iphone notes — fading at the edges (chloe)
by chloe
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(iphone notes is a series where we ask writers we love to dig into their journals/iphone notes,
and send us selections of the memories/thoughts/moments lost within.)
I’m super stuck between wanting to capture everything I experience and bottle it and wanting to be fully present and live in the moment.
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Around my pupils is a miracle, not a mutation. I don’t want to learn about how people think; I want to learn about what they think. I respect the learning of science. I really do. But I wish that science would just shut up and let me use my fucking descriptive language. As for math, I don’t respect that at all. That’s just bullshit. Like, what the fuck. Anyone who thinks we require math beyond the basic level to function in society is deluded… and also probably a sadist.
What’s important to me is people! Human experience. People who feel things. Why they feel things. How to put these things into words. Books! Books written by people who did things that made them feel things. The concepts that im interested in are things you cant touch. Im interested in love, in fear, in the power of knowledge and what knowing too much means for our ancestors. Im interesting in people who are fucked up, people who have committed crimes, the things that drove them crazy.
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Listen to drive me round by mallrat on the plane. I forgot my journal, I never use iphone notes because they feel cheap and overly technological. What happened to pen and paper? Pretending my boyfriend is next to me and manifesting all the good plane adventures he and I are going to have one day. We’re going to go all over and its going to be beautiful. the buildings will be pretty and the flowers will be exotic and im going to try not to have allergic reactions.
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I feel quite inspired right now but not in the way that’s like, wow i’m motivated, more in the way that’s like, my eyes are droopy and life is very intricately nuanced and worth writing about. I am driving on one of those reads without streetlights where you have your headlights on and you can see nothing at all past the headlights except for maybe the occasionally high-visibility apparition, the ones that are glued to the roads so that people using the roads don’t die. My right nostril is blocked. I miss Rory so much all I want is to be in his bed. He’s in his bed, but whats the point of being in bed alone when you know what it’s like to be in the bed with another? No point at all. You might be comfortable and snug but you know deep down that you actually just want to spoon your special person, no matter how overheated it makes you. You will fry for them in your covers like a little doona clad burrito.
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Her hair smelt like bubblegum and when I kissed her neck, she tasted of vanilla. I liked to graze my fingertips over the skin of her legs. She was ticklish there. Sometimes she’d throw her head back and laugh so hard I could see her retainer, a small, silver inchworm on the back of her straight, white teeth. The only other time she laughed like that was watching her favourite television show – how I met your mother. She wasn’t a very happy person, I don’t think. Sort of glass half full, and solemn as the moon. Only around me shew as content, me and the sitcom characters. When I went over to her house once I saw the broken glass on the floor. Someone had done a poor job of sweeping up and there were still tiny particles like toxic fairy dust scattered on the floor, reminiscent of a bad afternoon. Her father had thrown it at the wall when her mother told him she got a speeding ticket. She said this was a common occurrence. Her house smelt like mildew and mould, but she smelt like bubblegum.
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Yesterday, I was on facetime with my boyfriend and we were talking about real things, existential things – religion, supernatural beings, the afterlife. We were talking about reincarnation and heaven and souls and everything in between, what we believe in and what we do not.
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“do you think” he slurred slightly, taking a pull of the bottle nestled in the brown paper bag, “that we are, in fact, in love?”
I had to smile. Even drunk and asking weighty questions, he was so wonderfully articulate. His face, a lucent white-blue in the full moonlight, was so earnest and vulnerable that I wanted to agree, just to see it split into his glorious sunlit smile.
“have you drained that bottle yet?”
He looked as though he’d been slapped and I immediately wanted to swallow my words.
“my profession of love for you is completely independent of how much alcohol I have consumed” he insisted.
His face was the picture of beautiful adolescent inebriety. Thick lashes rimming grey eyes, glassy and far away. Soft lips parted slightly, the way they do when you are in a deep slumber.
The crepitations of the night felt overwhelmingly loud as I mulled over a way to reply. His gaze felt suddenly suffocating instead of sincere, like was interrogating me. The conversation had changed from drunkenly light to ponderous in a matter of seconds, and it unsettled me. I shifted through the stars in the sky with my eyes, chose the brightest one, took deep breaths, counted to ten. Something I always did when I was faced with things, important things. Things that couldn’t be met with sarcastic remarks or eye rolls.
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Isn’t it peculiar how when you become enamoured of a certain person, everything else in your life sort of fades at the edges? Anything that isn’t that person blurs together, like you’re looking at your life through frosted glass.
Your brain becomes a pink marshmallow in a cup of hot chocolate. Melted, gooey, filled with sweet memories that dissolve into the rest of your body, stored away for another day. And everything outside that marshmallow appears bleak and unimportant.