I often find myself thinking about weather patterns, natural disasters. Storms. I spent last week with an ever-changing sky, listening to animals respond. I watched a storm roll in over the endless sea.

Maybe because of my inability to impose order on nature, I’m obsessed with storms, thrilled by them. Minutes to hours before a storm, there comes a time when I know (in my mind, with language) that a storm is coming. Before knowing it I often feel it. A pressure headache. The smell of metal. The sky turns green before a tornado.

At age eleven, I landed in Hawaii during a tsunami. The turbulence over the pacific was intense. Our plane was eight seats across and our cups were flying, three feet above our head in the tiny toy plane. The pilot told us that he’d never had to make an announcement like this, but his best advice was to get to high ground as quickly as possible upon landing, and he would be doing the same. He told us to call our loved ones. The forecasts were catastrophic.

Miraculously, Hawaii was mostly spared. Japan was not so lucky. The 3/11 earthquake triggered the most powerful tsunami to land in Japan since the invention of modern seismography in 1900, and it was followed immediately by a snowstorm, slowing rescue efforts significantly. It caused a nuclear meltdown. Almost 20,000 people died.1

A seed was planted; it grows with me. Death is with us, always.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (epicenter Sumatra, Indonesia) launched the phenomenon into the popular consciousness. It was widely filmed and immediately shared via the internet, a relatively new phenomenon. The image of waves as tall as mountains was striking. It hit with very little warning on Boxing Day, when much of southeast Asia was heavily populated with tourists. The event changed the distribution of masses inside the earth, increasing earth’s rotation, and shortening the length of the day by 2.68 microseconds.2

It is estimated to be the fourth deadliest natural disaster of all time, killing nearly a quarter of a million people in fourteen countries.3

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Before a tsunami hits the tide rapidly retreats. There is a haunting clip of a vacationer who ambles out into the drying seabed with the flopping fish to collect shells. And there he remains, blissfully unaware of the swelling of the sea, the wailing, the silence, the wall of water approaching him. There were birds all around, but he did not hear them. The birds go silent and he does not notice.

The angry sea drained back. The seed grows with me. With us, always.

One of my unseen myths is a story of cause and effect. I believe that things are caused by other things; that all happenings can be traced back to an initial cause. This is the central myth governing scientific thought. My love of patterns, my curiosity lives in this myth. If it’s true, everything becomes a puzzle piece. How delightful.

Storms break my understanding of cause and effect. The complexity of nature—its brute force—renders science a childish token of man’s ego. To land in a tsunami that claims 20,000 lives across the sea is to remember why our ancestors created Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. In my daily life, events are small and simple enough that with time, I can trace back from the effect to a relevant cause. Complex systems do not operate this way. “Emergent wholes are often described as “more than” the sum of their parts.”4

Language is an incredibly powerful tool of the mind. It expands our capacity for communication, allowing us to enter into someone else’s consciousness. Language also breeds a tyranny of the logical brain, the brain that speaks in words. Over time it can blunt our sensitivity to the myriad of other ways the body, the spirit communicates.

The large language model has rapidly infected our consciousness because we are easily fooled by language. The most important part of a magic trick isn’t the sleight of hand, it’s the magician’s ceaseless chatter which primes the viewer to expect a trick of the light.

Language’s danger is in tricking us out of our body, away from other bodies. I paint, I do yoga to build immunity against the tricks of language. The more ways I experience the world, the bigger my world becomes. Birdsong is consciousness-expanding. They’ll tell you when a storm is coming.

Nature is a complex super-intelligence. In death, we and nature become one once again, the way we were. We all know this, and we hide from it. We chase death, of the ego, separation from consciousness, la petite mort. The most important pose in yoga is a preparation for death. With us, always.

The storm was rolling in for hours before it entered my awareness. A new sun came out, hot and metallic. I retreated to the lean shade of the deck as the lizards emerged and pressed their lungs out, flattening into the burning sand. The wind brought me its smells and tastes, the sea whispered rain, rain. We, the birds, the crickets, our voices all changed. The clouds dropped a shadow across the land. We lowered our voices.

People give their sorrows to the sea because it has the depth to hold them. We played a secret sharing game, and I struggled to think of secrets about myself. I sit by the sea. I become the sea. I hide things in the depths of myself.

Fifteen years later, when I paint the waves they still look like mountains.

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I’ve been seeing signs of childhood (mine and others) everywhere. A dark-haired cellist, a baseball team with a lefty batter, home. Grits with sausage, a capsized ship, aunt Tita’s on Tuesday, home. Creamy tahini sauce, dishes in the sink, socks on the floor in the corner, home home home.

My hometown is Montgomery, Alabama. I always wished I could claim Jamaica or Guyana as my home like my parents do. Alabama (the state, the concept) never felt like home to me, but the old magnolia tree in the front yard did. Lentil soup, torrential rain, and deep swaying pines did. I still use trees to locate myself.

People get territorial about their hometown. Specificity about boundaries creates meaning. I asked friends when someone becomes a “New Yorker.”

Maya responded, “I think it’s a funny question that happens here but it should be treated like everywhere else. People are just from where they’re from.” I felt a twang. What if the place I’m from never felt like home? What if I kept dreaming about the darkness from before I was born?

Maybe home is a feeling of belonging.

I think people who crave belonging often try to become New Yorkers. “It’s my understanding that transplants never become real New Yorkers,” Christian, Emma, Emma, Rebecca all say. There’s a hard pill in my throat. I’m swallowing it. Davis says, “part of being a real New Yorker is seeing New York through multiple different stages of your own life as well as the life of New York.” That seems right. I guess I’m estranged from my hometown.

As a little girl (four or so) when I looked in the mirror, I would see a face that did not look like mine. Who is that person? I wondered. And why is she staring at me? When I closed my eyes in bed, I would feel my body lift up and into the cold night sky, into space surrounded by stars—spinning, weightless, not afraid. Remembering, maybe, how I got to earth in the first place. My body is a hotel, not a home.

I’m visiting Guyana for the first time next week. My free astrocartographydotcom reading, shows intersecting lines over the country of my father’s birth. Guyana, the only non-Spanish speaking South American country, one of the least densely populated countries on earth. Guyana, former Dutch colony, “land of many waters.” Guyana, home?

Home is a fig tree at the beach, shades of green. Home is Sparky; Wishbone and Blondie; Bronx and Blade. Home is a mountain, a morning coffee, the roof at sunset. Home is a peacock call, a booming laugh. Home is the sun on my face, the rain on my skin, an ice cold drink in the park. If you are searching for home everywhere you learn to find it everywhere too.

The old trains still run to Coney Island, and the old tracks still collect water in my brain. Home is a mourning dove.

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We may be misled through ignorance and in good faith, but we are deluded by false representations. A person may delude himself.1

sticks and stones

I almost got my full split in my Thursday yoga class. Tension released, and I dropped suddenly to the ground; then terror gripped me, freezing the muscle and halting my descent. I slowed my breathing and wondered how the brain-body discerns whether a pain sensation is a warning of real danger to my person, or fear masquerading as pain to attract my attention. Inhale, exhale. The moment passed.

Painful sensations send an emergency //PAY ATTENTION TO ME// signal to the brain. For infants, all pain is an emergency because they lack language, context, or a sense of separation from their caretakers. They are helpless. As babies become children, they learn to identify the subtleties in pain; the sharp metallic taste that rises with shame is quite unlike the flash of light and sea of darkness that signals a fracture in the bone. Pain’s cousin, empathy, is crucial to our development into sensitive and social beings, members of a communal species. A person’s relationship to pain defines his existence in the world.

Some pain is unfathomable and senseless, like a mother living on after the death of a child. Any witness to it bears its memory, a fire-red warning in their psyche, a reminder of the randomness of fate and the inevitability of death. The memory embeds itself, creating a discontinuity in her sense of self—a small death. She stops believing in God. The capacity to understand this kind of pain is primordial.

Other pain is the tax you pay to bring your dreams into physical reality. It demands that you weigh your aspirations against the offerings you must make to reach them. Will you sacrifice the beliefs you hold? Love? Safety? Ease? Your answer in the abstract matters less than your willingness to face the truth that pain is revealing to you. Are you who you say you are?

If you’ve ever broken a bone, if you’ve seen the flash of light and sea of darkness, you know what it’s like to die. Pain requires us to tell the truth about our mortality, and our response to it is an opportunity to practice facing death.

funhouse mirror

Fact is very often stranger, simpler, and harder to accept than fiction. It is no coincidence that the compulsive avoidance of pain (of truth) often coincides with spirals of addiction and self-sabotage. The mind layers illusions in a misguided attempt to block pain. To become who you want to be, you must first understand who you are. Pain can be a magic mirror, an opportunity to investigate yourself without the foggy haze of self-image. Those who sit with discomfort rather than running from it might be rewarded by becoming the person they want to be, living the life they want to live. They must be willing to answer, again and again, Will you pay the tax? Are you courageous enough to see the truth of who you are? Colloquially, we call this productive pain toughening up, growing pains, a dark night of the soul, taking a leap of faith, stretching into “the belly” of the muscle, and going into the belly of the beast.

Some pain is self-inflicted. There is a quotidian, often relational genre of pain, and its danger lies in its social sanctioning and the ease of acclimatization to it. Emotional abuse, addiction, and self-sabotage are examples. Some understanding of this pain must be built so you can navigate the world. However, this pain is unproductive and should only be tolerated for the shortest possible time—long enough to learn how it operates and how to avoid it. The memories we scaffold around this quotidian pain can be distorted, exaggerated, or missing altogether.

event horizon

Latin deludere “to play false; to mock, deceive,” from de- “down, to one’s detriment” + ludere “to play.”2

I’ve been watching a lot of low-vibrational reality TV lately (namely, the Ultimatum and Married at First Sight). The participants lie to themselves and each other constantly. About being attracted to each other, about wanting to be married, about their alcoholism, about their families, about their fidelity. The lies take on a life of their own, grotesquely snaking through the lifeless bodies of the TV stars, puppeteering them, masquerading as real people. Delusion is a reality distortion field, with a gravitational pull and an event horizon. Staying in circumstances where you have to lie to yourself is poison to the spirit and a dice roll with obliteration.

I keep watching because there’s something fun about teasing apart the little lies people tell on the show. Delusion shares the lud root with illusion and ludicrous. The root connotes play, metaphor, and the intentional diversion of attention. Magic shows are captivating because the thought that things aren’t quite as they seem is intoxicating. Illusion is fun because it is consensual and cabined to a specific context. The all-consuming gravity of delusion is frightening.

To live at all, we must harbor some delusion of immortality. To take our first steps, quit our first job, break off abusive relationships, start over, move across the country, admit fault, to live feels like dying sometimes. To take any risks in life, we must accept that we will die and we must know that we will live forever. Both and. But modern society (and the extractive, abusive structures upholding it) use our love of stories and hard-wired reliance on external validation to feed our delusions and use them to control our actions.3

Part of growing up is learning how much you value the truth. Telling the truth to yourself about yourself, and making choices from a place of integrity is not easy and it comes at a cost. Will you pay the tax? Individuals, communities, entire nations have defense mechanisms for ejecting the truth, rearranging it, swallowing it down, and regurgitating it again in a compulsive spiral. If you lack integrity, the stories you tell yourself about yourself require no grounding in truth. For someone who is living a lie, the truth is poison to their entire reality, their self-image. Try it for yourself, speak truth and watch a person in delusion’s grip become a gray-eyed marionette, cradled in the poisoned hand of detrimental play.

Play, storytelling, lies, and illusion are all ways of transcending ordinary reality by building a new reality that suits your predilections. All desire is a kind of transcendence; all desire is the pain of not having. If you lose sight of reality, desire morphs into delusion.

If you choose instead to live in reality, desire can be used as a positional signal; a fulcrum to recalibrate your actions to be in service of your goals, life, and purpose.

fire together, wire together

For me, the past year has been an intensive course on differentiating dangerous pain from pain which is an opportunity for growth. Training my brain to take new pathways, even if they are better pathways, has been frightening and tortuous at times. Our brain-bodies always prefer the path of least resistance. This neurobiological predisposition is an evolutionary miracle—it’s how humans learn and react quickly to things in our environment. Pathways in the brain allow us to execute complex tasks. Tasks become easier as the paths in our brain become more well trod. Habits form. Some habits are detrimental.

This is why yoga has been deeply transformative for me. Through the physical practice, I am teaching my brain that change (which is often experienced as pain) will not kill me. I practice sitting with the pain that is productive, until the pain itself changes, and it always changes. I am left with a better understanding of reality and a stronger and more flexible mind. I try to think of pain as a vigilant friend in my body whose ultimate goal is to keep me safe, happy, and healthy. My job is to acknowledge my friend and build a relationship of trust so when I say, “no no, this pain is okay, this pain we need,” my friend, will listen and relax long enough for the sensation to change.

The sanskrit word for “full split” is hanumanasana. Hanuman, a hero and deity from the Ramayana, is known for his heroic leaps of faith.4

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The journal factory exploded, so I’ll be here philosophizing every Tuesday. Keep reading & subscribe if you like art, psychology, alternative career paths, and being in other people’s business! Also, I don’t use AI for anything because I really enjoy using my brain. Let’s get into it~

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yaya the lawy artist

For past year, I have been fully stepping into my identity as an artist (again). This experience has been liberating and surreal (again). I quit my job in corporate law to give myself room to breathe and paint. That choice comes with a thick pressure layer, but it also had an inevitability and a gravity to it. Have you ever watched a decision dancing around in your face like a jester, practically daring you to make it? It feels like the first move I’ve ever made with real stakes.

There’s a lot more to be said about that, and a lot has been said! Just ask my partner, the most loving, patient, and gracious person I’ve ever met! In this moment, I’m at peace living the life I used to dream of endlessly. I trust myself to figure things out as they come. And most importantly, I am incredibly grateful to have the time and space to paint again.

I have been painting to orient myself through these changes, and along the way I am discovering new language for my work (come through frontal lobe!) I paint the world as I see it, melting across a gradient of abstraction and figuration. My visionary and fabulous friend Nancy commissioned the work below, and the story surrounding “blue.electric” deserves (and will get) it’s own post. This remarkable work is living and breathing because we both poured our love and life into it. My brilliant and delightful friend Dane described my work as “surreal dreamy realism.” In his words I “use skin-scapes as a place for abstraction.” An unexpectedly beautiful part of having friends & making art is being seen more clearly than you can see yourself. You can explore more about my work on my website & on Instagram.

Illusion, Perspective, Mind

Painting is endlessly fascinating to me because I am obsessed with exploring the role that illusion plays in human cognition and perception. Obsessed enough to spend four years studying the causes and consequences of a pathological mismatch between perception and reality (B.S. psychology). My mind works best by alternating between an aerial, pattern-making view & a close-up, close enough to blur the boundaries between the categories I’d previously established. There are many names for people who intentionally blur the lines between fact and fiction…illusionists, liars, sorcerers, social media managers, filmmakers, and figurative painters to name a few.

Like my paintings, my research interests exist on a gradient of abstraction of the illusive concept of intelligence. In my formal schooling, I’ve studied the most granular unit of intelligence, the brain (neuroscience), up a level to the social brain (psychology), up another level to organization between social brains to create a society (law), up another level to society’s effect on social brains (sociology/ecology). I am also interested in language, image theory, film, complex systems, and emergence. In waking life, I consciously mediate the proportion of awareness between my mind and my body to modulate my own perception (yoga, walking, running, breath work, meditation, painting). This directly informs my art. I am the camera and the camerawoman and I am constantly fiddling with the aperture. I’ll write more on this later.

Painting Practice

I have a new commission, which means I have a big work on the way, which means life is worth living!

On Sunday, I discussed the commissioned piece with my client. I treat these initial consultations like I treated client meetings in my legal work. I come in organized, with a system and a set of questions that I always ask. I didn’t expect my legal experience to serve me so directly and immediately in this new chapter, and it’s cool to see it pay forward so directly.

I adore this part of the process, getting to know someone by learning what art means to them, what symbols move them, and how I can work with them to create a shared reality in the form of a piece of art. I view painting as the ultimate form of manifestation (literally, making ideas manifest in a physical form), and I am honored when someone trusts me to create a piece for their space. Painting reveals new depths of humanity to me. It is a practice of seeing, and seeing is something that a body does. To me, all good art is the byproduct of having a body. I’ll share more about the piece and commissioner if & when the time feels right, but right now we are in the delicate early exploratory stage where ideas benefit from a bit of guarding. To be continued!

Last week, I also did a 2.5 hour long painting study while my partner shot some footage on a Harinezumi camera. Stay tuned for the videos, but in the meantime, here’s an exclusive first peek at the painting that came out of that sprint. I’m proud! Lately I’m drawn to painting partial slices of life, and people just barely in frame.

The Business Side

I’m considering a few alternative structures for my business, so on my reading list for this week is ’s work on Artist Corporations and The Future of the Responsible Company (What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 50 Years) by Vincent Stanley.

I am avoiding eye contact with the logistics of shipping oil paintings, but my algorithm knows and has been delivering me highly targeted reminders....For now, I’m grateful that my most recent commissions will be delivered locally.

Gratitude

I have a complex relationship with faith, the mystical, and the unexplainable. I grew up skeptical of the concept of an all powerful (male) God on a cloud granting wishes like a genie. The older I’ve gotten, the more I enjoy leaning into the magic of not knowing how everything works. I am experimenting with believing that the shape of my thoughts, directed attention, and faith might carry me just as far as a white knuckled grip on facts and logic. So I’m doing an abundance manifestation podcast series. Last week I asked the universe for an easel, and within four days of my asking, someone in my studio building was giving away an easel. Abundance!

I also had a ton of fun at my friend Sarah’s wedding, Nonso bought me the aforementioned Patagonia book, I reconnected with an old mentor who was extremely encouraging about my leap, and I went to dinner and a figure drawing class with Addison. Love really is all around.

If you’ve made it to the end, say hi—I’d love to know who’s here. Take care, and I’ll see you next Tuesday!

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This external practice reflects an internal shift which I have experienced over the last year or so (which I’ll maybe explore in future writings). For now, know that I have gone from viewing my mind as a resource to be wrangled and controlled, to viewing it as a forest to be nurtured. I no longer see great ideas as singular or linear. All great ideas are cumulative and cyclical.

For most days over the past six months I have practiced writing my Morning Pages as outlined by Julia Cameron in the Artist’s Way. I really enjoy this practice and encourage you to visit her work to learn more about her philosophy. I haven’t showed up perfectly. I have missed days and weeks and months. But over time the more I write, the clearer my ideas are. It feels easier to write and easier to think. Sidebar - this is also why I feel strongly that everyone should STOP outsourcing their brain power to AI chat bots! You are atrophying your Mind Forest! But that’s a topic for a later day! And for the record, if you ever see anything written, painted, spoken, or otherwise created by me, rest assured that I did not outsource my ideation to artificial intelligence. Any triumphs, mistakes, and embarrassments are my own.

I write because each new idea plants a seed in my psyche. For my mind to be thriving and layered with a diverse ecology, for it to be robust and resilient against the dynamic forces of nature, ideas must be planted at different times and given room to germinate. Some old ideas must fall like two-hundred year old redwoods to feed thousands of sprouts and saplings which will grow and die in turn. As I write I till the soil and dance on the dry mountain inviting rain clouds to form. Writing is one of many ways I cultivate and nurture my mind.

I also cultivate my mind by reading. I have always been a voracious reader. When I was younger and I had more uninterrupted time, I would often devour a book a day. I didn’t have the same challenges I have now, where my inner life is constantly interrupted by so called “Real Life.” I am consciously retraining my attention span with practices including reading, writing, yoga, meditation, and painting, but my time is still limited. Over the past few months especially, I’ve found that I can only get through 15-30 pages a day in stolen moments while I am commuting or waiting for a friend to arrive to brunch. I have also found that each morning when I wake up and pack my bag in a frenzy to get out the door, I am drawn to a different book in my growing stack. I’ve stopped fighting the urge to control my mind and finish one book before starting another, and instead I just let my hand reach where it wants to reach.

As a result, ideas from many people, places, and times cross pollinate and bring genetic diversity to my Mind Forest. My thinking evolves. Not all ideas are meant to survive a day or a year or a decade. I prune what needs to go. I welcome forest fires that clear away the underbrush. I allow my to mind change with time and trust that its essence remains the same. Reading from multiple perspectives at the same time has trained me. I remain far more interested in finding the connections between things than deciding that one way is the Right Way. I leap nimbly from one set of ideas or paradigms to another without allowing them to rest heavily on my psyche as absolute truth. I stumble across books all the time that feel placed in my path for a reason. Who am I to say that I can’t start reading this one until I finish that one? I’m not in the habit of biting the hand that feeds me.

This has also taken the fear out of starting things. I am relieved to untangle some of my long held self views. I don’t have to be a capital R Reliable person who is capital D Determined and capital F Finishes what she started if that identity does not serve me anymore. Instead, I choose to be a person who tries things and shifts course when they don’t work for me anymore. I’m not trapped in anything. I know this to be true, because I trust in the flexible strength of my mind.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I’ll probably write more on these topics in the coming weeks (to like till the soil of my mind garden or whatever), so if there’s something that you’re interested in, let me know! As a treat, I’ve provided my current list of books below. My interests lately have been centered around philosophy and religion, sociology (and the human environment), neuroscience and design, human physiology, and consciousness. If you’re interested in more book recommendations on these topics, I have plenty. I just might not be able to tell you if I liked the ending.

1. The Soundscape by R. Murray Schafer

2. Matriarchal Societies, Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe by Heide Goettner-Abendroth (purchased)

3. Neuroarchitecture by Christoph Metzger (A Capella Books in Atlanta, GA)

4. The Genius of Trees - How They Mastered the Elements that Shaped the World (gift from Vince)

5. Cities and Society, The Revised Reader in Urban Sociology by Paul H. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (book box on Graham Avenue, Brooklyn)

6. Breath by James Nestor (book box on Graham Avenue, Brooklyn)

7. Wheels of Life, A User’s Guide to the Chakra System (A Capella Books in Atlanta, GA)

8. A Handbook of Anatomy for Art Students by Arthur Thomson (book box at Cooper Park, Brooklyn)

9. Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch (borrowing from Vince)

10. Ways of Being by James Bridle (purchased)

11. The Other Almanac by many contributors, published by OR Books (Pioneer Works Book - Press Play)

12. The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall (Vince checked out from the library)

13. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Translation and Commentary by Sri Swami Satchidananda (purchased, recommended by Michelle)

14. A Course in Miracles, published by Foundation for Inner Peace (purchased, recommended by Nikki)

im five and matilda is my favorite movie and i see myself in her secret magic, her benevolence. i’m twelve and stargirl is my favorite book, she allows herself to be strange, i want to be strange too. im fifteen and i listen ceaselessly to richard charles edwards and i feel connected to his sorrow, enmeshed with it. im twentyfour, mindgame is on, i am crashing cymbals and psychological chaos, fury and sex, deception. the belly of the whale sustains me.

ipluckmyselffromtheroot.

ive felt a lot of fury lately, always. refined into something more acceptable—ambition, determination, creativity, dedication, chips, shoulders, and the like. there are times when i feel aligned with the flow of time and i relax and let the water take me, but now im clawing against a rip current, threatening to drown myself to spite the ocean of time/space/life, like she’d give a fuck. if time had a neck and skin and bones and veins and arteries and blood, i would throttle her.

itssacredthisexerciseofbeing.

im twentyfive and i saw a holy shade of orange on train today. i bathed in the persimmon. a woman screamed, the pain thick in her voice, “WHY WON’T YOU LOOK AT ME, WHY WON’T YOU LOOK UP FROM YOUR PHONE.” i’m sorry. i don’t have an answer for you. i’m sorry. persimmon is holy. this is my stop, excuse me.

ipurifymyself.

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I got into an argument with a girl named Caroline in the future. We fought like sisters a bit too close in age. “Most women these days don’t deign to marriage, the most they’ll submit to is domestic partnership,” a haughty narrator clipped. We were young, or so it felt. Our argument was girlish.

I asked her coldly if she really thought i was less than because my mother didn’t marry my father—because I was an open secret. She retreated, shamed by her cruel instinct. I got into a light gray Porsche, and moved to drive out of the garage in which we were suddenly arguing, but the wheels were on a track and the door was locked. I was trapped, although I didn’t feel it. This was the last dream I remember before waking up.

two: GLASS HOUSE:

The details are fuzzy but the contours are clear. I was in a beautiful home with glass ceilings and one panel open. The delicious moonlight lapped over a lush Zizi plant visible through the panel. I captured pictures of the plant at the witching hour, and the photos showed the reflection of the kitchen below me in all of the closed panels. I was not visible in the photos, and I was wary of looking them for too long. The moonlight was not changing shape. I cant place the house, but it felt quite real to me. Especially those on and on windows, covered only by the canopy above. 

It was night and I should have been scared. I was alone in the house (or were there dogs protecting me?) Either way, the dogs were silent and I was not afraid. I fell asleep in a room in the house, and when I awoke there were strange (male) shapes mutating in the darkness around me. Not afraid, I simply closed my eyes and tried to remember what those shapes were in the light. A (male) figure walked through the yard. Although I laughed and spoke (to myself? to no one?) as if i was not afraid, I searched frantically for my pepper spray—then bear spray—thinking to myself that I must remember to put it by the bedside table if I survive to the morning.

one: PINNOCCHIO

There was a party; it felt like a memory. Lots of laughter, and a jaunty silliness about someone who got in a fight. The star of the show walked in, impish and light. The room was his as he set the scene for the wackiness we must have all been dying to hear. He was the only man with a face in the dream and the only one who didn’t feel threatening. 

His act felt scripted, but not in an off-putting, eerie, or trivializing way. In the comforting way, like when you were a child and it’s getting late and you’re watching tv with your parents, and you know you’ll be told to go to bed soon. Scripted like, “will we be having dessert?” at the restaurant, and your mother always says no, “unless someone wants to share?” Warm with love and expectation, the whole room buzzed with order. The background characters were actors, I know this now, maybe no more than clay. 

There was a girl. Her name was Katie. Katie and I were in love, I think. Or at the very least I was in love with her. I’m forgetting a lot of details here, as this was the first dream. But I think we knew each other for a long time; I think we went through a lot together. At this party there was a bonfire and a beach. We had returned smelling of camp smoke and sea air and laughing, so much laughter. The laughter was incidental, the background characters were clay, and after the party there was really only her. She’s the only thing that had a real shape to me. She narrated a portion of this dream, and she told a story about us. It’s gone from me now, but she spoke as if we were old friends. I’m not sure why we weren’t telling the story together. She was not reading from a script, and she was not made of clay.

Notes:

All three dreams are setting rather than plot-driven. I did not know a single character from anywhere in these dreams in real life. Even in the glass house (which was presumably my home), there were no pictures of anyone. The only real creatures which briefly appeared in my *psyche* were the dogs, but they were never actually physically present. I did not think of anyone I know. This whole dream universe existed outside of my real universe of characters. It’s kind of like I was in, or watching, a movie. 

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my ac cut off.

i took off my black, tight shirt. i’m hot. pacing around my apartment in my sheer blue bra and shorts. yeah, hot like that. but more pressingly, hot. the heat of it. the itchy heat of being alive. life is beautiful when you don’t know what to do. 

life is beautiful when you’re angry with your mother. life is angry when you’re beautiful / beauty is life when you’re angry / life is angry / you are beautiful.

and aren’t you fucking thirsty you haven’t had a sip of water in hours. 

i should drink some water. 

you’re mad at mom, that’s when she’ll decide to die, to spite you. ooooooOH no, how dare you write those words, don’t you know how powerful your mind is, girl! don’t you know it’s all your fault! all of it, the beads of blood, the sprays of snow, the sea roaring through the levees, it’s all you, little girl. 

you're the most powerful being in the world, you're the only being in the world, you’re alone. doesn’t it feel that way my love? you don’t know who you are and knowing is all you have, so you are nothing. 

if only i could feel the spray of the ocean, if only i could feel the spray of your sweat while we make love. if only i could feel the spray of your spittle spat screaming in my face, absurd. you’re not alone if you can feel some spray. 

turn your ac back on, you’re hot girl. you’re hot and it’s making you crazy. I'M FROM THE ISLANDS—or i was supposed to be anyway. but i grew up down south, so i'm supposed to be hot / and if the heat makes me crazy, then I'm supposed to be crazy, right? 

don’t call yourself crazy, it’s un-feminist. and anyways, it’s booooooring boohoo you’re a woman boohoo you bleed booooohooooooo it’s so played out to find beauty in your suffering in your life in your anger. you’re just the spray of the sea, you know? here, gone / one second, the next. 

take a breath. you’re not breathing anymore, you’re screaming. contain yourself, you’re all that you have, disappear, but no, stay right here with me. stay with me, alone and gone / nowhere, i love you. you should drink some water. 

the heat dips you gently in madness.

i’ll periodically (*goal, once weekly) send out short prose, poetry, and commentary pieces, old and new.

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