August 27, 2004
Getting out of my chair to check the date, I’m surprised to remember it’s Friday. Just weeks before school (UGH!) starts, I have finally hit a stride within myself, found a chord that wouldn’t necessarily shred off my skin in the process-I am summer, and I love it, and I really consider making it so forever.
I have cut myself from any and all friends and have immersed myself entirely in the dull scent of August. I really am on a love/hate seesaw with everyone I know; sometimes it gets to be hideous, grotesque, what? Pornographic, if I want to be especially fictional today. But in not having any company, I have receded into the simplest of existences-I am an amoeba, for goodness sakes, reproducing asexually and forming a delicate army of myself.
I’m going to make promises to myself, promises that I know I’ll break-I make promises to God and break them too. And it’s not that I’m incapable of doing right; it’s just that it’s much more convenient for me to do wrong, regardless of the expiration date scribbled down my back, regardless of the line of casualties on the due date.
And, actually, I will do anything to prolong the effect of doing right. I will probably do the right so many times that I become a negative… a film negative, with black skin and white hair, but I don’t notice; I am busy outside myself.
Yesterday I went bike riding and passed a group of friends, and seeing them made me dizzy, made me rather suicidal, and now I know why I am not attached. And I know why I am not congruent, but I don’t know why I want to be congruent during school. The sight of people, people my age, makes me tired and irrelevant. Redundant and clumsy. So of course I play along!
And after bike riding I went swimming. I was floating, and I could hear my breathing amplified into a loud, brassy rustle. The moon was there, the stars were there, and everything else according to their designated places. And for the first time in a long time, I was, too, in my designated place. Not in Spain, or France, or even New Zealand, but here, breathing into chlorine and the weaving body of the stray cat that wandered by the pool.