Dear Diary #15
What If I Told You About My Entire Year
I have been back for a year now and I still cant really believe it.
There’s a lot to be overwhelmed by. Even the flight back was overwhelming. I had just given up everything I wanted to start over again, hoping this time I’d get it right after spending all the pandemic years leading up to this moment excavating my new self out of ether. There was a lot of turbulence on the flight, especially toward the end and during the landing. At one point, the flight attendants had to sit down and strap in, that type of situation. The middle-class white guy across from me in the very last seat of the plane starts clutching as the cabin shakes while we descend. I am trying so hard so hard not to giggle at him, and failing, and then making myself laugh more by failing to not laugh at this poor rich man’s emotional and intellectual misfortune. Trying my best to use my hand and mask to muffle myself as this guys life flashes before his eyes.
Dude, if we were dying, they’d tell us.
Once we land, the Latino guy sitting in front of the poor rich guy turns around and stares at me really intensely, like he’s trying to figure out what I am. Times like these I am so glad witchcraft isn’t illegal, because I would be at least thrice dead, but I didn’t even do anything this time, so this is extra fucked up. Eventually, I give the guy a sarcastic wave and he goes back to minding his business and waiting to get off the plan. The friendly middle-aged East Asian guy next to me perks up for the first time since we’ve been sat together, asking me if I am visiting or if this is home. I think he liked my unserious spirit. I answer him “I just moved back!” and the fact that I am being asked this question in this moment excites me. We get to chatting and he tells me he lives in Naperville and is flying in to see his two kids. One daughter in Brooklyn with a family and one son in Manhattan. He asked me what I do, and I push down the fact that I have just been fired to share with him that I am a writer. He’s really excited by this news. As we get off, he wishes me well in all of my endeavors, his exact words. I really needed a warm welcome to look back on, because my first three months being back here were mostly bullshit.
I get myself to Greenpoint. I do not know why I opted for a sublet in Greenpoint, but after some reflection, I think my subconscious had the wheel from November 2024 to March 2025. More on this later. In Greenpoint, I am welcomed to my sublet by a skinny, racially ambiguous girl with perfect highlights. I later find out it is a very impressive wig. She’s subletting the other room in the apartment. She’s dressed to go somewhere, because everyone in New York is always headed somewhere, but she gladly helps me with the tattered box of everything I own that’s not in storage or my luggage. We drag the box into my side of the railroad apartment and exchange strained (for me) chit-chat. She tells me she’s here from somewhere in Western Europe and she makes music, and I immediately joke to myself that she does music because she thinks she looks like Cleo Sol and later that night, at Rash, she does indeed compare herself to Cleo Sol. She’s here doing some collabs or whatever big city creative people call it when they work with others. She’s harmless, but I don’t miss people like her much. I let her live. The room I am staying in is filled with the art supplies, clothes and shoes of the woman who is on the lease. Somehow I push it down, but I know I was disappointed and not surprised. I knew when I saw the photos there was going to be a lot of stuff in here, which is usually the trait of someone who is trying to have their cake and eat it too, but I wasn’t thinking clearly and was very simply concerned with having somewhere to live.
I did my best to start to unpack and give myself some sort of normalcy. If I had to guess, I was tired. By the time night comes I notice another problem: the room is fucking freezing. There’s a window that won’t close. There’s no heater to be found. I then remember that the last time Barbara lived here was in September, so it was likely warm, and a non-operational window was not as big of an issue, especially in a room you don’t sleep in. I unpack what I can and lay down. I probably ordered delivery, smoked, and passed out.
There are many days in the sublet that I do not wake up until three P.M., and at no point do I think of seeking help. At no point do the people who claimed to be my friends recommend I seek help. None of them seem to see anything wrong with how I am behaving given everything I am going through, and that was a problem I didn’t have any energy to fix. I am doing my best to take my medication and get on benefits in New York, but they need so many different pieces of paper, I decide it’s easier to keep spending money I don’t have. I can’t cope with asking the girl I am subletting from to write a letter proving that I pay her to live there. I have spent half of the past year collecting and protecting bits of dignity where I could.
At some point I crack. Prior to this moment, I am participating in a situationship that’s begun to implode. I had no space for any more instability, but I didn’t feel like I had any power to end it, so I sabotaged it and faced the consequences. Better than being stuck, I guess. I see where I was coming from and I’m glad I did it. I also apologized. All’s well that ends fucked.
Years ago, I was smart enough to keep the keys to a friend’s apartment, which made being homeless for a few hours bearable. The night that I got kicked out of the sublet was the coldest night of the year. I was at a club in Manhattan when Barbara, like the green-eyed, cis-het Texas Latina she is, invited some backup, cis-het Latino goons to protect her, because she thinks she is a white woman, because she thinks I will hurt her. They put my stuff into the hallway of her building. My friends got us a car to her place, made sure I had my electronics and documents, and got the fuck on to Bed-Stuy, to another door I can open. We drop my stuff and got back to the club. After the club, we get breakfast at a diner where I can’t eat, but do chase my molly high with coffee, as if that’s how that works. On the way out, I meet Bill de Blasio, and have my friends take really cunty photos of me that I post on Instagram with the caption “jupi-gate”.
The new year starts, and I am waiting to be able to go back to Mexico for my yearly trip. Every day feels so long and I have no sense of purpose, but then I get to return. I have some sense of normalcy in the vast forest. The trees and the creek and the birds and the ants remind me that my life is greater than this one moment, and it’s all going to go, and I am, in fact, going to die, so I may as well take advantage of this non-ether chapter of my essence’s existence. Before and after this are probably both really boring.
After the trip, I move into what is likely the most uninhabitable living situation I have ever experienced.
Every day in the house off of Utica was the same. At five in the morning, the mother of the Child would wake up to go to one of those healthcare jobs that they sideline straight Black women into. At seven in the morning the Child, a one-year-old nonverbal autistic one, would wake up and cry. The Child’s cries were like no other I have ever heard or hope to hear. This child’s cries came from the depths of its lungs, saying what Child couldn’t yet, because that’s what crying is for, but this crying is doing far too much heavy lifting for what the Child must want to say. One night things escalate. He just won’t stop screaming, and the mother has lost all patience. I am in my room. The walls in the house are incredibly thin. I can hear the mother, the father, and the mother’s mother placing the Child’s toys in the hallway, to make room for what, I don’t know. I guess, Punishment. I can’t tell what they did to him, and my brain really doesn’t seem to want to remember, so I won’t pry. I remember hearing the mother expressing disdain for the child and her life, with the mother’s mother standing by, passively, as she usually did whenever anything stressful was happening. I definitely eavesdropped as I went to grab the jerk chicken I had gotten delivered, but I can’t recall what I heard. I remember the unamable feeling of when the child stopped crying. It’s like the mother yelled at him until he went even more nonverbal. I pray one day he gets to speak.
