April 22:
I carry around too many things. When my bag is packed to the brim and my hands are full it reminds me of my atachments. There is something deeply sensational when I think back to my days in Marin. Everything I learned from a dillusional young man, while having purposeful entry into the solace of a suburbia embedded in nature, in a way I had never seen before. Right now I am thinking of the first time I found the creek at Natalie Coffin Park. When I needed to be away from him and his family, and what I would later realize was the world, I would escape into the trails coated in redwood trees and laced with small waterfalls. Sometimes I would take my shoes off and let the cold water embrace them. There was a moment when I would realized that it was possible for me to abandon everything. I did have such a capacity inside of me. Sacrificing my attachments to everyone else, I could have a room in their Marin home and hideout in the trees when I needed. Adapt my sleep schedule to avoid the parents, and even him. Arguing it was for the sake of being an artist, the extent of the damage from abandoning my freedom in this way was unpredictable. It was highly possible I would lose my mind with him. But as woman who felt it was already gone, I had the urge to keep burning. I would have to have sex with him. However, the longer I stayed around him the less he wanted me. I could handle the occasional moments. They were actually quite gentle and pleasant, just enormously unsatisfying. When I think back to my life at the time, the fervent indecision about if I should make the move, I was absolutely aware of the power dynamics occuring. I was just as much a victim as a perpetrator. They were Israeli - so they saw right through my intentions but in retrospect they were harmless rather than exploitative. It was a silent cat and mouse game.
A story about this indecision may be interesting, it is becoming furher behind me in linear time, but there is a level of permanence in the game I played. I th0ught I wanted that life. I had identified it and proceeded to play, but I was not cut out for it. It is truly a life for a particular kind of repressive woman. One thing I am not sure about is when and if some of these women are aware of their active suppression. If they are, then what kind of reality are they buying into? The idea of being with an charismatic and erotic white, persian man. His family firmly identified as Israeli. They were wealthy enough to live in Marin. His older siblings went to amazing colleges, and the two oldest brotheres were multi-millionaires. I wanted into this world because it was beautiful from the outisde.
There is something in me that sees wealthy white people as exotic. I lived among them in my time in Marin, and there was something particularly satisfying about rubbing my appearance in their face. Especially walking around with him. The use of exotic flips its use from white people upon women like me. Where I am seen as exotic, their is ambiguity around where I am from but with dark features and wide hips I am the erotic, colonized.
April 18:
As I watched the sunset from the highest point at SF State, I stewed a bit in the nagging thought that I cannot finish anything. From painting, to writing, I spend more time starting and thinking about it then I do executing. I am no longer an adherent to discipline, or rigid abandoning work ethic. I think we as humans only can tolerate so much of that and I spent on all my reserves in my time as a young athlete. But, so far I am this way and this way I am - I musn’t think too hard about.
But it did cross my mind that in the vast landscape of this world, in the humiliating downpour of labor, the crossroads of violence, the awe of survivial, there are so many unexpressed thoughts, beyond the form of ideas. So many scattered minds and so many sad souls. Do I cry for them? Are they any less artists? What if those ideas could be brought to fruition? How could our global discouse feel and be different.
There are so many unexpressed thoughts.
I remember when I fell in love with the sky, by first falling in love with the clouds. Billowing, voluminous clouds arrived at the turn of the spring season. It was my intense attention to them that solidified my reckoning with their constancy and fluidity. I was being driven around by a young man and we couldn’t speak to each other. It was the most alone I had ever felt with someone else. But, in being so alone I was pushed to look elsewhere. Observance is an enlightening practice. I like to imagine, if I were to paint what I see - what colors would I mix and where would I start?
When I saw the clouds in a new way that day I felt the overpowered, like my efforts to paint were useless. I would much rather just look at the sky.
I remember when I use to cry at sunset, when I was watching the old couples home all alone on their top floor.
A note on my last entry: sara, don’t forget to listen to young hearts run free every once in awhile. I do not want to lost myself in these fights, but it is hard to tell when he is right and I am wrong. He makes me convey myself in an argumentative style that does not work for me.
Earli-mid april:
I write today fairly certain my relationship has ended. If not in the affirmed sense of mutual agreement, it is my physical condition today. I am drained and reluctant to reach out as I replay the realization he took all his belongings. He did forget one shirt however. A lulling phantasm of my own thoughts arose this morning. The bitterness of the conflict still stings, but I indulge in the feeling of stillness and the way my inner phenomenons feel different. I sense my direction towards creativity, the artistic project I seem to forget in the chaos of school, work and this relati0nshio. Reminded of the peace of solitude, I still reguritate my fear of being alone. There is a larger part of me that does not want to back, that genuinely cannot return in my current afterstate of the last argument. I find no way to move forward today and certainly feel my thoughts - he calls me. I feel different.
The home is the narrator. The narrator is the home. The home has eyes and sees it all. So much so that the ones who live in it belong to its universe. The people who live in there each have diferent stakes within its walls. What they do in and with the space is a langeuage from their bidy. The tenant rents next to the garage. Here plants and her hair seem to grow faster ever since she moved there. She has not kitchen which makes things messier and cleaner at the same time.
When the home sees her the home tends to judge her immobility. She is so constructed by her mind, so haunted by its labrynth - the disconnect from her body escalates. The landlord is an old man by the sea. a mother of two who works for the city. her lover lives in the trees, her lover is a neighboring student.