I) preoccupation

I build a small queendom.

A rooftop garden of astroturf and half-lit roaches.

All this because my sister tells me Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the Plague…

I think it was the dejected weather that sold me, streets narrow and uninviting, never-ending dampness, all housed within a country that only reminisces the past. I hate it here.

I resent our glaring similarities; but that is only because I would probably hate it anywhere that wasn’t New York. Be still my ordinary life,7 the one that I watched fling itself from the Empire State Building. I had a job, a real one— not one of those stupid customer service disasters that no feeling human should be subjected to.8

As disenchanted as I am, shamelessly sprawling on my illusory throne made from a stolen lawn chair and a duvet cover sans stuffing, I have a task. Cherry-picking my way through yet another helpless book trying to name (justify) my condition.

I conceptualize how bizarre I look; half naked, sunglasses, something rolled, American. Existing. The nice normal folk in the flats around me wince– I don’t blame them, I have the most disgusting rooftop garden on the block. But it is mine. Virginia Woolf sees no reason for me to be procrastinating.9

7

Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking (London, Fourth Estate, 2005) 4. Didion describes an engrossment with a newfound definition of ‘ordinary’. Most who grieve describe the past as ordinary, as if there was no trace or warning of unconventional disturbance. Was it ‘an ordinary beautiful day’ when that drunk driver hit? I bet it was…

8

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (New York, Verso, 2004) 41. I love Solanas’ outlook on an automated future here. She suggests all non-creative jobs should be automated, freeing humans (especially women) to use their brains as they were intended. Considering my attitude and treatment of the public has gotten me fired at every low end job I’ve ever had, I welcome this future. Customer service has killed honest emotion. I know you don’t want to work either, so why are we fighting?

9

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London, Penguin Classics, 1929). Virginia Woolf infamously claims that in order to write fiction a woman must have, well, a room of her own. The idea here is that history is male constructed, nobody can argue that, but women have been trapped into views that don’t represent us because our sources are male. A room is a start, but I bet a shit ton of money would help. $ £ € ¥.

Speaking of nice normal folk my neighbors seem nice and normal.

I don’t actually know that I just know that their gardens are much nicer and much more normal than mine.

There’s an old lady with some sort of spaniel in the flat east to mine I think

she plays reggae unpredictably, and I like it she chats with her youthful working class neighbor she offers him a beer they share a stonewall that is covered in moss.

I saw him bring her groceries once I wonder if she has a condition or if he’s just nice I doubt it

but, he refuses the money she offers I can see him waving his hands in the air I can’t hear what he says but I do try.

I am ripped from my fantasy when the old lady with the spaniel belatedly asks if I am enjoying the uncharacteristic English weather. I nod too eagerly, as one does when they are caught being a dirty voyeur. I might as well have binoculars.

I have this strange urge to introduce myself. I do not. It’s complicated.

The only one thing I know for sure is I am not present. My imagination seems to get thrown easily these days. “Certainly someone could produce an account of this freezing time as an act of dissociation, or a borderline psychotic effort to erect a shield against the death’s reality,” writes poet Denise Riley, who lost her son unexpectedly, “I want to avoid offering my amateur speculations about existing theories, instead, while hoping not to lapse into melodrama, or self-regarding memoir…” I must interject. No, the maudlinism is real. I do not know where in history sorrow became regarded as exaggeration. I blame the masculine sources Woolf was talking about. I am twenty five years old, I am in pain, and I will not apologize for sounding as such.

“I’ll try to convey that extraordinary feeling of a-temporality.” 10 I am not here. As Riley admits, this state is not rare, possibly the most universally untold symptom to loss. I am a voyeur to this Earth, I watch it rotate without me. This arrested time lasts days, months, and then if you’re me, well...

Back to the sort-of present now I am three years unrecovered! I declare this mockingly into the sky. Three years? I have left my grief untouched for three years? I unsuccessfully try and direct my attention away from the clinical and back towards my dysfunctional peeping habits. But alas, I’m record-scratch-stuck in grief again.

I wonder what She would think of all this fresh madness…

10 Denise Riley, Say Something Back/Time Lived Without Its Flow (New York, NYRB, 2020) 71.

My sister breaks me from my lead-colored11 reverie with a ring on the telephone. I lost my page anyway.

“Happy Birthday!” A sing-songy lyric transmits over the ocean.

I’ve lost track of time figuratively and spatially. I’ve let my skin burn red.

April is a minefield, taunting me with all sorts of ironies. I will spare you all the calendric details, because even when it happened I thought it was a joke; that someone would conjure up a world where She dies five days before my twenty third birthday. Her death and my birth are housed in the same month of deceitful renewal. The planet decided to add to the festivities this year with a pandemic. So much to analyze and yet all I can conjure is that April is an inconvenient month for me to be stuck alone and almost out of drugs…

“It’s not my birthday yet.” I say dryly. Do not age me and push me further from my last tangible moment of normalcy.

“I know that, we are celebrating early!” She keeps the enthusiastic charade. It’s very impressive considering my sister cannot keep a secret.

I’m waiting.

“Okay, I had a morbid thought,” she finally admits. “I’m sending your gifts early, just in case I die the same day mother did, I don’t want my present to also arrive on your birthday posthumously.”

Simone De Beauvoir, 11 A Very Easy Death (New York, Pantheon, 1964) 20. My absolute favorite phrase when talking about a melancholic world view, “a lead colored world”.