I’m staring at the ceramic dog that occasionally moves, he’s on the shelf now, looking at my roommate’s stack of records - a Blondie one, to be exact. I wish I had some respite to an unending scribble in my belly, but I don’t. At breakfast we joked about the thing I said many months ago, that I hoped this year wasn’t as much of a stale rice cracker - we joked about it because it was as such for all three of us; then, I suppose, with a sense of hope, we all agreed that the second half of the year is always more substantial and exciting things would eventually happen.
*
You can’t escape your own restlessness, you’ve tried. You go to another city and drink your usual coffee order and talk to strangers, and for five minutes it’s all good and well, then you’ve found another projection for what is wrong with you and you’re walking around Vincent Square crying, and you talk someone’s ear off about it and they’re very kind and they make you pomodoro pasta while you sleep on their couch for a few nights. Later you are embarrassed about it but you suppress that and store it in your jaw and hips, and get on with it.
You tell yourself that when you force things to happen, they are never as good as when you surrender and let things be. You try it for a minute, the time passes, and again there you are trying to make one end meet another in a desperate attempt to untangle the wires in your belly. This is where you are now. It seems you don’t know better, even when you do. You are happy, but you are also looking at who you are about to become dead in the eye. You had hoped to find her on some bikini-clad hike in the Calanques National Park, and then again somewhere in East London, on the side of the road somewhere talking to someone over a glass of French natural wine - “My friend Brett worked on a wine farm in Perpignan last summer, you know. I should probably try to get my WSET 1 this year,” is something you would totally say in this instance.
You tell yourself you can redirect your focus, that aligning yourself to where you are now will open up a world of possibilities because you’re in the present. You got that from a TikTok you saw in the middle of the night when you couldn’t sleep. You’re twenty-six now and everything feels really weird and serious, but you also don’t really know what you’re doing. You want to make things and build a name for yourself, but you don’t know how to get there. You want to be in love again and live like that one Sharon Olds poem for a day, but you don’t know how to get there either.
*
My roommate’s cat is snoring next to me, and the ceramic dog is still enamored by Blondie. The scribble in my belly is partly hunger, and I’m trying to write a poem about someone’s mouth, but it’s a futile attempt. It’s cold outside in a kind of pleasant way, and I feel really pretty. We’ve been laughing about our mini-skirt-summer, and some one-trick-ponies that we’re trying to not think about. Tomorrow is another day and it will be good. One day I will look back at this time and laugh at how simple things could have been. Who knows. Who knows.