EVERYBODY WANTS (TO BE A CAT)(TO LOVE YOU)

On memory, movies, and unclogging my head via your inbox.

On the plane I take 12 pages of notes of things I would have tweeted on my locked account but couldn't because I was in the sky and not interested in paying for the Wi-Fi but the thoughts really did just keep coming. The only things that keep me from my phone are: airplanes, movie theaters, driving, showers, and a really good friend. Even when I am reading I need to tell you all about it. Even when I am gaming I need to tell you all about it. "You", a stranger, or my future very best friend. I say writers should be my friend because I am good at word-of-mouth. At least three people I love and three people who follow me on Instagram have bought my favorite book. I want you to care about everything I care about. I want you to think that everything I think is good, is good. When I write poems, I am capturing a moment and asking the reader: don't you think this is beautiful? Don't you think this is worth remembering? 

In another life, where I am not a poet, I would be a lifestyle influencer. In this life, I am a girl who monetizes the oversharing. She monetizes the absences, too, the gaps in her audience’s knowledge intriguing, mysterious, instead of regular. I've always wanted to be mysterious in this way, wanted people to wonder about me; wondering about absence is a form of missing someone, I think. They'd say, oh, it's been two hours, where did she go? But I know the only times I am silent are in the dark of a theater, the social contract keeping me from checking my phone, from chattering through brain static to the person next to me, from making up little songs about what it is I’m doing. 

In her essay "Summer Movies", Durga Chew-Bose writes: "Going to the movies is the most public way to experience a secret. Or, the most secretive way to experience the public." This second formation has always resonated with me: my wallflower heart, my social anxiety, my agoraphobia, all so soothed in this collective enjoyment of art. Silent unless prompted by the art to do otherwise. "People-watching" does not appeal to me - if you are watching someone, there is a chance they are watching back. I love attention, I love to be known and spoken about (especially when I am not around) and yet a public eye feels like surveillance, feels like at any moment my public presence can be turned against me. So much of me is paradox, contradictory with desire and fear constantly tangled. I want but cannot do because, because, because.

I haven't gone to the movies since the pandemic began. My last was was Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I cried of course, in the way I cry at every movie, sometimes as early as the opening credits crawl. I am used to it until I am around someone who isn't. Have you ever done something so completely average and it be met with concerned looks? Durga's essay motivates me to go to my first solo movie; she writes, "When I exit the theater I feel smug with power having just stalled time...What it comes down to–despite having sat motionless for two or so hours–is being possessed by energy that I can only describe as kinetic." I wanted that despite so desperately. I see Hail Caesar. I wish the musical Channing Tatum's character performs was real. I tell every boy on my dorm floor that I am taking myself out on a date. In my memories they look at me strange, but who knows how reliable this is? I feel like people are often looking at me strange; it's more likely they are not looking at all. 

This was in 2016. When I think of my first year of college I am reminded so strongly of discourses on self-care, particularly skincare discourse centered on the face. I remember being told to put so many different things on my face in order to fix things I could not see; I remember self-care feeling alien to me, because of this. It felt like an excuse to not try at all. So often, in my first years of college, I would refresh the scars on the back of my thighs and the shadowed crease of my elbow, nails ripe with anxiety autopiloting on my skin. I used to be riddled with marks, and cannot remember why they started to fade. 

I do think I know my first memory, though. I am continually teased by my family members for the way I start my stories: "when I was three..." But, that is where my memories start; right on time, too. I am three and standing in the hallway of our Michigan home's second floor. There are three doors in this hallway; my bedroom, first. Then the bathroom. Then my brother's room. On the wall by the bathroom, there are photos of my parents, of my brother, of me, even smaller than I was then. I realized three things: one, I was alive, conscious, awake. Two, I recognized my family even if this was my first memory - their faces latent in my subconscious, their faces known to me before I knew anything else. Three, my family had existed in forms I had never known them - what existed in my head was not forever. They had been in this world before me, they did not come into existence as I knew them, and that was jarring. I came into this world knowing we would all change. 

I have felt very passive lately, violently so. In high school I would cope with conflict by saying the writers of the TV show of my life were doing their best to not get canceled. They had to keep stuff interesting, and so things that did not make sense needed to happen for the sake of intrigue. I am always trying to make sense of the senseless but my paradigms are falling apart; it's easy to measure your life in 22-episode seasons when you know the road map ahead. Emily St. James writes that shows about college do not succeed in the way that shows about high school do because college is too vast and diverse of an experience; that it does not come with the inherent universal (to a white US audience) that high school shows do. This is not why my framing disappears, though, I don’t think; but I struggle to remember the reason. I struggle to remember many mundane things I used to pride myself in knowing: the presidents in order, the name of every professor in the English department, the first three generations of Pokémon, and on. I'm afraid I've forgotten something important when a friend leaves. Did I mistreat them? I'm afraid I've forgotten something important when our housing is in limbo. Were there signs I missed? I tell Lee I'm afraid my brain will run out of space, or, rather, it already has, and the new information I am taking in is replacing knowledge indiscriminately. I am losing French grammar rules but now I know the astrological signs of each boy in Haikyuu. For now, High School Musical is still in there. Cassie says I remember more than anyone she knows. I used to be a very serious person: stern with my friends, rigorous with my schooling, reading Beat poets and watching movies that made me feel hollow inside, but the things I am remembering seem to show I am not so serious at all. There is something about being sixteen that feels like it will be who you are forever. 

But, as one of my first lessons in consciousness dictates, we are all capable of change. Each year, I become more scattered. I have always had the potential for mundane chaos (Gemini sun) but had too many serious pins holding me together; a silly girl who always felt responsible for everything all of the time. My propensity for guilt has not lessened, not at all, but there's something about how I approach my sadness that's new. I do think I am a little absurd. I do not want to be seen as a very serious guy. Paradoxically, I think–many see me as serious but do not take me seriously. How many times has a loved one not known I was not exaggerating until they saw me fall apart? Again, the serious pins. Mitski sings, oh the eggshells are on the ground, I'm trying I'm trying to pick them up. When I listen to this song, I see myself at sixteen. I am no longer trying. Let me fall apart and be remade entirely. 

Instead of presidents, in my head is static. In my head is lines of poetry. In my head is worse-case scenarios. In my head is cats. Cats are something I've loved all my life. Once, a friend wrote me a long birthday letter on purple paper. They remarked how I love something that will hurt me (I am allergic to cats) and isn't that poetic? My dedication, made more admirable by the asthma. The truth is, I have loved so many that have hurt me. Sometimes I think I create the conditions for my own hurting; it is, again, the easiness with which I cry at the movies. Despite it all, I will continue to love so many. In this, I am certain; there is no amount of brain static that can cloud that. I know I will always need a good friend to keep me from my phone, a good friend to take me to the movies, a good friend who will believe me when I cry.