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The sky in Arequipa has me feeling giddy and spoiled after Lima's white, foggy simulation backdrop. Here, every hour brings a new act, and I find myself checking in on the daily performance.

7:00- An expanse of ordered clouds, thick and cottony, matching the sleep still in my eyes.
11:00- A pure cornflower hue wears at my sworn antipathy towards the cold, distant call of all blues.
14:00- No sky to look up at, just sun. Screaming, insistent sun.
16:00- The flirtation between pink and gold makes all three of the city’s volcanoes blush and glow.
17:30- Dusk floats in on this bed of the most tender tasting gradient of cadmium, coral, and lilac while the moon sits, waiting in the wings.
18:00- I am a tiny witness to the epic, ancient battle between orange and blue. The contours of reality pose for me in high contrast and all is exquisite.
21:00- A deep periwinkle stasis dotted with silver freckles curtsies good night.

My loved ones and I wish for our oppressors’ demise, but in consolation we fantasize about our own exits. Two fictions, bound like a sweet bow. All around us too many people are saying too much, speaking too often, insisting upon leading conversations, polluting the streams with language they have extracted from us…

Indulging in metaphors of living like a refugee because of impending ecological collapse.

Who wrote for you to write?

I am disappointed that under the weight of this life all I can do is say less, write less, retreat. I wake up and I don’t know how to write. I go to bed and I wonder why they are not more exhausted. Why have the vowels not vanished for them?

I am tired of their obedience and I am resentful of how their obedience has shaped me. Misery has emptied all their recesses of true imagination, and this claustrophobic space is where we are expected to become. Their attachment to this dysfunctional life means that we can never divorce ourselves from it ourselves, it is a cruelty that wears me out but makes me ruder, tougher, angrier. ….
Good morning! What have you done to democratize suffering today?

We watched the professionalized, the middle class, and the upwardly mobile become radicalized this year, pursuing liberation through opportunism and neoliberalism after they discovered alienation and loneliness for the first time. A foolish detour into self-recovery when the horizon is collective transformation.

Repeat,
Loneliness is not disappearance
Loneliness is not dissappearance
Loneliness is not disappearance

…Cultural production is burdened to resolve what every other entity in this universe cannot. It is incapable but so are we. Maybe we let it die.

I wonder if we will ever write again in a time without disaster. I know the answer to this. I know that too many energies have to be reorganized for new worlds to feel possible. I know that getting what we want means losing what we want. I know that nothing works and nothing is true I know I know.

But I don’t wanna be true I am tired I am depressed I am powerless I am powerful I am a misandrist I am petty I am weak I am arrogant I never forgive I am uncompromising I think of you often I have nothing left to say but I love I say nothing but I still exist

Chaos and fear and panic and surprises and alternative endings.

None of the usual fear that I am bruising her peach soft exterior- in fact feeling a certain unspoken current of energy between us that night , somehow upheld by the deliberate lack of eye contact as we slipped addictive substances into each other’s hands.

I have felt so very Venusian for some time now. So very swept up in the fickle and fleeting nature of human relations. So arrested by (and lately enamored with) the senses I continue to be gifted with morning after day after evening after night. I am easy and moldable and yet still solid, taking form as it pleases any given composition almost unconsciously. There is observation involved, of course, but I am noticing it has become a kind of watchfulness that only settles on that which serves me. Turning an eye comes just as naturally as turning a phrase. I am of flesh, just as responsive to a held gaze or a smile coming from the throat as I am likely to embody them. I am recipient and participant in all that I admire. Any and everything is up for resurrection and then appraisal. I want it all gilded and supple and I want it now.

Mercurial me has been shelved. No need for questions and circular roving right now. I am unfurled and unfazed, confident in my ability to attract and reject.

Thinking of the cycles of hobbies (is "hobby" english’s worst word? Where is the dignity in calling the activities that center and heal and are me,“hobbies”??) that keep me alive. Routines that are never constant but they are cyclical and build one upon the other, each riding its own wave, sure to wane but always always to return. How pleasant it is to indulge in my interests, how if I only maintain these interests, I will have something to live for.
Something to live for.
Not “a purpose” but something to live for.
I’m not always making art and I’m not always writing nor am I always sewing or even reading- But they each happen often enough- in their own time -that I can count on their longevity and the thought warms me.

I have so much to say to you. That’s precisely my problem. I let all the little things accumulate— let them clutter my brain in little miscellaneous piles—A Tetris standstill of observations and expectations