ras malaise
vignettes, verbal snapshots
vent 2
the way that i want my imaginary girlfriend / husband / accessory organ to be both a loser and the answer to every problem i’ve ever had;
the way that this non-person is a backlit mirror, offering the most private details of my skin to its harshest critic and strongest advocate;
the way that i am relieved to know i’ll never plan a wedding;
the way that my hypothetical attachment looks at me with an eyeless face, hurt because i have found peace in apathy and resigning to The Real World: that i’ll never have him / it in this life (neither of us know what they / she is);
the way that my diary begins with explicit instructions to myself to never read it;
the way that i no longer use it because i'm afraid to catch something from an old entry;
the way that i have no idea what my mother’s hair texture is, because she has put heat on it every day that i’ve known her, and it feels like she is hiding something from me;
the way that guilt comes in a wave when i question her interiority as though it were a slight aimed at me specifically;
the way that my Schrödinger’s fantasy begs me to make sense of the mess in my own interior, so that it may take a shape, and with a body finally be able to die;
the way that; ;
;
may 15, 2026
portrait of my large sleeping cat
asking why my cat makes this noise when he sleeps: somewhere between a sniff and the sound of two balloons rubbing each other. his body is muted and dense from rolls of fur; but at night he seems to inflate, breath turned resonant through something spacious. his plumpness has changed from that of a peach to an eggplant’s—round from musical emptiness. rich fur that folds over itself in his waking hours now seems light and thin—heavy softness turned delicate—it becomes the thin layer of dust on a porcelain teapot.
he is full of the air that surrounds newborn bread. he will float, any minute now, in a slow upward tumble, and stretch his back against the ceiling.
dec 18, 2025
vent 1
Generous offer I solicited from a classmate to drop me home on her way out of town. We share a conspicuous number of interests and the practice of telling jokes that fold in on themselves, abandoned with “Damn, nevermind” before the attempt is even registered ;
Only saw her do it a couple times, but I always recognize that resignation setting in mid-sentence. She anticipates the joke as dead on arrival because she knows the feeling of one forming cold. “Me for real.”
My 12th grade English teacher fished a poem out of some dusty crevasse in the Western canon. The first stanzas describe a gnawing one-sided love that bled him onto paper. He then says something about writing, and how his words are so different spoken. I forget his exact metaphor, but the image that comes to mind is something falling out of him malformed and squirming blue when it hits the ground. It is trying to breathe, but can’t. Never quite alive, it has only ever been dying. He feels the pulse of his written word and prays to trade their places.
Years later, I remember feeling the paper wet and heavy, red in my hands.
nov 7, 2025
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