october
There’s a hurricane in Florida right now and the scammer slash influencer Caroline Calloway is reporting live from Instagram. The internet thinks she’s going to die with her cat Matisse. Everyone feels bad for Matisse and they hate Caroline for sticking around just so she can write another essay and sell more books via sticker links. They hate her fake lips and blush blindness.
What a terrible, terrible thing to happen, they all say. She doesn’t need those fillers.
I don’t want to write about Caroline Calloway or devastating world events. It’s been some time since I’ve been here, anyway. I think: just something outside of what’s become my day-to-day. Nothing that can be invoiced. “Amp’d” up. Or broken apart into channel-specific elements that can be scanned and known in an instant. So that in as few words as possible, it can be convincing and understood.
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October.
There’s sunshine but my insides feel dark and slow moving — viscous and biting like poisoned treacle. They’re heavy, but I’m desperate to write lightly; to see my chosen letters crystallised and sparkling in the sunshine, like the salt pans I walked and tasted in Gozo.
It feels like a long time ago now; those speedy, technicolour days where we ate crunchy pastries on the sidewalk and every day we drove across that country like we were happy runaways. I had intended to immortalise them into small, contained groups of words that could decorate the corners of what remains in memory like those statues of Catholic Saints we saw everywhere.
I would run my fingers over silent, limestone walls and you were always dressed like a mob boss on vacation and I meant to get it all down on a blank page, just like this one.
I had planned to preserve that feeling of weightlessness – of time stretched into forever – so that I could place it on my desk like a tiny, glowing relic. A souvenir of what it’s like to think of nothing bad and experience everything good.
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If I was going to write something new, I wanted it to be funny and come from a place of emotional stability.
Paragraphs that show how much I’ve paid to sit in front of a therapist for over a year; a weekly allocation of funds which I’m now spending to straighten my smile and rebuild several teeth with resin — so that they’re just as glossy-real as veneers. Irony, at least in this example, is not the same thing as humour.
It would be nice to write something that feels like a happy escape for someone else, which are some of the last words I heard from someone I loved dearly many years ago.
Write romance novels, she had said. There’s not enough people writing about the happy things.
The people online right now might be writing about Caroline’s fake lips because they don’t want to think about Matisse dying or the many other pets and people dying. It seems easier to consider the tragedy of an hyaluronic acid-filled face over the notion that one day, we too will need to leave the lives we knew behind.
Maybe I’m writing about it because even though it’s not light, at least it’s something to fill a blank screen and I’ve not yet figured out, at least here, what to say.
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