The envy of the gardens
Clear-headed, in want of nothing. No mystical denial either, just the sense that everything is coming my way—either way.
CYBER DIARY is a bi-weekly publication of digital diary entries.
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“Luxury: Seclusion.
Purpose: Preservation. Leisure: Home. Alone. Unstressed. Uncombed. Undressed. Indulgences: Movies….and Italian tragedies.
Proclivity: Daydreaming. Hobby: Night-dreaming.
Favorite soundtracks: Trees speaking wind. Rain. Night thunder.
Ever passionate: Fashion. Personal aim: Mystic. This Lifetime or next.
Sensitivity: Everything.”
— From “Woman Seeks Her Own Company”, Sandra Cisneros
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5O DAYS OF SOBRIETY—-! This bumbling infant clarity has slowly made me more amicable, reflective, warm. I am reading The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara in the mornings (10am) and my twin sister’s poetry after 9. I take my espresso sweet and day-long. I listen to no music, only catatonic neighborhood. Before bed I watch Love is Blind just so I can watch Indie Nile’s Love is Blind reaction videos. I’m playing with life more—I can feel myself expanding. I start my job at the English school next week. Money, at last.
Not much but that’s splendid. The sky is raining tulips, daffodils, and pearls. In my dreams I drive the pinkest limousine and wake up refreshed and clear-headed, in want of nothing. No mystical denial either, just the sense that everything is coming my way—either way.
Dinner was thin rosemary and butter steaks, green beans with feta, honey toasted almonds and walnuts.
Dessert: figs, raspberries, dark chocolate biscotti.
An ice-cold Coca Cola Zero. A cigarette (mi dispiace).
I’ve ordered books online for the first time in MONTHS. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; not current titles. Both called to me. I have hundreds of books I want to read. It’s a whole new world, my once-rough cerebral terrain wet with fertility.
Sunday evening. I cleaned the house yesterday. Lavender soap for the kitchen floors. Drank too much coffee. It’s late, I’m still drunk on brown energy. Everything fresh, linen and citrus. Maybe it’s the easiest thing in the world to feel this way in Campania, with the pink oleanders in the dusty blue rainstorms, the black olives, sweet basil, chestnuts, truffles, soft fruit. Vesuvian apricots. Mediterranean shrubs from all the way from Napoli to Nola. Buffalo mozzarella, plump as a baby.
It’s heaven on Earth. It made an angel out of me.
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Though we may move houses soon, which is heartbreaking. I’ve only just fallen in love with this place. It sits at a perfect walking distance from the train station, the frutta e verdura market, the tabbacheria.
When I first arrived at La Casa Verde, all I could see was its desperate need of renovation. Peeling turquoise paint, crumbling tiles on the terrazzo, complete lack of natural light in the kitchen—nothing but blemishes, obstructions. I had thought of Luisa’s small house, with its clean white walls and high, curved religious ceilings. I loved the castle of her bathroom, glass bottles of retinol and perfumes, tubes of Maybelline lipstick and opulent nail varnish.
Luisa, so swan-like. In possession of impossible warmth and glamour.
I had never seen something like it in the flesh before. I felt like a leopard breaking into a temple the night that we entered her bedroom, both in a hurry to dress and go out into the after-rain for an apéritif. Twenty euro heels as black as caviar, as pink as romance. Clothes were spilling out of her closet: fuchsia, chiffon, lace. Sheer white curtains hung over her windows, the room illuminated by a cold slice of moon.
I could never really shop because, since I was always drunk and always getting drunker, my weight was constantly fluctuating. Or even when it wasn’t, I was in denial of it all-in-all and refused to shop. Maybe in a couple of months. I could not tell you my numerical pant-size. Dresses made me itch. My Dior Forever Skin Glow foundation did nothing for the dry, alcohol-inflamed state of my skin. The chocolate liner made my lips look smaller on my puffy face. This was well before I quit the drink and lost 10kg, and Luisa kept passing me her little embellished blazers and dresses to try-on. I wasn’t able to figure out if she was blind, just trying to be sweet, or just loved when I refused a garment and said, no, è troppo piccolo, but I adored her for her bountifulness, her preparation.
I relished the fact that I never saw anything reminiscent of her style on Instagram, even though her style is a reflection of the dominant female style in all of South Italy. At least it was not in my algorithm! Organic acquisition. I hung off of her air like a cat!
Whatever esoteric, ancestral knowledge regarding the dutiful joys of adulthood that I was meant to have acquired from my mother, I got instead from Luisa. Really simple things like: getting dressed is fun (my mother used to cry and slap her thighs together), cleaning is refreshing, meditative (my mother used to cry and curse and sleep).
Luisa, Luisa, her pretty face like a sphynx. Imagine a bright and elegant Italian girl doing something as tedious as clerical work. I liked the juxtaposition. I admired that type of person who could work Monday to Friday and build a rich life around it. It was interesting to me that she could follow a diet for three months without falling into a hole of panic, explosion, and self-punishment. She intrigued me with her unconscious refusal of decay, complaints, lethargy. She was always moving, anticipating, offering something. Hypnotizing people with her nourishment.
At Gio’s party, in the cold, blue month of February, we were all floating on a cloud of gin and tonics, lime wedges, and Peroni. Luisa wasn’t drinking because she was on a twelve page diet plan from her nutritionist that she later forwarded to me on WhatsApp. I said thank you, but I couldn’t follow it. 30 grams of whole wheat Corn Flakes seemed like a very depressing way to start a day.
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After the injuries that the black bicycle short stick-and-poke humdrum of Toronto had left on my stylistic-psyche, I felt like I had finally been delivered. My hundred year old house, on the contrary, reminded me of my dislocation, my drabness. But it was last October that we moved in. Anything and everything could have reminded me of my “drabness” at the time. Now it is a sanctuary just like I am my sanctuary. Neighbors throw wildflower seeds onto the earth. Time melted away or I melted into time: either way, I emerged.
There is the phantom limb of ugliness, that ancient distorted belief.
The residue of an eating disorder gets less and less. I sweeten the coffee, I taste both pastries, I am no longer afraid of fruity chewing gum. I also remember my love for strange things: Pure Seduction, jasmine notes, tiny red skirts, Tony Bianco heels, tabloid magazines, acrylic pedicures. Moodboards. Online shopping. Bella Venice.
One day I will buy a house. Take courses. Try out fiction. Find a mentor….
I didn’t have a girly teenagehood. It all seems fresh. Not frivolous. But it does feel almost silly, un-intellectual to love these things and call them “femininity”—I think I will just call them FUN. It is like when Franz wrote to Milena, "I am dirty, infinitely dirty, endlessly dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity."
Most importantly: a decline in laziness. A purification of my own taste. Still calibrating. Maturing into moderation and sensuousness. I am starting to recognize that the shame was a story I told. It was embedded in my bodily memory. You cannot just ornament yourself and expect to blossom around its poisoned seed, you have to pull it up from the root. Get your hands dirty. Repack your soil. Or leave the seed, use your dark flowers wisely. Both are decent options. Truth is beauty; beauty is truth.
I have been infected with a life-is-delicious sensation.
Symbols of a personal prosperity. Lucky symbols.
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Finishing up this blog while I wait on the laundry to finish.
The first of the darker months has melted like chocolate and now a deep rainy winter is approaching here, lifting its moonless cape. Very soon the early nights will be eating the daylight up again. I am careless. I’m not thinking about vitamin D, meditation, or red light therapy. My mind has become sturdy, task-oriented.
I don’t mind too much that I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m going, or who I’m going with. It doesn’t phase me so much that I am in the dark ages of a personal financial crisis, always deciding between lipstick, slim cigarettes, or groceries (eggs, olives, feta, chocolate…), or that I disappeared from university twice. Or that my life is a disappearing act in general. I have risen up with a desire to live again. Hot hot hot! The urge to rush through it all has left me. I will luxuriate, go slowly. I am doubtless, imbued with direction, with an edibility that is both psychological and physical. I like this life. No matter how frail my paycheques get, my life itself is thickened, fattened, strengthened by beauty.
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Post title from here.