m most not getting.
September 7
You were an ocean of desire—thick and drowning my fingers. You were an army, aiming all of your arrows at my chest. How intoxicating it was to be the target of your immensity. I may never feel that way again, which is, I know, both a blessing and a curse.
In those hotel rooms, in the dark, we lived a dream—I was aware of nothing but sensation, the invasion of you on me and inside me and surrounding me.
Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between my erotica and my life.
—
When my father first died—that first week—the pain of his death unearthed all these old wounds in my body, brought them all to the surface, a forced remembrance.
He died and suddenly I had been hit by a car again. The pain in my hip returned—I had trouble walking.
He died and the pain from being violently mugged returned, my face swelled and tender in the places I had been beaten.
He died and I cracked my head open on a piece of playground equipment, 16 stitches in my forehead. The skin around my scar cracked and red, as if it happened yesterday and not 30 years ago.
You think you’ve moved on from something, that you’ve recovered, healed, but the body remembers. Every trauma, every accident, every bruise. It’s all there. Waiting to resurface.
Waiting to remind you that you are still animal—flesh and bone and sinew—you are this body—you are every scar that has left its indelible ache inside of you.
September 8
Last night I was so unhinged with desire that I put on makeup and a short skirt to go to Target! Then I took a suggestive photo and realized I had no one to send it to.
September 9
There was a moment yesterday when I thought A and I might kiss. I looked at her lips and a current shot through me.
She was telling me about her recent exploits. We laughed on our stomachs on the grass, faces turned toward each other, then away.
The moment passed.
I texted S, hoping she might be free or a source of comfort, but she was busy.
Life lately feels like this sweeping No. Not for you. Try again later.
The current sparks, the circuit never completes.
I lay here panting in a puddle of electric eternity.
September 13
That we lose what we love is what makes it precious.
September 15
Well, S broke up with me at my birthday party. At 2am. While I was wasted.
She broke up with me and then told me she loved me for the first time.
She held my hand all night and got me Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and inscribed it with a Sappho poem, fragment 105a.
“As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,
high on the highest branch and the apple-pickers forgot—
well, no they didn’t forget—were not able to reach…”
In the past I had considered the fragment to be about desire—the reaching-and-never-getting being desire’s whole point. Once one gets what one desires it becomes something else. It transforms.
But when one has just been dumped at 2am at one’s own birthday party, one could also interpret the poem as a message about loneliness: You will die in this tree, alone, unpicked, unchosen.
After she dumped me, I asked her to stay over, but she didn’t. And only then did my disappointment register.
Only then did grief play its horrible fiddle across my face.
I waited until after she had gone to weep.
September 16
S and I were a beautiful bridge, going nowhere.
Her desire for me was like a lightbulb flickering in a storm. Sporadic. Warming no one.
And yet. It was all I had.
—
I dreamed of D. We kept trying to find a place to be alone and eventually she tried to escape her house via a bathroom window, but I put my hand on her breast and she stopped escaping.
She melted into my hand, her movements liquid and immediate, the way she always responds to my touch in real life.
(It’s been almost four years, since I’ve seen her.)
(There was a time I looked forward to our trysts more than anything else in my life.)
—
Yesterday was shit. Absolute shit. But at least today no one can dump me. Because I’m alone.
Is this optimism?
September 17
The key to his Ford F-150 somehow made its way back to Oakland with me. I put it on my keychain. I carry him with me.
September 19—Chicago-bound
Forced myself to finish a sad book I didn’t want to finish. But I kept going, because what is an unfinished book if not a wound that never closes?
—
When a friend came over recently, I pointed to his ashes on the floor. “That’s my dad,” I said and laughed.
I think she smiled in response, but I could be making that up.
I could cry on this plane, but I’m not. Instead my eyes fill like snow globes, the moisture trapped inside, a prison of waiting. Is it shame? Politeness? SKY LAW?
I don’t know, I don’t know, but C said my words were “pure, honest, unvarnished, full-throttle beauty.” She said, “Keep going.”
And today that is a kind of enough.
September 20—Chicago, IL
The girl I was most excited to meet on OkCupid texted to cancel because she’s not over her ex. I offered to meet up as friends and she said yes. I have a strange feeling we might make out anyway. But if I’m smart, I will not.
[Ed. Note from Future Me: We did have sex, and yes, it was a bad idea.]
September 21
I had another bizarre moment of forgetting at Rossi’s, a little downtown dive. While waiting in line for the bathroom, I realized it was my birthday and I hadn’t talked to my dad yet.
Then I remembered he was dead. And would not be calling me.
My brother didn’t call either. Or text. The one year he’s forgotten had to be this one?
—
I also had another “I could kiss A right now” moment. But I did not. And I don’t feel angst about it. We are friends and I adore her. My attraction doesn’t need a destination. It can stay in my hips, rattle around like loose coins.
I can let it be its own kind of music. Its own strange symphony, vibrating me.
September 22
Grief is an asshole.
September 23
I met a woman from Instagram and she was lovely and we ended up making out in the bar and on the street and I asked her to come home with me and she didn’t and I wandered Logan Square in the rain and was in such a state that I texted a man I should not have had sex with and then had sex with him.
—
Someone carved your name into the sidewalk near the place I’m staying. I walk past it every day and miss you.
Falling for you was like the part in fairytales where the entire kingdom is asleep, placed under a potent curse. Except instead of wanting to wake up, I only wanted to fall more deeply into slumber.
But who would call this narcolepsy “love”? Other than a masochist. Or a poet.
And what of it?
When I was with you, the universe was more unknown than it was known, but those tiny bits of knowing were so intoxicating that I believed I was encountering the divine, that I was the divine—some rare eclipse, 7 of Jupiter’s moons, the sun rising from two directions.
That such a love not only existed, but that I held it in my hand, briefly, a cageless bird on its way to some other divinity, makes my life profound.
I am not sad. I am not even cursed. So why do I keep writing about you? Why keep myself under the spell of you, other than the obvious—I love to be under you.
Does writing cure anything? Is it a salve for yearning?
Just look at these hands, how mute they are. How graspless. Would you ever believe they held the known universe? That they held you?
(Next: On desire and devouring)
