DEAR DIARY

10.25.2024 in Old Bod

Everything here is old. Everything old here is relentlessly penetrated by modernity - stone steps ground down by centuries of scholarly boots are illuminated by LED glare and accessed by temperamental fob-activated automatic doors. Lucius Carey (Viscount Falkland/Fell at Newbury 1643) is looking down at me right now with painted eyes. He shouldn't be seeing me like this - I'm wearing Banana Republic jeans. I should not be passing through his hall, a specter of the present haunting the past.

Everything is old here. It changes your sense of scale. You enter a building constructed in 1925 and expect the paint to still be wet. You enter a building constructed in 1955 and expect the walls to still be sticky with amniotic fluid.

10.21/24.2024 Laura Kieler/after French

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.

I deserve a second coffee. I deserve a third. I deserve a latte made with whole milk. When I sit in a café -- and I am sitting in a café now -- I deserve to have the jittery young man with the tapping foot fall in love with the idea of me, unable to focus on the paper he is reading on patterns of seed distribution caused by rodent communities because he is imagining me flushed and reclined, a series of brushstrokes in the background of a better world. Coffee is far too expensive nowadays, and glorification should be included in the price.

10.20.2024 treating a man as an end in himself

I am in the library of ----- College, Oxford, sitting in the upper terrace level that you get to by climbing this steep wooden staircase. I'm in the library because I'm allowed to be here because I'm a student and have Access. I'm in the library because I need to be here because I'm a student and have Work. I'm here to do work but I'm not doing work - I'm just here.

I haven't been a student in a long time. I haven't had required readings in a long time. I haven't had access in a long time.

Yesterday was matriculation. I wore the black velvet skirt I bought from Ross Dress for Less for the 6th grade winter glee performance, the one where we sang "Hot Chocolate." Sub fusc! Gown! Mortarboard! They spoke Latin in the Sheldonian Theater to a discordant choir of throaty chesty mucosal coughs that rose and fell and echoed, bouncing off the painted cherubim. The coughs, that is. Not the Latin. The Latin was quiet and specific. There was a speech on how we are Joining a Community of Scholars etcetera. A woman with a Palestinian flag interrupted. The coughing paused for a moment - everything paused for a moment - to make space for the disruption, for the nondescript young woman and her flag. But guards appeared almost instantly and she was escorted out and the speech resumed, flat and unruffled, exactly where it had left off, and the coughing rushed back in to fill any empty air pockets. Coughing will rush in. Coughing is like that.

We ate brunch afterwards. We got our photos taken. We hovered in a day that was meant to be more than a day. We drank prosecco at turf tavern, poured from tiny bottles into large glasses. I sat alone in my room afterwards, beached amid cardboard Amazon boxes and expenses, and wondered how to expand, or maybe contract, to fit snugly within a moment.

I have lost time. I don't know how to come to terms with that. I don't know how to sit with that, or within that. There must be some way to expand, or maybe contract, to fit snugly within loss, to not rattle around like the last Altoid in a tin, sustaining constant vertebrae damage from the impact.

I'm breathing out years. I'm peeing out years. I blow my nose and there are years - crude and viscous - in the Kleenex. I want to be okay with this. I need to be okay with this. I will study hard and learn to be okay with this.

10.03.2024 mildly hungover in an Oxford coffee shop listening in to the airpod conference call of a young man in tweed with red socks and velvet loafers and a pocketwatch and a montblanc pen who is attempting to set the groundwork for company collaboration

I believe I employed the word "crystallize"

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