following the feel of the fire

wanting to write about my day while I'm still in it for once and while it's still not worn off into another state (I want to keep THIS mood in my rotation like a baggy tee)

A couple of facts about this week with varying levels of relevancy-- it's my second to last bit of Summer Class before Real Class, I've been driving on my own enough that my parents don't clutch the handle when I'm at the wheel, and yesterday my best friend in the world texted me as she was doing laundry and said: you should just come over. So I did! I took to her address up and up the long hill into her steep driveway (foot nearly bottoming out on the gas pedal). It was my second time at her house since she moved and from the wheel on park music still playing I was on the phone with her making sure I was in the right place. She looked out of her first-story window a little above level my driver's side, I rolled down mine; then, a smile across her face so wide and immediate it became a fact before an action-- I felt that happy to see her.

I entered through the backdoor past her bike collapsed on its side; she reintroduced me to her room and I laughed at her desk (Hesse Hesse Hesse, a portrait of a saint, incense of a Chinese variety, a gram scale) before we went out to her backyard and smoked. Her mom had left the house under her guardianship for the week but it wasn't rightfully hers and with her snubs of hand-rolled cigarettes and joints and the soft puttering of a lawnmower somewhere I was aware we were both still occupying the space of not-adult, pretending-to-be-adult, nineteen yet twenty. All of this is secondary: we walked around the house after that but I don't remember it, following after her and what were we saying, her cat padding figure eights rounding our feet a happy little motor. Last time we hung out was late June. We spent ten hours together, just taking more gummies when we got the munchies so we stayed high the whole day--we trekked miles out to the downtown and back, having retrieved snacks that did not nearly require a bus. That night was the best I had slept since before finals season. Yesterday she had work in the evening and I had to give time to get home anyway. Near the end we exchanged hands my cash passing for shrooms, the gram scale winking in the sideways glare from her window at her desk: a pocket mirror a square disc metal a glossy ease a finish of dust. I would have swiped off my thumb and licked.

Today, since tomorrow is Friday meaning no class, meaning my body could take the body load of it, I got home from the university, ate, and took 2g of shrooms at promptly 12pm. I started a timer. Especially alone, the waiting phase feels endless and doubtful. Most recently I had been at a concert with two others and we were hardly unique in our daring. I remember the high then, as starting soon after the opener left, I realized the inward euphoria from the music and movement was pushing outwards with too much force to be regular. This time there was no such measure; my first time doing shrooms alone (besides a microdose--lemon tek of 0.7g leftover in the middle of the night, stabbing at my phone so excitably). It was also unique in the sense that the onset was not allowed to be organically experienced, otherwise I suspect I would have felt the same as I always do--the itchiness brightening the marrow of my bones, fascination at my own skin stretched over the backs of my wiry hands. Instead, I had been laying on my side on my mattress and watching the clock tick by the half hours-- I'd just begun to feel the first hints of it in the soreness of my jaw and muscle weakness gathering in a forceful, nearly nauseating desire to laugh-- when my mom called up the stairs. I thought she wanted to me to go to lunch, although I had already prepared myself something to eat so I could avoid this situation, and was prepared, then, to tell her I would have to meet her later: she sidestepped those concerns entirely and told me I was going to the dentist.

In retrospect, I should've known better. I do recall, days or weeks ago, my dad telling me that before I went back to college for the semester, some date in August. And there were many ways I could've avoided it on the way: I'd planned a hike to play out my peak today before scattered thunderstorms on the forecast scared me away but had I asked I would have heard the reason why not. Instead. Instead, I cautiously agreed and accepted my fate. This is the sort of thing that sounds like it belongs in retrospect, as I am telling it now, and as I had imagined telling it, here and there, as the hours progressed. Should the concepts clash so deliberately to provoke foreboding. But I am internally without grounding for this reference. I felt it out, asked what should I do, but I knew there was already only one thing To do, to see it through.

I've never been afraid of the dentist or understood it as the opposite pole of joy (on a scale from day at the amusement park to a trip to the...). Shrooms themselves also haven't had an adverse effect on me; just a minor fainting spell that could've been a head rush. In the hour before I had to leave, I tried to wrestle back the overgrowth of the effects beginning to metastasize--or what is it called, infected blood? That makes it sound worse than it was, but how else can I explain the fever-warm, sickly sweetness of the syrupy heat ratcheting up. I already knew it was a futile practice but like any practice an effort for the sake of effort and because it was fun.

I listened to music in my IEMs and turned it down when it got too loud. I thought it would be easy to make a newborn overwhelmed and I should be the same kind way in this fresh skin. In and out of with varying volume. I remembered what someone said--music at a low volume revealing its particulars--and found it to be true. Even though I'd only ever listened to music low to intentionally lose its particulars I'd never found that angle to be very effective. Like for sleep, always distracted by the sudden stark throughlines of a song I'd never thought twice about before. A birds-eye examination of the ballroom scene with none of the vertigo. Then, increasing, coming closer and closer to the people dancing and eventually vibrations of strings being plucked by the roughened fingertips. I was playing updownupdown gaping at the ceiling when my mom walked in my room. I thought you said we were leaving at 2. It's 1:50. Okay, I was just listening to music. Ok, I know. Ok. Ok. Bye. I pulled on socks slowly from the still drying laundry and tried three different pairs before I realized they'd all feel wet at the cuffs of no fault of their own.

I wriggled out of driving duty. I thought about putting in my earbuds and going away from the world again, but partially out of curiosity to see if surrounded music from the car would thrum a different sound and partially because I did want to be in the world just then, I connected to the aux instead. I hadn't shared music with my mom like that since I left home. Played her a song I liked, song I stumbled upon around Seattle; on the highway with one hand she held mine over the divider--this too was a secondary new. In high school she taught where I attended and near the end her grip waxed and waned with the sporadic intensity of restless restraint. What was she holding onto now, I wondered, that I had already left and returned a different son, who could no longer perceive her trust, nor the constriction from her lack of it. I do not like being caught on the edges of silence with my mom, who at any moment could burst out laughing or crying or refuse to address the elephant that is her inclination to do so. I put on a different song, that my friend wrote, that my mom liked, that took us off the highway and into the office park. We parked at 2:25--perfect for the 2:30 appointment. We both said so ("just on time") and it felt so rehearsed. So nice I could hardly let myself believe it. I walked in and back to the left side, laid myself down.

As I was prepared for the xray I looked down at myself extending beyond the heavy mat over my chest. My bare calves seemed to warp, the clock distended; I was beginning to feel a little afraid again. Nothing yet, but the risk of coming to face a sensation I would not be able to handle. I needed to keep my mouth open for thirty minutes and without bile. I willed away the visuals reluctantly and as best as I could, by which I mean kept my eyes moving and my hands busy in the meanwhile, turning my earbuds from noise cancellation to the transparency mode so I could hear BITE SPIT RINSE at the same time as my security blanket of background noise. As expected, the actual thirty-minutes of appointment were hardly worth noting, appointment of appointments. But I did notice smaller shades of the process I had let myself by before. My memories made the yellow beam of rounded rectangular light above me wide enough to encompass nearly my entire field of my vision. Faces were obscured and hands mostly felt. The temporary assistant (who spoke to me, and was not hands) always integrated into my recollections with more prominence than the dentist himself. Now I saw the block of light the stomping undersole of a mechanical arm whose transparent edges off-white with disuse strained like a retina. I tried to focus on the dentist, the same man who's been sending me home with/out cavities since I was a single-digit, and noticed the obscured wrinkle in his brow.

I considered what made me uncomfortable about going to the dentist; I never hated it like needles or public speaking, but to be frank it was still no trip to the amusement park. It wouldn't have been the pain, that I could withstand, taken as temporary and towards a purpose, even if I didn't ever fully get it. (Pain didn't have to make sense, only to be, like all punishments, delivered with appropriate celerity, severity, and certainty. The institution of bad teeth.) What I hadn't liked as a kid had been the goop. I hated letting it touch my tongue, I hated that I couldn't wash my mouth out after or swallow without feeling like I'd get dosed up on some food-dye-fluoride-mix. There was somehow no goop this time (my first appointment without goop???) but the flavored scrubbing remained. As the dentist scrubbed at the seam of my lower teeth, I felt my bottom lip flatten in an attempt to escape the rotating nub of the tool. I imagined I could pout my lip and amend the issue somewhat right then; I thought about why I didn't want to do that. Mostly because it wasn't really an issue and wouldn't have made a difference. The tool, rotating and chasing my teeth, would impart its presence. The seizing in my chest then was similar to the climax of films from my high school Spanish class. My teacher loved action and there was always a moment where the fool would beg for their life, I hated that word, please. The conceit alone made me wince but the real tragedy was when the killing factor was not indifferent but an amused specter lending the victim a feint of choice and taking it away. My breath clenched in time with each of their desperate and pathetic grasps. How was this similar? Not with such stakes. I knew it was only resonant because I was not in my right mind and hadn't been for around half a year. It came around to what it's always been about--pacing. (Secondary: discernment.)

The other day, I was talking to a friend about what we like to write. I am nineteen and love love. I especially love the unconscious aspects of love and desire (what Freudian concepts I know nothing about: life and death drives). So minor happenings produce insane significance. I'm surely not imagining this. I just mean the flinching from contact with the ? of ?things. We want to consciously take ourselves in the opposite direction of entropy and don't know how. "We want to be bigger than the things that happen to us and can't do it." I texted my friend everything I do is about "mystifying or eroticizing the approach of death which is destruction or the banal and always unconscious." I'm embarrassed reading it back now, but lucidity possessed me and had meant it, even though I couldn't describe it well (the banal?). I just wanted to arrange something comprehensive of what I imagined if not what I believed and what I couldn't and can't logically reason. Omitting it would be dishonest beyond personal obfuscations. I sent that text while my mom was getting her teeth looked at and left the holding room.

Outside was exactly what I mean by summer. August is about the distance between blue storm clouds. Standing in a bright pane of light from the side, and all above me only rolling sheets, atmospheric stratifications once revealed folding inwards. The second story above the dentists' office I don't know maybe someone lived or worked, a propped window proof of life to let in the breeze. A picture taken with less saturation would be a disservice, and as if to prove it, a bright red car rolled to the curb before me. I made space and leaned against the minivan. Watched the patchy concrete below me morph. It had to be that spot that far; too long or near and the world became stable again. How to balance on that edge of clean focus without sullying it with sweat. Nor could it really be entirely unconscious. But I thought it had to be at most 49.99% consciously directed--there has to be the wiggle room for reality to vibrate or collapse.

Back in the car, I was ready to go home. My mom helped me realize my hunger. Were we close to our favorite place? The same Chinese restaurant our family has frequented for over a decade (the owners came to recognize her as teacher). We went that way but stopped at tjmaxx first. I was chatting with my mom about I don't know what. I was still not feeling tired. I got a shirt my mom called too short and a mug she called too ugly. I also helped her look for a yoga mat (she had mistakenly bought a yoga BAG online for 28 whole American dollars and hadn't thought to return it, but to produce a matching set) and helped her away from the allure of spiritually temu clothing. The interior mirrors revealed the aging of everything-at-once. I was sad to discover the clearance books section had been replaced with packets of pimple patches. But also, I was breaking out. In retrospect, I should have grabbed one. Instead we were already in the line and I was picking out a mug.

By now I don't feel high. I must have peaked around hour 2--that was the most excessive and closest to the brink. Afterwards is only the fist unclenching and wobbling and the mind set loose. We ate, and ate well, stopping when we were only a little overfull. My mom was gifted a dessert to take home (wink wink, for your continued patronage) and we packed up the hot meals I held at my feet with the rolled-up yoga mat and the mug between my legs and the short tee (pink horses galloping, XS, cropped) on the divider. She drove us home.

There is more to say but now I am too tired to say it. There was more I was thinking, too, about the Nature of Things, and how flickery but it is.. within a stable-ish outline? Each slice is at least an internally transparent photocopy. Maybe I'll finish this later, or maybe it'll remain a catalog of what I felt this exact moment before I take a nap. But I'll say this, I felt good. Of course, but I mean. I'm glad I went to the dentist. I can't imagine the day in a better arrangement. When we came out of the tjmaxx towards the car, spots of pinkpricks of rain flicked my arms and my mom hummed along to a song from back (her) home that sounded like: sunny potatoes: endlessly hilarious to some version of me. You cannot return from whence you came (what a funny word) as every moment of learning or choice is becoming a different universe and I should want to realize there's nothing to go back to but a narrower self in a narrower world. There is work to be done for this to be true. I hope this clarity remains and I believe what I know now. How could I not know, and realize from an alien inhabiting my brain. Rolling water off the back is not a rewarding practice at this stage boy. They teach you to float and swim, but first they throw you in.

Edited: In the dream of my nap. And after I woke up from my nap for precision and redundancy. I don't know if the clearheadedness is a placebo but I'll try to keep it going. Finally, snippets of poems I liked lately that I want to keep.

Two of Philippe Jaccottet's,And two of David Berman's.

Last week, I got back to college after a month long break. But it felt like I had been away for longer than that. At the train station, there were groups of kids like me waiting out the snow, the bus lines that were all delayed. Their suitcases and their laughter. They were like me.

I checked my phone a couple times on the train, and again, seeing that the last bus back to campus would be arriving soon. Five pm, and after that, nothing til morning. I could've waited. I was going to, but in the chamber of the station I thought I saw someone I knew, and I felt ashamed, the same feeling of dread of those recurring naked in public nightmares. The cruelest part about those dreams was that none of the characters ever reacted. They only watched with their impassive faces, eyes dark and depthless, and let me run around their lives. When I bumped into them at doorways, they stopped long enough to say, sorry.

I'd rather be forgotten than ignored. I pulled on my gloves and entered the snow. The walk back was two and some miles but sloped uphill. That was fine, I'd made it through worse, and my blood had always run hot. During the height of my obsession with my body, I'd once trekked over three miles to go to a classmate's party. It was bright and sweaty late May, and he was rich, lived in a nice house that looked like it could be on Architectural Digest or a real estate magazine you'd pass by in the supermarket. Well, I could've guessed that, but at the time, I still didn't know it. I trudged through Rock Creek Park with my shirt off, bare skin and binder chafing against my backpack, a proper hike. I listened to Long Seasons by the Fishmans three times. Halfway through the third time, maps told me I was near, but I didn't see anything resembling houses yet. Then, in that last half mile, they revealed themselves to me: gleaming glass paneling, big blue pools with water so clear and clean it might've been safe to drink, long driveways and dark (dark) wood. Before long I reached my destination. I knew it was the one because I heard the music from the backyard. Songs I couldn't sing along to. I couldn't make myself move. If someone walked out right now, and saw me standing all alone like that, they could've called the cops on me and have been right to. I sweated. The Fishmans were no longer with me. I didn't know if my friends, my two friends in the whole city, were inside. I was at their mercy.

Eventually, a boy I at least recognized climbed out of an Uber and began heading towards the backyard. He was coming back from an internship at the Capitol and wore those same starched suits. He knew he was supposed to be here. He probably knew every damn thing that was going to happen in his life for the next sixty years. I followed him, and I remember the look he gave me then, like he was startled. Disgusted. But he said nothing and let me pass him by.

The party itself was unmemorable. But I'll never forget how much I wanted it, back then, for my body to be exhausted and punished, and to be near people, to be loved. They were really similar things.

In January, I remembered my motivations, and considered the ways in which I really hadn't changed. I loosened my grip on my suitcase to take off my gloves and switch hands. I was starting to sweat again, so I felt the snow wouldn't hurt me. After all, the snow here was nothing like DC's slate-gray sleet: big, fluffy picturesque flakes, like the paper snow they made for movies. Strange, I felt an urge to stick my tongue out and catch one. Though I was no Californian. I grew up sledding, testing the thickness of ice on ponds, misjudging, and trawling back into my house with wet clothes. Still, my senses muted as they were, I let myself make the mundane into mystical, if only to entertain.

I put my head down and kept moving. The wind whistled in my ears, a singular tone. I thought even if there was someone with me, I wouldn't have managed to speak. I was too winded and my voice was too weak. I avoided all eyes and arms and felt bad. Something inside of me had crawled away and rolled all up. I always hated my soft belly.

The fog on my glasses. The squat storefronts. The sparse slants of light from the old street lamps. Felt like I'd been walking through a snowglobe in Target, a fake little town. But I saw real people, too. I smelled their smoke. Residents, who belonged here. The suitcase I dragged through the heavy snowfall scored two deep lines along the mass of footprints. I felt sorry. Sorry for intruding.