Last night one of my new Berlin friends, the one from Pittsburg, told me they are getting ADORABLE tattooed across their arm, above the elbow. Someone else asked why and they started talking about Barthes, who was the first theorist they read, and how Barthes says that in love, we reach the limits of language. When asked to describe someone we love, we falter. We become frustrated by the inadequacy of words to give shape to the way we feel. So we come up with silly pet names, which, they said, are still inadequate and a bit ridiculous but somehow right. Or at least the best we can find. So, they’re getting a tattoo: ADORABLE. 

I’m thinking about this impossibility of language in wanting to write to you now. How much I’ve written to you, and of that, what you’ve read and not read, and the ways I’ve come to this impasse with language over and over. I’m thinking about the hope I’ve held on to that saying the right thing would make everything better. "For two people who love the written word,” you once wrote me, “we are pretty bad at it.” 

Our relationship to each other an intoxicating, intense combination of cerebral and embodied. It’s rare I think, to relate so deeply in both. But also: everyone knows this feeling, don’t they?

The way you left things broke my broken heart, turned me inside out and on my head. The eight months of post-break-up spinning, of uncertainty, of me holding out for this belief in our love and in promises. How can I write this without sounding like every other person? 

Yesterday I turned on my flip phone because I finally decided to get a German number. The last text on that phone is from August 31, 2021. Against all the advice from pop psychology and breakup forums, I read through our messages from that summer, oh my god. A shift in perspective. How were you able to put up with me then? I was so stubborn and childish and blind to the extent of it. I was often unreasonable, not receptive or reciprocal to your gentle attempts to connect with me, to accommodate me, to make things easier for me. You tried so hard. I can’t believe I didn’t understand that until now. And us to each other, in moments of strife: “I love you always.” “I love you deeply.” “I love you forever.”  

May 28, 2021, I wrote you “it feels like we’re losing each other. feels like heartbreak.” and you wrote, “idk i’m just confused, last night was so so so so nice.” And I wonder at any claims on my part that I wasn’t pushing you away for months, or that it wasn’t all my fault too.

Last fall, a month after we broke up, we sat at Everett Park in the dark and you brought up the trip we took up the mountain, to the campsite where no one else was. You asked me then if I thought it was a swan song. Because you didn’t. But wasn’t it? 

In the wake of everything it’s so hard for me to not hold out hope. In the wake of everything it’s so painful to try and detach from the possibility of some other life which, in the best moments felt palpable and already realized in us.

Where does falsity rear its head? What’s the point of deeply felt, temporary forvevers? Right before you left Los Angeles: “I trust us.” “I’m still in love with you.” “I want you to visit me.” “I’m committed to making things better.”  As if suddenly changing one’s mind negates all the other promises. Or did you know deep down all along.

I think I still love you. Can that be true? Is it not the idea of you, or the idea of myself with you? Is it not the envy I have of you in a non-feminized body, the ease with which this allows you to move in certain spaces, despite the pain I know it generates? I think I still love you, but is it not my attachment to you, re-activated by old texts and a flip phone with the same background photo of you and the ornery rabbit who died last month, the one got from the woman in the SGV? Is it not a form of loneliness, am I just wishing for companionship on the level of yours? Is it not chemical, our bond built of a mixture of proximity and pheromones, entirely explainable by science, entirely able to re-created with and between almost anyone? I think I still love you.

But being with you I I lost myself, rock in force field. Disconnected — from the world and especially anyone with a connection to you. Disconnected from you but also paradoxically closest.  

So what has this Life been since? I have sought and gained affirmation of my Self as a Worthwhile Person outside of my attachment to you.  And I’ve wanted to find and experience and connect for myself with the kind of social intellectual life you always praised, a life that, with you, I did not feel I had access to, floating just beyond it with my only tie being You.

I’ve rarely been able to approach you without wanting something, maybe that was part of the problem. But what is any function of wanting when I am just as scared of seeing you at any future point and having everything between us bubble up in powerful resurgence, as I am of seeing you and feeling completely shut out or alien.

“There is no doubt that the skies are closing in. But we hold in common the universal right to breathe.”

Achille Mbembe, The Universal Right to Breathe

Quoted in Cloud Studies, Forensic Architecture, 2022.

“Cloud studies is forensics without inscription” 

“Bomb clouds are architecture in gaseous form” 

“We, the citizens of toxic clouds, must resist beyond the borders of states”

The film was included in the 2022 Berlin Biennale at the Akademie der Künste, Haseantweg, but it was much easier to focus watching it from my laptop, in my Berlin student apartment nearing midnight on a Tuesday. Incredible work of research and effective connection a true argument for, to, and from within, internationalism.

Anonymous lesbian love poem found in a twelfth-century manuscript at the monastery of Tegernsee (Translation by John Boswell)

“She says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live. Says to herself if she could write without ceasing. To herself if by writing she could abolish real time. She would live.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dicteé

Do I want to become a more articulate, concise writer for my own sake, or for purposes of perception? Immediately the answer is more complicated than the false opposition of OR. Truthfully I want to be understood by others, and access to yet unlived modes of bidirectional understanding. My compulsion to write is borne out of necessity which is also desire for more....

I last wrote here 14 months ago. False starts don’ equate complete abandonment. The questions of how to live plague me just the same, but circumstances have changed. 

The question of how to write, how to share one’s writings, these are IMPORTANT questions but not so that they should get in the way of one’s actual writing. The feeling of being not-ready has consistently held me in a paralysis which does not support readiness, or an approach toward it.

The simplest sentiment here and inside of me is that I want to be writing REGULARLY. I need to be, in order to bear witness to the G inside and outside my physical body. Suddenly it’s troubling that I so easily split myself in two, I wonder if this is innate, or drilled into me specifically by years of cognitive behavioral therapy and then an adoption of DBT as that which could solve what were then, to me, fundamental problems with my personality.

But this view of DBT is unraveling at the seams. F said she had to stop DBT because it made her feel “like a Stepford wife.” She lent me Margrit Schiller’s My Time With the Red Army Faction which is about urban guerilla warfare and the torturous carceral conditions of so-called “political prisoners” in so-called West Germany, but also a young woman’s process of polticization in clear terms. The book is not about DBT at all, except for a paragraph by Ann Hansen in the Foreward:

“Schiller recounts brainwashing techniques used to destroy the identity of the political prisoners. In today’s Canadian women’s prisons, the maximum security units use ‘dialectical behavior therapy’ or DBT, as their ‘dynamic security model.’ Participation in DBT is theoretically voluntary, but if a woman’s Correctional Plan stipulates participation in DBT and she chooses not to, there is a high likelihood that she will not be transferred out of the maximum security unit until she complies. In other words, it’s the kind of offer you can’t refuse.”

Quick Internet searches haven’t revealed any critiques of DBT within carceral systems or in general. Maybe a more thorough search will produce something which otherwise begs to be written.

Anyway I unintentionally quit therapy in September after aspirationally assuring therapist B that 9 hours’ time difference wouldn’t be a hindrance. Our first overseas (illegal) session was recklessly set by me for 2 in the morning, obviously B’s phone call was left unanswered. We had one or two actual meetings after switching to 7pm (19h), but then I stopped answering those, too... just not in the mood. I sent her a text message along the lines of “It’s not you it’s me....”

So I’m freed from the parameters created by our weekly meetings, brackets for my existence necessary when my mission of being alive felt both empty and entirely out of control. 

The first month of anything I feel high. There has to be a connection to “it takes 28 days to form a habit.” The Berlin intoxication is wearing off, but this life of mine, saved twice by DBT, is still good. Without constant, stimulating newness, existence requires forms of engagement beyond surface-level, or a complete numbing. Libras are notoriously shallow. But I want to dive. 

TO DO:

Read The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (1972)

most relaxing and inspiring day with J. got vaxxed (2nd dose) finally. had sex and made pesto and went to the beach. visited the bunnies and chickens at malibu feed bins. J loves the chickens so much. maybe we will care for chickens together 1 day. laid in the sun for a few hours, ate the pesto on pasta and some dragonfruit from their work with lemon and salt. magenta. came back home and watched gossip girl. perfect day.

Lying in bed. Waiting for J to bring me boba. I want to be journaling regularly,  stuck by the common redundant limiting desperate quest for self-improvement. sick and tired of... you know. Bummed to miss pole for the 3rd time in a row. What am I avoiding today?

What are some secrets to a good life?

How does one get better at swimming? How do you float for longer... what can help? 

Practice, the answer nobody nobody wants to hear. 

Who can teach me to take my time? 

Shrine Leo and I made for Kimi last month in Joshua Tree because she couldn’t get out of bed to come on the trip with us

It’s a windy day at the beach.

Everyone said jump in the ocean. I’m just sitting here in the sand with my new pink bath towel.

This towel set is bringing me so much joy.

I want to wear more jewelry so I can feel sparkly and protected and grown.

I think I love being alone. It’s scary though, every time-- what if I’m alone forever? 

What if nobody really loves me?

The closer you are to the ground, the less you can feel the cold of the wind. Ha, tell that to me, an air sign!

I’m stuck on the tight part of me, my brain, my temples, the shriveled part inside. What about the kinds of grounding that can exist outside of capitalistic systems of value. I’m thinking about all the skills I want to learn. I’m thinking about trades. About COVID as a rupture, how I’ve never been able to cope with the pace of things…

I’ve been wishing I didn’t have a body. Or maybe a sometimes-body. I want to disengage from sex, from power. I want to be young.