Dear reader,
Thank you for including my unhinged little thoughts in your week. I’ll be posting my free associated pleasure-tracts every Sunday. Before publishing this week’s tract I sent a draft to a friend to ask “is this too sad and insane?” Probably yes. I love you so much, here you go.
I met a guy on an app last year who was very into astrology. For our second date we went to a ramen place, and while we waited for our food he mapped out my entire natal chart. I thought it would be fun, but as he read it he looked up with this soft, slightly insane look: “You’re made to be a mother,” he said, “it’s your work, your family, everything.” He tried to hold hands with me across the table, but just then our food arrived. My moon is in Cancer, which he said was his favourite placement — he wrote a song about it once, for another girl. He played the song for me on his guitar later that night at his place which was filthy. The next day I went to Ikea with a friend, and as we were looking at bookcases the guy texted me a playlist called “For E 💕”. I was flattered but I didn’t really like any of the songs, and two days later I told him I didn’t want to continue. My friend looked up the guy’s Spotify profile and found a dozen other playlists called “For J 💕”, “For C 💕”, “For A 💕”, etc.
Houses, coffeehouses, neighbourhood: setting that I see and where I walk, year after year.
I crafted you in joy and in sorrows: out of so much that happened, out of so many things.
And you’ve been wholly remade into feeling; for me.
I recite this poem to my therapist all the time and every time he laughs it off. He has no time for my stupid poems!! It’s “In the same space” by Constantine Cafavy. I love Cavafy, he has the same birthday as me, and he died on the same day, our birthday. I wonder if the day we die somehow alters our astrological chart in retrospect. In death, is Cavafy even more of a Taurus, or do birth and death cancel each other out? Does the act of living add or subtract? The original Greek poem is devastating. Most English translations try to replicate Cavafy’s twisting of stiffness and fluidity, but his mildly deranged style is hard to match in English, a language that’s never been fucked by Zeus disguised as a gorgeous animal. I imagine Cavafy in the 1920s, wearing his little glasses, working as a government clerk in Alexandria, writing homoerotic poems for his friends about ancient myths and one-night stands. Has the discourse really changed??
I miss driving in the summertime. I miss hanging my arm out the window because I love to see my hand floating at that angle. I took ballet classes as a kid and there was a specific way of holding your hands, which the teacher would correct if you did it wrong. That’s how I hold my hand out the window of my car in the summertime, like I’m in Swan Lake except I’m listening to horny European disco. My brother used to drive me around as a kid with his arm out like that, but in a manly way, because he was smoking. We listened to Megadeth and Yngwie Malmsteen, because it was the 90s and he was born in the 70s. I still love the smell of Du Maurier cigarettes, and I don’t really smoke.
I saw the old man in the electric burgundy chair on my way to work again. We’re on the same schedule. This time he wasn’t backing out of his driveway, he was riding in the street, taking the middle of the lane like a fucking car. Now that I’ve seen him twice I think I love him even more. I think the love will keep expanding each time I see him; it’s an asymptotic love, where the limit does not exist. In the middle of the day I found myself thinking about him in his little chair on the road. I hope he has a little wife to keep him company, even though they hate each other. Because of this, he tears across the city at 8:45am every day in his electric burgundy chair to seek solace at the euro grandpa sports bar.
It’s so strange to work in a hospital, where every day you arrive, you perform the tasks of your workday, and then you go home, while the people you’re caring for continue to be sick and dying while you’re away. One of my work colleagues keeps a fairly realistic baby doll wrapped in a clear plastic bag in her desk. We use dolls for behavioural management in people with dementia. Behavioural management is a polite term for making patients stop shouting. You’ll step onto some of the medical wards at the hospital and hear the symphonic wailing of all the major languages of the neighbourhood — Portuguese, Mandarin, Italian, Greek. Their voices are terrified and lost, calling for their dead mothers or for their babies who are now grown up. Dementia is a terrible thing, you lose a part of the person every day. You wonder if you could lose any more, and you always can because the limit does not exist. I don’t know why the act of holding a doll, an object shaped like a baby, calms the terror of becoming lost. But with the baby they smile sweetly alone in their rooms, quiet at last.
I used to buy flowers for myself every two weeks from the florist around the corner from me, which is almost certainly a front for something else. The owner would let me look through the newest blooms in the refrigerated back room of the store, which felt dangerous and also special. I loved walking home with a bouquet under my arm on a Saturday morning with my croissant. Old women on street benches would smile at me as I passed, they’d say, “beautiful flowers!”. I don’t know why I stopped. But everything is expensive now, and flowers smell so bad when they get old.
I have a fresh bouquet next to me now and the flowers smell beautiful, like baby’s laundry detergent. They came from a friend I work with, who unexpectedly sent me the flowers this week. Last week I cried in our Zoom work meeting, which is why she sent them. The card said: Sending you some colour to remind you that you are cared for and deserve care. Wishing you moments of joy. I used to feel so strong and now I don’t always feel strong anymore, out of so much that happened, so many things. Surprise flowers are such a beautiful thing. What a beautiful thing to receive from a friend.
For u 💕
E