feb 12, 2020
If you don’t face your fears you avoid a lot of things, least of which is the main thing you mean to avoid so facing them helps you to face so many things and to be a part of a bigger world that you didn’t even know you were avoiding.

Likewise, facing small fears helps you open up a wider world because you don’t know what those things are connected to

feb 27, 2020
do I love him or am I just good at him?

feb 28, 2020
Sometimes when people believe in me, I wonder if they are looking at a beautiful girl that they wish for. That they want to believe them, to believe in them. Do men feel this way? ‘I am being listened to because I am a man, and damn it, and shame on me for my un-asked for plight.'

Do I shirk responsibility for my eyes? Deny my breasts their right to autonomy, to punishment?

I am not in a room of my own, and I want no one to know, so I want everyone to know. 

march 03, 2020
It’s how I feel when I sit on the stairs in my house and ‘listen’ to my mom yell things to my brother that I guess she’s told me before, that I guess she’s yelled at to me, me who was her child long before he was,

It’s not guilt, or responsibility, or shame, or 

a drawer labeled ‘things that actually happened.’

A fish inside me bit my veins; broken is the pulley that would have helped me to hide, I wanted to act, broken vase, glass reflection, wipe and shine 

I saw a woman, a star fruit unpeeled. Pretending to be juicy for the sake of a man, unaware of the bruise that appeared on my own neck when the man across the table reached out and grabbed her, woman unaware of my broken heel when she tripped on her way to the bathroom, woman unaware of the breath of the room that was held

I wonder who else felt the bruises. Certainly not the date I was with. 

Certainly not

march 13, 2020
I’m hardening like a callous. I’m exhausted of a person I don’t want to be I’m exhausted of the sticky tape around his throat that I feel like I could discard and get away with completely. I hate him. I’m allowing anger to bubble up and it grips me entirely. It feels refreshing, it feels like needles on my spine, I wish I was uncared for, I wish I was an orphan out of time

march 14, 2020
Reading through my old green notebook and I feel a sweeping pity for the people I have and haven't been. The admiration and respect that I showed others and saved from myself. I want to be read cover to cover, I want to read his old chapters, be a part of his adventurous new ones, and reframe the shadowed silent ones. I am ambitious, I am thorny. 

Writing immediately is a gift to my future self. I gift myself! I want to gift myself these things! fuck everything all the time!!!!!

I am suspected of coronavirus, sort of. He is sweeping sand from the floor of his house while he is on the phone with his boss, hearing her talk with concern about me, hearing a logical brain have logical concern. The moment lays on me smoothly. It doesn't penetrate or invade me, it respects me. I breathe next to it, I breath in coolly, I breathe out warmly. 

We're in the business of managing other people's emotions, we're in the business of unleashing, training, respecting, sharing, and holding our own. I make space for myself. There's more space out in space!

I gift myself, do you hear that Pete Walker? I gift myself! I gift myself, do you hear that Gavin De Becker? I gift myself! I gift myself, do you hear it? I gift myself.

I shy away from K's hands in bed and steel my teeth sewn shut and my porous coral skin dries, polyps retract, I taste like where salt has been, I taste the still spit in my mouth.

jusqu'ici tout va bien.

I am sick, do I have coronavirus? I'd say 50/50. Me, a participant of the pandemic. A part of the mayhem. Are people worried? Sometimes I am happy that this moment is encouraging panic. We are still human! we yell, with crazed looks in our eyes, the crumbs of our old caves tumbling down our backs (I love words, I love my family, don't tell anyone yet, I'll get so in much trouble, I'm getting in so much trouble). Corona Corona Corona! 

K is sitting at the shark's kitchen table reading the rum diaries, which he plans to finish today. Yesterday, we learned how to go fly fishing. We went to playa grande. I'll never forget anything ever again. I'll write poetry until my knuckles break and blister. I used to chew and gnaw until i hurt myself, now I will earn the dispersal of my own blood  on the red carpets that line my arteries, my synapses, the pinks of my eyes.

I am woman, watch me swim.

march 14, 2020
K has an allergic reaction to ant bites. How many? I ask, 10.. 12, he says. He was resentfully getting a papaya from the yard after he brought up that I put L before him, which I do. He said he takes a backseat to him, and he does. 

K is writing on the couch and I feel bizarre. It’s raining, it's windy, and L is walking around with a headlamp, cleaning his thermometer. We're going spearfishing tomorrow. We will swim.