Phenomenology

I used to fantasize about being a ghost, as a preteen. 

About dying, partially, yes. Not having to exist, when you’re fourteen, isn’t that the fucking dream? Not yet knowing how to eat, or think, or be. 

But to be a ghost, more so. To see how it goes. Slobbering over the fantasy of seeing, eventually, everything. To lay face first, mouth open at the bottom of a stream, tasting the rocks and looking for larvae. With hubris, to want to see it, that moment, the world ending. However long it takes, please god, I wanted to see. 

I don’t know most names, of the rocks, or the clouds, or the trees, or celebrities. I’ve tried, occasionally, to ask them, but I have no real interest in learning. Cedar, usually. Nettles. Slate. Timothe Chalamet. Trillium. 

I can’t really recognize faces. I have no interest in machines. 

But I’m very small, in memory. Climbing to the top of the playground platform, and the sun is out, and it’s summer time. I bring my friend up; look, look, look. At what? I don’t know. Everything? I don’t want to play, I just want to sit here. I just want to look at it. 

I’m a little older, and I’m shaking, crying, because I can’t stop feeling all my limbs. Much older, and there’s a little spider, zebra striped on my thigh, playing in my skirt hem, shaken off at the gas station. At work, today, a man gave me half a baguette, homemade. 

I lay in bed and feel the soft sheets on my skin. 

I went to the Museum of Northwest Art last Wednesday. Close to where I work, and free, and a shame I’d never been. Their current exhibit, Femina Lucida: The Art of Nancy Mee.

Critiquing an exhibit feels like criticizing a memoir. It makes me feel rude. But Mee’s work is blue blown glass and metal and scoliosis, spilled blood and a strong nose. Braced and pinched, violent and controlled. From signage, I think (I didn’t take notes): some time in Hawaii, maybe, and an interest in the deformed. Talking to my roommate, afterwards, and calling it accessible. Blunt enough for a person like me. 

I take a different route home, up Chuckanut drive. There’s ducks in the fields, still a little flooded. Big bodied vultures on the top of telephone poles. Buoys draped over doorways. I pull off to the side of the road and eat the best muffin I’ve ever had; double lemon, from an awful little coffee shop with burnt lattes and ai slop on the walls. 

I used to journal while weighted under the belief that everything was important. Like it was my sacred duty to document as much as possible, a penance for this desire to experience. Making up for the lack of ambition, or curiosity. Like guilty consumerism of the world, a hungry mouth of a vessel. To not want to to be anything, not really, but to justify my existence. I can see, and I can remember. Isn’t that enough?

I’m just looking right now, for now. I’m so fucking happy.