a lot of things happened and I’m in an airport terminal trying to shake the rubble from my head and my ears and replace it with alt-j. but oh fuck let’s just journal about it.

finally finished finals and was planning on going comatose for awhile to recover, but there’s always some lame party to be seen at. I mean this one was different, it was for my friend Leila, and there was a facebook invite and everything.  things in America are getting a little weird so Leila is deciding to dip and take the next semester off in Ireland. and I like Leila, even if she has a lot of opinions. I made her a playlist... in retrospect think I went a little heavy on the pub songs but c’est la vie. the thing is, Leila was the first person I met here, and since then we’ve split. although our circles still brush up against each other occasionally, I didn’t know a single person at her going away party.

luckily for me, this isn’t usually a problem. often I feel as if my social interactions are all simulations, and the real me goes vacant for awhile while my autopilot takes over my tongue. and I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but my autopilot is very good at what he does. he spins versions of myself people want to see.

I spent most of the time talking to this guy who is one of many ghostwriters for a very famous, very douch-y contemporary novelist. my autopilot wanted to know if ghostwriting felt like selling your soul. shocker, apparently it does. I asked him if he was working on anything of his own, and the expression that flashed across his face was of such deep despondence that I gave him my beer. and decided to..yknow. leave. I was beginning to feel like an asshole and the air was beginning to feel thick with the creased dreams of people I didn’t even know, like some sentient bummer fog.

I turned to find my jacket, and instead found a pair of eyes watching me from the door. they belonged to a girl and my usual reaction when a girl is looking at me is to simultaneously freeze and heat up, especially around the ears. her name was (is) Lex. there were globs of people passing between us, but her gaze was seemingly uninterrupted and honestly, it was one of those kairotic moments that make you dizzy for no reason. I don’t know how to describe the relief I felt, of having someone’s eyes on me – the real me - and not my autopilot, that bastard. I know this because Lex and I went through physical therapy together and those eyes saw me at my most helpless. we never talked in PT, out of some weird unspoken rule of mutual humiliation, but recently, very recently we rewired in an elective class we had together. too recent to be so excited to see her and I was wondering if it was the alcohol frazzling my nerves. but the thing is, I trusted her, her chemistry, her transparency. most especially, I trusted her don’t ask, don’t tell systematic approach to friendship.

anyway, she walked over and I stood with my paws jammed into my pockets and my molars sunk into the inside of my cheek. Lexie is pretty. for sure. but idk, the type of pretty that is unconventional, and not the unconventional that is actually a euphemism for ugly. but there was a real jarring look to her that night, mostly in her eyes. but maybe I just have a real thing for eyes. anyway, she said “howdy” and I said “hi” and then after a beat, “you have no idea how glad I am to see you.” she smiled politely and my autopilot told me to cool it, but I decided to give him the rest of the night off. is it really that bad if someone sees who you are? why is it that humans have a problem with letting someone else see that they are human? I don’t know. I felt like it was a lucky sort of night to be human.

she took over and asked nimble small talk questions and my auto pilot took notes from the backseat. she told me she knew Leila from plenary and that she always admired Lelia’s ability to piss off people for the greater good. I rolled that around my tongue a few times. another thing about Lex is that she’s a bit of a spaz, but a graceful spaz, as in the things she says doesn’t sound exactly right to you at first. but after the words bounce around in your ears for a moment, you realize she’s actually sort of crafty. paradoxically crafty.

finally, (finally!) she asked if I wanted to bail and I practically wagged my tail. we walked the riverbed back to my apartment and talked and talked. it was like a fucking indie movie, except it wasn’t raining or snowing. 20 min later she was in my kitchen eating a frozen burrito and reading me the first page of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. she liked Joan Didion and I thought that was pretty hot. I was fumbling for my ipod and also watching her in my peripherals, wondering what the red herring was. I played Talk is Cheap and she said that Chet Faker’s voice felt like a firm hand between her legs. I was sort of thinking, who says stuff like that? you have to stop saying stuff like that. do you possibly want to fuck? I was also thinking that Joan Didion was the author who made me fall in love with the harsh, unglamourized corners of CA and that her writing made my head spin. Lexie was looking at me again and I still wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted. under her rapid fire surface, I wondered if she was as sickly sentimental as I was, if she felt a mysterious ache on metro busses, if she had an autopilot of her own and if she ever had a hard time fighting it off.

I want to say these were the only things I was wondering. I was trying to ignore the flashing neon on her forehead, the word REBOUND branded onto her earnest, inquisitive cheeks. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, and opened them and the lights were gone. just her face, her flashing eyes. they were green. they were blue. they were gray. and all the colors of sad british singers who don’t make any sense.  

I didn’t know what she wanted so I asked if she wanted to smoke. she shook her head, so I asked if she wanted to binge watch Marco Polo. and like that, so easily, she was curled next to me on my couch watching Netflix and I was feeling pretty decent, pretty warm, pretty buzzed. I was buzzing. she was buzzing. but because these things are never perfect, my phone rings. my phone rings before the polos even reach the Silk Road, and my blood turned to ice, where it once warmed like coffee.

working on it. doing some final revisions. I was scrolling through documents on my laptop and I get tripped up one titled "for adelle" ... filibustered again. damn you adelle, I wrote that poem for you in spring. Tiny Vessels begins to play sweetly through my brand new earbuds through the scar tissue that were formally known as my auditory nerves and it's so cliche that I just can't. can't delete it.

my housemate emerged from her room today with two white bandages wrapped around her skinny white wrists. she took a few hits and then made some tea. we all pretended not to notice. I left her a few leaves of my aloe vera plant and an avacado/cheese sandwich. 

I am at a loss. this weekend was a sucker punch to the jaw and now I’m desperately chasing my own silhouette. oh and it’s finals week?

when I was 16, I had a string of panic attacks and a recurring nightmare about a lion chewing off my hands. my parents sent me to this wacky therapist who told me I had no cognizant sense of self and that that was the root of my disarray. I said but if that isn’t freedom, I didn’t know what was.

she said yes. and no. lack of personal identity was a dangerous thing indeed. I could slip through the cracks of adolescence. I could be, god forbid, insignificant.

she asked “who are you?”

and I responded with “who are you?”

“no!” she scolded, like I was a disobedient dog. “deflection is a defense method which…” I honestly don’t recall much of the therapy gobbledygook because I was probably zoning out and wondering what it might be like to be a coyote. or if the ocean ever felt lonely. some super zen shit like that. I remember she slid a blank piece of paper to my side of the table and I rejoiced. fuck yes, I specialized in de-blanking pieces of paper. she told me to start with the basics. “who are you?” I ended up writing some stupid story about a llama gifted with a lovely falsetto and how it conquered the Midwest.

the therapist  read it and tore it in half, and frustration curled between my teeth. it tasted metallic, like blood. she went to her computer and printed out some sort of resume and slid that over to my side of the table. I quickly realized she stole it right from an infamous online dating website. “we’re starting with the basics” she said again. and she waited. I remember thinking it was such a bullshit exercise because everyone always lied on dating resumes anyway.  so I ended up answering as if I was a member of the Glass family. I thought I was being clever, but she didn’t care, she didn’t even notice. in her eyes, she saw that I had overcome a certain aversion, of myself, of talking about myself. even if “myself” was a fictional character I plucked from a book.

 I’m not going to do that now. I’m scared right now, terrified even. my fire’s gone out and I’ve lost my way so I’m falling back to the surefire ashes, the fundamentals. 

today I spent most of the day sitting on the couch playing xbox skipping my classes and hating myself. around 3 pm my housemate came home and began making salsa in our kitchen. I said hey and proceeded to zone out, watching the rain hit the window. 

I really hated myself today. most days I feel pretty indifferent about myself, and devote most of my headspace to liking other people. but today all I could focus on was the self loathing welling up inside me. I skipped class. my employer hadn't called me back with holiday hours. the short story I submitted in int fiction the day before was so badly editted and riddled with gramatical errors, I could no longer look at it. 

around 3:10 my housemate said my name and I blinked. "hey" I said. again. 
she said "I think I'm an aromantic." she said this while chopping bell peppers in the kitchen. her hair was blacker than obsidian and pulled away from her face. 

of course, I heard "aromatic." so I said, "you do smell very nice. like ozone and daytime rain."

she began to cry. 

"no." she said. she turned toward the refrigerator. “maybe not aromantic, but surely asexual, I don't know, I don’t know why or how."

asexual. my eyes rested on our basil plant outside, saturated and green. It looked very happy to be in the rain. my housemate followed my gaze. "oh god." she said in a tremor. "I'm not a fucking plant, dan." 

"but I think you'd make a lovely plant." I said. "you could be a cactus flower. or a pond lily. or a redwood tree or a poppy.” I turn off the xbox. “it’s illegal to pick those in California,” I said as an afterthought. she made a strained sound and slapped a palm over her eyes. I couldn’t read her expression.

“you can be whatever plant you want, really.” I try to emphasize this point. “you’d still be one of the best people I know. or plant I know. whatever.” she began to cry harder and I began to worry I was being insensitive and very un PC.  I stood up and made it to the kitchen in two leaps.

 “it’s not really like that.” she said. 

fuck. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t really know anything about what it’s like. 

“tell me what it’s like. also, can I taste test the salsa?" 

she rolled her eyes. the salsa tasted spicy and sweet and amazing. she left the kitchen and returned with some basil from outside. “it’s more like I’m metal. sterile. barren. metal.” she said each word in the same tempo as the staccato rain drops on the roof. “it’s like no one will love me like this.”   

words stuck to the roof of my mouth. you are loved you are loved you are loved, please please please believe me