Greetings, loved ones / Let's take a journey
> note on all this> diary
> men I know and don't know
> garden notes
> about me
> about sinks
> eworm home
DEAR DIARY
07.07.2026 noli me tangere
July is a well-lit but hazy slice of time, sweet and lacking empathy. July is only in town for a little while. He is tall with long legs so each step takes him far. He will play his guitar in the warm evenings and girls will fall in love with him, undo their pigtails and swim with him in the sun-warmed sea. They will beg him to stay forever but he will soon leave, strolling casual down the dusty road. Because his legs are long his steps are long. He will stride off into a collapsing curtain of oranges, reds, and purples until next year when he comes back whistling.There are some girls in town who, when their time-lined mothers warn them to be wary of him, really do listen. These girls do not let down their hair or splash, laughing and suntanned, in the sea. They watch from upstairs windows, through curtains half-drawn. In bed at night they imagine being seduced and abandoned.
These girls do not let down their hair. They brush it back slicker and tighter, graduating from pigtails to sleek low buns. Their necklines inch upwards. In September their cousins return from summer in Florence and gift cameo brooches, which they wear daily at their throats. When snow first falls late November they put on thick cloaks and gloves and walk brisk to church and back again. They re-enter the house (it is like they never left the house) and look in the mirror and brush cold flakes from collar, cheeks, and hair. The white in the hair does not brush off. It does not come out. It is growing from the scalp.
07.06.2026
Beep norbo squamp. Squimblet in orbo. Norfit bonk. Sporbin bonk. In ibo nip plimb amplicop. Porb. Porb! Porbo SQUAMP.(later) Ippppppp... Non squamp.
07.04.2026
Up at 4:37am, shocked, breathless, and in awe of how many days/months/years I've allowed to passively elapse.07.02/03.2026 "they knew what they were doing when they made Patrick Bateman hot"
On Monday, when we were walking towards Millennium Bridge, I mentioned having been hit by an e-bike.You said "I know."
I was confused. We hadn't spoken--not properly--in about a year. Last time we saw each other we didn't talk about e-bikes, there was no opportunity to discuss e-bikes, e-bikes did not enter into it. How could you know?
You'd read my e-worm entry, you said.
Of course. I'd described the incident in detail on a public website I voluntarily link-in-bio on instagram.
But to hear you say "I know" ? ??
Later, you told me you'd also shown _____ my journal, when the two of you hung out. This was a shock to the system. "I think," you said, "I showed him the entry where you got hit by the e-bike."
So all at once I had to picture the two of you, maybe in Regent's Park, maybe somewhere else entirely, heads craned over one screen, pressed close and intimate, simultaneously thinking about me getting hit by an e-bike. Or maybe you handed him your phone and awkwardly stood there waiting while he watched me (in his mind's eye) get hit by an e-bike.
I had to picture the two of you picturing me getting hit by an e-bike.
On Tuesday, I took the Bakerloo line to the National Gallery. In the National Gallery there is this brilliant shock of a Velasquez painting. A nude woman reclines on the far wall of a room mostly populated by royal portraits and throbbing martyrdoms and the familiar Hapsburg chin of Philip IV. She lies on her right side, back to the audience, on a bed or divan draped with cloth. The divan's slope emphasizes the pale curve of waist, hips, buttocks. She looks into a small, rectangular mirror held up by a cherub. Her reflected face--angled improbably towards the viewer--is smudged serious, darker and less definite than the luminous body in front of which it hovers.
When I entered the room, a male docent was gesturing to the woman. He was telling a cluster of tourists how unique she was, how atypical of Velasquez's work, how rare for a female nude to survive the violently imposed modesty of the Spanish Inquisition.
The group moved on.
An American-accented father and his young croc-wearing son stopped and examined her. The boy got bored and wandered off. The father hovered a moment longer, called out "wait!" before rushing to catch up. His gaze was the last thing to pull away.
When I got home I looked the painting up on Google. The English call her the Rokeby Venus. She is famous and valuable. On March 10th, 1914, the day after one of Emmeline Pankhurst's numerous arrests, fellow suffragette Mary Richardson walked into the National Gallery with a meat cleaver and slashed the Venus seven times. News reports used the language not of vandalism but of murder. One woman had butchered another with a meat cleaver. The perpetrator was crazed, political, and irrational. The victim was innocent and recumbent, sensual but posed on unquestionably clean sheets.
Decades later, Richardson discussed her motives for the attack. The British system, she felt, refused to honor its clothed women, would not listen to their needs or grant them political agency, but poured funds into this nude figure, who hung silent and passive while men funneled in to ogle her.
The Venus was quickly restored. She hangs at the far end of a gallery. Around her are Hapsburgs and saints.
I did not know about her when I wrote, on October 21, 2024:
I deserve to be asked to remove my robe. I deserve to be told to remove my robe. I deserve to be ordered to put my feet here and here, to place my forearm -- no- no- there- yes, just there-- like that. Right there. And-- hold. I deserve to be approached - arranged - adjusted - commanded to curve my fingers - to extend my thumb - to cup my hand slightly so the knuckles show (it will make the hand look longer if the knuckles show). I deserve to have the tension in my wrist observed and aestheticized.
I deserve to have my name added to the museum label decades later by a bisexual intern passionate about highlighting silenced women and bringing their voices to the forefront. I deserve to hang across from Saint Sebastian, set in passive, if controversial, curatorial conversation. I deserve to be vandalized and then meticulously restored.
Or on October 18, 2023, when I wrote:
Someday, I hope to inspire a fantasy. They say that women are more likely to hang naked in a museum than to ever have a piece displayed in one. One day, I would like to hang naked on the wall of a museum. One day, I would like to hang naked on the wall of a villa in the background of someone's dream, rendered softly and flatteringly in oils, gently inviting. It is okay if I am forgotten in the morning. Actually – it is not okay if I am forgotten in the morning, but I have to be okay with being forgotten in the morning. Dreams are like that – you simply can't be picky about how you appear in other people's dreams.
When you picture me--if you ever picture me--is it clothed or nude? Standing, reclining, or seated? Crossing a bridge? Lying back on an analyst's couch? Hunched, poorly postured, over a laptop? Getting hit by an e-bike?
On December 2, 2024, I wrote:
Tell me something that makes me feel good about myself, really good. Tell me that if you could paint well you would paint me, and you'd paint me well, and it would be good.
When I wrote that December 2 2024 entry I was thinking, in part, of a conversation I'd just had with you. I suppose, when I wrote it, I was thinking of you. I suppose that you, in some way, occupy that entry. This whole weird journal is like that--it holds scraps of people, places, and things accessible only to me but which, once pinned in place by involuntary, indirect reference, are pinned for good. I can't actually remember what we'd talked about. But it doesn't much matter.