End of December 2023
I spent days and days completely out of my usual context. Seeing my family for the holidays. My plotline has been cut short. I was in that completely liminal space. I found that my hygiene was the first to go. The slovenliness felt absolutely delicious until it felt like all of the regular maintenance that was keeping me attached to earth was gone and I was floating in limbo. My clothes, all over the floor. Forgetting to shower.
Staying at my parent’s place makes me feel like I’m released from the performance of the adult I am being. And I take a departure back to the older versions of myself. At its best this can feel nice, an intimate time I can spend by myself, processing, thinking. Taking long walks and playing scrabble with my parents. Other times, these very same activities can feel unbearably boring and tedious, like I am reading a magazine at the doctor’s office, waiting for my name to be called.
I am currently writing to you from Florida. I am visiting my uncle’s house in this gated community. All the houses look the same and when I’m riding my bike back on the winding streets, I find myself making use of the markers available to me to find my way back. Once you get to the blue lives matter flag it is two houses down on your left. There is a small outdoor furniture set up with a fake plant the next house over.
There are many things to be inspired by in Florida, many years ago I felt it was something of a muse to me. When I was last here, I half-wrote a story about a Korean man in a gated community that was haunted by a crocodile. A very thinly veiled metaphor of the wild that disrupts such pristine order, of that something monstrous that supposedly this community attempts to keep out.
However, now, I have found that many days have gone by without me having a single thought. I have resigned myself to the internal logic of this space, playing pickleball, tanning by the pool. As a story, this space is totalizing in its scope. There is nothing it cannot compartmentalize, nothing too big or too horrific it cannot consume into its narrative structure. In some ways I envy this. There is no mystery to contend with, no stray lingering doubts. Though I remind myself these are the very grounds of its violence.
New year, new me (early January 2024)
I was smoking a cigarette with my head out of the window, staring at the people shoveling snow, having dinner in their apartment, and for a moment I saw myself from the outside. I wondered if this is what I thought 24 would be.
In many ways growing up looks a lot different then I thought it would. When I was 6 I thought all older kids learned how to snap their fingers and whistle. This was a mark of maturity, a certain worldliness. As checkpoints they marked my evolution as a human being growing up and attaining certain skills. When I learned to snap my fingers it was a triumph. I thought, when I learn to whistle I will be older, more advanced, more developed. Many checkpoints continued to be constructed in such a way, grades, and highschool, and graduation, and university. Every step marked me one step closer to the adult I was meant to be.
Gradually I retired trivial arbitrary markers and set my sights on more holistic displays of evolution—the maintenance of the body, the knowledge I had about current affairs and social justice and spirituality and philosophy, being a good friend, a good girlfriend, the healing of my internal and childhood wounds. For many years I have told myself this intricate story about the purification of the self. The banishment of pettiness, of wrongness, of badness. Each new year was a chance to be better, a chance to be vegetarian, do yoga everyday, read more. Every year could be weighed against the next, relationships could be compared and contrasted. I wondered often how each experience compared to another.
23 was about completely losing the plot. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you if I was a better or worse person from the year before. There were many invisible things that arose that couldn’t be compared or contrasted–some shadowy and dense, others exhilarating and enlivening, all mysterious. I thought life was about being good. I had made it my altar. I had made it my thesis.
Throughout the year the other girl was chasing me, beating me over the head, pinning me down and pulling my hair. On beautiful summer days, I wondered if I needed to leave the house or sit down and write. This freedom of choice feels like an unbearable burden. I felt like I was in stasis, like there was a right decision and I couldn’t figure out how to make it. The other girl was berating me, taunting me, wanting me to make the wrong choice, the bad choice.
I felt like giving in, like letting it consume me, like letting that other girl, that evil girl, that mean girl, that spiteful girl, that rains on the party girl fill every cell in my body. I have banished her to some dark corner where she only knows shadows cast by candles. I performed rituals alone in my bedroom, casting her out of every spot in my room that the sunlight touches. She has tortured me and made me miserable for too long. Though, I have a confession, in the middle of the night when the faucet is dripping in the sink and I can feel time moving around me I can hear her laughing at me. Or, no, maybe I think she is sobbing. Her mouth is shaping out some words, rounding and pursing. Maybe elephant shoe, maybe I love you.
One summer afternoon, in my old apartment, exhausted from the fighting, I decided to take an afternoon nap. When I woke I swear I saw something like hair disappearing around the corner.
Lately, I have been communing with her. I have been in conversation. She no longer haunts me in my dreams, or in the darkest corners of my shame. And as I was smoking, staring at the snow falling under the streetlights I felt I was understanding something. I thought life was about being good and purifying yourself from that which is bad, and now I realize it is much much more mysterious than that. In treating experience, relationships as if they were fungible was performing some great disservice. There was always something that escaped that calculation, some richness that could be worn down to the sum of its parts.
This drop off point is something I’ve been broaching time and time again. Everytime, I worry that I will lose myself in it. That place where no narratives can hold. Where there is no good or bad just the infinite repetition of contraction and expansion. But, it is much different than I thought it would be. It tastes like true freedom.
There is so much more I want to say about this. Most of which I’m realizing can only be transmitted through the medium of my voice. I will be playing with podcasts and videos on here for my patrons so look out for that <3
I’m excited and hopeful for January. I have been laughing with my lover running in the snow. I have been painting, and going to the movies on Tuesday. This is a special new moon dispatch. If you are reading this in somewhat real time, make a wish tonight. Write down your heart's desire on a small scrap piece of paper and burn it.
Love you, Thai xx
Hope all is well. You're a legend. Don't ya forget it