yearning

A couple of nights ago I had a dream that I was staying in Kathy Acker's apartment, assumedly on the Lower East Side. The apartment looked like it could have been on an episode of Hoarders - it was filled with, things, detritus, cereal boxes, books. I slept on an old designer leather chair. I know that in my mind I based the home on someone else's place I once stayed at in Pittsburgh who used to also live there, whose home was kind of like a museum to the LES. Anyway, I asked Kathy about living in New York. She didn't have much time for me. She was dealing with instead a rotating door of lovers. I stayed on the chair and flipped through a couple of books. Everything felt chaotic. I felt like perhaps I wasn't even there at all.

And then actually the next day or maybe the next it became clear to me that New York was not going to work out, not now. Because of the stress of it, because it stopped adding up or making sense, because I have a book to finish and one to promote in the fall. So I got out of all my commitments in time. I am saddened by this, in a way. Some sort of marred dream. I don't know. I also feel a lot of relief. I wasn't excited about the idea of throwing myself into this tumultuous existence of always traveling and being away from anything that felt like home.

I think what was sadder about my dream was the sense that Kathy Acker wouldn't give a shit about me now. I'm not sure she'd let me stay at her place. What I guess I desire more than anything is just to work on projects, just to write.  I feel if I keep writing then someday I will break through into some membrane, where I feel I will be really doing something radical. But I suppose this is a different desire than publicity, stardom.

Yet I yearn sometimes to be outside.  

When my mother died the woman who came and flushed the medications down the toilet left a pamphlet about How to Deal with Loss. One symptom was Yearning. I always thought that was funny. Like some sort of country song. The burning, yearning, burning, of my grief.