i'm meeting a boy this weekend,

i’m meeting a boy this weekend but my face is awful because of anxiety and i wonder if it’ll all come down before saturday. red splotches everywhere, will he even notice? do i blame it as blush? do i scapegoat embarrassment with a pass, a bit of humor? maybe i’ll cancel. i hope he’s not reading this.

will most definitely NOT miss dinner with hajin. meeting her man. she means the world to me and i want to know how she means the world to him. i want to see sparks in his eyes. i want energy to hum. i want to see it hum off goosebumped skin. 5 or 6 pm, need to double-check. i want love, visualized, like fog and nostalgic tango from history is made at night (1937).

it is annual tradition to ask my friends of their favorite films. to see why they love the world. also because it’s proof that i am a good friend. courtesy of karissa and carlo, i can’t believe it took me years of cinema to find the very embodiment of love here. this is cinema. and this piece of cinema saved the titanic goddamnit! you can watch the film in its entirety with the youtube link. i love me a youtube movie.

i’ll be wearing birkenstocks. bought used. stussy collab, bone white, though the logo is smeared off secondhand. beige-tones. jwa pillow clutch. you’re probably tired of me talking about it. but it’s the embodiment of dreams. and i want to walk city streets carrying my dreams. i want people to know this. i’m a walking dream.

i’m writing this from thursday, but by the time you read this, i’ll be with the boy. chilly, not cold. overcast. i have a gift for him, but it’s less of a gift and more of something i won’t use and need to get rid of. i have too many things. sometimes i count dreams as part of these things. maybe if i carry dreams out in the streets in the city then they’ll fall out, giving me less things to carry.

i’m always trying to have less things

to worry about.

maybe that’s why i watch so many movies.

maybe that’s why i read so many books.

it’s not that i worry over these stories. it’s that if i’m without these stories, than the rest of life won’t make sense.

i just watched himizu (2011). for the longest time i believed violence to be patriarchal. until i saw this. violence knows no sex. violence is. in everyone. in nature. and where does suffering vein from acts of violence?

we’re all hurt. and we all hurt each other. no matter sex. hurt people hurt people makes more sense now. people means all of us.

hours before i meet the boy, i will listen to this song to get ready:

played in bali, new year’s. found over insta-story from my favorite dj. it isn’t on spotify. there’s a vocal version of it, but this extended disco version swells as it should. all week i’ve been obsessed with it to the point of needing to put it on a third-party looper site to play it on repeat. disco music works in clubs because there are various swells that build and build, wind down, creep up, call goosebumps, burn the heart, cool off the skin. it’s liberty. do you know the difference between freedom and liberation? do you know what frees you? what flees from you?

when i meet the boy this weekend, i think i’ll say i’ve missed you. mixed with long time no see. because this works in korean. i cannot joke/half-mean where have you been all my life? i cannot half-mean/joke i’ve been waiting for you all my life.

i will meet the boy at the hermes gallery in gangnam. the art is gay and in the dark. what a dangerous combo. that’s just asking for action! with how things will play out, perhaps i’ll bring him to hajin’s dinner.

i want out. out of i went to see my father by kyung sook shin. it’s too blue. too much like winter. i’m already in winter. i don’t need winter to be more winter! 80 pages left. remember, it’s thursday. two buddy reads before february, on freedom by maggie nelson and the faggots and their friends between revolutions by larry mitchell.

i still have a cold. i hope it’s gone by tomorrow.

because i want a saturday night kiss. and i will not be sick and kiss.

call me courteous.

i want to kiss because i can’t get this line out of my head. via kiran’s newsletter, the poet and filmmaker forough farrokhzad has called my attention.

in the soft bed, my body

drunkenly quivered on his chest.

like a lone fish flopping about, gasping for water at the first taste of too much air. it tastes like death. is death too much? i want that. for the weekend.

i burn all my flames for the first week of january. i’m always like this. i always get like this. too bold, too brave, all eggs in one basket, and i’ll come crashing down, but i end with kiran’s latest newsletter note:

because it reminds me of all the desires in alphabetical diaries by sheila heti, which all of you should read. but in her latest work, she organizes all of her diary entries in alphabetical order. so all sentences starting with a will go under A, all sentences starting with be will go under B. but for q, there is a single sentence in her decade-span of diaries:

kiran says, i wish for more life, more reading, more writing, more art, and more beauty for you and me.

though in my regard, i do not wish, i will.

i will

i will

i will

no periods, no commas full stop

because i will die trying to read all the books and watch all the movies and write all the things necessary to me in 2024 i will—

and i wish you will too—

as always,

be well

do good work

keep in touch

<3

n

*copies of my my book have been restocked! you can grab your copy here.