#I'LL TAKE COFFEE AND TALK ABOUT NOTHING ( longform. )

[keykoded]

I know I should write in here more but it’s really hard, you know, to sit down and put my thoughts down in this neat orderly subject-verb fashion and maybe some adjectives thrown in for spice, sprinkling description over everything like that one viral photo of the guy throwing salt on stuff like he’s a new drag queen with glitter. I love that photo so much. It’s so shameless and nonsensical and I really think we have to cling to the little things right because it’s that or nothing, it’s that or absence.

I’ve just been thinking today. That’s why I’m here. Today I put together some new clips and it was late, dark everywhere on the screen, and this girl across the street stopped in the middle of a pool of light from a streetlamp and started crying. She was walking and staring ahead and seeing and then she just stopped and cried. No sound, of course, but you could see her shoulders heaving. I wanted to reach through the screen and touch her tenderly and I also wanted to skitter back in animal fear of what that kind of grief might mean. I’m bad at knowing what to do in the moment but afterwards I can think it through. That’s why I run the camera. It’s like practice in my head.

A friend of mine, one of the only ones I can call that genuinely, is at the hospital in Rapid City because his father is dying, and today a doctor lurched in except it was this metal pillar on wheels with a little screen on top like some kind of monster and on the screen was the face of the doctor, earphones in, to inform them that he was dying, he was dead, and my friend’s father stared at this metal pillar buzzing and crackling with audio and said I don’t understand because how could he? How can you understand when a stupid column with wheels rolls into your hospital room to tell you that your life is over? Then there was this Tim and Eric moment where the doctor suspended in this little box kept repeating it, and my friend’s dad kept saying what over and over again, back and forth, looping around, going nowhere, what and what and what and I just think that’s what we’re doing to each other, this total miscommunication, this repetition, and I don’t think it’s going to end well.

Here’s something else I’ve been thinking about. My mom has been taking care of her mom ever since I was in high school and she is still doing it despite everyone telling her that she should move out and call whatever state thing takes care of old people who can’t take care of themselves. She’s dedicated almost ten years of her life to a woman whose brain is three-fourths mush and who can’t communicate anymore, who makes sound with no meaning, garbled syllables, and who spends all night moaning and gasping because her brain thinks she’s in pain even though she’s laying peacefully in a bed. People I usually trust tell me that it’s beautiful to watch someone age but it’s not and they’ve never been more wrong. It’s watching someone fall apart slow and then fast, losing the ability to communicate and then every conversation is like mutely watching that girl cry under a streetlamp, raw and blunt but with no context or understanding, an outside observer to someone’s undefinable pain.

Sometimes I feel like these entries are too fractured but it’s how my brain works now. I got too good at fitting together random pieces and now I hold everything together with tape. Now and then I imagine the inside of my skull as fractured but held together with strips of clear adhesive.

The thing about all this is that I’ll never know anyone else but we have to inflict knowing on each other all the time. The doctor thinks that he knows how to console a dying man and his son through a video screen and my mom thinks she can translate every noise my grandmother makes into meaning and I think I know this girl in a red hat who cried across the street for three minutes and we’re all just approximating, every one of us, guesswork and experience and tape.

I looked in the mirror today. I try to do that once per week, a lingering look, no matter how much it makes my skin crawl and then I want to lay down on the bathroom floor to feel the coolness of the tile and imagine my skin sloughing off. My sister once said that it sounded like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis and that’s, pardon me, absolutely fucking stupid. A caterpillar turns into goo. Then it just becomes a butterfly somehow and frankly that’s the best argument I’ve ever heard for God because who else could come up with that? Nothing like that happens for me. When I lay there on the tile it’s like stripping past skin and getting down to soul except there’s no one else to see me. The bathroom floor seems like as good of a place as any to do that kind of thing.

And then there’s the other other thing. You know the one. I’m still thinking about it.

The thing I saw. The thing I still don’t know if I really saw.

I just don’t know how to handle