age of sickness
March 12, 2020
Today’s horoscope: There is no such thing as fate.
If I’d been told this a year ago, I would have scoffed. My belief in determinism was so solid, I never thought it would change. Now I wonder if the Universe isn’t complete chaos, and my perception of causality is a false induction—there is infinite matter interacting with other matter at all times, the majority of which I am incapable of seeing.
I wonder if prayer, if carefully chosen words spoken into the ether, simply changes my focus to the parts of reality that better suit my soul. I’m still trying to conceptualize the material (and perhaps immaterial, but I highly doubt it) properties I share with the rest of space, with the universe and with God. Which matter do I possess that brings metaphysical sensations of peace, awe, and love to the rest of my being? How do I spend more time engaged with them?
Today has been one of the strangest I’ve had in awhile. I’ve been unwell the past 48 hours or so, and my body has been extremely sore. My brain feels like it’s functioning at half capacity. I’m having strange dreams which leave me feeling emotions that aren’t associated with a single reality. People feel like foreign objects, and I’m seeing them all with the suspicion of peripheral vision. I’m feeling hurt, cast off, unwanted, and misunderstood. I’m trying to open up, but I don’t feel acknowledged.
With the Rat, I don’t know what to do exactly. I’m trying to enact boundaries, but I’m also feeling compelled NOT to enact them. He’s supposedly going to call me tonight to hear what I have to say, but I don’t know what to say. Maybe I’ll write him a letter:
Dear Rat,
I don’t know how to ease into what I want to say. Overall I’m feeling the uneasiness in my intuition that I must follow, and it’s compelling me to disconnect from you. I also feel drawn to your beauty. Your presence feels warm and pleases me.
But I feel very much not on the same page as you because you don’t communicate as often as I need, nor have you made any effort to resolve anything I’ve directly asked you about.
Namely I don’t know what you’re looking for from me in terms of friendship, romance, and sex.
You have said that I “flood your senses,” that you “adore” me and want me to be your girlfriend, but you don’t back up your words with communication or initiating time alone with me.
This inconsistency makes it impossible for me to move forward, to trust, to know where to stand, and therefore also which ways to behave towards you, which feelings to nurture and which feelings to let pass.
I know you are doing your best, and I don’t think bad of you.
But as I’ve betrayed myself in the past by waiting and trying to force others to see my perspective and get on the same page as me, I am going to listen to my instinct this time.
I don’t know how to approach romance these days. I feel like I might attach too quickly, obsess impulsively. And the disappointment I feel with every minute loss feels larger than it is because it pokes at deep wounds inflicted by the Magician. It’s impossible to explain how sinister the things are that I’ve seen in the past couple of years. Even I am distanced enough from them now that I don’t remember or fully understand how sinister.
With him I feel like I was entrenched in a cultish false reality. Why was it so beautiful?
I’m going to memorize some poetry for a moment:
“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d. I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owing (sic) things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. ”
evince: 1: to constitute outward evidence of, 2: to display clearly: REVEAL
retonym: a term … that is newly created and adopted to distinguish the original or older version, form or example of something from other, more recent ones.
In this age of sickness, I ache to surpass the perameters of my body.
I need to leave the city tonight.
I seek a patch of grass to fold itself around me, a muggy bog bottom to imbue my cells, a fungal network to become a part of.
Is the determination in my eyes as sincere as the crocodile’s?
I wish I could fold myself into a prism,
and experience myself as a frog.
The moss, the lily pad, the bog, none greener than I.
I close my eyes: the only light is stars, fireflies, the moon.
I close my ears: the only sound is the buzzing of flies, the croaks of bullfrogs, a few chirps and splashes.
I process them as though I were the chasm: the sound and its reverb flood my senses simultaneously.
My tongue captures a fly, and I plop into a puddle.
I don’t laugh because I am a frog. I blush—ribbit—sugar hiccup.
like moths decaying in a glass jar, asphyxiated by our own heaving breath
/
