Stephanie
I forgot until right now that I told Molly I would write about my Christmas Eve or Christmas Day in Philadelphia. Christmas Eve has already come and gone and I forgot. Now it is Christmas Day. It is 10:48am. I am in my bed drinking coffee and reading Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour. I've never read any of Sheila Heti’s books before and sort of can't remember what the discourse is, if I should be expecting to like or not like this. I went into Bindlestiff on Sunday to try to buy Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative but the shop owner could not find it, despite looking through several disorganized stacks for me while ignoring the customers waiting to check out. A copy of Pure Colour was sitting on top of a pile, alluringly green, and discounted to $8, so I bought it and started reading it during my lunch break on Monday and then on my commute home. I quite like reading it. I didn't know it was a book about a daughter and a dead dad. I have been thinking about my own dad, who is dead, because he loved Christmas, and because I get both more and more like him and less and less like him over time. Yesterday when I was in my car, WXPN was airing the entirety of the Boris Karloff Grinch recording, narration and all, and I felt really delighted, and part of the delight came from knowing my dad would be delighted, and that we have this delight in common, my delight deriving from his but also its own genuine feeling. I just got to the part in Pure Colour when Mira becomes a leaf. I don't know why something then reminded me about Molly and the fact that I'm supposed to be writing about my day but I took a break to write this on my phone.
*
Now that I started writing I feel like writing rather than reading. Why is that? There's something I'm often seeking after in writing that I don't know if I'll get: relief, or, if not relief, at least a feeling of accomplishment. Often I get neither, but I do it anyway. I feel sort of lonely. Last night I watched Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, which a friend had posted about watching the other day because it is a Christmas movie. I have seen it before, maybe 15 years ago, but hadn't remembered that, and I hadn't remembered that it is sort of a meditation on loneliness. At one point Tony Leung’s character explains that in the science fiction story he is writing, about lonely people on a long, mysterious train, there are two cars on the train where people are most acutely lonely, and must cling to each other for warmth, and those two cars represent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. While watching, I was thinking about how In The Mood for Love has these two characters longing straight at each other but with an impossible gulf between them, (the impossible gulf of being alive), and in 2046, characters are longing at each other but it's like their longing is actually directed at someone else. Everyone is caught up in each other's misplaced, projected desires. Everyone is playing out their memories, or fantasies, or stories, with new people, or the wrong people, not the objects of their actual desires. But maybe the objects of our actual desires are not real people either, properly considered. I'm getting very abstract. Like I said, I'm lonely and a little sad. I recently ended things, again, with someone who I love, because of an impossible gulf between us, and am perhaps retreating into abstraction, philosophy, art, like a character in one of these stories I love about stories and love.
*
The book has made me cry. I dog-ear and reread the passage that prompts the crying twice: “You were loving to me, and I only remember the loving parts of you now. That is true when someone dies—that you often only think about the loving part, but in that way you are just thinking about life, which runs through plants and trees; the loving part which is part of everything. That part of us is the best thing about us, and because it is the least individual thing, it shines through us so beautifully, when it shines. It is easy to remember that part, which is equivalent with life, when the person you love is dead.” I don’t think what’s moving about these pages, which go on, can be transferred via excerpt, and it’s the kind of thing that sounds like it could be too precious, but it doesn’t strike me that way at all, when I read it. A few pages later there is a passage about the importance of family tradition which I find myself repelled by in a way that makes me question my own being moved by the previous pages, though I’m aware that a book doesn’t work this way, that each thing in a book is not exactly what the author or even the book believes.
*
There are things I cannot say about my dad, and about this person I love, and about myself and the way I love or have loved, live or have lived, and the not being able to say is part of what I cannot say. I can see, lately, with a more neutral eye, that most people are sort of tangled up in a story that's a little beyond their own comprehension. Me, included. A lot of people really can't quite love each other the way the other person needs, or wants, or the way they even intend to, and this isn't really anyone's fault.
*
I get up out of my hunched posture in bed to do a yoga video because my body feels tense and cramped. I choose a video called “Feel Good Flow” and it does make me feel a little better. Now it is 12:46pm and I am typing this on the computer in my office, which imparts a different, somehow louder feeling to the act of writing, as if there is a noisier texture imprinting itself in my sentences. I have been writing by hand a lot more this year than I ever used to, which I enjoy, though I have begun to feel my writing lately is lacking a sort of rhythmic, sonic engine, perhaps because I’m not typing. Before I was serious about writing, I was serious about playing the piano. I type extremely quickly, which seems related to this. Like when I’m writing by typing, I can evade my mind and consciousness, like words and language are funneled straight through into my hands. That sounds really mystical, which I guess I do believe it sort of is. I don’t know. I miss it. I miss something I can’t quite put my finger on. I can’t tell if it’s because of sobriety, or hormones, or the end of a relationship, or getting older, or my new job, or the season, or the global situation of destruction and decline, or nothing at all, if the feeling just exists of its own stubborn logic, an animal in a field.
*
I loaf around in bed for a little while listening to drag queens talk on a podcast and playing a game on my phone where you unscrew colored screws from clear shapes. In between the levels of this game, there are advertisements for other games that promise they will boost your IQ but the advertisements frequently have misspellings. I sense I am playing a game designed by robots designed by other games. I wouldn't even say I find it relaxing as an activity. I just find it kind of pleasantly vacating. I get dressed in all black and red socks, which I think of as kind of theme dressing for my outing later to go see Nosferatu. I put on a binder and note the time, that I'll need to take it off by 9:30pm. I don't wear a binder every day, I think because I wish I could bind all the time but you can't, safely, and so sometimes it's easier to pretend I don't care, don't want to do it at all. Being kind of transgender is embarrassing because you think you are an original person and then you find out you are not. This year I will have good health insurance for the first time in many years, the kind where I could afford to get top surgery, if I decide I want it and decide I can deal with allowing that desire to be made known and real. I came downstairs to make shakshuka, which I made the sauce for last night, and more coffee, because it is Christmas and I am thus allowed to overindulge on my allowed indulgences. I have a vague desire when I open the fridge to day drink a nonalcoholic beer. I'll drink my coffee out of a mug my mother sent me for Christmas so I can text her a picture and say thank you. When I first came downstairs I greeted the cats in a loud high-pitched voice, calling them a beautiful supermodel and a handsome movie star.
*
I started reading through the entirety of Alison Bechdel’s The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For sometime near the beginning of the year. I put it down for a long time but the year coming to an end has me motivated to finish what’s left, so I can include it in this year's book count. I have a similar feeling towards The Inferno which I've been picking through all year as well, but I'm still only midway through hell. I had read some individual Dykes comics semi-regularly near the tail end of its run in the early 2000s. Reading now, I find it both unnerving and kind of soothing to see, in the characters, so many conversations and dynamics that feel so similar to contemporary queer life. In the late pages I'm reading now, on the couch downstairs, the characters are reeling from the election of George W. Bush, protesting the Iraq war. An odd specter started looming over my reading of this, however, when I learned that the former president of the former arts school where I worked, which closed in a catastrophic collapse this spring, was friends with Alison Bechdel, might be the inspiration for one of the lesbians depicted in these pages. It's harder to forgive or pretend not to notice the bad, liberal undercurrent knowing that in real life some of these women would surely go on to become academic administrators I’d regard as a personal enemy.
*
I feel pretty delighted after getting home from seeing Nosferatu, even though it maybe isn't my favorite of Robert Eggers’ movies. It was a sold out screening, the underground lobby at the Bourse full of families and goths. There was a mom in a red sweater sitting next to me who kept covering her eyes and leaning into her adult daughter’s shoulder. She recoiled especially viscerally every time someone vomited blood, which happened many times. I like that Robert Eggers’ movies are often concerned with people encountering horror or evil or other mysterious forces beyond their comprehension that then makes them incapable of participating in normal life. There were many moments and images in this one that thrilled me, though I found some of it a little too thematically heavy-handed. It was almost too hopeful, not evil enough, though its evilest moments were rather spectacular. I used the bathroom at the theater just before the movie started and discovered I had just gotten my period, which felt a bit heavy-handed as well. I had to stuff some folded toilet paper in my underwear and hope for the best.
*
At home this evening I ate some leftover mushroom, leek, and goat cheese quiche. I’ve accidentally eaten a lot of eggs today. I did more fizzy spacing out, aware that I’m dissociatively glancing away from some sadness. I’m on my second nonalcoholic beer. I just ate two chocolate peanut butter balls my neighbor Alison gave me yesterday when I knocked on her door to deliver her a container of Lebkuchen cookies my sibling Taylor had made. I send some messages back and forth with a stranger on the internet who had made a post titled “Merry Fistmas.” I say I will leave my house in an hour but don’t really want to, am preparing to flake when the stranger cancels instead and I feel relief. This is basically what I was saying earlier, about misplaced and projected desires. I read through the draft of a manuscript I’ve been working on, a sequence of fragments that concludes with a brief, lyric essay. The essay has the title “Wet Film,” which I like, but I can’t settle on a title of the manuscript. I’m not sure about the whole thing, really, but I’ve been working on it off and on for quite a long time, like four or five years, and want to feel like it’s “finished.” I would not say that finishing things is one of my strong suits as a writer. Because I don't really participate in holidays in a normal way, I am hoping just to spend some of the time off of work this week tending to my writing. I guess writing this entry itself counts. I spend some time rereading this, taking out some sentences, changing some words around, even though the day isn’t done.
*
I finish reading Pure Colour. I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not sure, in the end. It did get a little precious, I think, almost twee. But I really did love the description of Mira sensing her dad's spirit enter her when he died, and the sequence when she becomes a leaf communing with the voices of the universe and the dead. That felt like a quite accurate representation of the kind of spiritually deranging experience of a profound grief. It's just a few minutes after midnight. I send a text message where I try to articulate a difficult emotional experience, which I am describing while still experiencing. I eat four orange-flavored magnesium gummies from the plastic container on my nightstand. I check to see if there is a reply. It's not Christmas anymore, which I realize gives me a feeling of relief. Soon I will turn out the light.
