#102418

Giannis Antetokounmpo — Milwaukee Bucks

Bambam: Nahhh I’m from Thailand!

My skin is so dry, it's peeling, just peeling off in small sections, uneven and dandruff-like. My arms feel like salt was rubbed into them. It's lack of water. No matter how much I drink, it’s never enough. Some days I wander around the city, zombie-like, missing a ghost. Yesterday, following a dream I had where he came back, alive again but almost dead--I was forced to relive the dread of we won’t have this for much longer and the way it expands itself over each encounter, staining it. I awoke shaking and panicked and hurt, the fear and sadness of death and loss resounding from my unconstrained subconscious. I tucked myself into D’s arm like I do with every bad dream, visibly shaking, and he awoke and held me. Why did my brain do that to me? I asked him. Now I'm worried that he's not okay. I need to know he's okay. You're still grieving, he said. It’s only been a month. After that dream I've been anxious and sad in a way I haven't been yet. I cried almost daily for the first two weeks, but I was still alright. There was a stage of equilibrium between sadness and joy that made it so that I teetered on the edge of neither feeling for too long. This is different. It's become more disturbing on an existential level. Maybe it's sinking in more, or my subconscious simply opened an unfiltered pain that I was keeping safely locked away. I don't appreciate that. I had enough death anxiety already. I may be obsessed with death--I think about it daily, and now something I love has died.  He tells me: If you think about death every day and fear it every day, then you are not really living. I know this. Knowing doesn't make it leave. I stumbled around Grand Central in a grief-filled daze. I was forced to attend a meeting at corporate headquarters, the sixth circle of hell. I was shaking and trying to find an exit and trying to hold in the grief so as to not bring it into the meeting with me. I walked into Cafe Grumpy (and thought, fitting). I let two women go ahead in the line before me. They were appreciative and started light conversation with me, telling me they were new to the city. They asked questions like if I commute here--said they'd never been to this cafe and what drink do I recommend? I told them I'm mostly a tea person, but the coffee is good. They smiled warmly at me through bright blue eyes. They lifted my mood briefly and I was thankful for them. I hate what we are born into. I sat in D’s apartment yesterday after a nap, barely able to lift my tired mind and body from the heaviness of sleep and the heaviness of the bed and the heaviness of the darkness that now encompasses everything by 6 PM and the heaviness of not knowing if I love him and not knowing if it's just me who is incapacitated and unable to love another person well, unable to love someone who actually truly loves me. I only know how to love selflessly what will never love me back. D and I talked about this in the SoHo restaurant as well. I said to him: all my friends are cold. They are kind people, but they do not hug, or kiss, or say I love you, or hold me when I'm sad, or take care of me at the rare times that I reach out to them needing badly to be loved. I only know how to love cold people. I can keep them comfortably at arms length, and they can do the same with me. You're trying to fill a void with friends, he said. But what you really need is a family, and you don't feel like you have that, so you're looking for them to be your family. Nine times out of ten, he is another solar system outside of understanding me, orbiting comfortably around the dogmatic perspective he has etched himself into. (Or etched into himself?) But by the tenth time, he is so spot-on I begin to doubt all the other times he isn’t. None of them are, I respond. They are all my mother and father: tepid. remote. Not sure whether I thought that last part, or said it aloud. If I have kids one day it will be for the selfish reason that I need them. I need something to love that is, statistically, not as likely to die before me. I will bring a child into this same reality for my own selfish survival. Not sure whether that was a thought or a statement, either. Either way, I meant it. The next day, another corporate nightmare, another cafe. Wandering around zombie-like, missing him terribly, wondering if he's anywhere. 

10.24.18

prism_terra #귤

Stephen Curry — Golden State Warriors

Stephen Curry — Golden State Warriors