Substrate

I can only allow myself to create new. Too many times I’ve revisited old attempts at works, miring myself in past writing and thoughts. No more. No more reinventing, no more trying to salvage. Enough.

Over the past eight years, one thing that’s different is that I take longer breaks. I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. I used to write every day. I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something. I think it’s very much a poet’s novel, which means it’s basically—a woman stands out in a field thinking about other times she stood out in a field. And I think a lot of my energy when living in the city was going towards the performance of being human. That idea of “Hello! Look, I got dressed today. Ta-da!”

span of time when someone has lived is clearly stated, and you have to understand their lifeline through a hyphen. ​ We make the future in the now. What are we going to do now? ​ Time does work in a cyclical way. It's not as linear as we like to think that it is, and that's what astrology tends to highlight.

A tiny bit of forethought, some cautionary design.

After each draft, I found myself asking "...why?," and I scratched them out and started over. but the truth is that that's not really what's occupying my mind these days…so, this month, as with every month, I'll give you what's actually on my mind. It's August now, and I have so few memories of doing anything this year. I've had a lot of group chats, FaceTime calls, phone calls, video calls, and even a few trips out of town, but those memories all feel translucent somehow, like I could put my hand right through them.

i let summer take over the house for however long it needs --- making their way from meal to meal across the sky --- it’s not quite true that every car should stop while a poem is in operation but try to tell me it wouldn’t be nice

Sitting around drinking coffee and reading books and scribbling notes to myself.

“But in autumn, the evening of the year, a gradual hush falls over nature, its human parts included.”

“I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones”