putting on the same clothes as yesterday

August 23

I am currently writing on my laptop. I looked at my phone to break down the minutes of typing, and I checked to see who had messaged me. It was the group chat of my college friends, the people who want to go to Orange County late September. I am prioritizing them over Belle, or over anyone else, like Robin or Louise, because I remember telling everybody that I would make an effort to see them again after we graduated. They’re not counting on me, they’ve seen each other since. But I’d like to be a part of it. 

I’ve been told by many that I am an extremist. Tonight, at the dinner table, I began to talk to my cousin and my mother about the pressure of ending college and having your life prepared. I talked about how although I have a clearer image of what is next now over what I had in May, I still feel that I try to embellish my situation so that I can impress people. I want to reassure them that I know where I am headed, and that they can be satisfied by what I say. 

I don’t know where I got the idea that I was lazy. My cousin and mother both told me that I don’t need to speed up or slow down. Where did this idea come from? 

Even as I write to you right now, I realize that I have not taken a moment for myself all day, or all night. Everything has been feeling like work. Most of what I do is valuable. Even when I wasted my time at Marina Greens picking out the wrong dosage of gummies, I felt that my hours were all well spent. Who am I trying to prove that I am okay to, or better yet, when did I start believing that there was something to prove?

As I write, as I hurry for a deadline that is not enforced, what am I working towards? I would like to say that I am working on getting closer to myself, because I am the one watching these words be typed out on my screen - I am rereading my thoughts from these past few months, and double checking whether I would like for them to be read. Then I wonder if anybody will read it. And then I think about when I picked up The Woman Destroyed by Simone De Beauvoir, and realized that the entire introduction concerned itself with how much writing there was in the world. In 1967. 

I believe that when I put things out onto the internet, that nobody is looking. I know that there are eyes everywhere, purely out of statistics, but I also know that the internet is all anybody really has. There is no where to turn to sometimes but an online community. Whenever I post something, whether I am thihnking of reaching someone directly or if I am thinking just of myself, I am participating in a network of people who would like to be connected to the world. Blah, blah. People who want me to see the Swiss Alps during their semester abraod, people who are dressing up to go to the office, people who are eating dinner. 

August 25th

I have been busy writing down everything from my summer diary. I am working in a strange way. I know that I’m running out of pages, but as I write everything at once and watch it unfold visually, I realize that there is more to say. 

Yesterday I got the idea to volunteer for the Green Party after watching Andrew Callaghan’s DNC coverage. I don’t know if I have complete faith in Jill Stein, but I guess I’m willing to look into a candidate and understand them better if they are against Kamala’s warped excuse for policy. I contacted the San Francisco branch and the Marin branch as well. The latter seems to not be functional. I wonder if I am the only person who would like to revive the party. There must be other young people interested, I would hope. 

I can’t say that I feel lonely in these endeavors, because I meet so many people the more I sleuth. There is just so much I’d like to accomplish, and I’m starting to see that a team is necessary. I would also like to form some sort of collective, something where other people who have similar ideas can have proper discourse, locally. I want to see my community come together. 

I feel really good about the bookstore idea. I have been reading more of my Cuba book to motivate me to finish my article, and then tomorrow I’m going to begin Joel of Rebound Book’s “Standin’ in a Hard Rain.” I wonder if he’s any good of a writer. At the end of the day, archiving is essential, especially in a movement rooted in so much history. But, some of the people who end up logging their experience write like psychopaths. I understand the irony in saying this and I am not exempt from this sentiment. 

Me and Matthew are on speaking terms. It is fairly consistent, or at least much more than it was previously, so any increase in talking is an improvement. When I told him I had gone to the camera store for help with my camera, he wondered why I hadn’t facetimed him and asked him instead. I mean, I was already there getting my shit developed, but I thought the same thing. Why didn’t I feel comfortable asking him? 

As I am writing to you now, he is back in Ann Arbor. The times I took a car home from the airport, after January and after we had broken up, I would not look at his house. It was on the way home, and there was no way around it. I kept my head down, even though I knew he wasn’t in there anyways. I thought about how I would maybe never see his home again. It was always so sad. The weight that house carried was heavy when I passed by it, but only to me. 

I am going to write down: I hope we stay together. But I also hope that I get published in local newspapers, and I hope I get attention from my idols, and I hope that I make some sort of dent where I can, I don’t fucking know, avenge my diasporas and succeed in maintaining the culture of the Bay Area for working class people. I hope so many things, but he hardly talks to me, and I hardly can get a word in, because we don’t really have phone calls and we’ve never really facetimed before. I’ve known him for over a year now. 

I hate to admit this: I love him, because of how intense it feels to look him in the eyes. I think about what it feels like to be on top of him, to care about him, and if all of that will be enough for me down the line. Inevitably, I will not be able to get him to admit how he feels about me, because he tells me that he does not know. That is the answer. 

Can we both have something that is our own, and also have each other? I wonder if I will always resent him, if he will always resent me. I would like to tell myself that he is unnecessary, that I will find everything I need in this lifetime, and the rest of it is ahead of me. It would be nice to leave him in the past, along with the other people in college I will never see again. 

I think deep down, I am afraid of him, and I am afraid of being in a relationship with him. I keep thinking about Notes on Apocalypse Now by Eleanor Coppola. Eleanor had to take care of her kids as she struggled to document her husband’s financial disaster. She wrote about Sofia Coppola becoming more conscious as a young girl, and into her tween years, and she writes about how she is growing too, and how it is uncomfortable to never feel at home anywhere, to be constantly disturbed by a new project. She writes a bit about his mistress, and how that woman got to see the first edit of Apocalypse Now. Eleanor was fucking pissed. I read that, and I saw something like that happening to me. Alone in a house in the Presidio, except I’m not alone, I’m with my staff. And when Matthew wants to come to me, he does, but when he’d rather have fresh eyes, he’d find them. 

In this case, it is hard to feel terribly about Eleanor, or to feel pity for me. I am just delusional, and she is dead. Suffering ends, and it is relative. Eleanor must have had a comfortable end of her life, and she likely was proud of her legacy. 

I am currently on a cushion. Metaphorically. I sit in despair, thinking about how my career has not taken off yet, about how I have footage laying in a folder that I am embarrassed to sort through. I wonder how Eleanor organized her drafts, and if there are files sitting somewhere from a project she never finished.