The Heat That Will Come: fragments from spring on addiction and hope

oh. OH.

film by moi

1. So, [REDACTED], I am sorry

   For the mornings you woke to find me tearing up the floorboards looking for change,

   Nights I’ve kissed the bathroom floor until it became sticky with the honey of my work,

   Left like a love letter for you to clean the ink from. 

2. I don’t know how to start this. 

   Alternatively, I’m not entirely sure how it ends.

   If it ends, I mean. There’s a high chance it won’t or it can’t, and that’s horrifying but statistical. I like numbers. I find comfort in them. 8.6% of females develop eating disorders at some time. I know that. 6.4% of females develop addiction. The long term overlap is incalculable, though prevalent. I guess we’ll start there.

3. I’m going to tell you a funny story. Once upon a time I wrote a poem called Skin. Ten minutes after I wrote it I read it live, and there is a video that took two years to dig back up of me doing so: box-black bob laying undone, curly, birkenstocks on a fake stage (sin), visibly shocked when people clap after the performance. As if people don’t clap after every performance. 

   You can’t see watching it back, but it felt like the room erupted.

   For the next week, people who I had never met before came up to me to tell me my poem was one of the best they’d heard at school. The already fresh editors-in-chief of the literary magazine decided that night that in two years, upon their graduation, it would be handed down to me. I was two weeks into my freshman year of college. I decided yeah, actually maybe I would be a writer. And then I never wrote anything good ever again.

4. The building that I live in is rectangular and so is every unit in it. I joke that this looks like a dormitory hallway–that I moved from a dorm on campus to one off campus. But this one has a nicer kitchen and bathroom. But that one didn’t have cockroaches. 

5. For about a month during my second year of college, I was fairly certain I was going to drop out. I did not tell anybody–not outwardly–but it showed in other ways. I spent the last five days of spring break at my parents’ house, where I cried at least once daily about having to go back, being so stressed about all that was to come when I had to go back. My mother, rarely the attentive type, nonetheless took notice of my behavior and took me aside the night before I left. She told me that at the end of the semester, if I needed to take a year, if I needed to figure out something else entirely, she wouldn't be too upset. I told her that would not be the case. I told her that even if that were to become the case, I’d hope she would get upset. I’d be upset if it were my daughter. She said she didn’t know what I wanted her to say.

6. I’ve also started praying for a daughter that I do not have but want someday, and want desperately. I do not necessarily consider myself religious nor am I a family woman: I don’t want a husband, I only sometimes want a wife, but this conceptual daughter is one of the few pieces of my future I am certain of and I love her more than anything in the world. Cecily. Cecily. Cec-i-ly. I run her name through my teeth as I prepare myself in the morning, as I sit in our skinny hallway straightening my hair in the big mirror. When I pray for her, also, I pray she will not look like me. For a while, actually, because of this reason alone, I was certain I would adopt. 

7. You walk in–because even though there is a code to the building, the door doesn’t fully shut, so you can walk in–and the walls are bright green. The day I moved in I called it Ghostbusters green. I think I was a little off, but that’s still the Pantone-name in my mind. Every time I enter, I consider who must have painted the building, who in the world thought Ghostbusters green would look beautiful in a windowless hallway. I rent from a slumlord and the building is all college students. There aren’t an adequately legal number of fire escapes. Sometimes I think she must be trying to mess with us all. 

8. And what of it? You’re a businessman, baby. Catch the glint in your eyes in the bathroom mirror every morning as you brush your teeth–it’s ambition or it’s something else. You say you’re never gonna write about [REDACTED]. You try not to talk about [REDACTED]. You say there’s nothing in life like [REDACTED], and that’s a good thing: it’s the scariest shit a person can do. And it’s an open secret at this point with your friends and you’re not daft enough to think it’s evaded whoever the fuck else they’ve been drunk enough to whisper to. No one’s gonna do much about it anyway, you look inconfuckingspicuous enough. So you sign a lease with this girl so you guys can get your own kitchen and you make up shit about some unstable income on the application and now you’re sitting here in daisy dukes and a crop talking to a mom of four. Holy fucking fuck. Worse things than free coffee, though. You’ve long resigned yourself to never ask what kind of strings have been pulled for you–job offered? Yep, take it and run.

9. [REDACTED] taught me how to smoke. Freshman year she would meet me at front campus and we’d walk downtown, out to the docks that seemed much farther than they were. Her cigarette cartons kept their shape in her bag, she would pinch one between her fingers and hand it to me, and I would mimic the shape of her hand as I grabbed it; place it between my teeth and held still as she lit the lighter and whispered into the fog, “breathe in.” When [REDACTED] left for the city, I bought my own lighter from the CVS on Main. I asked the worker to grab it off the capped rack and he chuckled and said “just tear the packaging.” I bought baby blue, my favorite color. I still could not light a cigarette by myself until well after I turned twenty.

10. I had just finished dating someone who, for the first time, I did not feel utterly indifferent towards. This was my longest relationship, my fifth. [REDACTED] was the kind of person who I could look at after any given period of time and know nearly nothing about, someone cool and elusive who gave my life the boxed distinction I wanted: they would touch my body without trepidation, but not ask nor tell me anything too respectively personal. It was easy and stressless and fun until it wasn’t. Days after we hit two months, I realized I’d gotten bored. I hid out for a week, camped in various spots I knew they wouldn’t find me. I broke it off.

11. “Who here knows how to pull a shot?” Joel is standing at the espresso machine wiping the nozzle. Wiping. Wiping. “Really? You’re telling me all ten of you are true newbies? Nobody knows how to pull a shot?”

    You’re high as a fucking kite. Got nervous before training and stuck eddies between your teeth like a rapper with gold, flossed them out. Here’s hoping nobody smells the weed on you. Raise your hand: “I think Sophia’s showed me before.” Pull a shot in 32, that’s two seconds over. 

    Joel tastes it from the ramiken and says “Not awful at all. It’d get the job done in a rush.”

12. I barely left the apartment for seven months. That's the spiel, that's the punchline. Seven months. I went to class, I went home. I had panic attacks in class and in bed and the minute I walked into my own door. I threw up more than I kept down. That’s the joke. I hope you're laughing. 

13. The woman fenty folding outside of my building was arrested. Soon, the woman fenty folding outside of my building was back.

14. There is a Tibetan folktale that goes as follows: One day, the poet and teacher Milarepa, in order to connect himself with the earth, his spirit, as well as his corporeal self, went to live in a cave in the woods. Shortly after this, he ventured out of his cave to gather wood for the fire and came back to the cave to find it inhabited by many large, frightful demons. 

    Milarepa knew he had to get these evil spirits out. Afraid, he screamed with as much ferocity as he could muster until he grew too tired to scream again. The demons hadn’t moved. In fact, they seemed to be growing at home in the upset. Milarepa decided on a different approach: to practice his dharma amongst the discomfort. He crawled closer to the demons and sat amongst them as they seethed; he began preaching messages of patience, kindness, and comfort. The demons’ eyes opened wider and wider, but as Milarepa finished his teachings, they were still taking up residence in the cave, sucking out the air, growling, clawing at the walls and the ceiling. They were unable to be tricked. Milarepa began to surrender.

    “Ah,” he mused, still fearful. “We are going to have to live together, then. Perhaps I have something to learn from you all. I open myself to whatever you have to teach me.” 

    Upon hearing Milarepa’s words, every demon disappeared, save for the largest, angriest, most horrifying of them all. It opened its mouth, unveiling every sharp fang, foul breath. Its nostrils flared in and out with suspenseful rhythm.

15. I went clubbing. After January I figured February couldn't be worse. I got hives on my arms from the thought of going out. I used to think depression was the bigger problem. It’s not. It's the anxiety. I am afraid. I am afraid of everything. It physically hurts.

16. In New York, everybody is somebody. On my first night in the city I glimpse Drew Barrymore on the L train and stare until she lowers her sunglasses, playing out like a movie. When not done up for tv, she looks like my mom. I decide not to say anything, but we grin at each other for a second, and that’s enough.

17. I knew I was going to be an addict by the time I was thirteen years old. I had never taken drugs or drank, nor had any inclination to figure out how to begin, but it was a secret, a hush-hush topic my religious parents tiptoed around. The world of substances was a haunted house I was not allowed to explore, but I loved ghost stories. I became enamored with the idea of a high, romanticised it. This is not a good thing. But here’s me figuring now: you can grow out of whatever you grow into. Maybe in a few years I’ll wake up and look at [REDACTED] like it’s skinny jeans. I hope, I hope, I hope.

18. So, [REDACTED], forgive me, I’m giving you

    Bleach over brown feathers. You know the swan that turns back into a duck?

    Well I’m swimming in something, so I’m thinking you might.

---

Highly Necessary Footnote (tm)

HI AGHSGSJDGHS SORRY I know it’s late I am an intern I have a full time internship where I make no money sorry. A few housekeeping things:

• Don’t do drugs it takes over your life and your writing (this is where I would gesture widely)

• All of the [REDACTED]’s are for different people/things/whathaveyou except the first and last. So if you think you see yourself…well, you might. It’s not impossible.

• If you know me no you don’t for this one. I’m not taking questions.

• Go paid for my next New York Diary!!! Going up in a few days! It’s a fun one, I prommy :)

Ok that’s it love u all <3

R