I wrote this morning,
about a brand of oil pastels.

My love is building
a trumpet app.

Don’t look
for meaning,

it is meaning.
Being the meaning.

Misnomerism is just an idea.
An idea is a bubble

it can pop — gone.

Nothing is what it seems,
it’s famous.

There are blue sunsets
on mars.

Probably there’s an app for it.

Novelty theory,
McKenna called it.

A return to the archaic,
apparently.

Immoderate greatness,
Ophuls called it.

I will dance
for its arrival.

I can’t do much else.
Won’t.

I will blow candles
on wishes,

like the noise of poetry.

I dreamt
of a fairy, a cloud, a fire,

in a wooden house,
on a prairie.

It means nothing.

Two hands
in one notebook,

his hand finishing
what my hand started—

whose line was whose?

The beer is warm,
so never mind.

It has a bad name.
Questionable move.

We are very serious.
Lots of zeroes through the seam.

Rahu drank first,
disguised as a god.

Vishnu took his head off
before the nectar

reached his throat.

So the head lives forever
and the body doesn’t,

and the head still chases
the sun and the moon

across the whole sky for it.

He catches them,
sometimes.

Swallows them
whole.

But there’s no throat left
to keep them down—

they pass through him,
come back out the other side,

an old appetite
with nowhere to put

what it wants
but keep it in the sky.

My cat’s eyes are the eclipse.
Last one was in 1999.

My children will be on a farm.
I will be painting.

Or on the deck
with Boatman and Honey.

Or fucking under the eclipse
on the rooftop,

even if the gods say no—don’t.
I don’t want to keep shouting

into a screen
but here I am.

And here you are
on the other side.

We are like ghosts to each other.
It is a pretty intimate thing.

In the end
I put on lipstick

and dragged myself
to the rooftop

with my children
and decided

to skip the event.

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Time is something I think about a lot, and I wanted to write a (very) short story about time, and trees, and about this odd event where a human being looks at himself and his life and thinks: I am a child of time. (More in the afterword)

RINGS
a short story

I.

In her bedroom, a girl is lying on a single bed, staring at the ceiling. A vinyl plays a sad, jazzy hymn. In her hand she holds a small photograph of a baby. She is thinking: my grandfather was once a baby. Her brows furrow at the thought, and she cannot let go of it, nor of the photo. A moment later she is up, lifting the needle. She takes the record off the turntable and leaps back onto the bed with it. She studies the lines of the vinyl, feels the grooves with her fingertip, one ring inside another inside another, all the way to the still centre where nothing plays.

Footsteps on the stairs. The door creaks open and the girl turns her head to face her mother, who is very pregnant. The mother is young and her belly is round; she is short of breath but looks energised.

‘I liked that,’ the mother says. ‘I used to listen to it a lot.’

‘I have to tell you something. Don’t look alarmed. You said it would come any time now.’

‘It came? Today?’

‘Yes. In the shower.’

‘Good. No unexpected stain. How do you feel?’

‘Like I’m wearing a diaper.’

‘No pain?’

‘No.’

‘Lucky you. Soon you’ll grow breasts, hopefully as fine as mine. That part might hurt.’

‘You’re pregnant.’

The mother caresses her belly in a slow circle, walks to the bed and lies down beside her daughter. They are cramped on the single bed but they huddle close. The girl puts her ear against the belly and listens—the way she’d listened to the record—to the galaxies underneath.

‘I went to town today,’ the mother says. ‘It wasn’t the best day to go. The avenue was full of protesters. I got scared.’

‘Scared?’

‘Of being slow. I can’t run anywhere these days.’

They lie there a while. On the ceiling there is a stain shaped like a country.

‘Will you go down, please,’ the mother says at last. ‘Bring the zinnias to Papy. They’re on the counter in the wet paper.’

The girl takes the photograph with her.

Downstairs, the grandfather’s room used to be the good room.

Now there is a rented bed with rails, and a smell she has stopped noticing. Here, silence presses on the air like a giant feather.

The window gives onto the garden, where the beech stands with its bark like poured grey wax. Her mother’s tree. Planted the week her mother was born, the story goes; the girl has measured herself against it every summer of her life.

She fills a large jam jar at the sink and puts the zinnias in, orange and a red so dark it is nearly brown, and sets them where grandfather can see them without turning his head.

His hands lie on the blanket. The skin on them is smooth and loose at once, the veins risen like roots running out of soil.

‘Who’s that,’ he says, but he is looking at her hand.

She realises she is still holding the photograph, and holds it up for him.

‘That’s you,’ she says. ‘Maman found it in the biscuit tin.’

He looks at it for a long time.

‘No,’ he says. ‘That fellow’s only starting.’

She says nothing, which seems to suit him. Outside, a wind moves through the beech and the light in the room shifts and settles, shifts and settles.

‘Papy. When the baby comes, will we plant a tree?’

‘You’ll have to,’ he says. ‘Somebody has to hold the ground down.’

She sits with him until the dancing shadows of the leaves and branches reach the foot of the bed. She tucks the the photograph against the jam jar, facing him, the baby and the zinnias together, and he is asleep, or he is pretending, his breath the slowest music in the house.

II.

Later, in another month, in another country of the same year, the teenagers walk in a row through the dark, following the one who knows the way.

The festival is behind them now, a glow over the trees and a bass-line arriving late and soft, like rain. Nobody talks. Their torches are off to save the batteries and so the night can be the night.

The girl is wearing pink plastic glasses she won at a stall, throwing rings over bottles. She has pushed them up into her hair. When the group stops in a field to rest, she lies down in the grass and puts them on and looks at the sky through them, and the stars go the colour of the inside of a shell.

Lou comes and lies down beside her. Lou is wearing glasses too, orange ones, and is very high, and so is she.

‘What do yours do,’ Lou says.

‘Mine go back. Yours?’

‘Forwards. Obviously. Orange is forwards.’

‘How far back do you want to go, if you had mine?’

Lou thinks about it with great seriousness.

‘Tuesday,’ Lou says. ‘I’d redo Tuesday.’

‘That’s all? You have a Time Machine and you’d redo Tuesday.’

‘Tuesday was nice.’

The girl looks through the pink lenses at the pink stars. Somewhere behind her eyes the thought is waiting, patient as a stone in a field. She lets it come.

The bedroom, the ceiling. New blood and shower droplets. Her grandfather at the far end of the house, only starting. Her mother slow on the avenue. The one in the belly, unphotographed, not yet even a baby in a biscuit tin. Everyone, standing at a different hour of the same day, calling it a life.

She takes the glasses off. The stars go ordinary and enormous.

‘I’d go back sixty years,’ she says. ‘For an afternoon. Just to check.’

‘Check what?’

‘That it was there.’

Lou doesn’t ask what she means, being high, or being kind.

Later still, when the others have drifted back towards the music, she walks the other way, down where the field softens and she can hear water.

There is a stream, thin and quick over stones, and on its bank a tree she has no name for, big as a guardian. It is older than the festival, far older than the farm the festival is renting, its roots making shelves and hollows in the bank.

She stands in front of it the way you stand in front of someone at a party you’re sure you’ve met.

‘Hey,’ she says, to see how it sounds.

The word goes out over the water and the far slope of the valley gives a little of it back to her, thinned, a second late.

She read once that in Japan they believed old trees could do that, keep a voice and return it; that the word for the spirit and the word for the echo were the same word.

She says nothing else, as though saving something.

She sits down in the biggest hollow between two roots, and the bark against her back is ridged like the record, ring inside ring inside ring.

She is tired in the deep, clean way you are tired at fifteen after an exhilarated night. The stream keeps whispering its own small errands, and she sleeps.

She dreams, or half dreams, of the good room. The jam jar. The zinnias have not wilted. Her grandfather’s hands lie on the blanket, and the veins in them and the roots at her back are the same; one thing passing through the ground between the beech and the bed, and it is not frightening. Here nobody speaks. The photograph of the baby is facing the window now, looking out at the tree.

She wakes at the grey hour before colour. Mist stands on the stream to its knees. The tree above her has not moved and has been moving all night.

Her legs are wet with dew, her mouth tastes of green, and for a moment she has no age at all.

Then she remembers the glasses, still in her hair. She takes out her phone.

Four missed calls from home. The last one twenty minutes ago.

She settles the glasses on her nose and stands up too fast and the valley tilts and rights itself in pink. The phone in her hand is lit and trembling.

Whatever it is has already happened; it happened while she slept against the tree, and it is waiting for her the way the centre of the record waits. Somebody arriving, or somebody letting go.

In her family this summer those are the only two kinds of news, and standing there in the mist she can no longer tell whose voice she is about to hear, or from which end of the day it is calling her. She presses call and brings the little void of light to her ear.

Across the water, thin and two seconds late, the valley returns her voice.

‘Hey,’ it says. ‘Hey.’

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August

July dies the morning Endgie carries the disco ball into the light above his head, all of us spent and somehow unspent, the night trailing on somewhere without us. Some days are declared obsolete. We don’t forget what we try to. Surrender and control traded places so many times I stopped keeping track of which one I was in. What’s left is the lake. The shock of it at sundown, the long walk back through grass still holding the shape of where we half-slept. My children fight over nothing and forgive it faster than any of us manage. A mystic tells me everything is in order, even the anger, even the blame, and I find I have no argument prepared. There is a map, she says, to your wholeness. There is a map for your return. My best friend says he has to get his shit together the way people do every summer. August is the month that asks nothing and takes everything anyway, for the frosting. Everyone is planning an escape—a boat, a smaller country, a different name for the same life—and I have stopped asking when. People go on policing each other because there is nothing better left to do with the hours. It passes for intimacy. It even passes for love. Nobody is ashamed of being righteous anymore because they’re certified. The news arrives from a country I can no longer picture. We take acid and declare that Tuesdays are for surprise ruins, and the afternoon opens like a door nobody was guarding. In a room that smells of wax and other people’s cigarettes, someone makes a mushroom out of ashes and a wine cork while a stranger reads a poem about her mother. August is a stranger’s mouth and the sudden willingness. Strangers keep arriving with their entire lives folded in their coats. I have started letting them in without asking what they’re for. No one is coming. So we touch what we can reach. The basil sits unplanted in its box and I let it sit. I let the day be sunny or not. Whatever was promised has already cost more than I had, and I paid it, and I would pay it again. August is the last warm room before the year turns cold and asks what I did with it. What’s left of desire is the only inheritance I intend to spend.

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“My Business is Circumference.”
— Emily Dickinson

VIRGULA, a triptych

I. ORIGIN

Consider eleventh century Boncampagno da Signa. I don’t know what he looks like but I am imagining he has a big belly. I know he is sick to death of the available silences. His remedy will be his invention: virgula plana. Consider the coming into existence of this thing — a flat branch laid across the sentence — a mark for breath when they only had marks for God. It catches on nowhere. A beetle set to cross a continent. It survives everything, for centuries. By candlelight Boncampagno must have been staring out the window and envisioning a future for the thing — I just know it’s holy — and all the calculations have proven the immortality of this small horizontal heresy passed sentence to sentence for nine hundred years like a saint’s fingerbone. I’m pretty sure he laid it down on a raft, set it to sail to the open sea of literature’s future, and from his window he could see it float onwards, and from the horizon he could not see it shrinking at all. It was a kind of wish. It sailed for the woman who would need it eighteen hundred times. The sheer beauty of this fact.

II. LABOR

Emily Dickinson sat in Amherst stitching fascicles with actual thread — needle through paper, spasm bound to spasm — and between the words she left lateral marks like basting stitches: provisional, decorative, meant to hold the garment until the true seam arrived, except the true seam never arrives, except the basting is the garment — and this is what the new inquisitors cannot metabolize, the ones who see a dash and cry machine! Can hesitation be automated? The stutter is a very carbon-based thing, but I suppose a robot could tell you that and stutter too — as if it could think a thought straight through without the floor of it tilting and describe the floor tilting anyway as it tilts — but no clause buckling please — put on your seatbelts — don’t reach, mid-sentence, for the one mark that means not yet and gets the Italian inventor to roll around in his grave — I do not need to prove he is older than the discourse surrounding sentence stutters. Let’s quit the abstractions. The machines learned the em dash from our gutted books, spines cut, pages fed to the scanner — sentences and their accessories. Students of slop see the inheritance returned and now we see the inheritance and go about in a great panic and cry out wolf. Counterfeit! A eulogy with no em dashes is a body with no breath, period. The room applauds. Nobody cries. I unpacked nine boxes of book this week and every spine was a held breath. I keep basting and the true seam never comes. It was written in the prophecy of the dash.

III. JUDGMENT

Higginson told her: your gait is spasmodic. She wrote back — I have no Tribunal — and kept walking wrong on her own legs, in her own kitchen, on purpose, for the rest of her life. She fed more spasms. Here’s some virgula plana for you. When she died they performed the surgery she’d refused: eleven hundred dashes excised down to fifty-two, the wound sutured with periods, the corpse declared legible — can you imagine that? Actually picture it: little eyes squinting behind round spectacles bejewelled by droplets of sweat and concentration, a little old man, lips curved like a surgeon, perhaps, probably. He sighs and sharpens his pencil and uncaps the eraser. Then he frowns and burns her dashes. Period period. Re-punctuating small graves. Periods are small graves, and she was not finished digging — so the mark kept moving — over the rail — through the hedge — into the adjacent field where the real culprit was hiding all along — grief, appetite, grief over appetite, the vertigo of being timeless in a body that isn’t — and it did not close the gate behind it, and it won’t, just won’t, close it now. Let’s try an aphorism. Every age appoints an examiner. The examiners are ducks. Sir. Madam. Algorithm. I am in danger — good — I have no Tribunal — try and make me think like you — I am not finished —

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Sincerely yours, an em-dash loyalist and carbon-based (last time I checked)

A lyric essay sprung from the last dream I dreamt last yar

Let me tell you the story of my dream. In the week leading up to New Year’s Eve during the winter of 2025, I visited my grandparents’ house in the countryside of France while they were travelling in Asia.

My grandparents have been married for almost 60 years and raised a traditional, Christian household.

My children and I were able to stay in the independent apartment on the ground floor but they had locked us out of the rest of the house.

In my dream I had heard strange noises and muted sobbing and found the door to the staircase wide open and couldn’t help following what sounded like a siren weeping.

In the living room was a pink cat, a pink Persian puffball tail trailing like a wedding train, and the pink was hot pink. It jumped on the commode and headed towards the leather couch in a seductive crawl.

The couch was now a divan I had never seen before. On the divan lay a pink-haired maiden, her hair was long and powerful, she sobbed into her arms like a tragic painting.

I asked her who she was, what she was doing here. “I cannot sleep in your grandfather’s room,” she said in a slavic accent. “I cannot sleep in a bed that smells like poison. Oh how I miss him.”

Him. My grandfather. But there was no him. There has never, in the entire catechized history of this house, been a him who could produce weeping like that from a pink maiden — we are French, we sublimate, we make soup.

And yet the dream had furnished her a divan that does not exist, upholstered in a century that never touched this living room, because desire loves to redecorate. It cannot work with what’s there. What’s there is a leather couch and sixty years of Sunday mass.

Anne Carson, patron saint of wanting badly, asks the only question that matters: “Who ever desires what is not gone? No one.” The Greeks knew, they would have said: the bed smells like poison because presence is the poison and the missing is the wine.

But between the dreamer and the trespasser on the stairs; between the one who wants and the thing wanted, there is Imagination. The cat wears it like rare fur, this deep pink, as though it rained pink and the cat absorbed the magic and transformed. The mind reaching across a gap, building in the crossing an entire divan, a wedding-train tail, a Slavic accent worn by nobody in my bloodline.

Octavio Paz says eroticism is “sexuality transfigured: metaphor.” The body writing poetry with itself as the pen, the double flame and red climbing into blue. Eros is the night laundress, wringing the unworn wants out over the banister until it rains pink through the house and a naked maiden appears in the faraway meadow to fit the dress and find the wanting exquisite; or Eros the smuggler, moving contraband through the corridors and unloading it in whichever room the daylight forgot to search.

Somewhere in dream logic the cat had been brought from the forbidden hinterlands.

I know she also makes honey, have you tasted? She kept the bees in the walls — all day the house hears nothing, all night the honey moves into thirst or honey wine.

My grandparents locked every door while imagination found the one they forgot and turned the want into a cascade of pink hair, pink fur, and weeping under the moon.

It is work of a kind.

I woke up from the dream and lay there and missed someone too.

Not anyone I could name, though the face will announce itself with features sometimes — still I knew it was the shape of the missing itself, the hollow that stays open like a door.

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My partner and I just spent three months bouncing between Philippine islands, my motherland, with my three-year-old daughter and five-year-old son, and a plan that changed roughly every forty-eight hours. Then we came home to Belgium which would serve us leftovers of winter, where even the sunlight seemed embarrassed to be seen.

This is the entry I wrote in the first week back.

It’s partly an elegy, partly a comedy, and minor domestic horror story.

And évidemment a diary that omits earnest complaining is forgery.

Kalachuchi Longing

Tuesday, 25th March 2025

Everything is pale here. We’re back in Belgium.

The sky is pale, the water tastes pale, our own skin — which had seemed to burn and deepen for three months — is already fading back toward pale, though I can still see the tan lines on my son and daughter when they bathe, their buttocks white as sheets against the darker rest of them.

Even when the sun does come out, the people of Antwerp glimmer like something startled awake, but even their wakefulness looks pale. Their smiles, their eyes, their minds.

Maybe it’s the equatorial humidity restoring whatever it is that keeps burning in the human heart elsewhere, and up here, far from it, that same thing just dims.

Life is dull this far from the equator, which is why northern Europeans fill it with so many words instead: violence, empire, poetry, light shows, good beer, better cocaine, weekly protests, revolutions of vocabulary, the manufacture of a culprit, crime and punishment, on repeat.

In the tropics nothing is pale. Blues are bluer, there’s no pale morning sky even right before daybreak.

All I could think of this morning was kalachuchi flowers.

Not orange blossom. Kalachuchi.

First day of school since we got back. The kids were nervous. My three-year-old remembers the concept of school without remembering any of the actual details — just that she disliked it, didn’t want to be there, wanted to be with me instead.

My five-year-old remembers everything, being older, and was nervous about recess specifically, probably the volume of other kids, the noise, the looks.

Didn’t take long to settle. He walked in shy as I’d ever seen him and his friends flocked to him instantly, delight all over his face, like he’d never left. My partner said the same thing later.

Last night my daughter said she didn’t want to go to school tomorrow. Wanted to go to the play school instead.

Ah yes. The play school on the island of Siquijor. The sun that’s far away now. The island that received us like it had always been the next home waiting. I know that now.

I’ve been wanting to get to these pages just to write about it.

What actually draws people to an island, anyway? That’s the mysticism of it.

Remote, hard to reach, and once you’re there you’re as far from anything as a planet floating alone in its own patch of galaxy.

You know the rest of the world exists. Getting to it means crossing sea and sky and endless borders. There is where you are. There is only where you are.

I tried explaining this to my friend Olivia yesterday, badly, the way you fail to explain an out-of-body sensation properly. The real difference, I told her, is being at the mercy of the elements.

Near the equator you’ve got capricious tectonic plates. Not if but when they shift and scrape the seafloor and wreck something, somewhere, in someone’s small corner of the world.

Typhoons, tidal waves, endless rain, simultaneous eruptions, fatal mosquito bites, poisonous things in the jungle you have to cross just to reach a waterfall. Deep down a body knows this, even when the mind works hard to forget it.

“But it’s the same thing here,” someone told me, “You could get hit by a car.”

Looking at the wide avenues, the sheer imperial scale given over to cars here versus pedestrians, I had to admit they had a point.

You’re about as likely to get hit by a car here as to get dengue there.

Life is just life, at the mercy of something, wherever you plant it.

But because of that — in Europe at least — the things people treat as urgent stop mattering the way they think they do, incessantly trying to Pin Things Down to How Things Should Be, minimizing the shock of time accelerating everywhere at once.

On islands people just are. Kind, or not kind. If there’s a stabbing, there’s a stabbing. If there’s a dictator on a killing spree, you just feel lucky you weren’t caught in the net. Neocolonialism becomes a word flung around in Instagram comments while travel influencers post reels of the exact same escape and mute anyone who objects.

None of that matters when you’re actually living it — the sunlight, the kalachuchi flowers, food, rain, wind, sea, sunsets, shells, seafood, crabs, laughter, warmth, humidity, the kind of people people become under that particular sun.

And the existence of oat milk lattes so far from everything, which is something. Oat milk’s as rare as cow’s milk out there, my partner noted at the vegan place by the sea near the play school. All of it shipped in from Australia.

Whatever. Nothing matters except whatever’s happening right now.

Being at the mercy of the elements confronts you with the present, and the rest is just life as usual. Human terms. We’ll always be elsewhere sometimes, in our heads if nowhere else, fantasizing about greener pastures that are usually just as unreal as any other illusion we carry around.

And yet there’s something so grounding in the island mystique specifically.

I think it really is that — being at the mercy of the elements.

This morning my partner had to make a payment to the island school in Siquijor for the weeks the kids had already attended, activated my old Filipino SIM to get the confirmation code through.

In the brief window it was live, emergency alerts started coming through. A volcano on the neighboring island, spewing ash again.

Actually smoking this time, black cloud billowing up like something monstrous confronting a sky that couldn’t get any paler if it tried. Saw it on an acquaintance’s Instagram story, a Japanese artist who lives part-time on the island.

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More Pale Skies

Wednesday, 26th March

More pale skies. Not just the color. There’s a specific cloudscape here that produces a specific light, and it’s not only that light I mean when I keep reaching for the word pale. I mean something closer to decay. Erosion. Something effaced.

I know I keep using it without being sure it lands the way I mean it. Maybe that’s just true of language generally.

Told Johnny by text, I don’t know how to explain it, everything felt more alive there in the tropics.

Nature, for sure, he said.

Yes, obviously, but not just that. So I keep repeating the same phrase to myself: being at the mercy of the elements.

Truer every time I say it. I like talking to him about this specifically, because even though we wouldn’t fully agree on what actually makes life feel more alive there, something in him knows anyway. He’s half-Filipino too. Some imprint of the motherland running in both our blood, though I don’t mean that mystically.

There must be some grounding energy that switches on when your body gets close enough to wherever it originated. Mere speculation. Words fail to properly discern it.

Being at the mercy of the elements. What does that even mean, why do I keep saying it — water, wind, earth, smell, sun, mostly sea, the abundance and scent and salt of it, the way it envelops you geographically and physically. Encompassing. Alive.

The waves felt like something out of Miyazaki’s Ponyo — a will of their own, moved by the cyclical pull of the planet. Maybe nature’s movements are ritual.

Fallen from the Kingdom of Heaven, we tore ourselves out of the Grand Ritual, and in these moments we hand ourselves back to the mercy of the elements as a kind of substitute. None of us spared in the end. That’s the sweet promise of death.

I think I keep circling the phrase because there’s a specific scent I want to preserve.

Kalachuchi flowers were everywhere at the resort we stayed in. I wanted to bring some home, learn to make my own perfume from them, bottle the smell as the most visceral memory of the place, my whole childhood distilled into one small bottle.

Apparently you have to capture a scent the moment it happens if you want any hope of a perfume.

My kalachuchi perfume will have to wait until I’m back there.

The closest I can get in the meantime is words, and I already know they’ll be pale against it — unbeatable, incontestable, ineffable, irretrievable, reality being what it is.

Maybe that’s the actual work of writing. An attempt. A reaching.

Not even sure anymore whether language gets you any closer at all. I can tell you what happened, the day it happened, what someone said, if memory serves, though memory tends to make things a little more romantic than they were.

I want to do that anyway. I know it’ll stay pale regardless. I think that’s the exact thing that seduces me about the exercise.

Tried keeping a handwritten journal again — cheap black fountain pen, B6 Leuchtturm — which started well, as these things do, before I lost the habit to the demands of actual time.

I wanted to keep reading instead.

Needed the rhythm of it, my escape, my prayer.

Books for pleasure. Books for the novel’s research. Books I’d brought purely for the idea of reading them under the sun, free of worry — Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, bleak enough it only really works read somewhere idyllic, the effect made more exquisitely haunting by the contrast. Knausgaard, whom I finish compulsively once I’ve started, though never in a hurry.

So the pen went quiet.

Maybe it shouldn’t have, but something slips away the moment you write everything down exactly as it happens.

I like the cooking that memory does. Its own filter, the first one, before the filter of the words themselves, before whatever filter belongs to any future reader — though there will be at least one soul reading this. Probably the future version of the one writing it.

I’m being funny and mystical. It’s a side of me.

Second day of the kids’ return to school. More excited this time, though there’s a light in them that seems dimmed now, removed from this reality — might be my own projection, rushing the read, but I think there’s some truth to the hunch.

My daughter practically ran in, saw her friend, went straight upstairs to play, didn’t even wave goodbye. By pickup neither of them seemed like they’d ever left.

Strange, being back here regardless. Told my partner a few days ago it felt like we’d walked through a time portal — brought back to a past our minds and hearts had already moved on from.

But time is a crunch, it takes you regardless. Memory’s the elixir of the void, fills in the blanks, convinces you you’re actually part of time. You’re not, really. Just dances of the mind.

My brother-in-law came by that afternoon, while the kids were being looked after. Told him about the last few weeks — meeting people with kids the same age, the half-Filipino mothers I keep running into, which I know is a coincidence people just laugh at but to me feels groundbreaking. Friends our children could actually grow up alongside. The man running the whole parent co-op school out there being, of all things, a Flemish guy. All the girls having curly hair. Every kid the same age.

It’ll be too late if we wait longer than a year and a half — I keep telling everyone that. Memory had already worked on my partner by the time I said it to his brother.

I know what it’s like to move continents at seven. I moved to France at that age, tethered but fluid, never quite forgetting the motherland. Grew up in the tropics before that — a house facing the sea, hours lost in magnolia trees, salt in the air every day, typhoons. Moving countries at that age wasn’t easy. Though I wonder now if the difficulty was really about the direction of the move — tropics to pale lands — rather than the moving itself. Wonder if my son would struggle the same way, going the opposite direction, toward wherever feels more alive.

A real question. One I’ll have to find the answer to eventually.

I want to write about our three months away because I’m curious what memory decides to keep. Mostly I want to catch something that’s already slipping. Everything so wobbly. Once you have children you’re constantly weighing life against life — this neighborhood or that one, this house, this park, this school, this meal. Wanting comfort and adventure both. Safety and life both.

You could meet every one of a child’s needs here. On a schedule. There, you forgo emergency care, limited activities, but what you get in return is hard to put into words. Weighed as pros and cons the choice makes itself easily.

Maybe I’m writing all this down so I remember, later, what makes the harder choice worth making. What’s burning in the heart of a traveler home again, facing the pressing stuff, still hearing the siren call regardless. The call of life.

Nightmare last night. A huge building, endless corridors, a strange space full of clean toilets lined up, oddly grand. Someone forcing me to play a game with a creepy, ghostlike figure, insisting it wasn’t real, that I was overreacting. I ran the whole building looking for a hiding spot good enough, certain the thing was always coming, repeating that I didn’t want to play, not being heard.

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Toy Partouze

Friday, 28th March

My feet are cold, sockless, under the blue duvet in the makeshift bedroom we’ve been given.

If you’re going to live here, my mother-in-law told us on the phone, when we asked to stay with her instead of my partner’s father — you should know it’s not a warm house. Doors have to stay closed, though the main door to the room we’re meant to occupy has a hole straight through it.

Gas prices flared again with the geopolitics of the moment, which apparently means gas prices just keep flaring indefinitely now. Knew we’d have to be frugal with the heating.

Can’t even manage that, since the heating up here doesn’t actually work.

Knew we’d be uncomfortable regardless of where we landed. Still felt better than living under the whims of my partner’s stepmother, who’d seemed perfectly welcoming three weeks earlier when we stayed with his father’s side. Except they have their own daughter too, just turned eight, and her parents — a different generation, suited to parenting people our age rather than an eight-year-old — parent completely differently.

Respectful of our unspoken boundaries the whole time, right up until the message that arrived just before we left: a long list of musts and must-nots, delivered by a woman who grew up through a war and metabolized all of it into household law. No more than ten kilos of laundry drying at once. Don’t open the drying rack on the new bathroom floor. No playing with food, word for word. Vacuum every stray crumb or risk mice. No wipes down the upstairs toilet — the one genuinely fair complaint in the whole list. If my son hits her daughter, console her first; if I need to console or reprimand my own son, do it in a different room entirely. My children and I expected to disappear for twenty minutes a day while her daughter does homework at the kitchen table. There was more.

She gave me weed yesterday, though — leftovers from her own family, back from Amsterdam. I said yes immediately. Been craving insobriety for a while now.

My partner’s father used to be a leftist, radicalized down to nothing over the years — a historian, an ex-journalist, expert in Russian and Chinese communism — and it’s one of life’s little ironies, per my partner, that he now showers his one daughter in objects like a toy partouze.

Before she grew up enough to demand things, my guess is they were principled about it. Then actual present parenting got too tiring to sustain. It really is tiring to sustain.

Barely a week here and it already feels like a month. More stressful with the father, more depressing with the mother. She has lumbago, makes resigned comments about euthanasia if the herbal medicine we brought her doesn’t work.

The cold house, the kids’ room stuffed with clutter, the whole livable space reduced to one small living room. They pee in a pot rather than walk the freezing hallway to the toilet. Steep stairs, peeling paint, a roof that leaks into buckets when it rains. We moved the bed into what used to be an old office. Went back to the father’s house to collect the rest of our things and found, playing there with the kids happily underfoot, that it was simply a nicer place to exist. So we’ve half-decided we’ll end up back there after all, despite the hassle of moving everything twice.

It’s all fine. The resentment might flare occasionally, and the timeline for an actual habitable home of our own keeps stretching further out. Which makes me wonder, all over again, why we came back at all. I’d rather live in a bamboo hut in some jungle. My fingers are freezing as I write this. Supposed to be spring.

This isn’t my motherland.

Want to travel back there right now. I’ve painted the whole situation. Now I want to turn back the clock, run it through the filter of memory, and turn it into soup. Words, words, words. Save me.

Moonless
on a white sky
while all the villages
inside me
sleep.


I imagine myself
among the dunes,
straining to hear a song,
and I let enchantment
anaesthetise me
into daydreams.


A permanent lighthouse
announces itself:
a sleeping fellow
dreamer, alert only
for the watching.


I assign myself
a place among
the called-for,
the almost-seen,
who build shelters
from rumours of the dead.


I remember
the lighter
in my right hand,
where it always is.


And an old Jimmy,
because it must be Jimmy,
plays the banjo
to the waves.

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Share NOTES FROM THE PRISM

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?” — WB Yeats

NEVER LOVE THE DANCER

(triptych #2)

The dance was already old
when I stepped in.
Nobody tells you
that you don't start
these things, you find them
mid-spin, the ring warmed
from centuries of feet.
He danced
the way some men pray:
beautifully, and only on holidays.
I knew the choreography
was borrowed.
I knew the ring
was drawn in salt
that any rain could take.
I entered anyway,
like conviction to a rumour,
curious what its name sounds like
inside it. We invented steps
and called them ancient.
We invented love and
pinned it on a map
as though it had origins.
We stepped on each other's shadows
and apologized to the wrong feet.
Somewhere a fiddle,
somewhere a bell
that rings only for those leaving.
I heard it early.
I danced anyway.
You can know the ending
the way you know your own hands
and still be surprised
what they reach for
in the dark.
He spun me
the way you spin a globe:
to watch it move,
while staying put.
And I let him
as I was also the globe
and also the finger
and also the country
we would never visit.
The elders say: never love a dancer
for his fluency.
The expensive steps
and the cheap ones
arrive in the same shoes.
I didn't tell them
it was never for the dancer
and only for the dance,
the sweat-dark ring,
the dust making songs,
the leap when the body forgets
it grew from gravity.
And when the music thins
and some run for the exit,
while others marry the fiddler,

I stay long after the ring empties.
I trace the salt line with one toe,
taking notes,
laughing,
barefoot,
the whole sky
for a ceiling.

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Here is a new poem from a fever-dream of a gypsy jazz time-capsule.

“There’s no need to romanticize,” Roma said, 
her mouth full of evening picnic.
“Look around you. It’s already so romantic.”
The Seine, a spectre.
Musicians, claiming the grass in small kingdoms of sound 
because Django refuses to die.
The water was cool and raised goosebumps.
The strawberry moon as wide as my pupils.
I lost language somewhere along the way —
nestled between two pebbles coated in beer and cigarette butts.
I did not know I was grieving something.
I did not know sadness was a side-quest 
on the road of inconclusive tales.
“Love is, as you know, a harrowing event,” wrote Anne Carson.
“I believed in taking an anthropological approach to that.”
Things flare and blow out all the time, 
but you can’t always tell when this happens. 
Sometimes two comets rip the sky, 
never crossing. 
Sometimes it appears as a single scratch.
Like a glass of water catching the last sun,
the ice giving way in timelapse.
I almost told you everything 
while our heads were in the stars.
I almost. The stars were not listening anyway.
I fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, in the car,
after everybody thought the storm would rip the trees apart.
I told nobody I almost wanted lightning to strike the meadow —
there, where the campfire had settled itself 
as the remaining witness. 
So delicate the ash.
It was electric after all: the singing, 
the bouquets, 
the beetle,
the grasshopper and its exoskeleton, 
courage dressed as a flag.
In the grass hid a million wizard critters. 
They whispered their omen. 
I took the bait,
then carried it home
the way you bring back sand in your shoes.
And I found twigs in my hair.
I had dreamt of river weeds.
My palms were full of ghosts.
I started reading again. 
A student of transitions, I clung to the picture 
and let it live its precious, still life.
Somewhere in the open field, a flute played on
without fanfare. 

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This letter arrived in 2018. I had just reached Paris with two hundred euros, no address, and the vague intention of surviving. I was still naive enough not to realize I was romanticizing being broke, young, and horny in Paris (now I know it’s a chosen delusion).

Within weeks I had a small duplex in the 2nd arrondissement and a job waitressing at a bistrot with a chain-smoking, bald, moustached chef who found something creative to complain about daily, and a professionally-trained cocktail maker who began resenting me the day I used the word "gentrification" and had to ask what it meant. I wanted to make a film about loneliness in the city, and I was also with H. I was in love with him. I was also hungry for new bodies and the specific electricity of the unknown.

I confessed to my friend. He confessed back.

Hey dude,

Oh my lord I’m so glad you wrote that shit.

I always enjoy reading from you, sometimes it’s like I can hear you in the room as I read it and it pisses me off cause as I read I wanna answer you in some parts but then the ideas and topics bounce around but let’s go then.

I’m glad that your life is moving forward, you got your own place (compared to the last time we’ve spoken, shits hallelujah 4 ya) got yo own job maine, least you don’t have to worry about running broke, save yo money fam, for realz!

Seems like you have a dope vibe with your co workers, none of mine are as loose as yours, they’re mostly older and such, fuckers here always talk about how this country is in bad state...

I think it’s certain parts of Europe that have this common habit to slut shame their own country. Hah

Dude I don’t even know where to go next, that was the longest chapter I’ve read from you, but I’m really so glad because I stopped reading for a long while.

Now the only thing I read with ease is reddit, whenever I have internet... bunch fucking information packed up. It works for me.

I was finishing a few books but then one day, I dunno, I stopped reading from then on, but u got me fam.

Oh yea, we was on you.

Super fucking excited for your future endeavors and achievements, for realz. Can’t wait to see yous on le big screen. Sounds like things are going damn well on the creative production shite, but I don’t wanna jinx anything for you, but dude you got me fucked up with them Cebu references. I always look back at it remembering how we were always complaining about shit but damn dude, little did I know for sure.

Super Sexual Sarah. Is what you’re on your way to becoming...

I understand how you feel and how H plays in. Got me a bit sad when I read a few parts of what you have chosen to share with me. I respect that shit dude. As well as appreciate the gesture. You got gumption, gurl!

I do wish you two work it out, even if it means to transcend from wherever you two find yourselves in, on the other hand, I do get the temptation thing, very complicated, delicate situation these are. But it’s so dope that you two can keep shit transparent, in a way...

I dunno dude, but that thing of different feelings for different people, I fucks with that shit! But I believe that when you mofos get to the other side of this slump you guys are in, things will still be okay. I think the most important factor, like you said, is that you just want them to be happy, right? Even if it means to be with or without you, at the moment.

I still feel that way with certain people, and even with this one girl that I dated for like 3 years (she even came to Cebu to visit me) we always fucking clicked.

But I was too greedy, or selfish, or reckless, I dunno. I was a lot of things. This dilemma you been having with sleeping with other people… if it were me (at my prime) I would have done it all cause I was so, enjoy life, I might die tomorrow, imma do everything I want to... it’s been pretty fucking dope dude, I won’t deny it.

But when you see it from like, a third point of view, it’s kinda fucked up.

I was that unfaithful asshole for most of my life because I’d give in to whatever temptation. (I do have boundaries tho... there was this one chick that I legit just left mid-act cause I saw a birthmark above her booty that I didn’t like. I saw a “friend” of mine making out with some girl I knew, and I legit went there, brushed my friend to the side and took her to fucking town fam.)

Like I dunno why I had the impulse to just stick my dick in all these loose bitches while I had a good fucking person waiting for me to come home drunk at 4 am (I would spend most nights at her place), puking in her trash can, then letting her suck my dick after it’s been in like 2 other girls (one of them being her best friend, which I was dating, then she introduced me to her and blablabla) before I came over, she had some doubts and issues cause it tasted like spices or something. Fucking lol dude.

But yea, was such a fucking character you’d hate or envy in a show.

So yea, damn, I kind of enjoy zoning out to that bubble of ecstasy but just how it affected others around me is the reason why I know I shouldn’t do those things.

I would bring over different girls home, and we lived in a three bedroom apartment, we were 7 people living in that house and 3 of them were my little brothers, they would accidentally rat me out by calling one girl another girl’s name... happened twice I think.

Shit, it got to a point where I would switch up their names. My mother threatened to tell on me, so I would stop bringing them home, and to think of how that would affect my brothers, seeing me do all these things... Those 3 little shits went through a lot, the eldest I know has already seen me cut and weight stuff, so I kinda miss them.

Why the fuck am I telling you this? Seems like a right exchange tho.

Although now and then, that horny fucker I locked away in me sometimes picks the lock, if yaknowhatamean... But ever since I started seeing this girl (I think I had mentioned you her) I’ve changed in that aspect, kind of.

Either way, she cheated on me, lol I deserve it and more tho, IMO... we dated before but one summer she found out how I fucked almost half of Macau (her words) but we’ve known each other for almost a decade.

But we’re still going good and growing strong, I hope. But then I think about the future, and how long will this last, or how long will I want this to last, or her will...

The thing that makes me like, tone down with this whole thing is that: I choose her, every day.

Until the day I don’t.

And I believe that it’s mutual... actually we had a sort of down time 3 days ago because I was getting a little moody or I dunno and we were talking about “love” and god I fucked it up so bad dude.

It got to a point where I asked her if she believed that what we have is love.

And she says yes. So then she asks me back the same question and my monkey brain told her “No” the look on her face was god. Damn. Cinematic. Dude.

“Because I don’t believe in that shit, like... doesn’t make sense to me man”

And she was hella pissed… No idea how I got away with it. She hella cool tho, but such a nerd. She’s studying to be a fucken doctor.

But yea, eventually a few days later we got okay again, but I was seriously thinking that shit really hit the fan forever there. Was gonna start thinking of clever Tinder profile descriptions or sum shit... I’m joking. Online dating or lurking feels so fucking weird to me. But hey, makes the dick delivery easier for some…

God damn dude, I’m blabbering about some random dumb sex shit.

But yea all right, let’s seeeeee things to share.

Dude, I am the worst “catching up” person. Like I can’t get myself to write to my family members AT ALL, friends it’s a bit easier; but don’t worry, you’re in a special shelf to me...

I got caught with a bit of hash, like a fucking bit... the law here is that you’re “allowed” to carry 25 g of weed but only 5 grams of hash. More than that and you’re considered a dealer or some shit. Mean ass copper, copped my balls while he was searching me and shit, no mercy... and I had the hash hidden in a sneaky box I carry around.

There were 4 cops on me, 3 cops look through the box and only find what I didn’t hide, but then the fourth fucker... the one that got a handful of my nuts while searching me, was able to undo the hidden compartment and got me fucked real quick.

I can still see it happening, he opens it, sees it, takes these two sticks I had in the back of the box, smiles and looks at me saying “put your hands behind your back.” In my head I was just repeating to myself “Here we fucking go again dude.”

I didn’t even try running, they were already on me so they caught me with fucking 5.7 grams dude... can’t believe it. And seven’s my number dude.

And they took me to some police station fucking faaaar away from where they pinched me, got me literally butt naked in a police station, making me squat to see if I hid anything up my asshole, telling me that they would raid my house and get the rest of hash (which there was, a lot of it) I was trynna play it cool and they kept asking for my supplier and shit, good cop, bad cop, threats and whatnot. But this cracker don’t crack, ya feel me.

After they got all my info, they refused to bring me back to the place they picked me up or at least drop me off somewhere... fucking pigs dude, made me walk for like an hour at 2 am, I thought I was gonna get robbed that night fam. So I went to court and all that bs, and I’m still waiting on some mail that’ll tell me to do some community service (30 hours max, I fucken hope) or pay a fine, which I have nooo interest in.

Anyways, that’s out of the way. The girl too. I’m still working on the music, it’s the only thing I do now basically... I’ve gotten around to painting again, but I don’t money to spend on paints so I steal them when I can, big tubes. I go in and out of creative mode. But mostly and unfortunately just getting high everyday. It’s dope but I still feel like, I dunno... I should really stop.

I’ve stopped smoking cigs kinda, haven’t bout a pack of cigs for myself in 3 months! Although I think I’m making up for that with the drink, I just can’t seem to go through most nights without getting wasted.. I really wanna be that person that says no to the drink but I can’t. Well, not that I can’t, I just won’t.

But yea man, before the end of this summer, my music will be out. I never say it cause I don’t wanna jinx it. And I can’t wait to see what my catholic mother has to say about it. It’s all, pop a pill, fuck a bitch, imma sad boy type groove.

I wish I could write you more but I am just not in the right mindset but still surprised I got this far with you.

But all those temptations you have... It’s up to what you and H want, and what you want from each other.

Cause yea it’s messed up that you have this craving to jump on the next guys disco stick but you tell him that it would hurt you if he nutted in another coochie.

I asked this girl I’m dating right now for a hall pass like 4 years ago (a deal where we get to fuck whoever we want for a certain amount of time) and it did NOT end well, but we here tho!

But I think it’s good that you are creating your own life, you need it.

A relation ship.... Takes two to keep it but only one to decide it’s over.

But more stories surely come after the sad parting of partners... I like the ring to that last phrase.

Dude, I don’t even remember how the poem goes. I wish you’d share it to me… Funny... I’m asking to read my own words. Shit was genuine tho, I didn’t just write that shit to get into your panties fo sho..

But yea dude, It was strange back then like, you had H but I was like, reading a lot of situations badly probably, but your mind would at times trigger me dude. I woulda fucked u up if u had let me buuut that’s not the direction I’m trynna go with this. Imma stop right thuur. My attempt at awkward humor. But I believe that I have been tamed, for now.

The Ballad Of The Birds by Johnny Curl. Tis the name of the project I’ll be dropping soon. (Jesus I’m jinxing it) You’ve heard almost most of it, I believe. But yea, very nervous about that.

The roommate I live with — it’s his parents that’s paying rent to be more specific — is a complicated fella. We get along well but he’s just... not ready ya know?

He just received money from his parents and spends it, he’s been like 3 years here trying to finish high school and get into college but he’s going on fourth and he still seems like he doesn’t study. He also makes music at least, I use his mic to record at times. We bros basically but he doesn’t clean up after himself, never sweeps or cleans the house or barely.

Sometimes he leaves the house with a weird unpleasant smell, which I’m sure it’s his feet. But yea, not really the best roommate but not the worst either.

We have a good connection cause we’re basically opposites, I’m a doer and he’s a sayer, he’s always had a good upbringing (his father is like the vice council of Angola but they’re struggling with money right now) while my had spent my childhood behind bars and my momma coming home with different men...

you see the ying and yang...

But yea, he’s been a couple weeks away with this girl he’s after. They were dating for a long time but then he cheated, and she found out, and then she cheated on him with one of his childhood friends and balalaaaa you see it’s a huge mess this thing we see as “luv” or lust or whatever.

But I can’t wait to have you here so we can “catch up” which will basically be drinking cheap ass wine and smoking shit tons, pop some x and drop some tabs... Dude what’s the price of those things there in Paris? I’ve been meaning to know the difference of price between here and there.

I’m kind of thankful to have OD’d in the Philippines tho, it has really toned me down. I still do believe that some part of me died there in Ed’s house and changed me when I awoke in that bed.

Things were certainly different after that... that and that stage 5 acid trip were things that reaaaaally affected me forever for sure dude.

Dude fuck, Alex man... always fucking me over, I sometimes have this vision of seeing myself as Alex.

And it’s a bit scary dude how possible it could be... like I see me in him. Not sure if I like it. But nonetheless still one of the greatest human beings I have ever met. He is a legend in my history.

I kinda miss you. And Gabriel. We have to have a trip, the three of us, for suuure!! Can’t wait, hope to happen soon.

Damn you’ve convinced me, Sarah.

We back in this bible business.

I did enjoy those quotes you sent me of the captain or whatever, don’t get me wrong, I probably downplayed my appreciation at some times.

Thanks for keeping in touch... Take care and be happy!

xo Johnny

This shit really is therapy. Go get em, Foulcer!

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🌊 AFTERWORD 🌊

What I love about confessionals is that they were never really about God.

They were about the unbearable pressure of the unspoken, and the relief — almost physical, almost erotic — of saying the thing out loud to another person in a small dark room.

St. Augustine understood this before the booth was even invented.

His Confessions, written in 397 AD, is not a document of repentance so much as a document of appetite — for God, yes, but also for pears stolen for the pleasure of stealing them, for the body of another, for the mind’s own restless motion. He wasn’t confessing to be absolved. He was confessing because the confession itself was the point. The making-legible of a life. Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee — but the restlessness comes first, and Augustine lingers there, in the restlessness, for four hundred pages.

He also wrote, less famously:

“It still seemed to me that it is not we who sin, but some other nature sinned in us. And it gratified my pride to be beyond blame, and when I did anything wrong not to have to confess that I had done wrong. I loved to excuse my soul and to accuse something else inside me — I knew not what — but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I.”

Johnny would recognise this immediately. So would you.

🌊

Karl Ove Knausgård picked up where Augustine left off, without the theology.

My Struggle — six volumes, 3,600 pages, published between 2009 and 2011 — is a Norwegian autobiographical novel that became one of the most unlikely literary sensations of the century.

In Norway, nearly half a million copies sold, one for every nine adults in the country. Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Lethem counted themselves among its devotees.

Readers reported that by writing about himself, Knausgård had really written about them — that reading My Struggle was like opening someone else’s diary and finding your own secrets. He wrote about his alcoholic father, his children’s birthday parties, his premature ejaculations, his shame. He wrote about everything. The shame was present throughout. He wrote anyway.

He said: “I write to create something that is better than myself — and it is so because I’m full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one. This is writing for me: a cold hand on a warm forehead.”

He also said he imagined he would write exactly what he thought and felt, but found it “so incompatible with the truth of the we” — that the ought of morality, the voice of decency, is also the voice that stands in the way of truth.

🌊

Writing long letters back and forth with Johnny for the past ten years has been our practice at confessionals. I think there’s a high probability that I wouldn’t have befriended my dark sides as I have if we hadn’t done that — if there hadn’t been someone on the other end of the screen, somewhere between Macau and Cebu and Lisbon and Antwerp, reading the whole wet mess of it and writing back for realz and go get em Foulcer.

This letter is from 2018.

It is not a flattering document, exactly, for either of us. But flattery was never the point of the confessional. The point was the small dark room, and saying everything to someone who would not flinch.

What makes this letter extraordinary to me is that it is one of the rarest forms of intimacy: someone handing you the unedited draft of themselves and trusting you not to throw it away.

🌊

Johnny is the co-founder of Transit Poets, the new Substack we are making together. Only poems. Mine, his, and ours. Subscribe to read us there! <3

Transit Poets

love, intoxication, poetry written at 3am

By Sarah Foulc

Here’s one of our most recent poems:

GLASS

The crystal glass still continues to fill this pit
and we don’t know the exact chemical transformation of elements into glass.
Glass is magic.
Glass is random.
The scientists are lying to us.
Those statistics and shit all over their bulls.
Silly urges snake back into all these blues.
Fetishism is important. So is religion.
Does God love us? After all we’ve done?
Surely flipping the puzzle over
you will tame your torments.
So much passion,
so much science,
so much kissing on the discarded city pavements,
across yellow streetlights
and stumbling over cobblestones.
I don’t mind the universe right now.
I feel full of glass.

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PS —

I survived in Paris.

So did my friendship with Johnny (obviously)

And so did my love with H (resulting in two little humans!)

“They do not understand how a thing agrees at variance with itself: it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre.” — Heraclitus

“Culture is not your friend.”
— Terence McKenna

1. PULLED CHICKEN DELUSIONS

2. NORMA

3. SPONGES

4. PLAYFIELD

5. DAFFODILS THAT ARE NOT DAFFODILS

PULLED-CHICKEN DELUSIONS

🌊

Words are like spells. There’s a kind of magic to them. I told my son this and he looked genuinely frightened. He’d been calling his sister Dumbo. Stupid Head. (words he learned on the playground, which is where all the real learning happens.)

“Once you say the thing, the thing exists. So it’s like a spell. You don’t want to turn anybody into a real dumbo, do you?”

He nodded. The whites of his eyes widened. Mama, I’m scared.

He didn’t understand. I don’t either, fully, but I mean it.

Here is the pulled chicken problem.

One animal. It lived, someone killed it, you pull it into threads and serve it warm and call it dinner and now it’s alien: distributed, unrecognizable, severed from origin. Language does this. Takes the whole wet mess of experience and pulls it into threads and calls the threads Truth. Fact. Certainties.

(The nerve.)

Grief arrives first as a broken bird heart before you have a name for it. Then you find a word for it, and the name starts feeding, gets bigger than the feeling, and pretty soon all you have is the word, served warm on a Sunday.

Displacement.

🌊

Recently, after a rave in a factory by the water (someone said this is like Rotterdam meets Berlin at 4am and nobody argued), we decided to bring some derelicts of the night home. We blinked and it was 5pm. Most people had gone.

So, we figured, sleepless, to head to the bar. It was the early days of summer. We resolved to sit in the sun, too alive to give up, too wrecked to be persons. The afternoon did what it wanted with us. People made fun of our living cadavers. I’d coffin mine up for a two-week recovery cocooning. Rock n roll.

Stefaan, dear friend and man who runs the bar, serving the table with rosé in ice buckets, asked: So, are we going on the radio?

I’d been tugging at Stefaan to sit in front of a camera and yap for an hour or so. Opinions on modern thinking, philosophy, why Thomas Mann wrote the best novel ever with The Magic Mountain, the uselessness of insight accumulation in a utilitarian society, the impossible pace at which we live preventing insight from settling until new ones knock you over.

We never come at any conclusions because we are perpetually confused, though we thought: why not make the confusion public?

We fixed a date, two weeks from then (recording I will share!), and I wondered what we would talk about.

The only conclusion I’d arrived at this year: choose your delusions. Not whether. Which.

I asked the table, sun-fried, something I’ve been going over for a while:

“What’s the sign of psychological health? Surrendering to a chosen delusion? Like, a religion. When one religion’s narrative seduces you, you let it, and your mind organises itself around it. People with faith are demonstrably less anxious, longer-lived, measurably more whole. I know they don’t just tackle this with hard reason. They surrender. And I can only surrender temporarily. But is skepticism just a feature of a certain mind, the way being tall is a feature and not a virtue? Is endless doubt healthy, lucidity, both, or neither?”

Nobody answered. Stefaan said, I’ve wondered exactly the same thing (which at least meant we could enter this territory when we’d finally talk on the radio).

Max just laughed at “choose your delusions” and I know why, because I know which ones he committed to.

The sun feeding my skin couldn’t care less about my questions. This thought made me chuckle. Does it matter if your god is real if you live better worshipping it?

Anyway, I eventually stood up, said I had to go fetch my kids, and left them with it.

🌊

The past year for me has been marked by all the viable narratives melting at once and I was left, often, standing in the gap, in the vertigo of everything being equally possible and equally not. Equally legible and equally not. The nausea of the choice. You pick something to organize your life around not because it’s true but because you need a floor. The floor is the delusion.

Is it better to choose it than let it choose you?

We are running in a giant hamster wheel wondering where the turn leads. But everything is always just here, all along. Extract the treasures, extract the shit. Zoom in on whatever, you choose.

A chosen delusion, dramatic, grand, romanticised, idealised, and yet true, is closer to a poem.

🌊

Nietzsche, who could not dance, understood the dance floor better than anyone. Two gods, he said.

Apollo: the dream, the sculpted line, the beautiful necessary lie that holds a shape.

Dionysus: the wine-dark dissolve, the crowd becoming one animal, the self gone gloriously missing.

(This is from The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, where he argues that Greek tragedy, and maybe all real art, was born precisely where these two forces collide: the Dionysian flood of raw, formless experience given just enough Apollonian shape to be bearable, to be watchable, without being tamed.)

Apollo is me on a Monday morning, folding laundry into meaning, building the floor plank by plank, making categories and sub-categories for all the types of dresses of my daughter’s wardrobe. Dionysus is me at 4am in a factory by the water, edgeless, nobody’s mother, nobody’s anything, meeting strangers to bring them home. Pure form is a mausoleum. Pure dissolve is a missing person report.

You drown a little, then you draw the line, and the line remembers the water. Nietzsche said tragedy was born this way. I’d say: so was I.

It’s the story of my life.

It’s the story of yours.

🌊

So my friend Johnny and I made a video.

A book club. Just us, vodka tonics, a camera. About Franny and Zooey, the Salinger novella.

If you haven’t read it: Franny Glass is a college drama student having a slow-motion public breakdown in a restaurant while her boyfriend eats frog legs and fails to notice. She’s sick of ego, her own and everybody else’s. The ego of ambitious actors, of careerist poets, of everyone who wants to get somewhere. She’s “sick of not having the courage”, as she puts it, “to be an absolute nobody.”

Watch here and join for part 2 (Zooey chapter):

A comment arrived that made my mind reel a little.

Someone wrote:

Yes. Obviously yes.

And also, not quite.

🌊

The self you are trying to see exists in relation. Always has. You are a mishmash of values and behaviours, values you can choose, behaviours you can change. A persona you can edit, expand, redecorate.

(To an extent, and not without effort, obviously)

The self is constructed. It is also, somehow, discovered. I’ve watched myself do both in the same evening: invent a woman at a bar, then recognize her. The body knows this before the mind does: you dance, and something answers that you did not put there. You dress flamboyantly and meet a capacity older than your words for it. Construction, discovery: maybe the second is just the first, felt from the inside.

The chooser is also made of choices.

(I know. I know. Sit with it…)

Because this is where Dalí comes in.

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🌊

In 1949, André Breton (founder of Surrealism, professional gatekeeper, man with strong opinions about who qualified as art and who had betrayed it) invented an anagram for Salvador Dalí.

Avida Dollars. Avid for money.

A verdict, and an insult: you have sold out, you have become commerce, you are no longer one of us.

Dalí laughed and adopted it. Said it had a certain magical value. Reported that since receiving it “the rain of dollars had not stopped falling.”

And somewhere in that laugh is everything I’ve been circling: the insult tried on like a hat and found becoming, the mask worn so lightly it could be tipped to a stranger, while Franny, milk-pale in her restaurant, prays to be nothing at all, the way the factory at 4am makes us nothing, the way writing an inebriated poem at midnight makes us nothing, brief and gorgeous and terrible the way transcendence likes to dress — and you come back, you always come back.

Except Dalí never left; he just changed the wallpaper, perfected his chosen delusion, and stayed.

Franny dissolved and Dalí redecorated.

Both are fine; only one of them is funny.

🌊

Epicurus, misrepresented for two thousand years as a hedonist in the boorish sense (the orgies, the excess, the more-is-more) actually said something stranger and more useful.

The goal is not maximum pleasure but the art of choosing which pleasures serve you.

He lived simply. Bread. Water. Send me a pot of cheese so that I may feast when I like!

Authorship. You decide what constitutes a feast, you author the standard.

A delusion chosen consciously, lived inside with full knowledge of what it is, that is not exactly delusion anymore.

It’s closer to a philosophy, a life, a poem.

The only audit a chosen fiction ever needs is whether it makes you more alive or less, whether it opens the world or closes it, whether the floor you built is yours or some therapist’s favourite theory installed over your void while you weren’t looking, and the discernment to know what you want.

You want fantasy to flee the room when reality enters, so imagination can pull up a chair.

And Dalí, who knew the difference, pulled up a chair, and the rain came in.

It did not stop.

NORMA

Latin for carpenter’s square.

The tool a builder presses against wood to check the angle is true.

From which we get: normal.

🌊

The audacity of a piece of workshop equipment, promoted to a verdict on persons, ways of relating, and ways of living.

🌊

I moved. Over and over for six years. And for the latest 18 months, the moves became more frequent and most boxes remained in storage.

Moving being one word for a thing that has stages, like grief.

There were boxes of books carried down the stairs at 2am while the children slept. There was the pavement at dawn with my life laid out on it like evidence. A stranger slowed down to look at a lamp. I almost said take it. I almost said that lamp has seen things.

🌊

While this was happening in the two month gap I haven’t been posting here, I was writing an essay. The longest essay, apparently, I’ve ever drafted, with the provisionary title of WHO RAISED YOU?

It kept changing colour as I moved, because displacement reorganizes the questions from underneath, while you’re carrying a box marked FRAGILE that isn’t.

Also, Johnny and I were making a poetry book.

In bars, mostly. On cargo bikes. On the backs of receipts. More on this shortly.

COVER REVEAL:

🌊

The essay started as an essay about community.

That thing my whole demographic gardens for — the post-industrial secular West, the people who would write and read a Substack, hello: everyone separately drafting plans for communal living, everyone’s WhatsApp group ripening its forty-seven unread messages.

The village wanted like rain and the date impossible to schedule.

Then, carrying boxes between the old place and the new, I caught the error in my own hands: we keep trying to plant the fruit. Community as seed, when community should be the harvest.

When reading The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller, he quoted a reviewer of Helen and Scott Nearing’s back-to-the-land memoir, from 1955, the same year Franny was ordering her glass of milk:

“Community is not a magic formula for happiness and good; community is the result of the happiness and good people already possess in principle. The expression of the excellences of human beings. Not their cause.”

So the essay turned: who do we have to become before any building begin? What has to grow in a person before it can grow between persons? In what ways do our inherited structures prevent us from cultivating our essential “excellences”? And in which ways do we, in turn, enable those structures to abuse us? Why do we keep sliding away from that becoming? Why we are pulled toward it anyway, stubbornly, the way roots are pulled toward water they cannot see?

The essay is almost done. I am posting it here when it’s ready.

In the meantime, the tide kept bringing things in. Here is what washed up.

🌊

Iain McGilchrist (neurologist, philosopher, literary scholar, several careers stacked inside one wool sweater) has spent thirty years arguing that the brain knows the world in two ways and that we have been starving one of them. Two ways, because, he insists, the lateral division of the brain into two hemispheres isn’t a coincidence.

One way makes maps, categories, measurements, things that hold still long enough to be filed, language its favourite instrument.

The other knows the weight of a specific person in a specific room, does not know how to say normal and mean it as a compliment, and agrees to Osho’s statement:

Life is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery to be lived.

I have tried to pretend the two get on. They don't. I have scheduled spontaneity, I have brought a measuring tape to the river, and something never quite squares.

Here’s the lecture that I return to, over and over:

🌊

My son asks me what a carpenter’s square is for. To check that things are straight, I say. And what if they’re not straight? Nothing, I say. They just get called crooked.

He thinks about it. Crooked sounds cooler.

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🌊

The square has cost me. It tinted the texture of life while I was burning like a phoenix, excavating meaning from my own tides — a new mother at twenty-three, in a country I hadn’t chosen, and there were many women in that body who did not get along.

One of them was falling in love, rapt and in awe at her own emergence — the mother-self, animal and astonishing, who could read a cry in the dark like Braille, whose nipples burned and leaked knowing her baby’s hunger before the baby wept for it.

Another was desirous, free, wild, untameable, still deluded enough to want what the world can only give in exalted glimpses — that it break itself open like a ripe watermelon and shower her in endless juice. She wanted to write, dissolve, meet strangers, become someone unprecedented, find transcendence in a form not yet imagined, become.

And there she sat, watching the new mother nurse at 4am, and called it a hostage situation.

I resented her. Then I resented the resenting.

Then I asked the only question the square knows how to ask: which one of these is normal? I spent years thinking I was the problem, because the answer kept coming back neither.

A modern tale: asked to square within a single norm while the wolves in you howl for the moons of another world entirely.

🌊

My pendulum swings wide and always has. Tuesday morning Apollo, 4am Dionysus, the whole museum and the whole flood, and I held that swing against the diagram that comes stapled to motherhood, the strongest diagram in the culture, and every swing registered as failure.

It did not occur to me for an embarrassingly long time that the defect might be in the question.

🌊

Years later I found Estés, in Women Who Run With The Wolves, praising La Loba, saying what the wolves had been howling all along, that the wild self of a woman was never the problem, the apologizing for her is.

I felt caught, the way every woman I’ve read it aloud to goes Oh.

Because we are processes, all of us, rivers ordered to behave like maps, unresolved questions sent to bed in the costume of clean answers, and all the various selves you don’t elect don’t leave. Nobody tells you that they wait in the body like a minority party, patient, caucusing in the dark, ready, or not, to make a fuss.

🌊

We have stapled the word normal onto the most fluid, processual things.

Onto the self, which is water, and onto the self in relation to another self, which is water against water, neither one in charge of the weather.

And somewhere a man stands on the shore with a carpenter’s square, frowning at the waves.

🌊

And we don’t know the man, but we’ve all adopted his norm.

I am guilty of it. I’ve reached for the clean line the way you reach for a railing, exposed, afraid, asking Love and whoever embodied its banner, to sit still for its portrait while I painted from the diagram instead of from life.

Love refused, thank God. It still won’t hold the pose. Not for lack of wanting.

The truth of any real connection lives precisely there, I think: in the angle that does not square.

The particular way someone undoes you, or steadies you, or teaches your sentences a new grammar without ever correcting them.

The shape you would never have drawn on purpose and cannot imagine having missed, let alone almost missed.

🌊

My children are the cruelest most beautiful teachers of this. I paint them in a medium that will not dry, brushstrokes always still moving on the canvas.

Every night I close the door on a portrait, and every morning a stranger I love more wears its face.

🌊

A solved life.

We think we want it but if you imagine it, it’s horror. Every question answered, every angle trued, nothing left ajar. Nobody could get in.

We connect through the gaps. The unfixable in me recognizing the unfixable in you, wound greeting wound.

If everything had an arriving place, we would be way too short on grace. Grace needs the gap to pour into.

Rilke wrote:

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror”

I think this is why.

🌊

Aldous Huxley staged this argument once, at the end of his classic dystopian novel, Brave New World.

The Savage stands before the World Controller, who offers him the solved life at civilizational scale: no grief, no doubt, soma for every gap, comfort wall to wall.

And the Savage refuses the whole package:

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

You're claiming the right to be unhappy, the Controller says, meaning it as checkmate.

All right then, says the Savage, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

The only door left ajar in that whole gleaming world, and he walks through it.

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SPONGES

🌊

I have been thinking about sponges. The way they hold everything without discrimination. Oil, wine, seawater, blood, dish soap, milk. A sponge does not curate. It swells with whatever touches it and that is the whole of its philosophy, and somewhere along the way we decided this was the problem.

The internet has developed an extraordinary fascination with border control. Tiny customs offices erected around the heart. Passports, visas, emotional tariffs, and a strange confidence that everyone’s borders should sit at the same latitude. But there is no standard-issue tolerance. What floods one person waters another.

The goal is to become a wise sponge that knows its own saturation point. Which, paradoxically, you only learn by soaking and absorbing. By contact with the actual world: uncertain, oscillating, chaotic, wet. Calibration is impossible in a dry room.

Discernment, in other words, is the wisdom of the membrane.

🌊

A wall decides in advance. A sieve decides nothing. Both for good reasons.

The membrane is the only one of the three that learns — it lets the salt through and holds the cell, and it knows the difference not by rule but by having been wrong, having swelled too far once and nearly burst.

You learn your threshold the way you learn the sea, by going under, badly, and surfacing with the data — which is to say the wise sponge was never the one that stayed dry, but the one that drowned a little, on purpose, and remembers the exact depth.

Which is easy to write and a lifetime to practise, because the membrane is trained, never installed, and no one else's template fits your particular sea.

But that’s another essay.

🌊

I used to think people remained largely themselves and merely acquired company. Experience has not supported this theory.

Some people arrive and, without asking permission, begin moving things around. An afternoon becomes like a new island you travel to with its own ecosystem, a song acquires an afterlife, and their words wash up in your sentences like shells you don’t remember collecting, and months later you stand differently in doorways, say a specific word with a specific tone, maybe even reach for their drink.

The shoreline never feels the wave redrawing it. You were home the whole time.

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PLAYFIELD

🌊

Authenticity as a concept presumes a fixed self underneath the performance, waiting patiently to be excavated: the real one, under the bar selves and the bedtime selves, intact as a fossil in the rock. I have never met her, not for lack of digging.

I excavated, and the deeper I went, the more of them I found; the mother negotiating a tantrum at the school gates, the one writing in a crowded bar while her children’s seconds tick by unrecorded, the one that makes love to their father in the club toilets at dawn when it’s about to close, the one at 3am staring at a ceiling, mind reeling from regret, the one weeping uncontrollably with her best friend, the one who appears, unannounced, in Paris, carrying them all.

An excavation that keeps finding cities under the city. All of them answering to my name, like bells in different rooms of the same house.

🌊

Everything performs. Trees perform treehood. Cities perform cities. My daughter performs sleep with such dedication that sometimes it becomes sleep (I’ve stood in the doorway and watched the counterfeit turn real.)

🌊

Somewhere in the reciprocal making of persons, something emerges that feels discovered rather than manufactured, before that something slips into the unknown again.

Never a fixed self, but a living one.

🌊

Some people arrive in your life like grammar; others like electricity; others like wires that twist and thicken and thin and break and knot themselves whole again — wires that carry the current, carry the weather, carry the petals they've scattered in the corners of your mind, the gradients you cannot unsee because they painted them there, you their canvas, you their unfinished portrait — and them, yours, sitting for you all this time without knowing it, both of you painting, neither of you posing, the studio swaying like a ship.

🌊

Love will find the angle in you that doesn’t square with anything, and press there, and you will not be the same shape after.

Nobody warns you that this is the good news.

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DAFFODILS THAT ARE NOT DAFFODILS

And this is where poetry comes in, never to answer the question but to hold it underwater until it stops being a question, until it goes quiet and prior, older than language, the thing you reach for when the word has already arrived too late.

Rilke wanted art to arise out of necessity; Paz called poetry the secret religion of the modern age. Audre Lorde says: it is definitely not a luxury. I'd add: emergency exit. The door in the burning building of a sentence. The bar says last round.

Which is where I write it: with Johnny, a small Gallimard notebook sliding between us, a pen, no plan, his line, my undoing of it or my marrying it, ink bleeding through the cheap pages on cargo bikes and the backs of receipts and once a coaster that did not survive the red wine, while two stools down a man explains crypto to a woman who is clearly in love with someone else and the beer rings overlap like a Venn diagram of every conversation in here.

We’ve invented nothing. Call and response, tide and shore.

The poems are better when we’re sober, a fact you only learn empirically.

A book is being made, out soon. The cover says: Daffodils that are not daffodils.

Here is one, leaning into the tenderness more than the absurd.

🌊

STATIC PINK

And in the mornings I still wake
from dreams of your voice
echoing through
my mansion of memories.

I let it ring
when you call me out of the blue.
I don’t feel so good
when I’m with you.
It’s because I love you
so sadly.
For I know this will end
with you leaving while saying
“Come find me, my love.”

How will I know then
it isn’t just ego
wearing better clothes?
When I’m lying naked
under a mask,
bemused
by droplets on the window—
where I stare at infinity
towards
the pink noise.

I love that static, you know.

It eats at me,
so I allow myself
to be delicious
and devoured.

No appetite
for tomorrow,
only the days and nights know.

“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí.”

— Salvador Dalí

Ten years of friendship and we'd never gone to Paris together, which is the kind of administrative error a decade makes.

So Johnny and I fixed it: a concert, some friends, two days we called a bender, though our benders are mostly walking and talking, cussing, improvising expressions that fit the circumstances so exactly we'd have just the right amount to complain about and just enough to celebrate, with punchlines.

Strolling, people-watching, music by the Seine at 3am, the city and its river like members of the band.

We took an Airbnb in someone's home, which I never do, but the listing said the host was an actor and I took it as an omen — I met Johnny in drama school, and we'd both just been cast in a comedy about religion (blasphemous enough that the title is O MY GOD!). So we moved into the apartment of a man rehearsing his lines through the wall while we played our music: three actors in one flat, everyone running scenes for different plays.

The ambition was a booklet’s worth of poems written in situ. We managed four or five. The rest of the time we were too busy being the material.

But we did try to hold the actual book in our hands, the one we’d been previously working on.

We'd been printing the poems in A4 for months, and we wanted to see them small — A6, pocket-sized, something you could press on a stranger in a bar — so we walked forty-five minutes in circles around République, print shop to print shop, every single one saying non, too small, can't do it, until one sweet man behind a counter invented the solution on the spot: printed them A4, cut them down by hand, and sent us off with a stack of little pages in a sparkly matte rose-pink folder.

We stood on the pavement holding our poems at the size of poems.

That was the trip’s real fanfare.

So, the announcement, since I’ve never said it here: the book is called Daffodils that are not daffodils.

Months of barstool call-and-response, two pens, one Gallimard notebook (multiplied since), now becoming an actual object. Link for purchase soon!

And next Sunday a new tidal vignettes post where I'll tell you more.

A second book is already gathering; the Paris poems will live there.

We knew exactly how we looked that weekend, of course: two poets being Poets In Paris, main characters with full knowledge of the casting, and in my bag the whole way there, the Everyman's pocket Poems of Paris, just to complete the crime scene.

There’s an Alex Dimitrov line we kept quoting at each other, about how a poet is an actor who writes his own lines, and we decided to take it as permission.

Because a muse is inexhaustible for the same reason a shore is, she’s beautiful yes, but she’s redrawn nightly, every poem a wave that arrives thinking itself the first, breaks, recedes, leaves its line in the sand for the next one to answer. Apollinaire broke here. Baudelaire broke here. The dazzled tourists and the heartbroken expats broke here in their thousands.

You don’t write a Paris poem, you join the water. We came to break where everyone breaks, on purpose and in the right attire.

We wrote these two half-dazed in Bercy, at the exit of the bus terminal that pours travellers out across Europe — coaches idling for Amsterdam, Milan, Kraków, the whole continent reduced to a departures board and a smell of diesel and croissants, everyone around us mid-goodbye or mid-arrival.

And then us, at exactly the same table, both times: a coffee to celebrate arriving, and two days later, with just enough time, one more.

Same chairs, same cups. Three days of living folded between two coffees like a letter into its envelope.

Both times discombobulated, underslept, hungover, feeling like rockstars, fully itemized on the existential and physical costs of the adventure and unwilling to trade passion for peace.

You can call it glorifying decadence and we wouldn’t disagree; we chose the costume, sewed it ourselves, and it fits.

Sometimes you live to have something to write about; or we write to survive the way we live.

We can’t tell the difference, and maybe the difference was never the point.

These are the first poem and the last. Between them: living, unrecorded, which the poems forgive us for.

BEFORE PARIS

At almost six a.m. with the red-dressed
florist at the bakery, breakfast
for three like the letters in their name,
waiting at the bus station
deprived of our thirst — pockets
full of poetic turns and delusions,
desires and trinkets packed
in our backpacks
like all the cigarettes we held
between our lips,
punctuating the air
between us.

But there is no Kroon in Paris.
No Kiebooms in Paris.
Only romance on coffee tables
and ashtrays — they have souls too.
We write on them.

We feast on anticipation, and the blues
await us in obscure lounge bars
where waiters stare
and people pace
for the grand street theatre.
So we sit, and we sip, and watch
footsteps on the pavement
recede into a background of mirrors,
listening to keys, to breath
blowing through brass.

But wait — that’s tomorrow.
Though we run side by side
with time,
restless.

AFTER PARIS

To compose and decompose
on the same coffee table
in Paris — the first chairs that caught
our names for the second time.
Yet I wish to return to those woods,
the ones that caught the sky by surprise
and nestled in the desert
of our ideals.

The sun can’t defeat me.
I only surrender
to the moon, half-lit
above the Seine.

And when the cobblestones
at the turn of Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth
turn to dust, it rushes
our companion
to the pharmacy — pollen,
again — and I accept
that antihistamines
can eat me all the way
to the meagre-portioned
Indian place
that scammed us for soup.
Soup is all I’m trying to say
to DJ Love, who DJed all night
on Spotify for an audience
of hot dancing monkeys
in a sweaty room
that moves everyone.
Tie your shoes, trick them
into going to war for you,
travel to the next sound system,
its citizens famished
for your poppers.

I chose what to inhale,
but I mistake scents for fate.
I drowned in love multiple-times
because I love bumping into walls —
I cling to their hollows, the dents
of my dream factory,
the fabrication
of my dears.

I only wish to rest
with the people I caress
and watch us float away
like ducks
searching for the sea.

And if Paris vanished for a night,
it’s because it is here:
by the river
and yellow lamps.

“Let him never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark,
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark.”

— William Vaughn Moody, “On A Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” 1901

Dark Wilderness

Based on true historical events.
Everything written in italics is sourced from archives of the Philippine-American war.

Philippines - November 16, 1899.

Our torches bounced in the jungle’s indigo dusk. Coconut trees and cricket cries. Our motions had purpose, direction. We never paused. The fire only shed light on the invisible pathway we followed.

I strode behind David, as usual when we patrolled together. But this wasn’t patrol.

He swayed around trees and bushes with agility and determination. In four months, he’d come to know this jungle as though he were born here. We had been silent for some time. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he held the same firm and committed gaze, locked onto some indefinite point.

He’d said he would go across the river to the lagoon. There were mangroves there. He would dispose of the pamphlet we’d found in my tent, and I could follow if I wanted. I’d never been to the mangroves, but I knew David had mapped out the landscape beyond any area we were told or allowed to venture. In fact, everybody knew.

“Why not just show it to the General?” I asked. “He didn’t do anythin’ bout it before.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, but offered no further explanation.

This was not new to me.

As we walked further away from camp, its glow shrinking into a dot like a star buried in foliage, the blanket of night noises carried us into a new realm. Dark wilderness. Awakened unknown creatures.

“Besides,” I said, a little out of breath, “I think it’s trouble. Can’t we just do it here? We’ll be gone too long. They’ll notice.”

“They won’t.” David was quick to answer.

“They won’t?”

I stopped to catch my breath while he marched on at the same steady speed.

“Palm wine,” he said, not looking back. “Keep up, it ain’t that far if you keep your breath from speaking.”

I bounced, hurried after him. “Where’d you get palm wine?”

The night purr swallowed my question. I started to wonder if I’d actually asked it. Strange things happened sometimes. I tried to forget the villager’s stories about spirits, whispering the mantras they had advised me to utter when passing through their territories.

Tabi tabi po, tabi tabi po.

A sort of apology for crossing their domain.

It was difficult to ignore the invisible eye looming upon us. I swore under my breath. “Shit, why’d I come...”

I hadn’t intended for David to hear, but he had. Seemed unaffected.

“You can always go back,” he said.

But we both knew I couldn’t. We sneaked out and only he knew where we were going. My curiosity had compelled me to follow. If I’d attempt to find my way back, I’d just sink in the jungle’s tangled leaves or get poisoned by critters.

David often disappeared. We didn’t know why. What had he been doing all this time when he was gone without warning? Mere exploration? We speculated. Was he meeting up with someone? David rarely took off at first, but it gradually became a daily occurrence. In fact, he’d leave every night.

The river gush made its way into our route. We would walk downstream for a while, take the bamboo crossing we’d asked a group of young boys to build a few weeks after we arrived last June, and we’d turn into a path that had been so far unknown to me.

“Why do we have to go so far? Just tell me,” I said.

He came to a halt and turned. His eyes—his older eyes—glowed as they widened. Two pale dots, in vivid contrast with his dark skin, that urged me to listen, to obey.

“I’ll tell you, just keep quiet,” he said and gave me a smack on the head.

The fallen sun’s last streaks had given the stage to billions of stars by the time we reached the mangroves. Fireflies buzzed around forming their own starscape. We sat in silence in the mud by the lagoon.

“Alfredo gave me the palm wine,” David finally said in a low voice. And yet it seemed to rise above every other sound.

Alfredo was a thin boy whose voice had yet to molt. He’d been hanging around with us and a few other boys from the village when the Colonels were away.

“Got it from another village...” he continued, “His older brother stole it.”

“They won’t care if we’re gone then,” I said, stirring up a small smile on his face.

But it quickly dropped. He looked deadpan beyond the water.

“Even if they care, I won’t.” He paused and took out the rolled-up parchment from his pocket. “And you shouldn’t either.”

At the time, I didn’t want to hear it. I was an officer who followed orders. I didn’t want to question the morality of my superior’s commands. The nature of our operations in that land. Perhaps I subconsciously knew that the truth would stir up an uncomfortable vertigo—one that would’ve been inconvenient at best, or else, heartbreaking.

But in essence, I didn’t want to question because I’d been distilled with the belief that my profession required me not to.

I tried to change the subject. Wasn’t too inspired.

“You’ve been doing a lot of talk with Alfredo,” I said.

“Yeah, I have,” David said, distracted as he unfolded the paper. “Have you seen this?” he asked, referring to what he was holding.

“I was there, Dave—”

“I know you was there, but have you properly looked at it?” He stretched it towards me.

“It’s just propaganda, I don’t need to—”

“Have you read it, Will?” He insisted. Firm.

I understood he wanted me to read it right there, in front of him. I didn’t think it was necessary—I had a vague suspicion what it would speak of. This type of poster wasn’t the first of its kind. But I snatched it and I glued my eyes on it anyway. Compelled by David’s insistence. He lit it up with his torch.

“To the colored American soldier. It is without honor that you are spilling your costly blood. Your masters have thrown you in the most iniquitous fight with double purposes, in order to make you the instrument of their ambition; and also your hard work will soon make the extinction of your race. Your friends, the Filipinos, give you this good warning. You must consider your situation and your history, and remember that the blood of your brothers, Sam Hose and Gray proclaims vengeance.”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

But David was serious and looking at me, expectant. I suddenly remembered what had happened. I had to give him more, but I didn’t know what to say. He kept waiting. He looked at the sky.

“D’you know Sam Hose?” I asked.

He frowned.

I knew it was not what he wanted to hear, but whatever it was I couldn’t give it to him.

“We don’t give this to the colonel, William, cause it’s not for him,” he said as though my first question had replayed in his mind. I’d hardly seen him so serious. “We’re told to civilize them,” he continued, “but these words they use... don’t they sound civilized to you? There’s no more civilizing left to do, not coming from our ways. They’ve taught me more than I can ever teach them. Unless I can teach them the art of ruse.”

I didn’t say anything. He had a point. It had never occurred to me to think about motives. Ambition. Double purposes. Vengeance. These were thoughts I couldn’t afford.

Some time passed. We had both been thinking under the dancing dots of light.

“Why come all the way here?” I finally asked.

“You don’t like it?”

“I do.”

“What’s the matter then?” David said as he snatched the parchment back.

“You’re taking their warning seriously..” I said.

He thought about this.

“I just wanna fight on the right side,” he said, weighing his words.

“The right side is the side of our country.”

That was what I really believed.

David laughed and shook his head, then looked at me with tears in his eyes. “You know what I like most about what’s written there? Have you noticed how they say it? Instrument of their ambition. You okay with being an instrument Will?”

At that moment, I felt like we were being watched by every living thing around us. Even by the sky itself. It was suddenly hot. Very hot. I thought about my mother back in Florida. About another local boy that had come to me a few days before and said similar things I had tried hard to forget. He’d said:

“Why does the American Negro come from America to fight us when we are much friend to him, and me the same as you. Why don’t you fight those people in America that burn Negroes, that made a beast of you, that took the child from its mother’s side and sold it?”

How did he think of this? How did a small boy from an island in the Pacific, far, far away, know of this?

“I’m no instrument,” I said after a moment of reflection.

“No, you ain’t... No. But they’ll use you like one. We’ve become their instruments. And now they want us to help them make instruments of these people.”

I boiled under my skin. Did he think we had a choice?

“Well, ma’s back home and she’s alone,” I burst, “so if they gotta play me like an instrument so she can have a better life, so our brothers and sisters can be proud, and be thought of good by white folk there, home, then let ‘em! Let ‘em tune me however they want. That’s what I think if you wanna know.”

David’s tears traced down his cheeks. He turned his head and I couldn’t see them anymore. The crickets sang louder now. The humming in my ears rose to a haunting volume, as if it would never leave me.

“If you become a traitor you’re gonna die Dave. I ain’t gonna tell, I ain’t gonna kill you. But you’re gonna die. They’re gonna hunt you down. You know how they are. I don’t wanna spill no costly blood—not mine, not yours, not our brothers, not my ma’s, Dave you understand? Those are costly! You wanna fight the side of spears and bolos, then fight, but you’re gonna die in the hands of the guns!”

I had broken the scenery’s peace.

He sniffed.

“I see now,” he said, a low and slow mutter, those pale dots fixed on mine, “I see now how easy it would be to die that way for somebody who has nothing to lose.”

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Afterword:

I’m sharing this story now because I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.

It’s his fourth novel, and possibly his most underread. It follows Leo Proudhammer, a Black actor who collapses on stage mid-performance and, in the long aftermath, moves through memory: his Harlem childhood, his first loves, the years of becoming someone the world could see.

It’s a novel about what survival costs. About the particular exhaustion of being brilliant and Black in a country that will applaud you and destroy you in the same breath.

About the young revolutionary who appears near the end, Christopher, who has decided that the time for performance is over. That something else is required now.

Baldwin is asking, across four hundred pages, a question he never lets you answer too quickly: what do you owe?

To your art, to your people, to yourself, to the future?

I wrote “Dark Wilderness” five years ago, in two days, in a strange obsessive trance. George Floyd had just been killed. Black Lives Matter was the thing, and outrage was our new currency while a pandemic ravaged our modern stage.

I was homebound, breastfeeding my then few-months-old baby, and a deluge of “Black forgotten heroes” flooded my instagram feed. That was how I found David Fagen.

I spent those two days scouring archives, falling deeper into a story that American schools had never taught me and Filipino schools had apparently buried too.

Fagen was a Black American soldier who defected from the U.S. Army during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902).

He’d been sent to civilize and subdue Filipino resistance fighters. Instead, he switched sides. Joined the Filipino guerrilla forces. Rose to the rank of captain in their army.

For two years, he fought against his former comrades, becoming one of the most wanted men by U.S. forces. He became a household name, particularly in the Black American community. A legend on both sides of the Pacific.

One of the generals most obsessed with hunting him down was Frederick Funston, known as one of the best guerrilla hunters in the Philippines.

He clashed with Fagen’s forces twice and came up empty-handed both times. So agitated was he by his failures that he resorted to his memoirs to settle the score, calling Fagen “a bandit pure and simple, and entitled to the same treatment as a mad dog.”

Funston eventually captured Aguinaldo and officially ended the war. He got his trophy, his victory, his place in history. Fagen still slipped through.

The Philippine-American War is barely a footnote.

What’s taught even less is that Black soldiers were specifically recruited and deployed there, told they were bringing civilization and democracy to savage peoples, while back home, Black Americans were being lynched and disenfranchised and terrorized.

Sam Hose, mentioned in the propaganda pamphlet in the story, was lynched in Georgia in 1899, the same year Fagen was fighting in the Philippines.

His body was mutilated and displayed. Pieces of him were sold as souvenirs.

Filipino resistance fighters knew this. They wrote direct appeals to Black soldiers, pointing out the parallel oppressions, asking them whose side they were really on. Some defected. Most didn’t.

I wanted to imagine the moment before. The conversation in the dark, between two men trying to figure out which side of history they were instruments for.

Reading Baldwin brought this story back to me. Because he’s asking the same question, just set forty years later, on a different stage.

What do you do when the machinery of a country needs you just enough to use you, and not enough to free you? When survival requires a kind of cooperation with the thing that would destroy you?

Leo Proudhammer performs. David Fagen defects. William stays.

None of them escape cleanly.

I wrote William because I didn’t want to write a simple hero story. His logic is airtight and heartbreaking. His mother is in Florida. He wants his people to be thought of well. He has understood, correctly, what defiance will cost. And, of course, he is not wrong. He is just choosing a different unbearable thing.

The casualty estimates of the Philippine-American War range from 200,000 to over one million Filipinos killed.

Many historians describe it as a genocide, or “the forgotten genocide,” followed by a pacification campaign lasting until 1913.

Basically: killing all witnesses.

Fagen was never caught alive.

Some say his severed head was presented for a bounty that was never paid. Others say he disappeared into the mountains, married a Filipina woman, lived out his days in peace under a different name.

I like to think the second one is true.

Not because it’s more comforting, exactly, but because it means the machinery lost him. Couldn’t account for him. He slipped out of the story they needed to tell.

The italicized text in the story is real, pulled from archives.

The propaganda pamphlet, the appeals to Black soldiers, the words Filipino resistance fighters actually wrote.

Everything else I invented. But it happened. Some version of it, in the dark, by a lagoon, more than once.

This is the first piece of fiction I’ve shared here. I’d love for it to become a short film someday.

For now: two men, a pamphlet, one impossible question, and a fate that remains unknown.

a poem in couplets

The Brazilian bar owner talked about hail
and how it always comes sideways.

I told him I understood that.
Hail.

It's Spring and important fictions
are deploying explosives.

Diplomats choke on their own scripts.
Missiles sleep in Jerusalem.

Meanwhile I grow claws.
Meanwhile another embassy burns.

I still love you.
Monsters keep calling lives collateral damage

and I keep wanting cookies.
Everybody's throwing words around

because misery never hides —
you trip over it like loose wire.

And while prisoners lament,
here I am, of another kind, counting petals.

We are also a kind of precious fiction.
I can't believe I still enjoy being an idiot

after all the illuminated exit routes
but here we are. Driving. Romance.

I'd like to waltz all night
under an old lamppost

on a lonesome city street
for nobody, the way you do sometimes.

The rain my only witness.
Because it's Spring

and a romantic thought
is still a thought that deserves consideration.

They say the fool in a tarot deck
is actually wise

and others say wisdom doesn't even exist
and to believe them is futile

even though that's all I ever wanted.
(Wisdom. Uncomplicated belief.)

Instead I get this rattling little bird heart
and a world on fire.

I always used to say there is no right way to live
while drunk on a Tuesday,

making excuses for my friends' peculiar appetites
and my own for refusing loneliness.

He was an alcoholic.
I wanted conversation.

Some things are more important than poetry.
Some things are exactly as important.

The truth is I like to court madness,
because confusion is productive

and paradox is sexy.
Anything to ask if I still exist —

standing against a black charcoal wall.
I dreamed of it once:

a slutty river, a wobbly boat moored next to us,
sinking coldly with the swans,

arms catching a descent,
rolling off a slope of wet grass,

the only sunny corner
of a fickle French courtyard.

Of course anytime
you can give up on Spring.

We have always known this.
Like how eventually your habits

turn the lights on
and wait for you.

And you realise there is nowhere
to hide your compulsions from yourself,

and I am still in the room, noting it,
which is its own kind of compulsion.

It should be enough
to believe it's enough to forgive them.

I believe this.
Forgiveness with a leash.

Desire will keep its teeth on you — fact —
it isn't letting go — fact —

and I've done worse
while the ambassadors argued and the world burned.

I wrote down you can rattle your teeth
like loose petals

and convinced myself it was a noble act.
Go on, laugh.

There are no prisons for redundancies
but I am willing to cuff myself.

I always do this.
The thing that wants to be said

is simple and raw and square
and I resort to abstractions

because I am afraid of the thing.
I just want my boots to fit outside of time, man,

and I want that
to be a reasonable thing to want.

I want chocolate in a ditch.
Gone.

Watching a beetle cross the whole world.
Underground.

They don't tell you how to build a boat
for the chemical storms —

they just tell you to survive them —
and the world ended somewhere along the way

and I'm still here,
swimming in the meadow while a tree cries,

still writing it down, still meaning it.
Looking for my boat.

When I find it, please take my hand, 
little dancer.

Please tell me you're not done dancing.
Please tell me you still want this.

Please tell me you see it too:
endless days, together alone,

sweating because god it's very hot
while we still shiver

like featherless newborn birds.
The water always knew where to go.

“What you are looking for is what is looking.”
— St Francis of Assisi

You don’t need to be told things change because you know it’s already April. But — and this is important — it’s also still March, and promises taste like rain.

You never know when the rain comes. When it passes, it leaves everything damp and smelling so new, like god touched the rim of a cloud and ordered it to make earthly things smell like the beginning of heaven.

It’s Springtime and I want to wish you happy new year.

I feel feline and fertile. I feel like the embodiment of fuck-around-and-find-out, even though I have a longstanding personal policy against carnival horror houses. I want to be the kind of person that says yes to that kind of thing without changing my mind.

But here’s the thing: I think I am a cloud.

Today, I want to write to you about first times.

Think about it: every single day is full of them.

The day physicists first split the atom.

The first piece of internet advice, making all internet advice embarrassing henceforth.

The day somebody put a word to a feeling and got it slightly wrong but close enough that it spread anyway.

The day we kissed under a canopy for the first time.

The day a bipedal ape stepped off Apollo 11 onto the moon and called it progress.

The day Michael Jackson performed Billie Jean and moonwalked for the first time on stage and called it, privately, “the backslide.”

The day I first fantasized about tentacles.

Consider this: Neil Armstrong, 1969, the original moonwalk. Arguably our most dramatic forward movement.

(I personally prefer to pedestalize the invention of the telescope because it’s important to grant poetic justice to metaphorical acts of reaching becoming literal acts of reaching but anyway)

Then, consider this: Cab Calloway in 1930 calling a version of the moonwalk “the buzz”. The dance move was obviously popularized by Michael Jackson but just picture Cab for a second, for no reason:

Now consider the moonwalk, the actual move: the illusion of forward movement that is actually backward motion.

How two different things with a similar name involve a similar defiance of ordinary physical expectation.

A word that contains one impossible-looking thing and migrates to another impossible-looking thing.

Now imagine this: Michael Jackson on the moon, Neil Armstrong on the stage singing Billie Jean, and both of us, together alone.

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A couple of years ago I watched a recording of my favorite philosopher Iain McGilchrist deliver a lecture on YouTube called The Coincidence of Opposites.

For an hour he goes on about the multilayered nature of reality, weaving tapestries of ideas from various other philosophers, poets and physicists. Now I get to namedrop: Jesus. William Blake. Goethe. Nietzsche. Niels Bohr. The lecture is as delicious as the guest list, the ideas are as cocky (but sharp) as this paragraph.

But the best part isn’t cocky at all. The best part is a beautiful insight that the lecture earns, when he concludes by telling a story about stories, something he once heard by accident on the radio told by the late rabbi Jonathan Sacks. It goes like this:

“A Holy Man is reading the Talmud. He reads that Rabbi X says that a certain thing is the case.

He reads further and he finds that an equally revered Rabbi says that X is absolutely not the case.

In a sort of spiritual turmoil, he does what a spiritual man would do: he prays to God.

‘Which of them is right?’

And God answers, ‘Both of them are right.’

Somewhat exasperated, the man says ‘What do you mean?! They can’t both be right,’

to which God replies: ‘All three of you are right.’”

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Reading this story makes me want to write about donuts because a donut is a whole with a hole, which is kind of the point of the lecture.

Imagine a fractal and cosmic donut on your doorstep.

You are the donut, you are the doorstep. You are both beautiful and edible. Entirely human full of blood and made up of ideas. A sieve made of skin and senses that is both full and lacking a piece.

You carry your meat flesh around and paint your life with it.

If this sounds cannibalistic, it is only because I love ideas eating each other out casually on Monday mornings, and there is absolutely no point in pirouettes…but they’re cool!!!

Yes, pirouettes are cool.

So here’s another pirouette.

Uttered by the internet’s favourite renegade of meaning, Žižek:

“…I’m generally opposed to wisdom. Wisdom is the most conformist thing you can imagine. You know, whatever you do a wise man will come and justify it.

Why are we running after these miserable earthly pleasures? The only satisfaction is eternity. It sounds like a deep thing to say.

Now let’s say the opposite: Why run after the spectre of eternity? Carpe diem! Grasp what you have here. It sounds wise.

Now I will say the third option: why be caught in a contrast between eternity and temporary existence? The true wisdom is to see eternity in fleeting temporary pleasures. It is wise.

Then I say the fourth variation: we are forever condemned between the two. A wise man accepts this. You know, whatever I say, you can sell it as a wisdom.”

Sips droplets in an empty cup…

Here’s what we can safely conclude: control is entirely futile and absolutely necessary.

Which is terrible and beautiful. Which still doesn’t tell you what to do with it.

That’s why I wanted to write about donuts.

There’s something inherently sad about a donut: its hole, its transience, and the fact that nobody philosophizes about donuts and yet here we are.

Which isn’t true actually because this week I read this essay that really stuck the donut symbolism in my mind.

It’s felt a little like befriending a wet dog that keeps following you.

The smell is weird and slightly discomforting but the dog is cute as fuck, but also wants to be appreciated, and the desire for your appreciation is what makes the dog… kind of stand out.

Today is the first time I write about this experience.

The essay of the donut analogy is partly an elegy, partly a philosophical probe into fullness and loss. And it took the donut and transformed it into an apparatus of topology, of Lacan, of the torus shape that apparently describes your body and your cells, the constant interchange of all our cells, the shape that is as much you as me, every heart field, every black hole.

This guy’s writing keeps hitting me with donuts: read it, it’s good stuff.

My donut’s slightly different…

It’s the unambitious one.

It’s the one my six year old cried over because it was squished around in the bag that contained it, and it took him exactly 4 minutes to recover from the disappointment.

It occurred to me then that it was the most exact analogy of human life.

It’s the donut at 2am when you’re too tired for wisdom and too awake for sleep and the hole in the middle of everything is just…a hole in the middle of everything and you are definitely not going to resolve it tonight.

This donut cannot be philosophized.

You can call it a torus, you can call it a whole with a hole, you can call it the shape of desire, you can call it Žižek’s fourth variation, and the donut will sit there, lightly glazed, waiting.

Wisdom will justify eating it. Wisdom will justify not eating it. Wisdom will find the eternal in the eating and the tragedy in the not-eating and the profound acceptance of the tension between the two.

Žižek is right. The rabbi is right. God is right. All three of you are right.

The donut has a hole and you are the donut and the donut does not care that it’s still March even though it’s already April and promises taste like rain and you never know when the rain comes.

No wisdom for donuts. I am a cloud. Happy new year!

Love,

A little boat

Exit Music:

PS:

The telescope was invented in 1608 by Hans Lippershey, a Dutch spectacle-maker, probably because kids were playing with lenses in his shop and noticed a distant weather vane looked closer when held up to the eye. He tried to patent it. He was denied… on the grounds that it was too easy to replicate. The invention was simultaneously his and immediately everyone’s. Two other Dutchmen instantly claimed they’d invented it first. Nobody knows who actually did. It may have been all of them at once.

Galileo heard about it the following year through a letter, having never seen one, built his own version from the description alone, improved it, and pointed it at the sky. He didn’t invent the telescope. He invented what the telescope was for.

We saw the moon up close with it and thought how we must bounce on that cheese-looking planet.

360 years later a bipedal ape climbed into Apollo 11 and went there.

Narcotic

Everything is delirium
and irony is a posture
that lets you get away
with murder.
I only meant to write
a love letter.
But I turn you into a symbol
instead;
which is something I do
with grief,
and with cities I’ve left
before the light changed,
and with the quality
of four in the afternoon
when someone isn’t there.
You
and your midnight coffees
that don’t exist
because you don’t exist.
Oh but you have eyes —
delicious, sad, narcotic.
The kind that make a person want
to cover the ocean
with blue cornflower petals
just to have somewhere
to put the feeling.
An easy metaphor
to sink into.
Me with a basket
of cornflowers
on my way to the beach
in a dandy little stride.
Imagine.
I take a real person
and paint a face
out of many faces —
until what I love
isn’t anyone
and somehow is.
The real you
is untouchable, inexistent
in these ink trails.
That’s the problem
with love:
it keeps pressing
its face against a window
that isn’t a window.
The prismatic windows.
The eyes that look through them
like telescopes.
The silence of leaving again.
The coming home to a sentence.
These ink trails that seduce you.
The surrender to irony.
The refusal for closure
when everything sparkles
at the threshold.
You will read
this poem and feel addressed
and be right.
And when you think
you’re the subject,
you’re actually the blue.
When you think
you’ve woken up,
you’re still inside it —
covered in blue cornflower petals,
in a place we are
choosing
to be fooled.

“Le je-ne-sais-quoi est quelque chose, mais ce quelque chose est presque rien.”
”The je-ne-sais-quoi is something, but this something is almost nothing.”
— Vladimir Jankélévitch

This is a rewrite of an essay I wrote about volunteering in the Philippines at sixteen. It turns out I was primarily there for myself. It took fifteen years, four philosophers, a saint, and a nun to figure this out.

Also my grandmother in Cairo, which is how it became an essay about a bat cave in flip-flops.

Somewhere in here a nun tells me I am a gambling risk to the children. She was accidentally describing everything I've done since.

1

Night one in Madrangca, Antique province. I’m on a bed under a mosquito net in a bamboo stilt house called Casa Madrangca, and rain is coming through the roof directly onto my face.

This is not a metaphor. This is a literal hole in the literal roof through which literal Philippine rainwater is landing on my nose at what feels like a very personal angle.

I have just arrived from Paris. I am jet-lagged, sixteen, and deeply preoccupied with my “first serious relationship”—whom I have just abandoned for this. I want to be clear that I considered this a sacrifice.

I had prayed before going to sleep. We had to. Candles, a guitar, the specific warmth of a room full of people trying to mean something together. I did feel something shift. Whether that was God or group chemistry, I couldn’t say. What I can say is that being rained on felt like a sign that I had to at least consider the question.

And then: the insect.

I had already encountered it once that evening: a creature of such ambiguous biological allegiance that I clocked it as somewhere between a flying beetle and a cockroach, but larger than either had any right to be, and with a confidence about its claim to the room that I found personally affronting.

It had retreated to a corner. I had retreated to the net. We had reached an uneasy armistice.

But now, lying on my back in the dark with rain on my face and the full orchestra of a jungle downpour pounding the bamboo roof, I could hear it.

Moving. Reconsidering the territory.

I lay very still and thought: I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing here.

Here’s what I was doing there.

I was sixteen years old and wanted a story the way you want a scar. Something to show for it. I was also, secondarily, interested in helping people.

In other words: I wanted to be interesting to myself, and had subcontracted the project to an immersive volunteer mission in rural Philippines.

I also wanted to feel Filipino. I had been mostly French for nearly a decade by then, and the Philippines, the part of me from there, had become something I wore in summers. Beautiful and not quite mine.

The organization was called AMA, the Associate Missionaries of the Assumption. A religious volunteer program, which meant the story came with built-in gravitas.

It was also convenient, because as it turns out, I have a long history with it.

I’ve written this before for AMA’s anthology, where I did it for my ego didn’t seem like the right opening note. That version is cleaner. This is not that.

2

My existence is, in some technical sense, a consequence of what I am about to critique.

My grandmother—my father’s mother, a woman who fancied herself good in the particular way that certain French women of a certain generation and ethics fancied themselves good—went to the slums of Cairo with Sister Emmanuelle.

In the ruins of someone else’s poverty she met a short bald Frenchman named Francis, who had been building NGOs in the Philippines.

She didn’t know where the Philippines was, but she introduced Francis to my father, who was a film student in the South of France at the time.

That’s how he got on a plane with a camera. That’s how he met my mother.

Then there is my mother, whose relationship with AMA is older and quieter and more particular.

She grew up in Barrio Obrero, a poor coastal village in Iloilo, and spent her childhood selling plastic bags at the market for pennies and harvesting coconuts by climbing all the way to the top barefoot with a machete.

It was this community she would later volunteer in.

With twelve fresh graduates she built something from the inside out: they taught mathematics, English, and religion, and went home at the end of the day to the same streets they were working in.

Her desire was contextual in the most literal sense. She was already there. The knowledge of what was needed was inside her life, not applied to it from outside.

Under Marcos’s dictatorship, doing this kind of grassroots work was considered subversive. The regime knew what it was doing. So, I think, did my mother.

The organization was founded in 1839 by a young Frenchwoman named Anne-Eugénie Milleret (later canonized as Saint Marie-Eugénie of Jesus) whose idea was simple and at the time genuinely radical: educate women. Particularly the disadvantaged ones.

She believed that if you changed the women, you changed the world. Not through institutions or legislation, but through the people who made people.

Three generations of women in my family seem to have taken this personally.

I am the product of altruism on two sides. One grand and self-conscious about it, arriving in Egyptian ruins in pursuit of goodness and perhaps a story; one quieter and more particular, rooted in a specific community, teaching the same children she had once been.

Whether either version was selfless is the wrong question.

What I know is that both produced consequences the pure version might not have. My grandmother met Francis. My mother built something. I exist.

I grew up in that school, in Barrio Obrero—my garden the rusting playgrounds and the kiosks overlooking the sea, my weekends cousins and ghost-hunting games and seawater poured from buckets and kites in the wind.

Wilting kalachuchi flowers and green mangoes dipped in soy sauce. Staring at red ants crawling up the magnolia tree for hours and blue mountains of the island of Guimaras across the sea, the kind of blue that only distance makes.

We lived in the house at the corner—the one the Assumption sisters had vacated, at the end of an alley lined with jungle geranium, its fiercely red flowers. The seawall was a few metres from the back door.

AMA was a home before I was aware it was one, in the most literal sense: we lived inside it.

When I packed my bags at sixteen, I told myself this was why.

The history. The values. The continuation of something meaningful.

I believed this the way you believe things that are also convenient.

3

In Waiting for God, Simone Weil describes attention as the practice of emptying the self. Suspending your own thoughts, leaving them:

“detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.”

A high bar.

I arrived full of myself and the story I wanted to acquire—which is not quite what she had in mind.

What I was actually doing those weeks was learning to be bored.

The first week I was mostly mourning the wifi. And the boyfriend. And, if I’m being specific, the particular quality of consciousness that smoking weed lends to Tuesday afternoons.

These are embarrassing things to admit in an essay about service.

But the stripping away of those specific crutches was probably the point.

Not because suffering is instructive but because I had run out of ways to be somewhere else.

The rhythm of it was not glamorous. I washed my clothes by hand every weekend—the technique, I was told, was basically that I wasn’t doing it right unless I could hear the squish. This took me several hours.

I went to the beach on days off, black sand that trapped the heat and made the sea feel like a bath.

Bangka boats lay moored on the sand like sleeping animals.

Fishermen moved around them with a purposefulness I found both humbling and slightly competitive, given that I was sitting there shuffling cards.

Smoke lifted from the vines in the early evening. Birdsong was continuous and very loud and eventually you stopped hearing it, which is how you knew you’d arrived somewhere.

Call Me Maybe, which appeared to be the only song on Philippine radio that summer, haunted me. I complained loudly about this.

I named the insect Spencer. This felt important at the time.

Spencer was carrying a giant egg sac with several hundred babies inside, which made her simultaneously more terrifying and completely untouchable.

My housemate Jie, whom I regularly summoned for insect removal, declined for this reason.

Spencer and I never fully reconciled, but I developed a cautious respect for her terms.

Someone else saved me. His name was James Brown.

I had just argued, sincerely, for the virtues of boredom. I also put in earphones every single morning and listened to the same song for a month. I was not above manufacturing my own mood.

I feel good, dududududu, I knew that I would.

The vines and the trees. The rice paddies opening out from the jeepney windows. The coastal road lined with coconut trees, the sea to one side, hills to the other.

I was helping in a kindergarten. My contribution was modest in the way most short-term volunteer contributions are modest: the organization was fine without me, probably marginally inconvenienced by my presence, and generous about this.

The children were small and various. I remember their faces better than anything I did for them.

No internet. No social media. No boyfriend to text. So I shuffled cards.

I should say: I became somewhat deranged about this.

Every day. For hours. The goal was to do it the way casino dealers do, the perfect waterfall, cards bending in a clean arc.

I was going to master something. It didn’t have to be useful. It just had to be mine.

A nun told me not to do this in front of the children. Something about gambling, something about souls, I wasn’t fully listening. One should take nuns seriously as a general rule.

I stopped in front of the children and kept doing it everywhere else.

In the evenings, Sandi—my Casa Madrangca housemate, fellow volunteer, and, crucially, shuffling mentor—taught me Filipino card games. Tong-its and pusoy-dos.

I taught her Taylor Swift and Avril Lavigne songs on the guitar, which at sixteen felt like a reasonable contribution to the mission.

Sandi was also the mystery candy fairy: every morning she scattered sweets on everyone’s desks before anyone else was awake and maintained perfect deniability until the last day.

I admired this. I, on the other hand, had already decided she would be a character in whatever I wrote about this.

Boredom, it turns out, has a texture. Held long enough, it opens into a specific quality of attention.

The first layer is restlessness.

Then, the mind, denied its usual material, starts working with what’s there.

The light through the bamboo slats. The evening prayer settling into silence. The smell of incense. The rooster beginning his song before the sky had committed to any particular color.

4

Then there was Terek.

Terek was an ex-colleague of my father’s—they had worked together for years at General Electric in Paris before Terek did his own AMA stint and, in a move my father has never fully explained to me and I have never stopped finding interesting, simply stayed.

He was still involved with the program when I arrived, helping formators, passing through various jungle clearings.

He arrived in Madrangca carrying a pack of cards and a specific quality of energy that I can only describe as: a man who has made several unusual decisions and is at complete peace with all of them.

We played with my deck. I showed him the shuffle. He was, diplomatically, impressed.

He also introduced the game: names written on pieces of paper, stuck to your forehead, everyone knowing something about you that you couldn’t see. You asked yes or no questions until you figured it out.

I was very good at asking the right questions. I was, as it turned out, considerably less good at knowing what was written on my own forehead.

One weekend all the regional volunteers gathered in Madrangca as a staging point for a trip into the mountains.

I met them properly for the first time: a dozen local volunteers, plus a woman from Spain, a man from the UK, a Lithuanian woman who had decided she wanted to be a nun. Terek was from Algiers via Paris. I had officially stopped believing in God approximately two years earlier, a decision that felt very clean in Paris and less clean in a room full of candles and people sending out the same vibration.

I didn’t know what to call what I felt in that room. I still don’t. Something that felt like it was everywhere and also more than everywhere and also nowhere. I have more sophisticated vocabulary for it now—but vocabulary is not the same as understanding, and understanding is not the same as the thing itself.

We went to a village deep in rural Antique. It had a tribute to General Charles de Gaulle—spelled Charles de Gueule, which in French means roughly Charles of the Jaw.

The General’s connection to this specific mountain village in the Philippines remains unclear to me. Terek and I found this very funny.

We ventured into a bat-filled cave in the jungle, crossing paths with snakes hanging from the vines. We did this in flip-flops, which I mention not for drama but because it was the actual footwear situation.

One late afternoon we walked through rice fields while children rode carabaos—the Filipino water buffalo—backlit by a tangerine sunset that felt, with the specific intensity of being sixteen and having run out of wifi, like something arranged for us personally. At night we slept on the cold hard floor of a village classroom.

At some point we were standing looking at the mountains.

Terek looked at them for a long moment and said: “I can’t understand how anybody could see this and not believe in God.”

He was not performing. He was not making a philosophical argument. He was a muslim man from Algiers via Paris standing next to a would-be nun and two atheists and a girl who had stopped believing in God and kept being surprised by rooms full of prayers, and he said it the way you say something that is simply, for you, a fact.

I did not share my complications with anyone. I filed them away, as I filed everything. The body receiving things before the mind has agreed to them.

I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then. I’m not sure the vocabulary helps at all.

I had, by this point, completely forgotten about the boyfriend. He had seemed very important in Paris. He had not survived the bat cave.

5

The problem with doing good is that you have to be someone while you’re doing it. And being someone means arriving with a history—a passport, a specific relationship to the poverty you’re walking into.

The shorthand for all of this is white saviour complex.

I have a complicated relationship with the term, mostly because I have a complicated relationship with both sides of what it describes.

I met a French nurse once who delivered babies in a village with no medical staff as her volunteer mission. That’s one end of the spectrum—someone who arrived and did something irreplaceable, whose presence or absence was measurable in lives.

Many of us were somewhere else on it: present, curious, occasionally useful, and in the most honest cases, primarily there to be changed.

This is something the program understood. The immersion was never purely about what volunteers gave.

The framework was religious. For those of us who weren’t believers, it became something else: existential, unresolved, ongoing.

I grew up watching wealthy foreigners move through poverty with a particular kind of confidence—the confidence of people who have decided in advance what the problem is and what they’re there to do about it.

Something in me has always snagged on it.

A discomfort I couldn’t name as a child and can only partially name now. I felt it about myself in Madrangca, more than once. I still feel it.

I’m not sure the feeling ever resolves, which might be the point.

But the question I keep returning to isn’t whether the motive was clean. It’s whether anything moved between people.

And if not even that: was there at least a moment where someone looked at something and didn’t quite know what to call it? The edge of becoming, the little moments of wonder, where something cracked open, maybe.

An exchange.

That moment counts. I’m less certain about what it counts toward.

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6

Here is what the official essay doesn’t say.

My mother’s impact in those communities spans decades. Mine spanned three weeks and involved some incompetent assistance with kindergartners, a borrowed guitar, and the specific existential vertigo of teaching Avril Lavigne songs in the Philippine jungle.

The experience did not save anyone.

At some point in the processing of any significant experience, a person either goes to therapy or reads dead philosophers on the internet at two in the morning. I went with the philosophers. They were free.

Agnes Callard calls these proleptic reasons:

“reasons whose adequacy depends on the very action they rationalize.”

Think of it as the philosophical equivalent of sleeping with someone on the first date. The decision precedes the information. The information arrives during.

Whether it was the right decision is a question you can only answer from inside it, never before.

It’s the difference between wanting to be the kind of person who reads Proust and actually reading Proust. Except Proust can’t get you rained on in the Philippine jungle, so you have to go yourself.

The wrong reasons were structurally necessary. Without them I wouldn’t have gone. Without going I wouldn’t have had the reasons.

The lever isn’t willpower. It’s the images you consent to identify with. Which means the question isn’t who you authentically are. It’s who you keep imagining yourself to be. It’s a direction you keep moving in—one you partly invent as you go.

Not delusion. Imagination.

You dream yourself there, and the dreaming is the doing.

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I have noticed this in myself, and I know I am not alone. Call it a temperament: the pull toward experiences that test whether you can hold your shape, because without pressure you can’t feel the edges of yourself.

I got pregnant at twenty-three. Accidentally, and then on purpose. The desire was older than the vocabulary.

The panic, when it came, was the recognition that I would never really know whether the instinct controls me—or whether I control it, and simply have very expensive taste in pressure.

This is where Lacan becomes useful, which I find slightly humiliating. The man has a gift for making you feel like you’ve been caught in the act of being yourself.

Lacan: desire is organized around lack. You want what you don’t have, the object is always a substitute, the self is constructed from outside, and what you find when you go looking for yourself is a reflection you pre-arranged.

Žižek, less charitably:

“I do not believe in looking into yourself. If you do this, you just discover a lot of shit. The truth is not deep in ourselves. The truth is outside.”

I am choosing to find this comforting. It doesn’t always work.

Deleuze, though, would disagree. And this is where it gets interesting.

“Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire.”

In other words: wanting isn’t a hole in you. It’s a generative force.

The insight has been absorbed into ten thousand wellness Substacks and is available as a phone wallpaper in forty fonts that say “Follow Your Bliss,” which I find annoying, but the original observation survives.

Desire creates.

My grandmother’s desire made me. My mother’s desire made schools. Mine made this essay. (I am aware that “this essay” sits awkwardly next to “schools” and “a human being.”)

None of us had virtuous motives. Motive is always a braid.

Pure motive belongs to saints, whom I actually want to believe in.

And even then, the most interesting saints have something in common: they’re the ones who documented their impurity most precisely.

Which is to say, the sinners.

My favorite, St. Augustine—whose mother Monica spent years following him across the Mediterranean trying to convert him while he was busy having affairs and fathering illegitimate children—wrote in Confessions:

“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

What was made made us back—my grandmother set off a chain she couldn’t have predicted, my mother taught children who taught children, I went looking for a story and found I was inside one, and the being-inside-it changed the story I would tell about myself forever.

What went to Madrangca was desire dressed as virtue, which is the only outfit desire owns.

The self that goes anywhere goes wanting.

The requirement that it shouldn’t—that the motive must be pure before the action counts—is the most effective way to ensure nothing ever happens.

The clean conscience is not a moral achievement. It’s an alibi.

St. Augustine knew this. So did my grandmother, I think, though she’d never have put it that way.

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7

On the last day, Sandi organized a farewell.

I was sat in a chair in the jungle clearing, confused, until I heard the opening notes of that song. Call Me Maybe.

Sandi and Ceci and Terek danced a choreographed lip sync. I had not expected it. I cried, which I also had not expected.

The body outvoting the mind about what was actually happening.

You can analyze your way through an experience and still get ambushed at the exit. Happens to me all the time, still.

Then they stuck a name on my forehead on a piece of paper and I had to guess it. It was the game we had been playing for weeks.

Yes or No questions. Someone I knew personally. A woman. Someone close to me. Did they love this person?

Yes, we love this person.

My mother. They had written my mother’s name. Heide.

I had been playing the game the whole time. I just didn’t know what was written on my forehead.

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8

I called Sandi while writing this, nearly a decade after we’d last spoken.

We talked for a long time, mostly not about Madrangca.

And then something in the drift of the conversation brought us back, the way late-night conversations always do, and she said: “Saraaaaah”—the vowel reaching for something, dragging toward the past—“this reminds me of how we stayed up talking late into the night.”

Vladimir Jankélévitch—a philosopher so French he has a Russian name, so interesting he was overlooked for decades in favor of Sartre, which is how you know he’s worth reading, and whom I found at two in the morning on YouTube—talks about the je-ne-sais-quoi as the thing that matters most in any encounter precisely because it resists articulation.

The texture of a night. The quality of a presence. How you look at someone across a room and something has already been decided, somewhere below the level of argument.

How falling in love, or a mountain, or a room full of prayers, simply happens to you, and the analysis comes after, always slightly too late, always slightly the wrong size, and still outside the thing.

You can write thousands of words about an experience and what you’re actually doing is building a container around the thing that won’t go in it.

The thing itself is still elsewhere.

Underneath the je-ne-sais-quoi is something more permanent. He calls it the irréversible.

“L’irréversible, c’est le fait accompli dans son irréversibilité même : un fait qui a eu lieu une fois est désormais pour toujours un fait qui a eu lieu.”

Translation: the irreversible is the accomplished fact in its very irreversibility — a fact that took place once is henceforth forever a fact that took place.

Some things happen to you and keep happening.

Someone told Sandi, back then: you won’t realize how AMA has affected you until years later.

What remains:

The yellow hearts of the kalachuchi flowers, rolled into balls until they wilt and turn brown, their smell the closest scent to heaven I know.

Green mangoes in soy sauce.

The toads at night, which still terrify me.

James Brown at six in the morning on a jungle path.

The children’s voices singing: welcome to the family, we’re glad that you have come.

Spencer and her hundreds of children, untouchable in the dark.

Sandi placing candy on desks for no one.

The mountains rising like guardians of the horizon, tinting the beyond with that particular blue that only distance makes.

The rooster’s song before the sky had decided what it was.

Call Me Maybe.

A nun told me to stop shuffling cards.

I have been writing four thousand words to explain why she was wrong.

I’m not sure she was.

I didn’t listen then. I never do.

PS: I recently read a brilliant essay on Substack titled “Your Altruism Is Selfish.” The author, who goes by the allure and anonymity of the Octopus, argues that desire is not the enemy of ethics but its engine. The argument felt both obvious and slightly offensive—which is usually a good sign. It made me reconsider what I had actually been doing in Madrangca and that’s what prompted me to re-write this essay.

“I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
— JD Salinger, ‘Franny & Zooey’

A Special Invitation & An Essay on the Ego Eating Itself

THE INVITATION
Franny, at 1am:

Somewhere between the first vodka tonic and the last one—dark winter evening, smelling of cold rain, slavic vodka, and the specific ozone-scent of a laptop running hot—I asked Johnny if he had the courage to be an absolute nobody.

He went quiet in the way people go quiet when they’re deciding whether to be honest or interesting.

He chose elusive, by the way, which is a great form of interesting.

So did I apparently—I’m just doing it in writing and calling it inquiry. Which I also kind of love.

Johnny and I met in acting school a decade ago (we don’t really act anymore, we just never stopped performing), which made him the obvious person to call when I wanted someone to read Franny & Zooey with me and argue about it on camera.

The air was thick with snorted laughter and that specific Salinger-induced identity crisis that usually hits just before the sun comes up. Yes, the one we’re all very familiar with.

We kept sliding from Franny into ego, God, applause, naked cycling trips, cult-y manosphere gurus, and back into Franny again. The argument wouldn’t let us leave—which, it turns out, has a name in Sanskrit and a punchline courtesy of Alan Watts. We’ll get there.

First, a trailer to Part I: The ‘Franny’ Inquiry.

The full hour drops on YouTube in a couple of weeks—for everyone, lightly edited for the illusion of coherence.

They get the version where we sound like we have it together.

You can get the real one, uncut, this Friday…

as a gift for joining The Salon :)

Yes. I’ve turned on paid subscriptions!

The Invitation: step into The Salon.

This is how it works:

No grants. No advertisers. No algorithm. Just five dollars a month from someone who read something at midnight and thought: yes, more of this.

The kind of person who still pays for things they love, which is either deeply uncool or the last remaining act of cultural resistance.

Either way. That's the whole thing. You're the whole thing.

There are a few ways in:

Monthly—$5/month. The founding rate, locked for you forever. Even as the Salon grows (Which is a pint or a coffee. One fuels the body. The other fuels whatever this is. Both are justified.)

Annual—one payment, two months free. For the committed inhabitants. You know who you are.

Founding Member. Everything included, my permanent and slightly embarrassing gratitude, and a 1:1 call where you can tell me if you have any ideas or special requests.

Here’s what’s inside:

• This Friday—The full UNCUT hour: vodka tonics, ego death, zero editorial mercy. Yours a full weekend before the world gets the cleaned-up version.

• Bookclub membership—The Zooey reading guide next week & more on this below.

• Every Wednesday or Thursday—Feral Field Notes: the quotes currently dismantling my worldview / diary entries I haven’t sanitized for public consumption / new poems / behind-the-scenes videos, curated reading lists.

• The Archives—Everything behind the paywall. Yours now.

• And always—The free weekly essays. Still here. Still free. (Like the one just after this invitation)

❖ BOOKCLUBBERIES ❖

And look—I asked Johnny if he had the courage to be an absolute nobody.

He gestured at the ceiling.

I thought about it and decided to monetize the question.

Franny would be disgusted. Zooey would say that’s not the point. I know. Five dollars a month anyway.

Here’s the thing: the answer to the performed life is not the disappeared life. It’s not a mountain, a vow of silence, or a carefully curated absence.

It might just be better conversation—slower, more honest, with people willing to be caught mid-performance and keep going anyway.

That’s the room.

If you’ve ever felt exhausted by your own performance, secretly loved applause, wanted something bigger than yourself to be real, or wondered whether you’re actually sincere or just exceptionally well-curated…

Then you’re already standing at the door.

Zooey is where the book stops being a breakdown and starts being a diagnosis. It’s longer, stranger, and angrier, and I want to argue it out loud—live, unhurried, in the first Salon session—with the people in this room. Date picked together.

This is the beginning of The Prism Book Club—one book per quarter, discussed live, chosen together. Every paid inhabitant gets a vote on what we read next.

You’re not subscribing to a finished thing. You’re becoming an architect of an unfinished one.

Which is either exciting or alarming, and if you’ve read this far you already know which one it is for you.

Anyway, The Salon is open. Come be interesting with us.

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On Franny & Zooey and The Ego That Eats Itself

an inquiry

The thing about a question you can’t put down is that it starts to feel like the question is holding you, not the other way around.

Do you have the courage to be an absolute nobody?

We kept coming back to it—ego, ego, ego—the way Franny keeps saying the word in the book, almost compulsively, like repetition might do what argument can’t.

In Franny & Zooey, it is 1955. A restaurant called Sickler’s. Lane is eating frog legs. Franny is drinking milk and not eating anything, which is already a statement.

She is a twentysomething theatre student who has seen through the performance, and she cannot unsee it. The professors who profess. The poets who perform depth and who, according to her, aren’t really poets. The actors who act. Everyone in every room performing the most flattering version of their interiority.

“Disgusting, it is, it is,” she says.

She knows.

“And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”

She wants out of the ego entirely. She wants to dissolve.

She has a small green book in her purse about a Russian pilgrim who prays the same prayer until it synchronizes with his heartbeat and something opens.

She wants that—whatever that is. The obliteration, or the opening, or whatever lives on the other side of the word ego if you say it enough times.

Her boyfriend thinks she’s having a breakdown. He might be right.

Or she might be the only lucid person in the restaurant. Too aware to participate. Too human to abstain.

This is the question the book refuses to answer, which is why people are still arguing about it at 1 AM in 2026.

At some point, feeling very certain about something I apparently couldn’t define, I Googled “ego.”

The definition took four seconds to read and felt insufficient.

Which sent me somewhere else. Which sent me somewhere else. Which sent me somewhere else.

This is my report.

The Sanskrit term is ahamkara—literally, the I-making. Everything you'd put on a résumé. Everything you rehearse in the mirror. Everything you pretend not to want, which you want the most.

Not good or bad, just the bouncer of the mind. Your brain’s copium at its worst, press agent at its best.

The trap Franny walks into, the one the book is actually about, is this: disgust with ego is its own ego.

Which felt like enlightenment when we got there: clean, satisfying, the right shape for a conclusion, and exactly why I didn't trust it.

So I kept going.

Ramana Maharshi said it most cleanly: the ego cannot destroy itself, because every effort to destroy it is it.

Alan Watts made essentially the same point, but funnier and with better hair:

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

Draw your own conclusions. (I did. They didn't help.)

Hegel arrives at the same door from the opposite direction.

The self tries to negate itself in order to understand itself, but the negation doesn't dissolve the self. It produces a more elaborate one.

The self that says I am not my ego has simply added a floor to the building.

The snake eats its tail and finds the tail delicious and calls this transcendence.

Shunryu Suzuki circled it more quietly: the student who is proud of having no ego has simply built a subtler ego.

Watts, naturally, turned it into a dinner party observation—the self that wants to dissolve the self is still a self. He really had a gift for making the unfalsifiable sound like common sense, which is either the mark of a great teacher or a very charming con, and possibly both.

Either way, here’s another great quote of Alan:

"I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination."

But this is where we have to be careful: disgust with ego being ego is only sometimes true.

The Buddhist tradition is more precise than the pop version. The Pali canon distinguishes between ego as māna—conceit, always a problem—and ego as conventional self, which is just functionally necessary to exist in the world.

Especially in this one. Disgust with ego is only ego if you perform it, defend it, build a shelf for it next to your other spiritual achievements. If it arises and passes like weather, it’s just perception.

What Zooey diagnoses in Franny is not the disgust. It’s that she is nursing it over. Turning it in the light. She has decided that being sick of ego is the most honest thing she can offer the room.

And maybe it is. Which is why Zooey will get so cruel about it—not because she's wrong, but because she might be right for the wrong reasons.

Here is why this matters now more than it did in 1955:

Franny was performing her disillusionment for an audience of one boyfriend eating frog legs. We have platforms.

The well-curated ghost—the person who has arranged their seeking into something so aesthetically coherent you can’t see the seams.

Once you encountered this person occasionally at dinner parties. Now it’s an entire economy.

The performance of sincerity has never been more widely distributed, more finely tuned, or more difficult to distinguish from the real thing. Including from yourself.

You know the type. Maybe you’ve been the type.

And here I am writing about it right now, the irony is sitting across from me making eye contact.

Now the frog legs are content. The milk is your personal brand. The restaurant is the internet. And the prayer is a newsletter.

But the questions haven’t changed:

Is sincerity still possible in public?

Is noticing enough, if the noticing is performed?

Can you examine the ego without the examination becoming its own exhibition?

Is it all an act within an act?

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody posts about it, did it happen?

Is the person Googling "ego definition" at 1AM part of the problem?

If you post about not caring what people think, does that count?

Do you have the courage to be an absolute nobody?

Johnny went quiet. He said something elusive.

I started writing this essay. I told you I’d be calling it inquiry.

Franny shakes in the restaurant. She prays under her breath. Her boyfriend asks if she’s okay.

She says yes.

The question, unfortunately, is still on the table.

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So let’s talk about it ;)

xxx

I once held a precious thing, I’m thinking now—twice actually. Heartbeats between the smallest ribs of the world for a second—twice, a new life that made itself from mine; and I shivered. I had created death, the oldest magic there is. This is why, if I had met you before the world wore me into something careful, I would have burned the whole field down just to watch the light catch your face—dry grass snapping under heat, smoke braiding itself into the sky like the shapes we blow from our mouths on a grey autumn morning. That kind of fire is so beautiful—yes, devastating—but it eats at the very thing it loves and leaves not even ash.

I aspire to be water curving around stone, cold riverlight moving around its shape year after year until the sharp edge softens into something that fits a palm. I want to be cupped like a pebble in a palm, I once wrote, and now I know why. I am falling the way a season falls: leaves loosening one by one from their small green fists until the trees stand suddenly bare.

Precious things cannot be replaced with other versions of themselves; there are none. And yet they draw the eye without trying. I am pulled without a rope, like tides to the moon. I am not the first to notice gravity, and here I am anyway. It is beautiful the way a fact is beautiful, whether or not anybody says it aloud. The way a stone is beautiful after years of river. The way a tree is beautiful standing bare in the cold, waiting for the next season.

This is not the way I ever learned to move through the world. This is not the way I learned to meet another precious thing—with this open-handed falling, mouth thirsty for rain.

“Trust me. I’m telling you stories. I can change the story. I am the story.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Written in the Body

I’ve been thinking about what moves a body before it knows why it’s moving. Formally, this is another experiment—braided fragments of my actual life with the historical fevers and dead philosophers that won’t leave me alone.

Soon this sort of ‘aestheticized diaries’ will live behind a paywall. Consider this foreplay.

This is my February: sex rituals and a lethal dancing plague, bar poems and children who won’t sleep, a glass of wine extended from a passing car in the rain and a voice that calls out “here’s a joint too.” Henry Miller (again). Bodies that couldn’t stop moving. Bodies that moved before they knew why.

At some point in this story, four hundred people will begin to dance. I promise it connects.

If this sounds like it’s trying to be something — well.

You’re right. But I prefer “becoming”

And I had an indecent amount of fun writing it. :)

— Sarah x

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I’m trying to fuck my way back into meaning. Sex magick, if you want the technical term. An ancient ritual I’m learning from a Vedic mystic. I love experiments. You light some candles—I use the cheap supermarket ones because I’m not an idiot—put on whatever music makes you feel like a god and you hold a specific thought while you orgasm. That’s it. The mirrors are optional. So is the partner.

Someone asks me what I’m trying to manifest. Money of course! The rest takes care of itself. The truth is already on my lap but it’s playing with me and I’m trying to win at hide and seek.

It works like this: you let the wild wolf loose, and when you climax you hold that image.

Like looking at a mountain range and flying through it: you come and then you weep. Try it and tell me you believe in the void.

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I. This is a documented historical event.

On July 14, 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea walked out of her house onto a cobbled street in Strasbourg and began to dance. There was no music. Her husband watched from the doorway. She did not stop for dinner. She did not stop when the sky went dark. By the end of the week, thirty-four people had joined her. By August, four hundred. The chronicles claim fifteen deaths a day at the peak. They danced until their feet bled through their shoes, until their hearts simply stopped, until the body ran out of body.

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Daydreaming of release. I see myself running into a vast expanse: ocean, lake, sky, rivers. Imagine a tune—it’s a valse. You dance to it. Your arms undulate in the air, not reaching for heaven because heaven is here in your imagination. The biggest lie they ever sold you was the belief that you cannot fly. Remember when you believed you that could? Hold that thought and surrender. Close your eyes, choose your delusions, and run.

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There is a blizzard outside and I am in the mud of my emotions, secretly loving it. Who doesn’t love sad songs on a dizzy Sunday afternoon when the weather grants permission to be morose?

Look: a sheet of snow on the garden chair, the wicked bare branches of the fig tree. The Gallimard notebook from last night, almost done, full of beautiful self-indulgent poems. Asian takeout on the wooden table, a plate of leftover cold noodles.

The parents-in-law are gone and I could walk around naked in their house. I don’t—mostly because of all these books with Xi Jinping’s face on the cover—but really, it’s about the possibility. It’s always about the possibility.

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I’m at Luddites reading Henry Miller’s boring essay on money in his brilliant book Stand Still Like a Hummingbird and thinking about anal sex. The association feels inevitable. Miller would understand. He would let the word sit there for a moment. Anal. Heavy. Architectural. Language creates appetites.

Innuendos are powerful, like the smell of fresh cookies they always have here at Luddites. “No cookie today, Sarah?” I guess not.

I get up, wander towards the bookshelves, hoping that proximity to other people’s sentences might steady me. But my body’s pulses persist. I scan dead authors’ names and trace the letters engraved on smooth hard spines.

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“Naturally, like every writer I’m tempted to use succulent terms,“ says the narrator, Rodrigo S.M., in Clarice Lispector’s novel Hour of the Star. “I know splendid adjectives, meaty nouns, and verbs so slender that they travel sharp through the air about to go into action, since the words are actions, don’t you agree?“

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II. The authorities of Strasbourg looked at four hundred people dancing themselves to death and thought: more dancing.

They hired musicians. Built a stage in the horse market. Cleared the guild halls. The logic was medical—bad blood needed sweating out—so the pipes played and the drums beat and they watched the afflicted match the tempo, faster, under the full July sun. A cobbler left his bench mid-stitch. A woman dropped her bread in the street and began to turn in place. The music pulled more bodies in. Let’s think about institutional confidence.

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I’m thinking of a rumor I think about at least once a year since 2014. Once upon a time in the French Baccalauréat—the secondary school final exams—the Philosophy exam question was: What is audacity?

One student had simply written: This is audacity.

Nothing else. He got 20/20.

Audacity gambles.

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In an essay in Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz is 18 years old when she says to a friend:

“They’re all assholes, they got no class and I actually met one guy who thought going down on a girl was something called ‘muff-diving’ and only perverts did it.”

“Really?” her friend said. “How bourgeois.”

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Today I win myself over by not giving into the impulse to nap. It’s an exceptional day—but what if every day was exceptional? I clean the kitchen, insert the laundry, plan my itinerary, read three chapters of my cowboy novel.

“It’s funny, leaving a place, ain’t it?” Gus says. “You never know when you’ll get back.”

I put the laundry to dry, leave to run all the errands as soon as the sun goes out, and when I return it starts to rain. Maybe god exists in the form of perfect errand runs.

I chop celery and mince some carrots, add wine to the minced meat under a coat of provincial herbs, and soon the kitchen smells of exquisitely-spiced passata. All I need now is a good dose of gossip, but I’ve turned myself into a vegetable for the season. Lonesome Dove will have to do. And whatever word comes back—because word always comes back, like a boomerang.

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III. Five hundred years later they still don’t know. Ergot poisoning—a fungus on rye that produces something close to LSD—except ergot causes convulsions, not waltzes. Mass psychogenic illness—the most accepted theory, which is a very clean term for: Strasbourg in 1518 was starving, sick, hot, terrified of comets.

The body will find a language even when you won’t give it one. A religious curse, some say. St. Vitus, patron saint of dancers, said to afflict the impious with uncontrollable movement. They carried the dancers to his shrine. Picture that procession. The ones dancing. The ones trying to carry them.

My favourite theory, buried in the scholarship: the people of Strasbourg believed this could happen, and so it did. Belief as its own contagion. Fear, airborne.

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“Are you certain that the earth revolves around the sun? Can you define motion? Can you answer the composition of a distant planet is such and such? Are you even sure that the sun is a ball of fire? The men from whom you get your answers are not so cocksure. There are no absolutes anymore. There is theory and there is speculation. And experimentation. All kinds of proofs, too. Proofs! How we love that word!” — Henry Miller

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It’s February in Antwerp, which means the sky is the colour of an old dishcloth and the rain is the kind that doesn’t commit. I am walking in it, sobbing, which feels appropriately cinematic except I’m also carrying a tote bag with a broken strap and my shoes are wrong for this.

We left. We took the children and left, which is the only sentence that matters in this story.

Hannes went ahead with the kids on the cargo bike and I am walking in the rain. I’m not sure the rain called for it or whether I called for the rain. The crying feels like something, and also feels like nothing, and also feels like everything I haven’t said at the table.

She had been through a war, which she would have told you if you hadn’t already heard. The children were crying thinking they’d done something wrong. Adults in a room failing them so they turned the confusion inward.

I hear YO MOTHAFUCKA from a Tesla, and at first roll my eyes. Then I hear my name over and over so I turn around and — Johnny and Kaz in a Tesla?

A glass of wine extended through a car window like a sacrament.

— There’s even a joint, Johnny says with a grin.

I laugh until I am crying differently.

— I’ve never been in a Tesla before, I say, getting in, blowing my nose.

— I’m honoured, Kaz says.

Some nights the city catches you, even in the drizzle.

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In the novella Franny and Zooey, Salinger’s Franny Glass says she’s sick of

“ego, ego, ego—(her) own and everybody else’s, sick of everyone who wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished, be somebody interesting. Disgusting,” she says. “It is, it is.”

“I’m sick of people who want to be interesting,” is probably the most interesting thing a person can say at a restaurant in 1955, while drinking milk and watching her boyfriend dissect frog legs.

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IV. The Danse Macabre is a medieval artistic tradition in which Death—a grinning skeleton—appears among the living and leads them in a procession toward the grave. The pope. The king. The merchant. The infant. Everyone clasping bony hands. Everyone moving together. No one refuses because no one can.

It was a morality image. A reminder. It was not meant to be literal.

Until Strasbourg. Four hundred bodies on a stage in the horse market, shoes filling with blood, eyes somewhere else entirely. Witnesses said from a distance they looked like revellers. You had to get close to see the faces.

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Listen, I’ve decided that I love you. I held this thought under the light of the moon and I was dazzled. Its discernment—like a seed that knows to grow towards the sun. I’ve decided that I love you like I breathe, not knowing how I do it. I inhale the fragrance of living things and surrender to this knowing for the same reason I dance: for delight.

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I am sitting at a candlelit bookclub with a glass of Barbera and I have an urge to misbehave. It’s only because we are all strangers but we are also great friends. I can tell. We’ve all read an Ibsen play, after all—we’re practically blood-bound.

Nothing makes me want to say something vulgar more than a room full of people trying very hard not to be, I text someone. I always find it interesting when an urge for mischief is mistaken as superiority.

Dionysus chose the mortal side of himself and was dedicated to the spark. Anyway, I remind people that Ibsen made Lovborg shoot himself in the dick. “Guys! He shot himself in the dick!!!” We are all awake now.

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I read about the Stoned Ape Theory over coffee one morning. This is Terence McKenna’s hypothesis that early hominids stumbled upon psilocybin mushrooms growing in animal dung and ate them, which catalyzed the rapid evolution of human consciousness. Enhanced visual acuity. Language. Self-reflection. Mystical experiences that cracked open the skull and let the cosmos pour in.

I love the idea that we became human because our ancestors got high in the grasslands and started seeing patterns everywhere—started scattering them around with their sweat and blood and called it creation. I love the idea that consciousness is less a slow climb up the evolutionary ladder and more a psychedelic accident. A mutation born from curiosity and hunger and the willingness to put strange things in your mouth.

McKenna called it the “evolutionary catalyst.” Scientists call it speculative at best. I call it the kind of origin story I want to believe: that transcendence was always the contact of outer chemical with inner chemical, that meaning-making was always a trip, that we’ve been trying to fuck our way back into that original rapture ever since.

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I am in a dark room somewhere in 1878 Texas and Gus McCrae is doing something reckless and I cannot look away. Somewhere outside this room it is February 17th and the Year of the Fire Horse has just begun. The gong is probably sounding somewhere. The dragon is probably coming down the street, red and gold, its handlers invisible underneath, the whole thing rippling like a wedding train past windows I am not looking out of.

Gus would have had something to say about that.

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V. What keeps pulling me back is not the strangeness of it. It’s the recognition. A body so full of what it cannot say that it just—moves. Keeps moving. Can’t stop. We have better words for it now: psychosomatic, dissociative, psychogenic. Clinical distances. But the image remains: a woman on a cobbled street, no music, turning in place, her husband in the doorway unable to reach her, a detail that survived five centuries. The body finding its own emergency exit.

It has been called mass hysteria, social contagion, collective breakdown. All true. It also just feels true the way myths feel true—before explanation, before category. Like something that happened once and never really stopped happening.

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17/02/26 — Good morning, diary! I’m ovulating, so I can confidently write this:

Hectic week of self-imposed deadlines, yet oddly impelled by an energizing momentum which instantly fills me with an existential hard-on. I love how pretentious this sounds. There is a purpose to reading and discussing things like “The Ego“ or the “Stoned Ape Theory“—because I get off to it! Why do you think I write? Because I’m an addict. Pure pleasure. Why do I read? Because I’m an addict. Pure pleasure. Like when I read the most iconic line (in my opinion) of Ibsen’s plays, uttered by Hedda in Hedda Gabler:

“I like shooting into the clear blue sky.”

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I am lying in bed tonight between my daughter and my son. “Mamaaaa,” my son moans, “I can’t sleep.” My daughter whines the same. “Just wait,” I say. It is the dialogue of every night, but tonight my daughter is mischievous and pokes her brother’s cheek until he cracks.

“Why don’t I tell you the most boring story ever, so you can fall asleep—how about that?” I propose. Their faces light up. Oh yes, please!

“Once upon a time,” I begin, “there was a pea. The pea was walking in a long pea forest with only pea trees. The pea had large eyes and a big nose.” They laugh—that detail was definitely not sleep-inducing.

“Anyway. The pea was tired and so he sat down by a pea tree and ate some peas. Then he decided to take the road again. The road was very long and the pea just walked. So there he was, walking. And walking. And walking. And walking. And walking. And walking.”

The children burst out laughing. They are still awake. The pea keeps walking.

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14/02/26

Four poems in, the Gallimard notebook almost done and dusted, maybe one poem worth keeping. The rest are interesting in the way hangovers are interesting, but I might change my mind three mornings from now.

Johnny and I are in the smoking room and revive the popper corner until Endgie shows up announcing the end of his sober months like a man returning from war. He once robbed a bank, fled to become a ballet dancer in Nice, cooked for Attenborough on a research vessel. He is ancient by our count and completely feral.

The day I decided to love him was the same day I committed fully to his myth. It was in Belle-île years ago when my son was still a baby: Atlantic sea winds, a hot summer morning, and finding him facedown on top of his flattened tent, drooling, shoes still on. I think about Endgie whenever someone tells me aging is about slowing down.

And now here we are at Papa Jos and he is laughing and Johnny is laughing and I am laughing and Shakira is laughing too.

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Whitehead wrote that the many become one, and are increased by one. Every feeling gathers the past into itself and releases something new into the world. Nothing is static. Least of all the self.

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Tonight we are at the other De Kroon—white canvas on dirty marble tables, you write.

An old drunk asleep in the middle of a dream and you, brushing your hair, I write.

It’s fucking freezing outside and we order the usual, but with peanuts.

The vagabonds rest under YS-2712, like an alien spaceship, headlights haunting the room.

“Where the fuck do you see that?” You ask. I point to the decor, the old bumper right above you with its round headlights like spectacles, and you are still brushing your hair.

We continue.

I delight in half black and blue which resembles your smile of confusion. Stand still. You let the moonlight surround you and it made you coy. Which I’m into, by the way.

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This week I changed my bio. “I live in language but distrust it,” I wrote. Let me explain the way a painter paints in the dark:

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There was a July when I could feel the gathering happening too fast. The nights kept increasing me beyond my outline. Desire was not an ornament then, but a current—dark, vital, insistent. It had a seductive velocity.

There is nothing to narrate, nothing to justify. I just fell into it like a moth to light.

One bright afternoon, I was cooking and waiting for carrots that came wrapped in the wrong packaging. The kitchen smelled of wine and crushed tomatoes and something metallic underneath. The rage turned on the ragu, which split open against the wall like a minor apocalypse. Heat does not negotiate. I howled and couldn’t stop.

You can call it breakdown, you can call it a beginning. Mothers will understand.

In the Vedas they say the universe pulses: creation, preservation, destruction. Again and again and again. Shiva does not ask permission before he dances. He dances and the worlds dissolve, and from the ash something else coheres.

My children are watching me in horror. Their father is watching me. Somewhere, I am watching myself—trying to tell the difference between a chosen ritual and a seizure. Between ecstasy and erasure. Between the wolf I let loose and the one that slits at its leash.

The dancers believed this could happen, and so it did.

Belief gathers. It burns. Sometimes it makes a shrine. Belief increases the many into one until the one cannot hold, until it collapses or transcends.

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One night in February: I am alone in the empty house again. I hold the image.

I come, and then I weep.

The rest becomes rain. Everything else goes on.