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Small update: I go out dancing a lot these days because we found a club that plays plays Patti Smith 📸 and Chic DJ prowess: @afowler_xx https://ift.tt/2Hp9lxy

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Even though I’m still fighting bureaucratic beasts at the immigration office, I’m settling into my new life slice by slice. As Valencia becomes more of a home to me, I feel extreme gratitude for every artist who made work that felt like disagreement or comfort or falling in love, and especially for the folks who made the pieces I look at every day over my desk. Some of these tidbits are relatively new to me, and some have been on my walls for years. Regardless of how long I’ve been staring at them or where I am in the world, these words and images keep me grounded. If they speak to you, too, check out the artists tagged and follow their work. (Calling card by Adrian Piper, ‘My dear world’ chapbook by Meia Geddes, film stills by Andrei Tarkovsky, and half these works found at the happy happy place that is @kczinecon) https://ift.tt/2M2YZXj

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On Female Friendship (or, why I drive with the windows down)

“You can’t take my peace, bitch!” she shouted to the Acura that had cut us off in sweaty, tangled Baltimore traffic. The three of us were driving to the airport after a much-too-brief 48 hours together in deep Maryland, a place where the hot air hung thick and green beneath countless Trump flags and sputtering two-engine planes.

When I say that I’m in love with these women, I mean it in the way of love I’ve felt few times in my life. It’s love, an emotion that no degree of italics could capture. The way I feel for the two of them is doubtlessly deeper and more tangled than the way I’ve felt for almost all of my romantic partners. It’s an attachment that I suspect most folks are lucky to feel a handful of times in this life, let alone for so long.

What no one ever discusses about this kind of love is that it’s discouragingly difficult. It’s work, and patience, and understanding. It’s waiting three years to see each other because that’s the way life carries you. It’s forgiving each other when you disappear from text threads for months at a time, and it’s apologizing to your roommate for laughing so loudly at whatever they just emailed you. It’s FaceTiming in traffic because, yes of course that’s dangerous, but your main bitch is going through a time and you’re going to be there for her. It’s sending them the podcasts and albums that made you question yourself. It’s being devastatingly honest, out loud and for the first time, because they know if you’re lying about whatever’s on your mind and they’re not here for niceties. It’s holding your breath when you say your goodbyes, because you all well know by now exactly how precious your reunions are.

When I last saw these women, I had joked with them about being emotionally closed off. “I didn’t even cry once this weekend, and I’m angry about it.” We’d spent hours floating in piss-warm water, drinking improvised cocktails and airing out our ideas to dry in the sun of each others’ perspectives. After an intensely trying year away, a year in which I lost several loved ones and in several senses of the verb “lost,” I was ready for an emotional release with them.

But my dramatic, misty-eyed monologue never came. We all dove into our own souls, dredging up whatever willowy sludge we’d cared to share. I felt immensely self-conscious about how detached I could be in talking about the grief I felt, how coldly I could describe the well of my own confused emotion. I imagined that wasn’t a good sign, and my hyperactive imagination urged me to worry that they saw me as invulnerable, unwilling to be present and raw with them in the same way they had both shared with me. As we piled into the car to part ways, I felt anxious that I had taken our time together for granted.

And then we began driving. It was hot outside, a clingy stickiness that only happens when it’s July and you’re underslept and dehydrated from long nights and late swills. The windows were cracked, an overeager breeze stirring the car as if desperate to bring us one last moment of overlap. We were silent. We didn’t say a word, not until the obnoxious Acura swerved ahead of us on I-95 as we meandered south.

In that moment, something broke loose. Pushing her middle finger over the steering wheel, she yelled at the other car, the two of us passengers peppering in colorful comments about the value of serenity and the entitled fuckery expressed supremely by DMV drivers. We began laughing, an overreaction to the humor in a fleeting moment. We couldn’t stop. We had moved beyond words; we were simply together.

As the car’s atmosphere again stilled, the weight of our imminent goodbye again pressing down on us, the speakers opened up. “A tornado flew around my room before you came, excuse the mess it made…” Frank Ocean, a hymn we'd memorized through years of shared history. We all knew exactly where the other two were, without speech or sight. This was what it felt like to be with the people you loved.

I looked out at the tiny needled skyline, curving past us, finally welling down the tears I didn’t think I could release. And then a hand. She had reached over, tear-stained fingers in mine, to wordlessly tell me that she was there too. We stretched our palms into the backseat, the three of us clinging to the present as best we knew how, holding onto each other through the last minutes of the journey.

When I drive my car these days, I do my best to keep the windows down. I like to smell the leafy, dusty landscapes of the county where I grew up. I abhor the heat, familiar and fervently midwestern, but I enjoy the way it makes my skin feel, salty and stained with just the slightest discomfort. I relish the breeze and all it stirs up in my scalp and in my spirit. I love the way it reminds me of being in that car with the two of them, barreling toward an ending and yet impossibly confident that the wind would still, somehow, carry us back together.

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Happy Earth Day; here’s some aesthetic trash I found in Lisbon last month http://bit.ly/2Dww49b

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Wrote some tiny words about a tiny town http://bit.ly/2VEAC4r

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Las Fallas: worth the risk of developing tinnitus https://ift.tt/2Cq8pqG

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Went exploring; wrote about my feelings https://ift.tt/2VNwA9M

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“...at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance, prevails.” -Raymond Carver http://bit.ly/2TDPzmu

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Please to report that my favorite Notebook-themed bar, El Diario De Noah, is still serving a mean homemade vermouth https://ift.tt/2ryF9bu

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Hacked up a lung on an evening run by the ría #stillill https://ift.tt/2Pe2ecM

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Platonic life partner @me_myself_n_jo and I stumbled upon a breakdancing competition immediately after this photo was taken https://ift.tt/2Fbf1wF

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After the rain, before the Cruzcampo https://ift.tt/2z5q4kL

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https://ift.tt/2R9Ibxv

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Finally it’s not 90 degrees and finally there are clouds https://ift.tt/2RdWrG9

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🍄 https://ift.tt/2OPP8TL

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Hola, vivo aquí https://ift.tt/2IaGkoM