Disappear

My friend Alan posted a video years ago. He had discovered a way to instantly change the colour of a morning glory flower from blue to purple to pink—by holding a lit cigarette to its petals. At the time he acknowledged the act as evil. But morning glory is invasive. It grows over fences and up through stone, it strangles my herbs and my marigolds and, hydra-like, you can never cut it back fast enough, its milky sap weeping like alien blood. And besides: Alan is no longer here and morning glory will cover the earth when nothing else does.

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Due to a chronic eye condition, I have to wear glasses 95% of the time now and I hate it. Superficially, I think they make me ugly. Honestly, I believe they obscure my needs and desires from the world, which can only be conveyed through Looking. Someone told me once that my eyes seemed to hold so much. No one Sees me anymore. My lenses flare green in reflected light. I may as well be a machine.

I used to be the kind of person who never took phone photos on vacation. Berlin, London, Florence, Naxos. I wanted to experience it in totality, for that experience to be the memory—no facsimiles, no images of famous buildings or street signs or stray cats. I didn’t want to unknowingly take a photo that was identical to someone else’s. I wanted to be able to re-live the sound of the Aegean, the Ionian, the Tyrrhenian, not just be reminded of its hue. I was so stupid, because no memory is secure, and if I wanted to hear the sound of waves crashing against a shoreline in the Cyclades, it’s on YouTube.

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I am struggling with the thought that many things can become meaningless despite one’s best efforts.

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I started writing by hand in physical notebooks again. Journaling, I guess, although the word now feels stigmatized, a by-product of therapyspeak. I have two of them. One is for Morning Pages—a stream-of-consciousness practice meant to instigate clarity and creativity. The other is for Thoughts, usually bad ones. Journaling, as a mental health exercise, serves a dual purpose: it creates a space to process thoughts and emotions as they happen, which then becomes a record of those thoughts and emotions in order to track patterns and progress. I don’t do that. I bought a small, hand-crank paper shredder from Amazon to destroy all evidence of my fears and longings. It is made from transparent smoke-grey plastic and it can shred 4 sheets of Tomoe River Paper at once, the pages instantly turning into linguine, into papier-mâché fodder. I’ve heard that yearning has come back into fashion. Not for me. You can’t prove that I feel anything.