this is an ask for guidance

from who/whatever is listening

I’m sick of today but yesterday I wasn’t. Yesterday I was happy and smiling and relishing in the synchronicity only yesterday could have given me. But today I have grown too big for where I am. I resent the place i’m in for not growing with me. I need to stretch and I dont have room to. 

The last time i wrote to you i spoke about drums making my chest hurt. Since then i’ve come down with a classic case of costochondritis: inflammation of the rib cartilage across the chest. I’ve been in pain, I’ve been on too much ibuprofen, I’ve been on antibioitics. It went away a few days ago after about a week of 9 advils a day and another week of amoxicillin. Today I woke up and my chest hurts again. Today I am sick.

I am trying so hard to follow the music that makes me sing but I can’t hear it clearly enough. Maybe it’s a sinus infection clogging my ears. Or maybe it’s the insulation of my last year in undergrad. Or maybe I’m too old to hear it. Maybe it’s not playing for me anymore. 

“I have to write a song about my cinema and put it on paper. I have to be the drummer. There she is: my body: my prose. I found her.”

That’s what I declared at the end of September and I haven't stuck to it. 

It’s time I confront my future. I keep making stress-inducing jokes about not knowing what I want to do after college and following my friends wherever they go. But it’s not true that I don’t know – I may not know what or where but I know how, as in how I want to feel, and why. 

Over the last fourteen nights give or take a few I’ve fallen victim to stress dreams. In this brain and body of mine, stress dreams are not simply dreams because dreams are not simply dreams; I live half my life in dreams. I can’t always distinguish memories from dreams and I wake up at least three times each morning, two of them in dreamland, all realistic and plausible. If I’m being completely honest I don’t know if the third wake-up is always the “real” one. 

These stress dreams are about being late to my public art class (to which i was actually thirty minutes late this morning), my mom coming to visit and meeting people I wouldn’t necessarily introduce her to (she will be visiting this weekend), my friends giving me tough love as they have had to many times past and future (earlier I asked one to slap me across the face), and every other real experience I have ever had and will ever have. Last night I dreamt about my gums swelling with infection because of my smiley piercing, just to wake up and find that my mouth is infected. Just to wake up again and find it isn’t. 

“My body is giving up on me” is what I said all those weeks of advil and amoxicillin. Now i wonder if my psyche is giving out, too. I don’t want to feel like this wherever I am in a year. I need somewhere big enough, somewhere I can stretch. I love Alice in Wonderland but I don’t think I want to be Alice anymore. I want to be The Wonderland. Here, wherever I am today, I am Alice. And maybe I’m stuck in the rabbit hole, not even in wonderland yet. Or I’m the white rabbit and I’m late I’m late I’m late. 

I’m writing about a24 for Hot Literati and I feel like I have little to say that’s of any significance. There’s a voice in the back of mind telling me that the more creative aspect of my thesis is falling apart. There are so many voices diagnosing so many things as falling, and apart, and falling apart. I want to feel like I’m falling together!!!!  I want to fall, just not like this. Help me.

All love,

Vic