Last days

Changing yourself

It’s June, a month that makes me feel like my skin is crawling off. I can’t keep in all the selves I want to be. Last night, falling asleep I thought: All my selves are merging—I can’t find space in between to breathe.

How do you not get suffocated by all the ways you’ve changed and still want to change? Keep moving. Feel it all, but not too much to let it stick. The hard part for me is the not sticking. I lie in bed and think—staring at the ceiling, beginning poems I’ll never write down, getting deep into a feeling.

Recently, Jasmin Nyende did a reading for Saturn in Pisces for me. She told me that what I need is “Self-compassion in flow.” Nothing should stick for too long.

In “The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson wrote,

You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

I’m in Mexico City. It’s my first time here. I’m here with my boyfriend of almost three years. We walked through many markets yesterday, laid down in the park, ate tacos while a teenage boy in a suit sang on a karaoke mic. We’ve been talking over our relationship—or really I’ve been talking about it—and that conversation hangs stiffly over the trip. When I left our home in Oakland for San Diego, leaving was a grief. I didn’t want to let go of the slowness of our life even for a month. I was sad to leave the tree brushing against the window and the dusty house holding all its past iterations in it—when I cleaned out the freezer, there was food expired from 2016. The remnants of past roommates are thick.

Now I feel resistance to going back. My eyes have been down, focusing on each project in school for the last few years. I worked hard towards a goal and met it. Now life has opened up in a way that’s both thrilling and unsettling. Can I really be surprised?

I don’t want to tell the truth. It’s awkward to be so upfront with strangers, and yet it’s the only way I know to empty myself of it. Where can I put it down? Here, perhaps.

I can’t help but find the humor in everything that also weighs me down. I’m weighed down by thinking I knew what I wanted, and being surprised to learn that I had limited myself in considering my options. But I’m also laughing at thinking I could ever fully know anything.

I’ll finish writing this, we’ll have breakfast, then we’ll walk all day, dancing and moving with the sounds of strangers sweeping their streets. What if things don’t have to be so bleak? What if the questions can reveal more of the depth of love, however that love looks?

Keep moving, keep moving. The last days of my twenties hang off me like a sigh. Love buckles down—it’s never going to leave.

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1. The images without credit are from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay.” I’m writing this on my phone and don’t know how to add captions.

2. If you have Saturn in Pisces (and are also going through your Saturn return), Jasmine Nyende’s readings are a balm. I also don’t know how to add links: https://instagram.com/standarized_sext?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

3. I’m going on tour with Matty Terrones (we’ll be performing together—they do sound while I do poetry and visuals), and Adam Gnade (he’s reading from his books.) Hope to see you if you’re on the West Coast.

4. I have a book, The Snakes Came Back, coming out in September via Metatron Press. It’ll be years of poems.