there are a few hidden pages on this website with older work and if I pull lines from some of them it’s like,

bet you’re gonna tuck your hair behind your ear soon

cheek to cheek with the mountain

in a rush, before you said ‘can we keep going now’

I forgot about my birthmark again, certain light + certain gestures still make me feel good gutted, looping back to small and clear desires

‘the car is parked, it’s light out, your hair has grown back down to your shoulders,’

new fast thoughts + still moments, there is space for --


 there is a memory of a meteor shower and a love letter and a chart and a set of photographs that match in colour. There are pictures from car windows, a scanned list on pink paper, a different photograph of smoke after an earthquake, the first chapter of my book. Sometimes I forget those pages are there and when I go into the backend and find them it’s like why did you put that there, they’re not really a secret, 

this week I was in the back of a fast car listening to badlands honey I want the heart I want the soul I want control right now and then I thought about how sometimes it’s easy to deploy a baby or a honey or another tender genderless word in a song, get caught in a big elated pop song loop and feel no trouble at all, post-party nosebleed and how right now I am into getting high and walking around at night and I am into how cold a flower feels in the morning and I am into wet hair, as always, 

documenting has always been important to me, as notes and as images and as in being able to remember almost everything. To focus on the ways I have seen people comb their hair right out of the shower, to focus on the people who have washed their hair in front of me, all those early mornings, thinking about how I comb my own hair after I wash it and how I’ve felt when someone else has been looking at me. I don’t know what I’m trying to get at, I guess a routine tenderness. I watched my friend get ready for work once and felt like I loved her more than ever.

it’s always felt cool to write in relation to an image, so that’s me in a hotel room with wet hair in a forced documentation because I wanted to remember how I looked at a point in time where I felt happy but keep having the feeling that I will accidentally die soon. I had seen the souvenir part one + part two the night before and that, specifically the colours and specifically the dread, made the feeling more intense than it has been. I had been wearing suit pants to the beach, I had been wearing myself out in good ways. Before I showered I went on a four hour walk and the wind blew my shirt open up on the cliffs, my whole chest out, trying to have fast hands to close the fabric, kind of funny for it to happen there in view of the water. It made me feel shy but fine. I get to go back soon and that also makes me feel shy but fine.

after this I did comb my hair, I combed it all back and then I rinsed my hands, I thought about the things that we can write in the steam on a mirror, I did that too. I like the photograph because I felt like myself.

and then there’s brand new camellias --- before I took this I watched someone try to photograph a butterfly, he said not easy, it's not easy. I had walked quite far, sweating through the city, I still love when you’re too fast and a picture doesn’t turn out. Camellias are wild to me because they’re so blatantly beautiful and have this very soil based smell, not really sweet at all. These were in the first few days of the season and they were already hot from the sun when I reached up above my head to touch one.

thinking of touch, I didn’t realise until recently that some of the times I feel most like myself is when I’m packing my things into boxes or suitcases, you know, touching my things, knowing what I need, neat folds in clothes, giving away books I love but won’t read again, realising I get to keep being myself and that I am very lucky.

the inside of my suitcase is what I’d call a bad blue, too muted and corporate. There’s also a bad blue in this picture, I think it’s kind of off, the sea right before a storm, but how lucky to be able to take the time to sit there and watch all that lightning for hours, to see the colour of the sky span out so far, and to go home safe with wet hair, to comb it, to know