Chewing Gum & Graphite.

For The Displacement Project, we had to write one stream-of-consciousness page on what it feels like to worry. Here’s mine. It’s to be read very, very quickly.

I miss you and I don’t know if I’m supposed to or not. I know I told you I was trying to focus on the present but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have talked about the future even a little. I feel like I’ll have to say something when I see you again (which will hopefully be soon, but who knows?). Four months is a long time to not see someone, so that’s significant, right? Significant that nothing seemed to change, really, from that night on the roof at the end of August, the slightly humid air electrified with all the terrible clichés spiraling through my head, until Thursday. It’s like we picked up right where we left off. Well, almost. Backtracked a bit, picked up, and went on, naturally. But once again, once again, it was cut short, it was only a day; there was the weak promise of seeing you again before I came back to New York, which was left unfulfilled, dangling sadly in the air. And now what am I supposed to do? What are we supposed to do? Anything? Nothing? Something? WHAT? My life seems to be marked with uncertainty, brimming with I-don’t-knows, constantly threatening to spill over and knock me down in its wild current and now my hands are shaking. From what? It’s more my right hand than my left. From what? Lack of food, maybe. All I ate today was a Nutri-Grain bar and some pretzels and I’m probably going to make pasta for dinner. I should probably do that soon. My diet today is too one-dimensional. I need like, an apple or something. I should really go food shopping. Literally all that is in my fridge are two Brita filters, black current jam, salsa, and chocolate syrup. The cabinet’s not much better. I probably haven’t drank enough water today either, and I really have no excuse for that. I keep thinking about how, when I was in Arizona, whenever I turned on the faucet on the sink or in the shower, it always smelled like natural gas, and what the hell was that about? I really wanted to try that experiment in which you hold a flame to running water and see if it ignites. I remember at first I tried to breathe shallowly whenever I was in the shower, hyperbolically thinking that I could get poisoned if natural gas was really coming out of their pipes. As the days went on and I continued to shower and not feel lightheaded, I calmed down a bit, but it was still strange, and I’m definitely glad to be back in a place where water smells exclusively like water. I don’t know when I’m supposed to change my Brita filters. I know the water here is safe to drink anyway, but…

My right hand is still shaking.

All I want to do right now is sit in my bed and read House of Leaves but I know that’s a terrible idea because it’s creepy as hell and I get scared way too easily. I was reading it the other day when I was flying home and the second plane that I took was at night and I was 35 thousand feet in the air in the dark reading an incredibly creepy story and wondering why I was doing that to myself; flying makes me anxious enough as it is. On the first plane I remember looking out of the window and spotting a field of clouds in the distance, a vast blanket stretching over Illinois. I went back to my book (which was less affecting, considering it was light out). A couple of pages later I looked again and we were right on the edge of the clouds; they were disarmingly close. But they did look lovely, all of them, it, the blanket, the mass, so soft and inviting. But then I reminded myself that they were nothing but drops of water – water, not cotton, not foam, not feathery down. Being in contact with them would be nothing but wet and cold and unpleasant. They wouldn’t catch you if you were falling; they wouldn’t care, wouldn’t know, and the only imprint made would be not from your body itself but from the rush of air that followed you as you fell. The next time I looked out the window the plane was perched right on top of the clouds and I knew we were going to have to descend through them eventually; it was unavoidable. When we finally did, everything was white, foggy, and still, though it somehow made the plane tremble. We stayed immersed for too long and all knowledge of technology disappeared from my mind as I wondered how the pilot could navigate through this and my claustrophobia started to act up so I tried not to look out the window and I was reminded of being underwater, stuck in a wave and my hands were probably shaking similar to how they are shaking now and when we finally, miraculously, got out of the clouds, we were flying over (I’m assuming) a suburb of Chicago. We flew over a collection of houses, some still adorned with Christmas lights and wouldn’t it be tragic to crash into them so close to the airport? My mind always goes there, to the extreme of any situation: What if the plane crashes? What if my mom falls asleep while she’s driving and we veer off the road? It’s late and my roommate isn’t back and she never answered my text so she must have gotten murdered or kidnapped or both. And you, downstairs, probably don’t give a shit about me, and you, in another city, probably don’t either.

My hands are still shaking.