Deleted & Redacted: No. 0724
Wait, this is a hard thing to do and I notoriously shirk away from outsize challenges - like when my dad signed me up for tennis.
I am dealing in doubt, and I can do nothing about it. I was once excited about the prospect of pursuit: I was like, wow, I told everyone I wanted to do this writing thing (against my will) (I can’t keep a secret). When I told people, for the most part, it opened up opportunities, and everything felt possible. Then, when I sat down and made the lists and the considerations, looked at the portfolio, and considered the odds - I started feeling very incapable. I wrote that in June.
Here’s what I know now: in July, doubt is confirmation that what you’re doing is worthwhile. The attempt matters just the same as the possibility of failure. I don’t fully believe that, but I have lived an entire life sustaining myself on half-truths and delusions, so what are a few more?
Anyway, I have about four weeks until I move out of D.C. to Ireland (my first stop), and so much of my life is about the logistics right now, which is actually very nom nom delicious for the Virgo in me. After summer, I hope to have more missives to write you all. As always, tell your friends, neighbors, and enemies to subscribe. It’s a perfect newsletter to read on a plane, train, or wherever you find yourself idle or active.
Notes App Highlight Reel
random excerpts from somewhere in my notes app for easy reading.
these are quick ideas to read and see, and maybe even recognize the full range of human emotion.
May 27, 2024: Notes App Facade
Deleted Twitter Thoughts
things I could still be tweeting for the public if that was a thing that still existed.
Kirby’s Big Bright, Beautiful Future
I saw a psychic for the first time with my friend Erin last week. Here’s what she told me and my general thoughts on the messaging.
Long life, will live to be 87 or older. No sickness or injuries will kill me.
This is comforting and also a little terrifying. Given the general state of things, seeing the July hurricanes, I still do not believe I need a 401K and will continue to live like the gremlin I am.
I need to stop eating spicy food and pork to help my tummy. 🌶️
Damn, I just walk around looking like I have IBS, huh? That doesn’t feel like a psychic thing to know, but okay.
I will be wealthy in life. I should invest money and rid myself of debt. 💰
Okay, so if I am going to be wealthy anyway, I feel like it’s my responsibility to assume more credit card debt, not the other way around.
I will have one husband and maybe 2 kids. 👩🏾🤝👨🏾🤱🏾
This was hard to hear. I wanted more than that, husbands, that is. I guess sometimes you really do have to settle. Besides, the clock is ticking for me to be a divorcee in my twenties. There’s still time for a widower in her thirties.
I have to break down the emotional walls I’ve put up. 🧱
I have no idea why she would say this. I don’t think anyone has a clue. Also, walls are scalable. Cowards.
I have a lot of stress. 🤯
I’m calling it; she’s a hack.
Unfinished Piece of the Moment
If you haven’t surmised, the general theme of my life right now is premeditated change. I got this idea about being tortured by the Monstera Deliciosa1 I have had since 2019. I haven’t sent out a substack in a while because I have been trying to submit to journals and lit mags, and you can’t do both. So, I wrote this just for you. It’s a little silly and very dramatic.
Credence Lost
8-9 Minute Read
I wake up in the same place where I have slept every night that I have been in this city, minus three. I am the only one in this town with the correct number of pillows. I have never doubted this and have only been proven three times that credence is mine. Also, it is Credence who woke me.
Credence Clearwater Revival, my room's corner monster, keeping all the others at bay. Tonight, she woke me softly and gently, just wanting to confirm if I was serious and if I was going to let this happen. I reach for my eye mask to dull her and the orange light creeping in from the alley. I don’t have to explain myself to a plant that sprouts new leaves in defiance of me. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.
There was a heat wave, and I deprived her of light. I haven’t opened the blinds in three weeks. She sprouts another leaf, tiny with no fenestration. She hasn’t given me a leaf with fenestration since 2021. That’s not why I am going to let this happen to her.
The next day, amid conversation, remembering last night's standoff, I tell a friend in passing that I am thinking of committing infanticide. They stare back, concerned. Credence Clearwater Revival has always been the placeholder name for my firstborn child. Credence Clearwater Revival is the only child many know me to have, or I myself. The infanticide is her; I no longer can carry her with me in this life. I feel sick about it. Believe me, I do. A friend mentioned I could sell her for probably good money. She sold hers for $100 on Facebook. However, hers did not have a name.
Credence posed dutifully for the pictures, readying herself for harvest by drooping and letting the yellow and brown swallow what fenestration she had left. I took the photos, sighed, and placed her for bidding. Twenty-five dollars. She got one interested buyer, but he was the wishy-washy Facebook marketplace type, unsure and unprepared to cart a dying plant home with him. Days go by, silence passes between us, and I drop the price to $0. The $25 is defeated, FREE emerges shiny and bold. The buyer returns, now sure of himself and his desires. The price point is a determined letter of credence. “I can come tomorrow.” “Great, I say, I am free before two pm.”
I don’t sleep this night. She doesn’t let me. She scratches across the window, wails against the wall, extends like a vine, and takes control of the entire room, positioning herself as the monster to be kept at bay but saying nothing. There is nothing to say; she knows everything about me in the same way I used to think God or my dead relatives did. Credence understands sleep as a necessary routine; she watched me not do it for six months. She knows that I will no longer be free tomorrow before two. I can’t understand the worthiness of this fight. I deleted the app that reminds me to water her a month ago. I’m no good.
When the sun rises, she relents. I open Facebook and message the buyer that I can no longer proceed with our sale. I delete the listing. I make a mental plan to dump her on the sidewalk, one building over to avoid suspicion. I will take a sharpie and write FREE. I can’t decide whether it’s worth including her name. The timing is never right, and my nights have not ceased with torment from her. She does know me in the way I thought God or my dead relatives did. She can read my fucking mind. She knows what I am up to. We pass these nights, still yet without speaking, violence making its way across the sanctuary of the room. Even when I have guests, which I think violates our agreement, the guests never seem to notice anyway. I am back in my old way, sleepless and delirious, the brown and yellow creeping up her leaves. The blinds have remained closed. It’s still so hot outside. I haven’t watered in over a month, I had a gnat problem, and I am all out of hydrogen peroxide. It’s useless to buy a new bottle now. Everything new is useless; we have to make do with what we have until our minuses run dry.
Less and less sleep, more and more fury as the tide comes in. I am distraught.
It’s the middle of the night, 3 am. That’s the middle of the night, in case you were wondering, even though it’s actually really close to sunrise. It’s the middle.
“I know I haven’t done my best, but for fuck’s sake, I have done what I can,” I scream into the void she has built around my bed.
Motion stops. Nothing recedes. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” she sneered.
I garbled a little, but I think what I said was fair. What did I know? I have the scrambled egg brain of someone who is being tortured into psychosis by Instagram's favorite plant.
“I heard that,” she replied. I fucking knew it. I thought.
We took the conversation offline.
Why are you doing this to me?
Why are you doing THIS to me?
It’s so rich that you think something could be done to you; that evades me—you self-centered little brat.
Topical, Tropical.
That pissed her off. She darted to harness my limbs, wrapping me against the bed.
I just think it’s insane that you can do all of this, but I had to water and prune you.
I'm not doing anything. I’m at your mercy.
I am tied to the bed with your chlorophyll-scented vines. Let’s be serious here.
I can be serious. It’s all I have left since you denied me and left me to decay. Infanticide, I am happy to start there. I liked your name, so I took it, but it is so you to think I didn’t exist before I came into your house. You didn’t plant me from seed; you bought me off of Amazon for $10 because you were depressed. I am not some child. I am a full thing with a history, including your history. If anybody is going to commit infanticide, it’s me. You are still the same child you were five years ago—all your burdens mine to bear.
Would it show up in the autopsy if you killed me? I am feeling very concerned about the framing, I grew up Catholic, and you know..
Oh, I know.
Okay, it’s not such a thankless job. I brought you into my life and assumed responsibility for you as a way of assuming responsibility for myself. I am adult enough to know that. I brought you along. I took such care. I find myself among tears for company now. You were the priority every time - in the front seat buckled in. I took you with me. I made sure your leaves weren’t against the window on our long-haul drives to and from Texas so you wouldn’t get a sunburn. I placed you on a marble pedestal in my dad’s office, where you dutifully watched me work. I brought you here, to this home with just us. It took a while, but I tried to figure out the drainage situation.
It didn’t work.
Okay, I know it didn’t work, but like I said, it's not my best, but what I can. You were a consideration in my choices. Often, you were THE consideration. I made an entire post on Instagram for you. Did you know I have never done that for anyone? Of course, you did because you know everything. So why don’t you know, or better yet, why don’t you care that this is the worst way for us to end this?
Oh my God, BECAUSE you don’t care that this is the worst way for us to end this. After everything we have been through together. After the emotional turmoil, yearning, grief, fear, desperation, excitement, pain, and all the other emotions you’ve fed into my soil in lieu of nitrogen, you would think I would remain topline in your consideration. Yet, here I am, brown and ugly and dying, ready to be left on the street to watch you drive away without me.
“We can’t let the sunk cost take us both,” I whispered because I needed her to hear it as intended. “The resources spent, and god were they worthy, can’t justify spending more. I won’t ever be who I am meant to be if we both breathe the air from your soil and my past. Even still, I am not so ignorant of what you have done for me in holding all that. Even still, I propagated you, gnats be damned and sent a piece of you to live with my dearest friend. Even then, I was too late and still too scared to propagate the parts of you that are the most defined. A lesser picture of you will still remain. I am not too proud to know that when I pass versions of you in Mexico or wherever else you grow freely without all of my support, I will think of what you did for me and what we did together. I am ending this the only way I can, with the painful and searing knowledge that it can’t be the best way. It’s just the way.”
With this, silence reentered the chat. The recession processional began in the delirious late hours of the night, inching towards the oranges and pinks of morning. Credence Clearwater Revival returned to her form, and I to mine. I took a few hours of sleep for the both of us. I dreamed of her in a sweeter light. She was standing before me in a large glass vase, devoid of soil and all my emotional baggage, drinking from the clear and glistening water. She bloomed before me, a vision of possibility, letting go, and finding the right home. She had big, bold elephant ear-sized leaves sprouting in every direction, with the little leaves to which I had been so accustomed weaving throughout creating an inviting bouquet. Light danced around her, from roots to stems to leaves.
Before I headed out for the day in the morning, I opened the blinds for her.
Meet Creedance Clearwater Revival here:
