Posted on Monday, 03/24/25.

Sophie has white pillowcases with thin, connected crescents of red embroidery around their edges; I’ve seen them up close, had my face pressed up against them, which is why I can know their texture just by looking at a photo. The pattern might be called ‘scalloping.’

If I could be less decent I would inspect people’s faces more, plaintively and slowly, when I am with them. Sophie once placed her fingers at the hard parts of my head, where the skin wraps thinly and tightly over bone, and rotated me this way and that. I’ve written about her faint nosebridge freckles, maybe just from the summer then, but I don’t remember them. I’m instead thinking about the freckles from the barista at Fuglen this morning, the one near 羽根木公園; she wore black high-waisted jeans and had permed hair down to just above her shoulders. In a first, she asked me how much milk I wanted in my cortado, having already poured in the espresso. Sophie once told me she had been looking at the irritation left on my neck by my shaving, wondering if it hurt, which it did, and does.

Two nights ago I watched the 17th episode 死の棘。 of ウテナ, the second on the jewel-case DVD I found. In the middle of the episode Shiori pulls a sword out of Juri’s chest, slowly and magnificently. A bird hits a glass window and falls stunned to the floor, one wing crumpled underneath it. If I carried a locket around I am not sure who would be inside of it. Whoever mails me a small photo of themselves next will be in my locket, I guess, which means I will probably be waiting a long time, locketless. It helps me buy less, this DVD searching; I appreciate the warm disorientation and not-knowing, the anachronism, like I am a teenager in the early 2000s, drip-fed out-of-order anime through side channels run by the obsessed and stunted. Recently I have been feeling impatient and ugly, which is nothing new for the teenager, but they have more energy than I do, and the shape of their responsibilities is different.

I worry that I can’t write, which is something more sinister than feeling like my life’s stability depends on me giving up on writing, which has always been true. When I imply that I may have once been able to write I mean it only in that people I have cared about have said things to me about it that have made me feel quite electric. Like, that the people who have said this to me, some of whom I do not know in other ways very much at all, sit very embarrassingly in my heart like pubescent errors. I have gotten emails whose induced emotion dwarf any technical paper I’ve ever written, the enormity of the implied sadness there being something about which there is nothing else to do but prevent myself from considering, late at night. When I was in California I met someone who once emailed me to say they had read my website, that they had liked ‘Lead Poisoning’; their acknowledging this actually made it more difficult to sleep that night.

Nothing is that serious, is the impulse, to say. I worry that my resting face is too serious, and that the levity of the truly academic and aristocratic will never be mine, and that this will lead me to long exodic (exodromic?) periods of loneliness. I went to two different clubs and both times someone asked me if something was wrong because I was on my phone, presumably making a bad face. I loathe many types of seriousness in others, I think, and there are no real assurances that mine is different——being serious probably means submission to work, taking care of the body, and examining the difference between what one thinks they are doing and what actually occurs. The strictest adherence to this probably comprises joy and humor, too, like annotating the minutiae of ウテナ, or reading more 明治-era fiction on the train and almost forgetting my stop.