I’m my number 1 gaslighter. I walk down mental alleyways and side streets for miles until I realize I’ve strayed from the main path and drag myself out of whatever maze I’ve placed myself in. Future fucking faking is me constantly feeding myself this happy narrative about life, about reality, about people. After years of doing it, I’ve come to realize that it’s my brain trying to wrap itself around the sterility of life and the sometimes massive emptiness that comes with it. My brain amps up the dopamine and serotonin trying to process it, putting me in a sedated haze.
The future is interesting to think about. My tarot reader in Guatemala said that I had to let things unfold as they were meant to, that I needed to stop forcing things to happen. “There’s a softening that wants to come through.” I love that word softening. It makes me think of butter melting under a golden sun. He brought up my confusion and my one too many dreams.
In high school my teacher had us read a poem and one of the lines in it was “what does the soft animal of your body desire?” I remember my last day in San Pedro, I hadn’t slept and was wired on too much caffeine. I paced around the streets “Maybe I could move to a beach abroad, learn to surf. Stay out there for months. Return to NYC stranger, with curlier hair, and darker skin.” Another erratic dream added to my list. I love the way food tasted there, how my body responded to the sunlight, the energy, the subdued energy of everything. I wonder if, in that moment, I truly came into the awareness of what the soft animal of my body desires.
I want to admonish myself for not knowing what my next step will be. Maybe it’s easier to think of life as an inevitability. When I visited Belize 1.5 years ago I knew then that I would visit Guatemala. Now that I’ve returned from Guatemala, the world has opened up. From what it pushed me towards, I think I’m being encouraged to go abroad for a longer, deeper journey. Maybe I’ll take my projector with me this time.
a soft death 