Right now I want the desert inside of me to be what I’m standing in the middle of, like the feeling I had when I woke up this morning after dreaming about getting off a bus one, two stops before it exploded in flames. I love living in an urban environment but I’m hard-wired to wide open spaces. At work I fugued out to the forest I spent endless hours biking through in the hot summer sun last year in DeKalb. I think my last midwestern summer was a good one.
I dream more awake now because I sleep only rarely. My insomnia fluctuates and my body no longer knows rest, really. It’s like I’m less exhausted when I sleep no to a few hours. Things are happening somewhere.
Summer is happening I think here in the bay. I find myself more enthused when I’m feeling the sun. I’ve been wearing shorts even though I immediately have to change back into pants once I clock in at work. It’s ok. The bay never gets that cold, but cold enough and overcast enough that the remnants of S.A.D. still peak around corners.
I’m trying to figure out who I am I think. I have a desperate urge for a bicycle, though I don’t think I could find the same satisfaction living in a city with a bicycle as I once did biking empty highways to small towns miles away from my own. Summer sun beating bleating barking down on my neck, covered in sweat, headphones that never left my ears, both cameras in my bag that I spent so much time figuring out how to attach to the bike that wasn’t even my own. I always found a renewed sense of energy when I would wake up hung over and would fight the ennui by hopping on the bike and heading to my forest, the forest that was not a forest but a forested park that I called my own even after the girl was murdered inside of it, the forest where I sat in the wind on a grassy edge of the stream and shouted all of Bataille’s THE SOLAR ANUS in the girl’s memory. I wanted to mete the insistence of death with how much pleasure that forest, my forest, had brought me.
I would bike through dirt and grass until I had to get off the bike and walk it, going under train tracks and sitting alone and feeling really terrific. It’s tough, because it makes me wonder if in those moments of stillness when I felt holes filled, it makes me wonder if I’m not for the city. If I just need to find the perfect empty space. I have constant fantasies of living in, as I always say, “an abandoned coastal hotel flooded with sand up to the eighth floor.” It’s like art because futile when the world around you is exciting.
On May 1st I move into a bedroom that might actually be mine, not a sublet but not a lease, a flexible position to be in, and I am lucky and understand that I’m doing at least something right to be able to find myself inside of homes repeatedly, over and over, even when it seems like everything is falling apart. I will feel out the room and if it feels right I will fill it with plants and rocks and marble obelisks, maybe bits of Greek statuary. I haven’t seen the room, all I can hope for is that there is a window, maybe even a big window, because I need the solar light.
