AGITATION
This project is being conceived out of necessity for truth—a truth born with urgency and made fertile through forces of unbearable friction stirred within these quiet and unexpected moments contained by both internal and external agitations.
All of this leaves me exposed to a pool full of grief and self-doubt. Who am I now? Who can I be now? Where can I put down this grief?
On a random Friday, I pulled on the loosened ends that held a very convenient, very comfortable life. The day started with plans for coffee and ended with a conversation containing the first agonizing truth I would have to face. That was the beginning of the end.
Who am I without the security I look to find in others? It doesn’t matter— I can no longer afford to pretend one can outsource such a momentary guarantee. I am too old now to look towards the one(s) I love to settle any self-doubt and fear that, if left raging and at its most unruly within me, destroys the possibility for peace in my life.
On a particularly sweltering hot Saturday in LA, I felt myself drowning in a pool of grief once more. I lay on your bed under too many layers of sweat in your room. Why now, of all moments, had I let the fear of opening myself up to this thing I’ve wanted for so long run feral? This thing that, underneath all the heat-induced delusion of that weekend, I still want.
Could you picture me better? I close my eyes, and I see us on your couch. You reading the Sonic Youth book I spent way too much money on, me reading the latest issue of your zine. Your arm is firmly resting on my leg. These moments, I realize, are the moments which provide me the security I’m in desperate search of. The warmth I find myself enveloped in during these fleeting moments of security cannot be found in a promise, not in any guarantee of a future; it is not contained within any convincing explanation we could come up with to explain what it is we are doing together. This warmth only finds me in these quiet moments of performance of everyday life. I want to tell you how much I would like to find myself in this moment over and over again. The best I can do is take a picture that doesn’t do this moment any justice, but at least it’s something.
I have no idea how any of this happened. I can’t see a clear path forward right now. I try not to give way to my desire for a path forward with you to run amuck, either. I try to sit still. I delight in the memory of your physical strength. I let myself want everything and I let myself want nothing. I look for the truths that want to be found within me. I swallow my grief, I say goodbye a million times in my head. I write you this letter.
