star spinner
A billionaire who made his living taking everything from people decided even that wasn’t enough and does a nazi salute and the texts on my phone start piling up like a stack of books for a class I don’t want to take. My friend Nityasya tells me to write about my rage. Writing is my rage, is my fragile fists pounding against the iron doors that are closing on my hope for a better future. I am trying to decide whether or not to brace myself to break every bone in my body trying to pry them open, or learn how to pick locks.
My reading at The Pasta Tarot: Manifestations and Martinis dinner that also made me throw up into the cast iron pan my eggplant parm was served in tells me I need to stop overextending myself at work, stop doubting myself in love. I keep taking on new tasks, like I’m campaigning to be anointed queen of productive procrastination. My desk is littered with half finished beading projects and a stream of scribbled on sticky notes with all the things I need to keep in my head. I feel claustrophobic in my apartment so I make plans and then double book myself when I forget to add them to my calendar. Some days my brain can’t even contain the memory of myself. I text you reasonable questions with a string of apologies and then cringe at myself after. The roads are paved with ice and chemical salt and my skin shrieks as it makes contact with the air. My body is a lump of granite, too cold to carve. I have no goals or resolutions except to defrost.
It is warm by the radiator in the Park Avenue armory and we decided that we would use the disco ball as our north star to find each other again. The crowd buckles and sways and flails to the drumkit and my friend and I are whisper yelling to each other about thinking about going on anti-depressants. We’re still dancing. I tell her about how I never ever think about how my chemical baseline has been artificially herded, lifted, squeezed into a perkier and more upbeat shape. My emotions are a trophy wife, as if I opted to upgrade to a glossier version through agency rather than desperation. She’s worried about losing herself. I describe the arid valleys of sand-swept lows and fossilized traumas that I’ve collected passport stamps in. I should have told her not to worry; it is still cold in the desert at night.
The executive orders keep coming, a freight train of fascism, and my instagram is feeding nothing but despair and despair keeps me from completing tasks and tasks are what keep me from feeling helpless and the doom-spiral doors are unyielding. How can I, an eldest daughter, hold everyone in my hands. My therapist is going to read this and tell me that’s not my job. My own happiness feels frivolous, and eternally out of reach. I worry I’m being melodramatic and needy and self-absorbed and clingy. I worry that no one needs to read what I have to say right now. My horoscope once told me that I use caretaking as a means to ensure that people will never leave me while I was cooking dinner for a friend. I sell off some clothes and jewelry to raise money for relief efforts in Gaza and LA, research food coops I can join. Time may ooze and seep and the tundra may stretch out to the horizon line but I will not slow. I am my community and my community is me; if they are threatened, so am I. I take my lexapro every night, without fail.
My friend starts on her anti-depressants. I’m proud of her. Maybe this year, my goal should be to drink enough water. It’s a dry biome, after all. The last tarot card in my reading, the one where I asked about my personal happiness, was ‘The Sun.’