Annum
It has been a year to the day since you handed me my first (thing). It was a perfect afternoon—a first Spring day begging everyone to play outside; the general exhale of society getting vaccinated and vacillating with the anxieties of Pandemic Year 1. This was a moment of brief ecstasy before Pandemic Year 2 officially started. All of the new leaves on the trees that lined a street I was moving off of screamed at me: “yes.” I cannot explain the feeling further than this but I have never wanted something as badly as I wanted in that precise moment.
Thankfully, because it’s hard to want something that badly, the feeling dissipated with the sun. But almost two weeks after this Spring day, I’d become engulfed at vigils in Philadelphia to honor the memory of a dozen Asians shot down in Atlanta. The mood was incredibly sad, but I realized when I attended a performance event the next evening, no one else was mourning. So when my desire returned during the performance, I was shocked that it absorbed my grief and then never went away.
My transformation, my wanting, has informed every single aspect of my life, every day since. You have been as much a witness as I have been a subject of it. But because it has made me a more exciting lover to my husband, a more interesting person to the rest of the world, and a more rapacious artist, I believe that the result of the transformation is not to take the desire literally. In other words, while I have fought the impulses of irresponsible behavior endemic to passionate awakenings, I am smart enough to see the effects of that awakening benefit the people with whom I’ve formed covenant. The true destiny of my desire is to let you (not me) take advantage of it.
It will have been a year to the day, that my logorrhea began. I have written every single day since this day last year. Some days a lot, and other days not so much. But every day, I have written.
On April 19, I finished the first full draft of a personal essay I have now published in pieces. That practice then turned into a daily newsletter. On June 3, I started a dark notebook of self-flagellations to catalog horrible insults about myself. It is so rough to read now, I feel a little sick at the thought. On September 14, I wrote a word of finality in the self-flagellating notebook—”I hate you”—because I felt your gaze avert and the permanence of aversion (however temporary) hurts like hell. I started a different notebook. It mostly cataloged jealousies, once I realized that was what drove my abnegation of self.
Thankfully the mean journals quickly turned into a book of sorrows, and sorrow is tender. October was a sweet month. By November, the desirous feelings of the Spring and bittersweet feelings of the Fall were all blended, so I started a daily love letter campaign on my blog (this substack).
I write faster than anyone I know. There are two manuscripts in the works on top of my journals. One about Yoko Ono and another about my dead sister.
My transformations have been informed by the end of a relationship with a breast pump (because I stopped lactating), and blood pressure monitor (because motherhood made me permanently hypertensive). One operates pneumatically and the other through transduction. This is also when I became fascinated with radiation (to find god). A pump, a monitor, a wand—a trifecta of bodily measuring instruments that depend entirely on the logic theory of salt water. Kiki Smith yes yes yes.
I became obsessed with my blood pressure this time last year. I started calculating the rate of passage of blood in my valves by measuring the beating of mercury in a vacuum. According to the astrological chart that I do not believe so much in, my Mercury is in Taurus as are my Venus and my Sun. This means that the way I talk, the way I love, and the way I am perceived, are all Taurus-like. This does not mean I believe I am a hard core Taurus (at least not all the time), but it does mean that I do love and write and present myself exactly the same way. What you see is what you’d get.
We’re in a Pisces season now. It’s all passionate emotions. That is my moon sign—supposedly my id. My moon sign has taken over jesuschristfuck. Again, if moon signs are metaphors for anything, the most curious aspect of the year is that I started menstruating at the crest of every full moon around this time. Like clockwork. If you menstruate you’ll understand how strange that is.
Listen. I do not believe in as much magic as I make it seem, but I believe with the entirety of my soul that the universe is screaming at me at the top of its lungs, and if that is not magic, then perhaps it is simply time and timing. What does the travel of the sun signify? The moon? The blood in my heart? The milk in my breasts? The metals all over my body?
I am a fortune in cymbals. A date in a calendar. A memory. What incredible timing.
