(no subject)
It's been raining a lot since I got to Sydney, Australia. I'm staying in Bondi beach. It's beautiful here, even when it is grey outside and the rain falls all day long. It isn't like most places I've been that have summer thunderstorms, where the sky opens up for a few minutes or a few hours and then the sun peeks out and paints the wet pavement and greenery in shiny yellows and golds. Here it's been raining and dark all day for two days, a steady rain, not so bad that you can't walk outside without getting drenched, but enough that if you're outside for more than a minute or two you'll wind up wet. It patters evenly on the rooftop and windows, unceasing. The sky is the same color now at 8:00pm that it was at 8:00am: a flat, bluish slate.
Sarah has had to work most days since I've been here and I've been mostly alone. I've been practicing yoga at probably my favorite studio I've ever been to in the world and reading a lot. I'm on my third book in a week. Sarah tries to apologize but these are always the things I do when I travel and I am content in the little bubble of her neighborhood.
By content I mean that I am not secretly dying to go look at the Sydney Opera House (which I'm sure I will at some point), not burning to see a kangaroo or hug a koala (I'm sure I'll do these things too.) But like most times that I travel I've been experiencing a riot of emotions that range from loneliness bordering on despair to a giddy, hysterical euphoria. There's something about foreign travel that makes me feel alone and alive, but mostly, it isn't quite either of these feelings. It's this kind of raw openness, like looking at the colors on the film of a soap bubble that's going to pop. There is fascination, and sadness, and a sense that everything as I know it might cease to exist at any given moment. It's like finding the threads of a raw edge of reality and realizing you could grab one and unravel it and find something totally else underneath it.
This doesn't only happen when I'm traveling, it happens other times too, but it happens always when traveling. I think it's anything that shakes up the fixed notion of what's real.
I tried to explain this to Rhett once and he knew what I was talking about right away. He's the only one I know who's ever really understood this, but I don't know if it's because no one else knows or if I just haven't ever really tried to discuss it.
We were in San Francisco sitting at a restaurant down by the Marina. I'd had a few glasses of wine and I watched a seagull dive down into the water. It only dove a few inches and came back up, like sea birds do, but seeing that bird in the water, something clicked or shifted in my brain. I felt like the floor of the restaurant was tilting. Maybe it was the dichotomy of the thing, the sudden awareness of something existing where it doesn't belong. I imagined the bird swimming through the ocean. I didn't imagine it exactly, I -saw- it, feathered and gliding serenely deep under the surface. And then it felt like the world was a grand joke, that we believed that birds don't swim but that it wasn't true, birds could swim whenever they liked. It was only a concept that kept them where they belonged in the air.
Rhett described this feeling the same way. He said the time he remembers it the most was once when he saw a baby's pascifier laying on the side of a dirty LA street. The dichotomy again. There was something soft and small that belonged in the sweetest softest place, an infants mouth. And then there it was lying on grimy dirty asphalt. The forces that hold our world in order are tenuous at best.
And for a second you're standing on a yawning chasm. I used to let this get to me, fear, panic, but if you just stand still, or just keep putting one foot in front of the other. You don't have to look into the void. It's there and you know it, but you don't have to do anything about it. You shouldn't even try, probably. Just keep existing, because one day you won't be able to any more whether you like it or not.
Non-existance. I don't actually believe that I will cease to exist entirely when I die, but Cassandra will. She could disappear before that, that scares me too. That's part of the scary thing about that feeling, you realize that one small misstep, or one willful jump and you could leap into something totally unfathomable.
I've seen it happen to people. I think a lot about the ayahuasca trip I took last winter. I took it with a close guy friend, Peter, and his best friend, Michael, who was a casual acquaintance of mine, in a living room in Cedar Park, TX with a Peruvian shaman. I went into the whole thing with this kind of respectful spiritual reverence. Everything I'd read about it described it as deep, healing spiritual medicine. I fasted for two days before it and sent my silent prayers up to "Mama Ayahuasca" to be gentle with me before I drank my little shot glass of thick bitter liquid.
We took three round of it. About halfway into the first round I was overcome by an overwhelming -lack- of any kind of spiritual context at all. The shaman sat in the center of the room sprinkling herbs over a glowing brazier, shaking a rattle made out of gourds and feathers on a stick. He chanted and mumbled, half coherent songs and stories, half in Spanish, half in English. He talked about condors and about the sacred mission of he and his wife to fill the earth with children, that that was all of our sacred missions. Peter and I both report having the same kind of thoughts. I thought, inexplicably spitefully: "I hate condors. I want nothing to do with having children. I wish he would shut up." I thought, and this was an important part of it: "I am just on drugs. There is nothing magic or ritualistic about this other than that I am stuck sitting silently in a circle listening to an old man on a drug trip talk about whatever his drug trip wants him to talk about. This is no different from being on acid. No different from being on mushrooms. I'm tired of his rambling and I wish I could get up and dance and play. I wish I was somewhere else."
The second two rounds of taking it were an endless nightmare that I don't really feel like describing, except that it was nothing but pain and darkness and vomiting and the absolute certainty that I was going to die. There were beings, too, lots of them. They hissed and danced around me and they said to me "Let go!" but I fought them with anger and venom. "Who are you to tell me to let go!? Why should I trust you? I don't, I won't, and I don't want to die. Leave me alone."
When it was over I was just happy that it was over. Peter and I laughed about our similar, petulant thought patterns during it on the car ride home and I didn't think much about it again. Michael was a little bit more effected it seemed maybe. During the "debriefing" that I, being the only small female in the group that took the same dose as everyone else, was still tripping too hard to do anything but bury my face in a pillow and wish everyone would stop talking, Michael talked at great, chaotic length.
A few weeks later, he started to lose his mind. I wasn't privy to this knowledge, I didn't really know him, but Peter told me afterwards. He was his best friend. He started making crazy, manic phone calls to his friends and family. He started filling up notebook after notebook with crazy, nonsensical equations. Pi = the eye of horus. That kind of thing. He formed wild conspiracy theories. A few weeks after all that started, he walked into the Omni hotel with a rifle and shot and killed an innocent bystander. He was shot down by police when they arrived on the scene and he leveled his rifle at them. As far as I know and from all accounts from the people who loved him, he was a normal, sweet, compassionate guy with no prior history of violence or mental illness.
It's impossible to know if the ayahuasca trip triggered something or if it was just the unpredictable nature of mental illness, but I had a moment of surprise in art history class a few months later. Most of our class centered over Western art, what I'm mainly interested in, and I loved it, but before Thanksgiving we had a brief class about the art of the Americas, which I have very little interest in. But looking at slide after slide of art found in central and South America, we were looking at the same beings I saw on that Ayahuasca trip. Those stylized serpents, jaguars, insects and men? Those were -exactly- the beings dancing, hissing, telling me to give up and give in.
A few weeks after the shooting at the Omni, Shane's roommate, this fantastic artist, Rex, and his girlfriend Rilee took acid for five days straight. At first they were funny, and we laughed with them. "We feel like lions. In a jungle. Except space aliens. In outer space." But then we all started to worry when they started writing the same kind of insane nonsensical equations all over the walls of their bedroom that Michael did before the shooting. Pi = the eye of Horus. The golden ratio times infinity. Whatever, that kind of thing. We called his Mother and had her pick them both up and help them come back down to planet Earth. They seem to have made a full recovery, but it was deeply unsettling while it was happening.
So the things that we see on these little peeks into the nature of unreality, they're pretty universal, I think. Drug inspired or otherwise.
Maybe I try to combat that, focusing on living in the flesh. Maybe I'm wrong to do that, who knows. It certainly creates it's own levels of sometimes crippling anxiety.
I practice yoga every day. That forces me to live inside my body. Sometimes that's such an overwhelming feeling I want to bang on my yoga mat and scream from frustration. But you don't, you just breathe, and hopefully you're training your nervous system to know that living inside your body is an ok place to be.
I drink a lot of alcohol. I don't know about that, actually. Whether that's a way to live more deeply in the flesh or to escape it. I can do life either way, actually. It kind of doesn't matter. When I don't drink I can live life with the vague moral patina that I am treating my body like the temple that I ought to, but time ticks by, minute by sometimes agonizing minute, that I try to just breathe and live with myself in. Anxiety is a minute by minute reality instead of something that I delay until a hangover sets in and then offset how much a hangover magnifies it by starting to drink again. When I don't drink, I feel that the effort it takes to stay present makes me miss something essential about life, joy, spontaneity, liberation, but when I do drink, I probably miss a lot of essential things about life because I black out and forget them.
I'm not sure how I got on all this. It probably sounds more dramatic than it is. It's probably just been too long since I've written.
Relationships. I'm not sure if those are an attempt to live in the flesh or escape it. It seems like it could be both at any given moment, the crush of two bodies together, that thin or not so thin glowing thread between them we call love. That moment so often, it says "Let go!" and I refuse like I always do, because I don't want to disappear. Fingernails and lips and teeth into the body that I am holding because that is definitely real. But I focus on this so much, these interactions between human beings. They take up most of my time and my thoughts.
In LA I met with my little Victorian costumed tour manager. I never noticed before what a sweet angel voice he has. We made love one afternoon, and it was brief, sweet, vaporous. Our chemistry is indisputable, we fall into one another like a magnet, and I love that. You don't find that every day. But I don't really know him, and I don't remember our night together. He was busy working and I spent most of it with a girlfriend. We drank several bottles of champagne and a lot of gin. Or I did, anyway.
We were sitting at the show together and she asked me "What are you thinking about?" And this remark was totally unbidden, I don't even know if that actually was what I was thinking about, but it just came out: "Kissing you."
She said something to the effect of that she worried that if we kissed it would somehow ruin things, which I understood, and I apologized, but I felt ok that I'd said it anyway. We went backstage and sat with my little tour manager and it felt like a safe sweet small bubble. When the night was over she asked me if I would go home with her. I said "Of course," but that I wasn't sure she really wanted me to. She said "You'd be willing to leave him to leave with me?" I said, "Of course," even though that probably wouldn't have been very nice for him.
But I was very drunk and he came back to us before the matter was decided and I went back to his room at the Luxe in downtown LA and she went home alone. I don't remember a single moment of it. I woke with the hideous typical hungover fear that there had grown between us a hideous chasm and that I had to escape so as to not keep imposing on his world. So I left, but that was totally unfounded, as it is pretty much every single time I feel that way, which is often. He still texts me every day. He says nice things. We talk about books. He invited me to come to Buenos Aires straight from Sydney, which fits into my travel schedule perfectly, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Hawaii, glamorous itinerary, instead of a pit stop in Austin. But the ticket from Buenos Aires to Hawaii is $3000 and neither of us have that kind of money to toss around for a few days in South America.
The next night I stayed with a guy friend, a different Peter. He lives in a beautiful home in West LA with a hot tub in a beautiful back garden. We ordered ten bottles of champagne from a delivery service and invited all of my beautiful LA girlfriends to come over, including my friend, that the night before I'd wanted to kiss. We all drank a very lot of champagne and we all wound up naked in the hot tub and it was lots of fun and giggles. Somehow, because I am an expert at believing I have done everything possible to offend when there is no real basis for this in reality, I believed for two weeks that inviting a bunch of pretty girls over to be unclothed and frivolous was something Peter might be mad at me about. Ludicrous if one examines it, and today he texted me "When do we get to have another hot tub party?"
But all I remember from that night is her. She brought me a necklace when she first arrived and then sometime in the champagne blur we started kissing and didn't stop. All I can remember is sinking into her, hours of it, both of our hair hanging in wet matted clumps in our faces, hot water and bubbles, almost drowning trying to breathe her in.
At some point she left and I passed out on the couch. I woke up feeling like a teenager with a bad crush. I lamented to Peter, "It's too much, it's not even worth it." This irrational fear that is the constant cost of putting oneself out there to connect with people.
She texted me that afternoon "You are like a dream." And of course I felt incredulous, suspicious even. It is so easy for me to love. I do it every day, all the time. Why do I have this belief that it's impossible for other people?
When I got back from LA Shane came over and stayed for three days. Every thing I wrote about him in the last entry is true, but I love him anyway and I don't want to lose him. Those golden threads of love energy, they're so strong between us. He makes silly, stupid, selfish, scared, childish mistakes, constantly. But I'm sure I do that sometimes too, and those are not the important things. The important thing is the way we hold each other.
I accidentally stumbled across one of the other girls he's seeing on Instagram. She's prettier than I expected, and very clearly a teenager. Her Instagram is all selfies with song lyrics under them, things I used to do when I was her age or maybe even a little older. She clutches a cigarette and/or a coffee cup in every one of them. She takes selfies and checks in to his house like it's a bar or a club or something, and hashtags it too. The name of his album is the name of his street and that's what we call the house. The most recent one has Lou Reed lyrics written under it that I am sure if you look back far enough in this exact journal you can find pictures of me with the same lyrics written under them. She must love being there, think it's very exciting, and I don't blame her. I think it's very sweet. The whole thing feels very sweet now actually. I tried to tell him that today and he thought I was kidding, he didn't believe me that I could have made such a turnaround. He said "Why would you want to talk to me about this when your are half way across the planet?" I did because I wanted him to believe me, how I felt once I actually saw her, with everything that's going on in my life.
So I've been in Australia mostly practicing yoga and hanging out by myself and reading and thinking about unraveling realities, except on the weekends, which have passed in a predictable drunken blurr. The other night Sarah took me to a Christmas party in a pretty apartment overlooking the harbour. I hadn't eaten anything all day and the only things they were serving at the party was oysters, ham, and Vueve Cliquot. I didn't eat any of the former and drank a lot of the latter. Sarah woke me up from being passed out on the sofa to go home and we got into the Uber and then she kissed me, what funny recent events. I was drunk enough to have passed out on a strangers sofa so this is all very, very hazy. But I think it was all giggles and sweetness. I'm not sure how or why or when she got it in her head to make this bold move, it was utterly unexpected to me but not unwelcome. We went to bed together and were awake for hours. I remember holding her small body, her heart hammering against her rib cage like a tiny captured bird. In the morning she said "Do you reckon things are going to be weird between us now?"
In my half drunk, half asleep stage the question seemed absurd. I said "They don't have to be if we don't make them."
That's the easy obvious answer. I'm just spending every day grappling with the rawness of being alive. The beauty and the terror and the human attempt to grasp onto something before we slip away.
Sarah has had to work most days since I've been here and I've been mostly alone. I've been practicing yoga at probably my favorite studio I've ever been to in the world and reading a lot. I'm on my third book in a week. Sarah tries to apologize but these are always the things I do when I travel and I am content in the little bubble of her neighborhood.
By content I mean that I am not secretly dying to go look at the Sydney Opera House (which I'm sure I will at some point), not burning to see a kangaroo or hug a koala (I'm sure I'll do these things too.) But like most times that I travel I've been experiencing a riot of emotions that range from loneliness bordering on despair to a giddy, hysterical euphoria. There's something about foreign travel that makes me feel alone and alive, but mostly, it isn't quite either of these feelings. It's this kind of raw openness, like looking at the colors on the film of a soap bubble that's going to pop. There is fascination, and sadness, and a sense that everything as I know it might cease to exist at any given moment. It's like finding the threads of a raw edge of reality and realizing you could grab one and unravel it and find something totally else underneath it.
This doesn't only happen when I'm traveling, it happens other times too, but it happens always when traveling. I think it's anything that shakes up the fixed notion of what's real.
I tried to explain this to Rhett once and he knew what I was talking about right away. He's the only one I know who's ever really understood this, but I don't know if it's because no one else knows or if I just haven't ever really tried to discuss it.
We were in San Francisco sitting at a restaurant down by the Marina. I'd had a few glasses of wine and I watched a seagull dive down into the water. It only dove a few inches and came back up, like sea birds do, but seeing that bird in the water, something clicked or shifted in my brain. I felt like the floor of the restaurant was tilting. Maybe it was the dichotomy of the thing, the sudden awareness of something existing where it doesn't belong. I imagined the bird swimming through the ocean. I didn't imagine it exactly, I -saw- it, feathered and gliding serenely deep under the surface. And then it felt like the world was a grand joke, that we believed that birds don't swim but that it wasn't true, birds could swim whenever they liked. It was only a concept that kept them where they belonged in the air.
Rhett described this feeling the same way. He said the time he remembers it the most was once when he saw a baby's pascifier laying on the side of a dirty LA street. The dichotomy again. There was something soft and small that belonged in the sweetest softest place, an infants mouth. And then there it was lying on grimy dirty asphalt. The forces that hold our world in order are tenuous at best.
And for a second you're standing on a yawning chasm. I used to let this get to me, fear, panic, but if you just stand still, or just keep putting one foot in front of the other. You don't have to look into the void. It's there and you know it, but you don't have to do anything about it. You shouldn't even try, probably. Just keep existing, because one day you won't be able to any more whether you like it or not.
Non-existance. I don't actually believe that I will cease to exist entirely when I die, but Cassandra will. She could disappear before that, that scares me too. That's part of the scary thing about that feeling, you realize that one small misstep, or one willful jump and you could leap into something totally unfathomable.
I've seen it happen to people. I think a lot about the ayahuasca trip I took last winter. I took it with a close guy friend, Peter, and his best friend, Michael, who was a casual acquaintance of mine, in a living room in Cedar Park, TX with a Peruvian shaman. I went into the whole thing with this kind of respectful spiritual reverence. Everything I'd read about it described it as deep, healing spiritual medicine. I fasted for two days before it and sent my silent prayers up to "Mama Ayahuasca" to be gentle with me before I drank my little shot glass of thick bitter liquid.
We took three round of it. About halfway into the first round I was overcome by an overwhelming -lack- of any kind of spiritual context at all. The shaman sat in the center of the room sprinkling herbs over a glowing brazier, shaking a rattle made out of gourds and feathers on a stick. He chanted and mumbled, half coherent songs and stories, half in Spanish, half in English. He talked about condors and about the sacred mission of he and his wife to fill the earth with children, that that was all of our sacred missions. Peter and I both report having the same kind of thoughts. I thought, inexplicably spitefully: "I hate condors. I want nothing to do with having children. I wish he would shut up." I thought, and this was an important part of it: "I am just on drugs. There is nothing magic or ritualistic about this other than that I am stuck sitting silently in a circle listening to an old man on a drug trip talk about whatever his drug trip wants him to talk about. This is no different from being on acid. No different from being on mushrooms. I'm tired of his rambling and I wish I could get up and dance and play. I wish I was somewhere else."
The second two rounds of taking it were an endless nightmare that I don't really feel like describing, except that it was nothing but pain and darkness and vomiting and the absolute certainty that I was going to die. There were beings, too, lots of them. They hissed and danced around me and they said to me "Let go!" but I fought them with anger and venom. "Who are you to tell me to let go!? Why should I trust you? I don't, I won't, and I don't want to die. Leave me alone."
When it was over I was just happy that it was over. Peter and I laughed about our similar, petulant thought patterns during it on the car ride home and I didn't think much about it again. Michael was a little bit more effected it seemed maybe. During the "debriefing" that I, being the only small female in the group that took the same dose as everyone else, was still tripping too hard to do anything but bury my face in a pillow and wish everyone would stop talking, Michael talked at great, chaotic length.
A few weeks later, he started to lose his mind. I wasn't privy to this knowledge, I didn't really know him, but Peter told me afterwards. He was his best friend. He started making crazy, manic phone calls to his friends and family. He started filling up notebook after notebook with crazy, nonsensical equations. Pi = the eye of horus. That kind of thing. He formed wild conspiracy theories. A few weeks after all that started, he walked into the Omni hotel with a rifle and shot and killed an innocent bystander. He was shot down by police when they arrived on the scene and he leveled his rifle at them. As far as I know and from all accounts from the people who loved him, he was a normal, sweet, compassionate guy with no prior history of violence or mental illness.
It's impossible to know if the ayahuasca trip triggered something or if it was just the unpredictable nature of mental illness, but I had a moment of surprise in art history class a few months later. Most of our class centered over Western art, what I'm mainly interested in, and I loved it, but before Thanksgiving we had a brief class about the art of the Americas, which I have very little interest in. But looking at slide after slide of art found in central and South America, we were looking at the same beings I saw on that Ayahuasca trip. Those stylized serpents, jaguars, insects and men? Those were -exactly- the beings dancing, hissing, telling me to give up and give in.
A few weeks after the shooting at the Omni, Shane's roommate, this fantastic artist, Rex, and his girlfriend Rilee took acid for five days straight. At first they were funny, and we laughed with them. "We feel like lions. In a jungle. Except space aliens. In outer space." But then we all started to worry when they started writing the same kind of insane nonsensical equations all over the walls of their bedroom that Michael did before the shooting. Pi = the eye of Horus. The golden ratio times infinity. Whatever, that kind of thing. We called his Mother and had her pick them both up and help them come back down to planet Earth. They seem to have made a full recovery, but it was deeply unsettling while it was happening.
So the things that we see on these little peeks into the nature of unreality, they're pretty universal, I think. Drug inspired or otherwise.
Maybe I try to combat that, focusing on living in the flesh. Maybe I'm wrong to do that, who knows. It certainly creates it's own levels of sometimes crippling anxiety.
I practice yoga every day. That forces me to live inside my body. Sometimes that's such an overwhelming feeling I want to bang on my yoga mat and scream from frustration. But you don't, you just breathe, and hopefully you're training your nervous system to know that living inside your body is an ok place to be.
I drink a lot of alcohol. I don't know about that, actually. Whether that's a way to live more deeply in the flesh or to escape it. I can do life either way, actually. It kind of doesn't matter. When I don't drink I can live life with the vague moral patina that I am treating my body like the temple that I ought to, but time ticks by, minute by sometimes agonizing minute, that I try to just breathe and live with myself in. Anxiety is a minute by minute reality instead of something that I delay until a hangover sets in and then offset how much a hangover magnifies it by starting to drink again. When I don't drink, I feel that the effort it takes to stay present makes me miss something essential about life, joy, spontaneity, liberation, but when I do drink, I probably miss a lot of essential things about life because I black out and forget them.
I'm not sure how I got on all this. It probably sounds more dramatic than it is. It's probably just been too long since I've written.
Relationships. I'm not sure if those are an attempt to live in the flesh or escape it. It seems like it could be both at any given moment, the crush of two bodies together, that thin or not so thin glowing thread between them we call love. That moment so often, it says "Let go!" and I refuse like I always do, because I don't want to disappear. Fingernails and lips and teeth into the body that I am holding because that is definitely real. But I focus on this so much, these interactions between human beings. They take up most of my time and my thoughts.
In LA I met with my little Victorian costumed tour manager. I never noticed before what a sweet angel voice he has. We made love one afternoon, and it was brief, sweet, vaporous. Our chemistry is indisputable, we fall into one another like a magnet, and I love that. You don't find that every day. But I don't really know him, and I don't remember our night together. He was busy working and I spent most of it with a girlfriend. We drank several bottles of champagne and a lot of gin. Or I did, anyway.
We were sitting at the show together and she asked me "What are you thinking about?" And this remark was totally unbidden, I don't even know if that actually was what I was thinking about, but it just came out: "Kissing you."
She said something to the effect of that she worried that if we kissed it would somehow ruin things, which I understood, and I apologized, but I felt ok that I'd said it anyway. We went backstage and sat with my little tour manager and it felt like a safe sweet small bubble. When the night was over she asked me if I would go home with her. I said "Of course," but that I wasn't sure she really wanted me to. She said "You'd be willing to leave him to leave with me?" I said, "Of course," even though that probably wouldn't have been very nice for him.
But I was very drunk and he came back to us before the matter was decided and I went back to his room at the Luxe in downtown LA and she went home alone. I don't remember a single moment of it. I woke with the hideous typical hungover fear that there had grown between us a hideous chasm and that I had to escape so as to not keep imposing on his world. So I left, but that was totally unfounded, as it is pretty much every single time I feel that way, which is often. He still texts me every day. He says nice things. We talk about books. He invited me to come to Buenos Aires straight from Sydney, which fits into my travel schedule perfectly, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Hawaii, glamorous itinerary, instead of a pit stop in Austin. But the ticket from Buenos Aires to Hawaii is $3000 and neither of us have that kind of money to toss around for a few days in South America.
The next night I stayed with a guy friend, a different Peter. He lives in a beautiful home in West LA with a hot tub in a beautiful back garden. We ordered ten bottles of champagne from a delivery service and invited all of my beautiful LA girlfriends to come over, including my friend, that the night before I'd wanted to kiss. We all drank a very lot of champagne and we all wound up naked in the hot tub and it was lots of fun and giggles. Somehow, because I am an expert at believing I have done everything possible to offend when there is no real basis for this in reality, I believed for two weeks that inviting a bunch of pretty girls over to be unclothed and frivolous was something Peter might be mad at me about. Ludicrous if one examines it, and today he texted me "When do we get to have another hot tub party?"
But all I remember from that night is her. She brought me a necklace when she first arrived and then sometime in the champagne blur we started kissing and didn't stop. All I can remember is sinking into her, hours of it, both of our hair hanging in wet matted clumps in our faces, hot water and bubbles, almost drowning trying to breathe her in.
At some point she left and I passed out on the couch. I woke up feeling like a teenager with a bad crush. I lamented to Peter, "It's too much, it's not even worth it." This irrational fear that is the constant cost of putting oneself out there to connect with people.
She texted me that afternoon "You are like a dream." And of course I felt incredulous, suspicious even. It is so easy for me to love. I do it every day, all the time. Why do I have this belief that it's impossible for other people?
When I got back from LA Shane came over and stayed for three days. Every thing I wrote about him in the last entry is true, but I love him anyway and I don't want to lose him. Those golden threads of love energy, they're so strong between us. He makes silly, stupid, selfish, scared, childish mistakes, constantly. But I'm sure I do that sometimes too, and those are not the important things. The important thing is the way we hold each other.
I accidentally stumbled across one of the other girls he's seeing on Instagram. She's prettier than I expected, and very clearly a teenager. Her Instagram is all selfies with song lyrics under them, things I used to do when I was her age or maybe even a little older. She clutches a cigarette and/or a coffee cup in every one of them. She takes selfies and checks in to his house like it's a bar or a club or something, and hashtags it too. The name of his album is the name of his street and that's what we call the house. The most recent one has Lou Reed lyrics written under it that I am sure if you look back far enough in this exact journal you can find pictures of me with the same lyrics written under them. She must love being there, think it's very exciting, and I don't blame her. I think it's very sweet. The whole thing feels very sweet now actually. I tried to tell him that today and he thought I was kidding, he didn't believe me that I could have made such a turnaround. He said "Why would you want to talk to me about this when your are half way across the planet?" I did because I wanted him to believe me, how I felt once I actually saw her, with everything that's going on in my life.
So I've been in Australia mostly practicing yoga and hanging out by myself and reading and thinking about unraveling realities, except on the weekends, which have passed in a predictable drunken blurr. The other night Sarah took me to a Christmas party in a pretty apartment overlooking the harbour. I hadn't eaten anything all day and the only things they were serving at the party was oysters, ham, and Vueve Cliquot. I didn't eat any of the former and drank a lot of the latter. Sarah woke me up from being passed out on the sofa to go home and we got into the Uber and then she kissed me, what funny recent events. I was drunk enough to have passed out on a strangers sofa so this is all very, very hazy. But I think it was all giggles and sweetness. I'm not sure how or why or when she got it in her head to make this bold move, it was utterly unexpected to me but not unwelcome. We went to bed together and were awake for hours. I remember holding her small body, her heart hammering against her rib cage like a tiny captured bird. In the morning she said "Do you reckon things are going to be weird between us now?"
In my half drunk, half asleep stage the question seemed absurd. I said "They don't have to be if we don't make them."
That's the easy obvious answer. I'm just spending every day grappling with the rawness of being alive. The beauty and the terror and the human attempt to grasp onto something before we slip away.