diary enteries

I wake up nude to another day and in this I feel the constant circle of death and rebirth. Don't they call in French the orgasm the mini death? French used to be what English is now. I don't know how to find what I should say today. I'm not sure what I think. I'm daydreaming of mundanity - a salaried job and mixed pattern bedsheets. I'm daydreaming of reading French and doing math and giving birth and all these important things.


Yesterday was Good Friday and I had sex for the first time in months and after that I sobbed and then I played with my fidget spinner and went out and got on my knees and prayed to God, like a true Zoomer would, all these things.


Return to the body as a biblical predilection, as a sacrament.


I'm finally understanding when they speak of Christ as the body. Like in biology, mushrooms are unclear whether they're an organism or a species, they all share the mycelium network of invisible threads which makes the boundaries of one indistinguishable from another. That's Christ, I guess, the collective body. The passage I prayed with, I don't remember exactly, but it was something about how Christ bears all suffering as both his becoming and unbecoming. This seems to fit very closely to the conceptions of corporeality. I didn't explain it well then to A and I can only explain it worse now since I am tired and new to theology. Raised Catholic, he’s always amused at how revelatory it is for me to come to such fundamental conclusions.


There is something a bit magical, though, about approaching these texts for the first time as an adult.


I think it's just like that the beginning is also the end and thus it's neither of those things. Like disease only exists because the design of the body preconditioned it so it’s not really antagonistic. Both suffering and pleasure, I guess, come from this one simple form which is innocent and eternal and true.


I felt very strangely sitting on the roof with A, drinking a beer in the hot afternoon yesterday. I tried to explain it. "When you paint," I said, "you're not supposed to use black from a tube coz it'll look unnatural. You're supposed to mix all the colours on the palette and what turns out is still definitely black but there's all these other layers of complexity in it that don't make a difference in whether it's black or not but with this palette you have to work with it wouldn't be the exact right black without it."


"I think I get it," he said. "Like crying after sex."


I have been noticing this day especially how intensely I feel everything. Like physically, my every day is blindingly bright and breezes are skin crawling and sounds are blissful or violent, the way people describe the way drugs feel, we both agreed that we could never do drugs the way our friends do, since such a small amount is so entirely overwhelming and it takes days just to feel real, to feel connected to the world again. If I did that every weekend, I'd have a psychotic break.


"What I'm trying to say," I said on terracotta orange, "Is that this right here is a colour."


Seeing him again it's as if no time has elapsed.





April 19


There is a singular glint of light off the gold door handle to the porch, it is very tiny but painfully bright, looking at it is nearly seeing straight into the sun and it has these glistening rainbow rays which extend out its entire radius, giving an appearance of a flesh and blood heart of the virgin, and the longer I stare the larger the radius grows, I'm not sure were I a schizophrenic whether the symbolism means of beckoning to the outdoors or if I should simply sit it untouched and observe.


There are essays circulating IG at this point about schizophrenia and the conundrum of God and they're starting to make sense, a bit, about the magic of seeing patterns of things and anyways how smart am I to have predicted for 2022 the it-boy as a 4chan sort and the it-girl some sort of class a personality disorder. There is this group of new meme pages driving this ethos and I like them cuz it feels like a meme renaissance and the content's finally funny and interesting again but on the other hand it’s all cursed texts and I feel insane if I look at them too long. Yes, yes, I do think insanity is a contagion and in this case it’s the secondary appropriation of 4chan culture which has already weathered such a brutal place, as perceived by outsiders and horny femmes. It more often than not seems a sort of erosion of the psyche or maybe just the downstream of digital allure to its most base and incomprehensible parts evermore so in the mainstream, and a warped reinterpretation to accommodate the platform capitalist system. I’m not sure enough to say.



April 20


I took A to the station to leave. We both stood quietly holding one hand in the others and the other on the metal handrail until I said, “I read something online that’s kinda interesting. There’s this psychological effect, like observed from studies, where the more time someone spends in urban environments, like the longer they live in a city and the less frequently they leave, the higher their risk for schizophrenia is.” He said, “that makes sense to me.”


We were late so had to run through the central station and he kissed me goodbye very quickly. I was sad to see him go but I didn’t feel too bad since I know I’ll see him again in a month and we both have exciting times elapsing in between. I imagined how it might feel to bid ado to a husband sent to war and thought I then might understand how something experienced from the external could drive you mad. I went back down the escalator and looked at the magical moving steel steps and LED lights and rubber armbands and wondered if our environment might really be doing that.


The building was a square, tall-ceilinged concrete fascist masterpiece. If we all seem to have complex PTSD from our childhoods and real PTSD is all hallucinations and misery, what does that say about reality? I felt slightly untethered from the moment I left him. Offensive silhouette in swinging silk slip against a floaty sensuality. There is some pleasure in that. It’s why I like being alone, I suppose, it’s like some people’s acid trip, everything is a metaphor and it just goes and it goes. That’s why I know too the necessary moderation of the thing.


At the station everyone was sipping vapes made to look like cigarettes in cheap mass-produced outfits. I bought a metro ticket at a machine in the basement by some curlicue stairs and everyone rounding the dim lit intersection struck me immensely as a soul in passing.






Maya Chambers is a writer and artist living in Montreal.