Holy moly moly.
Soundscapes closing.
Songs for Antigone: The Kick Inside, Silvery, Mountaineers, Vantablack.
Thinking of saying to goodbye to turquoise bike: impossible.
Have I grown sick of the Thai Red Curry from Thai Basil?
Back to Bangkok Style Pad Thai.
Home-cooked meals soon.
Oh my stomach.
Colanders Art.
Pleasing dream.
This has been a restless week. It will be another restless week. In my restlessness I would like to remind myself of where I was, in a time very near to the present. This was a time I saw no future and did not seek for one. Where I wanted to take one year off and go hide in Northern Canada. Where I simply did not care to make a life of myself.
Somehow, the tides of life have turned things around for me. I got into one law school, the another, then a Masters program. Then I got a scholarship. And I thought—no I am not sure. Then thought—wow, I am beyond excited. But soon after—geez, I am not sure about law and what about the program I am still waiting for? Following a reassuring call with a mentor I affirmed—law and this scholarship is a solid, good path. Yet one day later (today) I am ruminating, stressed—what about US law schools? Will they propel me to spheres of power I cannot imagine?
First, I realize, I must calm myself down. What I am truly stressed about is signing a contract and then backing from it. What I am also stressed about is the stress of delaying decisions, making plans. So then, I am to think—there is no wrong choice. Whichever experience I inhabit, I will make the best of it, and I should also choose the experience where I will be allowed to find time to be my own human too. In life we can go many different paths. But one person, at one moment, can only make one decision. Life splinters into different paths in our mind, but in real life, we walk one path with many offerings. But it is still, one path. To see myself as a high-ranking diplomat—yes. To see myself as a community lawyer—yes. I am all of those right now, I do not know which one I will want to become and so there is no point in worrying about that. I can become a print-maker, a shop-owner, a poet, an English professor. The figs are abundant. The figs will drop, but that does not mean I am paralyzed. Simply that I am lucky and privileged enough to even have the chance to try to taste so many different figs.
Now, time for sleep, my gal.
In the 21st century, to be in love with another is more necessary than ever. I have tried self-love, self-care, personal development, stress eating, book diving. Nothing, nothing is a better antidote than love between two.
If you can derive your love from familial and platonic love, then I applaud you. But for me, the only sustainable solution is to be completely dependent on another, and to have another completely dependent on me. Every day. Every metaphorical day.
Of course, I would refuse to admit this to, say, my Twitter crowd. But I crave it. It is my deepest secret; I must let it expand.
I look at self-sufficient people around the world and I applaud them. Then I say thank you, when they spit at my feet.
(I cannot be okay. I cannot be okay if I am briefly imagining jumping from my friend’s balcony on Level 46 when we are sharing charcuterie.)
But I was okay when I was in love. I was so okay that I was shaking within myself all the time. Everything falling out of place, falling into place. Everything, finally everything.
So—Yes. When I say I need to be in love I really mean it. But I will refuse you if you are also the type that needs to be in love. I can only pity you from afar, and hold you near my heart.
In my sickness, I see every sign as either a vessel of salvation or destruction. Unable to hold two ideas at once, I either merge with one or wander amongst countless, which is like a cycle, which is like the fog. In my sickness I close the blinds to my window every night, and sometimes afterwards I rip one side open, crane the pane halfway, and stare at the distance between my body and the ground. In the morning I let a big breath out with the wind: it smells unbearably like spring or mass-produced breakfast.
In my sickness, I diagnose my condition as sickness. Every couple of months I add a new characteristic to the consideration. First it was rumination, then sensory-processing sensitivity, the trauma of heartbreak, imbalance of idealism and cynicism, cultural dissonance, self-image, rupture from the cycles of nature, mommy issues…
In my sickness I do not see many things or declarations as authentic. I often assume a position of skepticism, believing that people have a motivating agenda that is unethical or are embedded within a system that is too perverse to generate genuinely ethical sentiments that I can apply to my own living.
In my sickness, I am not always sick. I might not even be sick at all. Who makes the boundary between functionality and dis-functionality? Maybe I’m just normal, a depressed normal, an unstable normal, a mostly fine normal. How am I not, okay?
In my sickness, I am reproachful. I forgive, but failing to forget, and failing to completely forgive, or perhaps forgiving erroneously, blame the mis-forgiven once again. I bless the sun constantly, relieved it has appeared, overwhelmed that it shines, across the entirety of the sky.
In my sickness, a pimple (just red, no whitehead) grows under my eyebrow.
I trim my bangs, enough to still hide the inflammation.
That bitch made me cry, but she’s an influencer now. She’s an Amazon Associate who “really tries my best to choose local and small brands, products, and services whenever I can.” She got those weird on-page pop-up ads that manifest with a click. Fuck ads. Fuck shitty workplace environments and government bureaucracy. We all compromised our integrity that summer.
God I wish I was a graphic designer. Wish I was Angel Chen’s face. Wish I could speak European, bear a sleek tattoo. Wish I had an effortless Twitter that made me seem smart, nice, and not neurotically dependent on validation. Wish all my underwear was sexy, and terribly comfortable. Wish I could hit those high notes and low notes. Wish I had a male specimen that could reciprocate perfectly my need for a specific type of physical affection that requires an emotional understanding built on months of a whirlwind trust. Wish the cafeteria food was less salty and more Chinese. Wish I didn’t inherit my mom’s face pores. Wish I could do with less clothes.
I can do with less clothes.
I came back to Winnipeg on December 13th, and quickly fell into a feverish yearning for my high school crush. On my first night, under two thick blankets and embracing my stuffed dog, I gazed at the streetlamp and black sky and snow-covered road, and felt my past surface as a dark ember. In the weeks prior I had been worried that memories of the summer, afternoons of unspeakable depression, would haunt me stubbornly, but the cold and the changed trees allowed no other season to exist in my consciousness. All I could think about were those freezing evenings with a violin case on my back, the sound of tuning instruments in the basement rehearsal room, and my naïve longing for a boy I had fantasized would kiss me first.
I grabbed my notebook and wrote lines like “In my Winnipeg, the only person who mattered was you,” and “your gaze fell in the air like misunderstanding.” For several brief moments I wanted to call you. I had no fear. I was just curious, curious perhaps about whether you had changed, whether you were still of the temperament to do the things you had done when we knew each other more intimately. I would like to say that on my side I am of changed temperament, that I would no longer read Ezra Pound to a hopeful someone by the river, foolish and nervous, but of course I still would, flowing river or frozen.
The heat of the emotion left me some days later and I started to meld into other, more recent emotions. At some point I dug up my old notebook and I found a poem (a dual poem, the only one of such I’ve written thus far) about a visit to the Art Gallery. It was the year of the Picasso exhibition, the summer where my skin was tanned to a shade my mom scorned at, the time I still believed you could like me. What I didn’t understand then was that even if you did, it would not count for much, not in the way I wanted and deserved. I would look at you looking at a woman of cubes; I do not remember suspecting you would ever look back at me.
A few social-political thoughts about the film before I head to bed (and before I had read the critical reviews):
A few aesthetic thoughts about the film before I head to bed (and before I had read the raving reviews):
Simultaneously, the similarities and distinctions between God’s Own Country and Call Me By Your Name, films both premiered in 2017 and featuring two men falling in love with each other, astound me. CMBYN, lush, vibrantly coloured, seeped with the beauty of high European art, flourished with the nostalgia of a full soundtrack, invites me in its atmosphere of the mystery of love. God’ Own, soiled, broken walls, grunting and unfolding in the language of the everyday, of labour and the gray green fields, shows me the day’s break of love.
Both films use naming as a way for the lovers to affirm their intimacy in a way that signals the untraditional circumstance of their binding. In CMBYN, it is the exchanging of birth names, the mirroring of souls. In God’s Own, it is the exchanging of derogatory words, the mirroring of solidarity. In their naming the lovers claim infinity, and both films end with such an attempt of the claim. For Elio and Oliver, this attempt is breathy through the landline, a dream already gone. For John and Gheorghe, it is under the same sky, and a reassurance that things may return and move forward.
Thus the latter return on the bus together. For the former, the last bus trip is the first, and it is away.
Wounds are important for both films; Oliver’s is of mythic proportions across his celestial stomach, untouched and thus transcending the grotesque and stinging of an aesthetic foreboding; John’s is rubbed with Gheorghe’s saliva and licked by Gheorghe’s tongue and scabs quickly, palm to palm healed.
The two pair of lovers both play in water. The water is of different temperature and temperaments.
In CMBYN the labour is intellectual; in God’s Own the labour is physical. To me, this difference is pivotal. With the intellectuality comes irony, obscurity. Thus Elio and Oliver’s age difference can be more uncomfortable, compared to John and Gheorghe’s. The physical necessity in God’s Own highlights John and Gheorghe potentiality for equality, the need to undertake the same tasks, their need for each other as muscles and limbs.
The first time John and Gheorghe have sex they are filthy, wrestling in mud. What there was of filth in CMBYN was largely lost from novel to film. For example, the cinematic Elio and Oliver do not watch each other shit, and Oliver does not eat Elio’s ejaculatory peach. Instead, Elio begs Oliver to not eat it, and finally crumbles and weeps into Oliver’s chest. Regarding this scene, Aciman notes: “The film takes a very physical, almost lusty moment and finds its emotional equivalent right way. So that it never allows you to dwell on the physical without ever giving you also the emotional counterpoint to it.”
So it is, both films, both lovers, sinking deeper and deeper into pure emotionality, their own emotionality, Elio breathlessly brushing Oliver’s hair before disappearing towards the waterfall, John kissing and kissing Gheorghe’s neck in the family living room, bright in first love.
All real love is perhaps the same, so terribly similar that we dress it with their distinctions. These distinctions make the circumstances, mark the decisions, make of love, faces of infinite interest.
