You’e been in Chicago for more than a year now and it’s finally home. Isn’t it?
Allegedly, but you’re still finding your way back to it. It’s a hard thing to describe, the impression of belonging without the aptitude to accept it. But here you are, city and body, reluctantly synonymous. So you’ll make the most of it. You’ll write the next entry.
It starts with poetry. This new thing you do to process what you can’t yet say aloud. You dress words in symbology, adding meter, even rhyme should it come to you as villanelle or terza rima. You are sure of very little except that language has a way of finding you from someplace unknown. You love this and you hate it. Your divinity and your disaster.
But it is also your one confidence. The rawness that comes from the things you feel make the words come faster and more resplendently. Whole fountains erupt from you when passion and longing and agony meet your pen in colloquy. It’s effective, too. The written word has a deconstructive property. It slices truth to pore-sized morsels, enough to slip in, wander, settle.
Hence poetry, the great orator of emotion. Blessedly, the pen leads you to revelation more often than not. And you’ve found that instead of beautiful and meditative poignancy, the words come out angry. You read back the end of this recent one and recoil at what you have inside of you:
I love you, he says
I love me, he means
A snake made of baby parts
I’ll come for you yet
It’s my turn
To bleed you, demon
But you know what led you here, to this Gula state. God, how you’ve ripped yourself apart. How you’ve made yourself amendable and apologetic and how you’re always there to smooth a snag and make things nice and let others feel better even when they’ve maimed you. You deserve to be angry sometimes.
But your anger is also a symptom of a larger problem. The thing that keeps you detached. How you want so desperately to get out there, to connect, but you cannot seem to crack through the surface of others. It is no one else’s responsibility to heal you. You know this, but it still makes you sad. How lonely everyone is. How imprisoned by it they are even when you throw ropes. But we’re all victims of something greater. It’s the root of your anger, too, even distantly. Capitalism. American individualism. Socializations made worse in the last four years. This pandemic that has altered humanity and that you see everywhere. So much disparateness, with no aim of mending. Our various moods made large in our solitude. Simple tasks grown overwhelming and defeating. You see so many self-diagnoses and you think, “Is this individual or collective malaise?”
Individuality. Once an admiration, now something you hate. We are unique but we are also the same. You keep on saying this. That it is our sameness we should embrace, not our singular tragedies. Set that shit aside and find what you share. But no one wants to. Everyone is in their own worlds while you’re so hungry to crack out of yours. You wonder if this means you’ll always exist in misalignment. That your longing for connectivity will only make you more lonely. And it’s a worse kind of loneliness, you realize. Having the tools but nothing to fix.
So you write poetry about a man who hurt you and it makes you feel better. To peg this agitation on a guilty individual instead of a more general, communal antagonism. And you’re no better than anyone else, but you are better at admitting it. You know you can be an annoying bitch. Quick to snarl but also quick to amend it with apologies, a confusing concoction. You blame this on your mind, always in motion. But at least you can say it aloud, the things you suck at. Accountability is a trait you cherish, yet you wonder if it’s a confrontation to others. Your willingness to address these things only highlights their unwillingness to abide.
But therein is your conundrum. Thinking yourself so evolved while you stew in pouty words about someone else. You’re in your own world, too, don’t you see it? You say you want out while you weld the bars that trap you. Bitterness and intolerance. Moods you sharpen and hold in a striking pose you never act on. Doesn’t matter, you look scary all the same. You are scary. You scare yourself. The anger but also the self pity. You write poems about sad men but you write worse of your own life and how you resent having to live it.
I stand by the sea
A great conch to my ear
I call for a siren
End this for me. End me.
I am exceptionally hungry
For the ground
You say that words are your confidence. They are, but you despise confidence. You despise ego. But you are a writer and that’s all you can do. Exist within yourself. Cry that others won’t let you in while you kick glass in their direction. Mourn the life you want while you crave death. Know that craving death isn’t real, that most days you are happy to be alive, but it’s those ugly days that bring you here. To this space where you write little stories for people who will now start to worry.
But they shouldn’t because you’re fine. This will salve in hours and then you’ll set the pen down. Maybe text some folks and feel better. And you’ll think of how our shells don’t need cracking so much as massaging, with words you can turn gentle instead of sharkish. That’s how we get in. We love each other through the hard stuff. We listen and we allow. Together. Maybe one day the love you’ve cultivated will strike the right heart. Maybe it already has. You’ll know with time. We don’t have much of it, but we have enough to figure these things out.
And even though you have to probe yourself with these entries every so often as a reminder, you know you’re where you’re meant to be. In this city. You keep coming back, after all. And there’s so much for you here. You’ll keep writing your mean, sad little poems as a release valve while you cultivate a better daytime. You will find little joys in the things that only exist here. The collective affection for dumb shit like the rat hole, the mothman, Malört. The smells of lake and wind that coil through buildings and alleys. The skyline so magnificent and clean and sparkling at night that it feels like science fiction.
You’re here even when you’re alone. (And you’re never really alone.) You have little places to visit, little sights yet to see. You have words to write and to read. You have a mind to fill and the curiosity to fill it.
There’s a feast on the table and you’re ready to eat. Dig in already.
Reading this from a cafe in chicago, which im visiting for the first time! And just tried some malort yesterday (i was in the minority for thinking its no worse than most alcohol) which was a lovely coincidence! Thank you for a little window into a chicago i can’t see as a passerby 💗
I always look forward to your newsletters - your writing is so captivating.