Some Sort of Frenzy
it's become a habit, a way to start the day.
i’ve realized recently that i think that the age of seventeen is pretty adult. not because i consider myself an adult, no, rather the opposite: i still think i’m fourteen.
I’ve been getting migraines recently. I know what’s causing them: hormonal imbalances as I approach and end my period. It’s sort of ridiculous that if you have a menstrual cycle you end up with one, maybe two, weeks of feeling normal, between all the hormonal bullshit. There’s ovulation, and PMS, and then the actual period, and after it’s finally over, your body is readjusting back to baseline. For me, this readjusting takes a solid week. The migraines stick with me the whole time. They ache, soft, or strong. Keep me in my bed, in the dark, or they send me to school wearing sunglasses.
Right now, under the sunglasses, the whole world looks like it's been dipped in oil slick. I lean my head against the cool glass and close my eyes and pretend I can’t smell it burning.
it’s really cheesy to write about Quarantine. i think most people don’t want to remember it was real, that in some ways it still is. two thousand three hundred and one people died from covid related causes in the united states this week. to a lot of people, writing about it feels kitschy. if you surveyed two thousand three hundred and one people and asked them if they’d be willing to read fiction about Quarantine, i bet most of them would say no.
There’s a sharp, stickling pain running from my nasal down to my maxilla bone right now. I’m listening to the Mountain Goats. I’m always listening to the fucking Mountain Goats. I’m listening to the Mountain Goats and thinking that I just have to get this out there, just have to get it on paper, just have to say this is it: I’m going to be done, and once I’m done I can crawl into the dark and listen to the air move. My head hurts so much. I can’t tell if I need a new prescription for my glasses or if everything causes me eye strain nowadays, no matter what. I feel stupid, a lot of the time. Like I can’t get my brain to work, even though making a wounded animal follow instructions is a fool’s errand.
i’ve been writing about Quarantine more obviously recently. i found this album, it’s about twenty-twenty and it’s called THE END OF REALITY AS WE KNOW IT by ANXIETY CAT and if i listen to it i get this feeling of sudden dread, and of impermissible nostalgia. the thing is that the world didn’t end then, even though i was so sure it would. it feels like the world is ending now — it might well not. the artist has one hundred seventy-nine monthly listeners on spotify and their top track has like, six thousand streams. to me, there’s nothing more horrifying than remembering that it all happened.
Neurologists won’t talk to kids about migraines unless they’re drinking their weight in water daily, unless they’re sleeping at minimum eight hours a night, unless they’re exercising. My only option to get rid of the migraines is to start birth control pills, which would make me so nauseous I’d never get out of bed. Right now, I pray every night that the over-the-counter stuff doesn’t stop working.
the thing about realizing you’ve left the year of twenty-twenty —that you’ve left it so much that it’s been half a decade since— is that you get scared when you shouldn’t be. i’m not fourteen. i haven’t been fourteen in a long, long time. but i’m scared that i am. i’m scared i haven’t gotten anywhere since. there’s a disgusting culture of nostalgia, these days, but no one wants to admit that the nostalgia we’re on about is getting further and further away, and at some point writing about Quarantine isn’t going to be contemporary, anymore. that it might already not be, anymore.
They make it hard to listen to music, especially in headphones. Especially some of my favorite genres: shitty backwater folk music, with peaking microphones and laughter on the edges and the sound of the record skipping because when they recorded this, for streaming, the master copy wasn’t exactly perfect anymore. Right now, I can’t listen to folk. I listen to a lot of jazz, when my brain hurts. When I can stomach it. But when your hormones are out of whack, sometimes other things hurt too. I’ve been listening to a lot of Björk recently. It feels more human than Radiohead.
And, there’s always the Mountain Goats.
i’m writing about Quarantine because i’m still stuck in there. which, in it of itself, is incredibly cheesy and kitschy and gauche. everyone thinks they left something behind, before or during Quarantine. that they lost something innate to their being during those long months. no one wants to admit it, because everyone thinks it. THE BEGINNING from THE END OF REALITY AS WE KNOW IT makes me want to crawl under my desk and cry. makes me wish that when i open my eyes, it’s twenty-twenty, and i get one more shot at it.
Everything I write about is about music. I don’t know actually anything about music except that right now, I don’t care how much it hurts, I just want that fucking catharsis. I want to hear Björk’s voice and remind myself that even if I don’t make it, that if none of us do (though I think we will?)… then, I still tried. I tried so fucking hard, even when it hurt.
I GO THROUGH ALL OF THIS BEFORE YOU WAKE UP,
SO I CAN FEEL HAPPIER TO BE SAFE UP HERE WITH YOU.
if you enjoyed this, i also blog on tumblr as offslime (music, comics, etc.) or compher (sports). my art is accessible on hlaoruin.