I first wrote this piece now three years ago, when I first moved to New York. This piece arguably started this Substack, and I have dedicated a section of this publication to an autofiction series that sprung out of it, Homebound Bound.
And yet, I have never before published this piece itself. In fact, for these three years, I refused to even look at it, after I had it reviewed by the good people at Foster.
Usually that happens when a piece of mine is panned. I figure, “ugh, it’s a mediocre piece and not worth the effort to fix up.” But this piece was even harder, because the reaction was the exact opposite: glowing. This piece was doing something “real and honest”, doing something “truly special”—my reviewers’ words, not my own.
And for the next three years, I felt I could not live up to that, even though I wrote this in a mad dash of a Saturday night bender, finishing my initial edits the following day.
Maybe I still haven’t lived up to it. But at least I’m here, publishing regularly (if not regularly enough), and have been for more than a year and a half now. In fact, the first post of my Homebound Bound series, and maybe the first piece I felt truly proud to publish, was published a little more than a year ago. And now, exactly three years after writing it, I publish this one.
HOMEBOUND BOUND
I'm standing in a field
A field of questions
As far as the eye can see
Is this what it means to be free?
Or is this what it means to belong to the free?To be free in bad times and good
To belong to being derided for things I don't believe
And lauded for things I did not doIf this is what it means to be free
Then I'm free
And I belong to the free
And the free
They belong to me- Bill Callahan, Free’s
********
The present, Brooklyn, June 22, 2021
9:24 a.m. I've been up since 7.
By “up”, I mean a sort of half-awake, half-snooze state. I hold onto the sensations of sleep, but I pretend I’ve already started the day.
This is how I pretend I’ve started the day: I convince myself I’m already thinking deeply about my project—the project you’re reading, right now. This project is to write something about my recent move here, to Brooklyn.
That’s what I decided, in my half-asleep state: “I’ll write about my move, today”.
I said to myself: “I have it in me to write something about my move, and for that something to be beautiful.”
So, readers, I’m trying to write something beautiful right now, about my move. We can start from that.
9:39 a.m. The feeling this project evokes in me: it's like a mine feels, when you imagine a mine. Deep darkness, precarity, rough wooden planks that buttress killing walls that could collapse upon us. But there's gold there. The gold is waiting to shine down there, magnificently, and yet it won't shine until we unearth it and set our lights upon it.
Down there is why I haven't written; down there is why I moved out here; down there is what I hope to find, now.
I'm writing, but I'm really looking for answers, for gold. My readers, my friends, you happen to be along for the ride.
My readers, my friends.
Who are you, anyway?
2:48 p.m. I’m back, over five hours later. Instead of writing about my move, I:
Ate breakfast: muesli
Responded to dating app messages
Jumped on a work emergency
Tried to write
Went to the bathroom
Ate lunch: red bean soup
Read the news
Got a snack
Tried to write
Went to the bathroom
Got a snack
Tried to write
Vacuumed the apartment
5:33 p.m. I’m back again. Another three hours later. Instead of writing about my move, I:
Went to the bathroom
Took a nap
Went to the bathroom
Ate dinner: pasta with bolognese
Is this project doomed? Is the fabric of day-to-day life doomed to suffocate any attempt at writing? Eight hours have passed, and what can I say I’ve done?
I try to write something worth saying, and all I have to show for it is a ridiculous set of bullets about my meal breaks and bathroom trips.
I thought about writing while cooking and eating dinner. I thought about what I'd say—about writing—when I came back here.
Why do I need to say anything about writing, when I’m supposed to be talking about my move?
Well, maybe if I found the right thing to say about writing, it’d explain, even redeem, all the hours I just spent failing to get a decent word written.
So what do I have to say about writing.
Well, what struck me, standing over my boiling pasta water, was that writing is infinite.
Yes, infinite. And that’s beautiful, but also a huge problem. Every single point along the way can be decided differently. Most writers and more writings don't, of course, hurtle off into unpredictability, because we have structures and formats and genres that set some conventions for the medium. Guardrails.
But we're not directing a movie here, stuck with whatever financial, technical, and human resources we have in front of us. We’re not sculptors, bound by the constraints of matter. At any moment, we could decide to add in whatever the fuck we feel like, follow whatever direction or whim we choose. To curse, to disgust, to rebel, to deviate completely. Every word in the English language is at the writer's disposal for such a task.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who I admit I barely understand, does have this one line I've always liked. It's his most famous line: "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".
(Søren is like a one-hit wonder philosopher, to me. He has his one, most popular ditty I love, and the rest of his opus is grating, to my ears.)
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom". You can understand this line, as I do, with no other context about the rest of his thought. All it says is, as we face more freedom—more choice, more to decide, more paths to take in our lives—we also have more opportunities for misstep, failure, and catastrophe. These can not only doom our efforts, but destroy our very lives. Financial failure, prison, ostracization.
My Saturday evening bed-bound writing is unlikely to financially ruin me or land me in prison. I have no plans to flirt with ostracization, either. But it's a far more conceivable danger. I could easily find something to say right now that, if I had an audience of millions of people, I'd be instantly beyond the pale—maybe outcast completely, maybe relegated to a misfit fandom, maybe left no choice but to dull each excess with another still greater, leaving people numb to my post-cancellation scandal cadence.
This scenario is a figment of my imagination, of course. I have no audience of millions, and while I'm indebted to my few readers for any excesses they do point out, I'm far more afraid they'll (yes, you'll) see my writing as vapid, unoriginal, turgid, unreadable, cringeworthy, incomprehensible—bad, in a word. "The dizziness of freedom": "All the words in the English language at your disposal, and *this* is what you write about?" the Judge in my brain fulminates.
And as a reader, how can you respond emotionally to a bad piece of writing except with pity? "It's a nice effort. Keep at it!" As a reader, this is your one consolation for reading a bad piece of writing. You get the schadenfreude of condescending encouragement. And, if you are the receiving writer, if you have any sense, you listen. Maybe there's a path to improvement. Or—frank advice to the successful doctor who is trying to become a fiction writer: "Listen, doc, I'm not going to lie... stick to your day job."
And there's the true fear, there's the heaviest irony in Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom". Because if our fear is all about the consequences of navigating this space of infinite freedom, those consequences are precisely that we lose this space of freedom.
We find ourselves disdained or ignored, and therefore never worth reading in the first place. We find ourselves canceled, and therefore no longer acceptable to read. We find ourselves pigeonholed and misunderstood. We find ourselves, even with an initial success, eventually “past our prime” or “a one-hit wonder” (sorry Søren).
We find ourselves, in any event, banished from that space which once offered us infinite freedom of expression.
Present in the freedom, there lurks the danger of the unfreedom. The anxiety is our recognition of this danger.
And so we so often avoid walking down the road of freedom in the first place. The fantasy of freedom, however false and frustrated, is sweeter than the disillusionment of freedom lost.
6:39 p.m. I break for matcha and dark chocolate.
The decisions on how to continue swirl up in my mind. What path do I take? There are too many. I think: maybe those people who are most literally unfree—the oppressed, the refugee—might gain true, ultimate freedom more easily than those who are born into relative freedom. Maybe from a harder beginning, a purer absolute appreciation of freedom becomes possible.
Would that be because there’s literal unfreedom, like physical bondage, but also mental and spiritual, like delusion and compulsion? Or, because the unfree learn the value of freedom more than those born into it, and fight harder for it? Is it like the Christian hagiographies, where those who were the clearest sinners also had the clearest path to sainthood—the libertine Saint Augustine (“God, make me chaste, but not yet”), the prostitute Mary Magdalene?
But, really? Are those who are unfree, then freed, any freer than those who start out free? Am I diminishing the struggle of the unfree by suggesting they have it easy thereafter? Isn’t this an entirely individual experience, anyway?
From what vantage point could I ever even begin to understand this question, writing while lying down on my $1,500 Nectar mattress in my fourth floor Brooklyn walk-up? Or how am I to even begin to define my terms: “freedom”, “appreciation”, “have it easy”?
Oh, there may be something here, friends, but am I qualified to give an answer, to even suggest the possibility of an answer, at this moment, or any? No. I don’t know. No.
This path, this thought, in its embryonic form, is one of many infinite paths of writing, and one I won’t take.
And then this alternative path pops up, another idea: Rejection is how you understand who your audience truly is. In love, in writing, even in your own life and personality. Your audience is who you resonate with and not who you don't. You're not for everyone. I certainly am not. So if you don't like what I write (the punk rock teenager in me suddenly pipes up:) fuck it.
Oh, but I can't blame you, reader, for some restlessness. I don't really know what I'm doing either.
6:55 p.m. I arrived in Newark past midnight on March 17…
6:56 p.m. Interruption. Distraction. Re-reading parts of this essay. Recapturing lost glories. Ah, it felt like writing flowed so easily once. Seems so long ago. Woe is me. Will I ever write that way again?
That was all of 45 minutes ago. Shut up and focus.
********
San Francisco → Newark, March 17, 2021
I arrived in Newark past midnight on March 17. First class flight, two legs, stopover in Houston, Texas, where I ate something called Catfish Opelousas at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. The server made me an off-menu Negroni, which she prepared in a martini glass chilled with ice slivers.
"Never had a Negroni with crushed ice, nice touch." She just smiled at me, as if the idea of a cocktail without crushed ice was incomprehensible to her. When I asked her earlier about the favorite drink among locals, she pointed me to the Cosmopolitan, then Budweiser.
The catfish was delicious, topped with oysters, shrimp, crab meat, and a rich brown garlic sauce, dirty rice on the side. Inhalably good. I downed it and the drink and left in time-is-tight search of my flight.
I had, in addition to the Negroni, two gin and tonics on leg one and two gin and tonics on leg two. They brought me those little liquor store shooters two at a time, so I didn't have to ask for seconds. Very thoughtful. My first class seat reclined into a completely supine position, and any adjustment I wanted to make—head up, legs down—I could do from a schematic of buttons that mapped to my body on the chair. I watched Glory with Matthew Broderick and Morgan Freeman and then, against my better judgment, Matrix: Reloaded. Next to me, a many-tattooed man with the hip dark urban style of a many-tattooed man drew a tattoo of something resembling a sea animal.
This was the purest, the best form of solitude. I was leaving my city of 10 years, moving back to "The City" of my childhood, the city I grew up 45 minutes west of. I'd gotten a steal of a deal on first class tickets for my flight out of San Francisco. I took pictures of my fully reclined feet and sent it to San Francisco friends, to East Coast friends, to my family. I read and I watched movies and I drank and I ate Catfish Opelousas and all this accompanied by what seemed like a consistently calibrated dimness of light, from airport to airplane to airport to airplane. Sometimes of a purplish hue, sometimes whitish/grayish, but always that uniform dimness, a light of pure, cinematic isolation, a light that imparts that nighttime airport feeling of leaving someplace behind and picking up anew in another world. A world where no one knows your name and you know no one else's, and you eat their food and drink their drink and feel satisfied.
Two days ago, in a covered awning at a restaurant called The HiHi Room in Downtown Brooklyn, I recalled the story of perching my 30 pound carry-on atop of one of my two 70 pound first class checked bags, and delicately wheeling the full ensemble around the airport. I managed, if comically, to move my whole existence from curbside to check-in desk, from baggage claim to rideshare zone, from coast to coast single-handedly. We laughed about it at HiHi, about the humorous figure I struck, but I also silently appreciated in myself a defiant solitude, an ability to make this move, my belongings all in hand, while reveling in this twilit night of travel and its heart-filling feeling.
Solitude gives way to loneliness as freedom does to unfreedom. That plane ride felt like a new world was ahead, opening up to me, full purely of possibility. Three months later, I write from my bed on a homebound Saturday night, unsure of how I'm supposed to escape my apartment and discover this new world I've supposedly entered.
********
Back to the present, 7:53 p.m. Word of the day: Quart. It dawned on me for the first time that this comes from "quarter", as in "quarter of a gallon". This is literally its translation in Spanish: "cuarto de galón". No great flight of intuition taught me that; my ziplocs just happened to include Spanish translations on the box.
Home economics tip of the day: You have to turn off the carpet brushroll on a vacuum machine before cleaning a yoga mat. Otherwise your yoga mat will look like a machine chewed on it. A few days ago, I learned a similar lesson about bath mats.
7:57 p.m. Oh and here's the fatigue. Wave 2. Wave 1 was doubting I could even get started in the first place, and exists nearly always at the start of a writing project for me. Wave 2 is the sense of, "Well, I've done enough now, haven't I?" And with it, the sensations of slumberousness, exhaustion—exhaustion from laziness and resignation, not from having exerted myself to my maximum capacity.
I'm a ways away from that max exertion. In my desperate urge to feel like I'm not constantly catching up to my writing goals, I'd set a commitment to myself to write for 12 hours today. I've already cut that to 10. I'm four hours in so far, four hours of legit, no-nonsense writing. 2 a.m. is my stopping target. Six hours more.
And you were already thinking this piece was getting too long, weren't you?
My readers, my friends, I'll be honest, but you don't feel like friends. I don't know what you are, who you are. I don't know if you are my audience or not, yet, and what an audience even looks like if I were ever to find one. You're hidden, nameless, shapeless entities, just like those women I have yet to meet on the dating apps and the people I have yet to meet in new hobbies, activities, and social endeavors in this new city.
“But that is precisely life,” my better nature chimes in. An "X" marks the spot where we don't know about other people, and must roll the dice and see what we are given.
I hope you don't regret rolling the dice in reading this. Don't worry about me or my feelings.
(But do, please, worry about me. my inner child yells out)
********
Brooklyn, May 17 - June 22, 2021
I moved into this apartment approximately one month ago. May 15, the official move-in day. May 17, the morning they actually finished the repairs on the place. But I didn't move in right away, and instead spent a few days at my parents' place in New Jersey. The paint fumes in the new apartment were giving me a headache, and my parents were, anyway, leaving to visit my sister in California. Which meant I'd have their big suburban house to myself, a flavor of welcome high-class solitude not unlike that of my airport entr'acte.
May 27 is when I really moved in, meaning I've been in this apartment for 23 days. A week shy of a month, I remind myself, and this is a comfort. This means I've made decent use of my time here, that my life over this past month—not even a month—hasn't been a waste. I did a lot, truly. May 27, I had nothing more than a mattress on a large blue tarp. Now I have an apartment, complete with all the things one would have in a bedroom, all the things one would have in a living room, all the things one would have in a kitchen, all the things one would have in a home office. I have gas after three weeks of waiting on National Grid. I have an AC propped on two hand-hunked blocks of styrofoam and drilled directly into my window frame by my lazy super. I have a MacGyvered kitchen ventilation system using a window fan and air purifiers.
The final major installation was an attractive wooden West Elm medicine cabinet, which I wrapped up on my birthday. This required me to dig into the mess of a wall above my bathroom sink, full of geologic layers of hard shards and wall anchors and drywall and what may have been brick, hard and rough and snaggy and pale pinkish brown in its powderized form. I was terrified I might catch and cut a pipe with my drill, flooding my bathroom with water, and I texted the super after already drilling four failed holes in the wall and breaking two anchors on something metal.
"I'm planning on replacing the medicine cabinet btw, is there anything behind that wall I'd need to avoid?"
"Not sure"
"Ok, I'll just try to follow the holes of the previous cabinet maybe"
"Ok cool keep me posted"
Enough complicity to proceed. I couldn't leave this project hanging over me. Not on my birthday, not with the failure holes in the wall and the old medicine cabinet down in the trash bins. I drilled three more holes, and the last set finally took.
"Got it done no problem 👌🏼"
"Ok cool good job"
My super is very encouraging when it means he doesn't have to do it himself.
That day, my birthday, I found the first roach. He was an inch and a half long, stuck on his back and paddling his arms under my wheeled laptop standing cart. I was already vacuum-in-hand, cleaning the styrofoam snow that had accumulated in my room full of discarded packaging, so I just sucked the sucker up quickly, a bit nauseous but glad to have him so easily caught.
The follow-up roach, #2, I discovered later that night. Same size, but much quicker on its feet, and it fled under a radiator as I chased it with the vacuum end. Shit. Shit. I hated having to concede defeat to its dextrous intelligence. And now every dark nook of my apartment suddenly appeared to me a possible abode of fat roaches, on this night of my birthday.
"Happy birthday, JG. Welcome to your new apartment." - New York City.
********
Back to the present, 9:42 p.m. As soon as I think of them, I search for them. As I got up to go to the bathroom and walk around just now, I turned on every light, wheeled my laptop standing cart around, went into the kitchen, peeked around the refrigerator and around the stove. No sign of them. I'd only seen one more since my birthday. But that's still an average of one roach per week, with a landlord who still hasn't returned my calls requesting extermination.
I told my friend about the roaches over sushi, and she made me feel less personally gross by confessing her own occasional roach woes at her place. Then she made me feel even more alarmed by distinguishing between normal, small roaches and what she called, "bird roaches". Roughly as large as birds and, well, they can fly. I quickly Googled this when I found roach #3 and confirmed that I have what are called Oriental cockroaches, AKA waterbugs, which don't grow as long and don't fly, not American cockroaches, AKA enormous flying bird-sized fuckers.
The thing about roaches, though: they flee. You can't be too scared of something whose whole MO is to get the hell away from you.
9:53 p.m. If only I could flee like they can. If only I had a den of fellow fat roaches to call my home.
9:55 p.m. Wave 3. This is a deeper fatigue, a more gut-deep one. This one doubts the whole project of writing, regardless of whether or not the writing is any good. For even if the writing is any good, what is the point, even, of writing?
All the books I've read, I think of. How much of the time I spend reading is just a pointless quest to finish, to cross a book off of my list? By writing, am I just adding to some other poor sap's obligations, forcing my thoughts on them when they'd be better off doing something creative and writing instead (but then, better off writing for who—don't they just perpetuate the same cycle themselves?)
Of all those books written and read, do any of them, have any of them made any of us truly happier?
Oh and the thicket grows dense here. "Why happiness?" yes, of course that question, and, also, what a bar to set either way! How could we even begin to answer the question of whether a book, whether writing can make us happier? And maybe they have!
But this is Wave 3, these are the doubts it presents me with, and if they look like stupid questions and stupid doubts, I'm too stupid at this point to do anything about it.
10:10 p.m. Above all, the day-in-day-out bothers me. What do I do after I write one piece? Write another? My friend Elliott once complained to me of having to do all the daily things we have to do each day—eat, brush our teeth, shit, clean, sleep. At times, I've said to myself, well, we can and should find ways of embracing and appreciating even these mundane moments. Now I feel the opposite—what if even those activities that seem unique, unquotidian, creative, and singular, like writing, are themselves part of the cruel monotony of daily life?
A new unfreedom: I write, and may even find freedom and new direction in the writing. But the writing is today's piece, then tomorrow's, then the next day’s. Freedom is just a series on the TV, one episode after another. The content is different, but the form is the same.
Unless there's a reason. Unless there's something I can say I'm doing this for. What. What?
10:29 p.m. My momentum is flagging. I'm starving, and though I'm trying to slim up and lose a gut I gained in these past few weeks, I ordered myself three late night tacos for pickup.
And hey, what of it? I've already written for a solid six and a half hours, maybe the longest uninterrupted stretch of pure writing in years. I don't know what this whole piece amounts to, and what's next. I'll have to edit the damn thing, and that'll be its own heroic effort (editor’s note: it is). But there's a breathing vista here. I'm up in these craggy heights, it's nighttime, I see stars and town lights and distance from this rock ledge I'm on. The climb isn't over—it's really just begun—but I'm relaxed, I feel the ground under my feet. I even laugh, on this imaginary ledge.
10:58 p.m. One reason why I write: when I return to the world after a serious session of writing, the world is an order of magnitude more vivid. Everything glows with a more primitive aura. Everything is colored as if with fire. I ache with an awareness that I'm a divided individual, with a desire to unite with the vast and gorgeous world that surrounds me. Trite as the attempts to articulate this might be, the feeling is anything but trite.
Bill Callahan's song “Writing” comes up on the shuffle, unprompted: "It sure feels good to be writing again."
11:25 p.m. Full of taco and beer.
Why did I come out here, to New York?
Certainly not to be alone in a fully furnished apartment at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, eating tacos after forcing myself to write.
But much less so to be surrounded by unopened moving boxes with zero writing done, while still alone on a Saturday night.
Right? Alright, alright.
I'm out here, in this new city. That means something. It could mean something different, worse, or just different, but this is the story I'm telling. This is my freedom, to tell this story this way.
My move, my new home, the home I was bound for, the home I am bound in.
The home that I left. That year we were all homebound.
********
San Francisco, September 15, 2020
I wanted there to be something special, to at least remember the date.
We were six months. Is that an anniversary?
My curse, my story: I couldn’t hold down a relationship for more than six months.
(Well, come on. I decided to break it off both of the last two times. But: I respond: six years without a relationship longer than six months. That’s what feels like a rope around my neck.)
A relationshipless ogre. Like a relationshipless ogre. Look at you.
(Stop pitying yourself.)
I loved her.
*yells from the cliff edge, from the skyscraper’s roof, but only in his own head, keeping it together*
I lov’t her.
I spent all night cooking. Twice fried Korean chicken wings, three kinds of banchan, stir fried potato and squash, caramelized walnuts and eggs, sesame tahini dessert balls.
A magnificent, impressive meal.
But I underestimated the work completely.
I’d barely started cooking, and she was already at the apartment.
She was stressed with work and went to do her own thing.
She didn’t offer to help. I didn't want her to. Or maybe I did.
But I was in the zone. Whatever.
I cooked. My roommate silently browsed the web in his corner of the kitchen.
9 p.m.
I finally finished. Brought in the plates to eat.
Compliments. Yum. It is all very good.
We watch something. We go to sleep.
Wake up, cuddle.
But I get irritable as the morning goes by. We fight.
Stupid stuff. I cooked a meal, the least you could do is wash the dishes.
…
But I don’t care that much. I just want to be alone. It’s ok baby, I’m not upset, but can you go now.
Well we fight anyway, by text.
I expect too much. I act petty. I didn’t mention anything.
I told you. I told you twice.
I need a break baby.
When she’s not here, when she’s away:
She’s fighting for a better future
She’s fighting for a better future with her ex-boyfriend
She’s fighting for a better future with her ex-boyfriend spending long days talking driving down to Half Moon Bay with him
She’s fighting for a better future with her ex-boyfriend spending long days talking driving down to Half Moon Bay with him learning about the fabric of reality he’s really a genius he’s really the best kindest wisest human being you’ll ever meet you’ll meet him eventually you’ll work with him eventually
She’s fighting for a better future in a code only they know how to read
She’s fighting for a better future and they fucked once but it was a one-time thing it’s complicated baby you understand
The next time I come over I discover his socks and underwear and pajamas in my drawer.
I help her to paint.
She’s already mostly done painting.
We have sushi.
She apologizes for the underwear and pajamas in the drawer.
She smokes. I turn my back to her. I’m in no mood.
Silently, short of sleep in the darkness.
I roll over.
I give her the best head I’ve ever given, she says she’s ever gotten.
Sorry baby.
One day later.
Two days later.
Three days later.
Something flies falling back into the sky from where it came.
--
It’s time to leave this place.
********
New Jersey, April 10, 2021
Suburban New Jersey. At my parents' place for almost a month.
I’ll soon be in New York. A world of freedom, choice, possibility lies before me.
But here, for now, I just take the world in. An envelope of natural noise surrounds you everywhere here. Tree frogs, crickets, birds, a thick organic drone.
I go on a long walk. It's lunchtime at work, and it's a slow day. So I walk outside, past the neighboring houses, down streets I hadn't walked directly on since my high school years.
These streets feel vast, teeming, wild in spite of the manicured gardens of these suburban tracts. It’s the trees. The sheer, looming bigness of the trees, more imposing than anything man-made could be. They feel eternally here. They make the houses feel temporary, almost unreal, dreamlike. Gone in a flash.
I frequently experience a strange flavor of memory. It consists of nothing more than an insistence of place. I remember one single slice of a location, as if looking at a photograph, almost always from my childhood. The memory is empty of people. It's timeless, static but also eternal. Above all, it's charged with some emotion or impression or nostalgia that I can't put into words, though my associations with it might be rich.
A hallway in my old childhood home, and a light switch that's long since been replaced.
The kitchen table before the house was remodeled, a white particle board table mottled with little specks of color.
A nighttime stretch of undeveloped land between suburban yards and local highways, passed through once as a teenager looking for a high.
On my walk this day in my childhood neighborhood, I approached a certain bend in the road. This bend is snapshotted in my mind with this strange kind of memory, charged with inexplicable significance. Over the past several years, my mind has returned to this bend in the road again and again, unconsciously. For instance, I’ll think of it when I write something creative, like this thick, dense-aired poem I wrote last year, haunted by this bend. But I’ll also think of it alongside random mind garbage. When I think of the Beatles, especially their fluffy early songs, I think of this bend. "Baby you can drive my car". Instant callback. Why?
I approach this bend and the air grows thicker. The sky and the atmosphere and the immense trees bear down on me. The blue shade of the sky grows deeper, heavier-seeming. This feels like the depth you get on psychedelics, like you're "really seeing something". I pass through the bend and keep walking, the feeling building, sustaining, building, choking, invigorating, sustaining. I walk, I try to look normal to a man jog-walking a stroller with two kids, his eyes downcast, but then they don't look normal to me. Nothing is. Cora Lane passes Locust Drive and approaches Dogwood Drive.
An intersection, then. Then. The world collapses into this single window of my viewpoint. My feet keep falling but I stand stunned, amazed. What is this? I drive past this intersection almost every day I stay here. Trees, an intersection, the sky, the road, all the same. But here, on foot, I see them as if they are a universe away. They're their own vision, no longer part of a passing landscape.
Crushes. Crushing me. Primitiveness millions of years of age old. A thick breathing living undying thing. My eyes tight, unbelieving.
What is this?
Nothing more than an intersection, surrounded by houses, new houses, new families.
But no. These stone-and-matter houses are also eternally old, empty and forever occupied. Part of the green, green eons old, predating it all.
It, ever, ancient. This, unbridgeable, a breath-born world, unimaginably foreign, a universal birthplace, beginning.
I can’t. I can't live in an impression like this. It would end me.
It releases.
********
♥
JG
"One reason why I write: when I return to the world after a serious session of writing, the world is an order of magnitude more vivid. Everything glows with a more primitive aura. Everything is colored as if with fire. I ache with an awareness that I'm a divided individual, with a desire to unite with the vast and gorgeous world that surrounds me. Trite as the attempts to articulate this might be, the feeling is anything but trite."
Straight 🔥
“I can’t. I can't live in an impression like this. It would end me.” - if I had a nickel for every time I overheard someone saying this in reference to New Jersey