i bust the windows out your car

& other ways to scream into the abyss

I pass a man sleeping on an abandoned sofa outside of my building. From my apartment window I hear yelling. I shrug, nothing to do with me. Later a neighbor tells me that the man woke up grumpy from his nap and smashed 6 car windshields on the block. One of them is mine. I think that I too wake up grumpy from a nap sometimes.

The windshield looks like a bowling ball dropped on it. The neighbor says he used his backpack. What the hell was in the backpack? I wonder. The tow truck man tells me Welcome to LA. I want to tell him about the time I woke up to a strange man clearing his throat in the kitchen. But he is already gone.

I have an important writing deadline this summer and nothing exists to me except for it. My partner works in music and I follow her around on tour like a groupie and in each new place, a new writing ritual. In Philly I slip into a coffee shop by Rittenhouse Square and write. In the evening, bubble baths and long decadent dinners in the fading summer light. In Ocean City NJ I tuck into the back of a beachy coffee shop. Baptize in saltwater when I’m ready to throw the laptop out the window.

This year has been a lot. But I don’t have to tell you that. I oscillate between completely creatively fried and creatively manic. I can’t keep up with myself and the balance of making what I love and making what makes money. The chiropractor tells me not to cross my legs. This display of modesty is apparently behind my back pain. I try not to cross them, but I just can’t seem to keep two feet on the ground.

Majority of the summer, I’m at the Cabin in rural PA, eating pasta, smelling flowers. I put my toes in the grass every morning, do my little stretches, get my chi up. Then, for balance, I slam a few espressos on an empty stomach and sit like a hunched goblin at my desk and tap tap tap for hours.

A hundred degrees, a hotel room in Cincinnati —- I hit a wall with my writing. I call the editor I’ve been working with — Leone Ross — on the verge of tears. Within minutes she comes up with the idea. The structure I’ve been searching for 10 years. A few more weeks and finally: a first draft I am proud of. Finding the right structure — for a project, for a life — is the hard part. Once you have the vessel, everything else can flow.

(If you’re looking for an editor to get your manuscript over the line I highly suggest Leone)

I come. I go. I come again. Never in one place too long. The movement is comforting like a lullaby or nodding off in moving car. Am I running from something or towards something? I cannot tell. One morning at the cabin, I wake up and put my toes in the grass. The dew is cold on my feet. Summer’s over, it’s time to go home.

On the plane ride I impulsively decide to go on a water fast. I’m short of answers and looking for God. I accidentally do five days. Accidentally in the sense that I only planned for a day or two. On day two a veteran faster tells me that the real benefits kick in at day 4, day 5. The stem cell activation the immune system reset, the clarity. Well fuck, I think, I didn’t come this far to come this far.

And so, nothing but water for 5 whole days. I feel delusional, aggressive, heartburn, and weak. And then on day 4: clarity, enlightenment. I see everything — myself, my place in the world, my next steps — clearly. I am untouched by thoughts that would have had me in a chokehold before. I am beyond emotional meltdown and triggers, untouched Then, on day 6 someone sends me a voicenote I don’t want to hear and I’m so upset I can’t sleep for two days.

Tail end of summer I have a shoot on a Caribbean Island that is not Jamaica, I’ll be doing my own make up, the team tells me. I panic. I’m not being a pick me girlie when I tell you that I don’t know how to do makeup. It’s simply a fact. I have neither the skill nor the patience and everything gives me eczema, an allergic rash. Once on set, a producer friend asked Did you learn to do makeup in 2015? as she side eyed my ziploc bag of “drugstore glitter.” I blushed, how did she know?

I find myself on the verge of tears in Sephora the day before the shoot. What things do I need and what order do they go on in? I let a sales associate talk me into buying hundreds of dollars worth of stuff. It’s simple she promises. I go home and put it on exactly as she told me, in the exact order she said. I look like a corpse. I panic call my friend Zuri. it’s giving lord farquaad she says. I return everything and start again, a blank canvas once more.

(Which is to say: I’m looking for recommendations for hypo allergenic, fragrance free, simple make up product recs for oily/combo skin and how to apply them if anyone cares to bless me)

Once as a teenager I tried to do what American teens do on the television: sneak out the house. My friend and I tried to slip out her bathroom window, but my head got stuck in the burglar bars. I don’t remember how I got unstuck but I do remember that eventually somehow we made it to the party. I tell my mother about this, thinking I am old enough now and it will amuse her. When she hears my head got stuck she laughs. When she hears I made it to the party she stops laughing. It doesn’t matter how old I am now.

I struggle with the news and the weight of the world and how I can feel like I am doing something, contributing. During the last Trump presidency I was a journalist. I wrote about his every move, went to every protest. The screaming into the abyss gave me a sense of purpose, of doing something.

This time around I am no longer a journalist and for reasons I won’t get into can no longer go to protests. Earlier this year, when ICE invades LA, I feel panicked, useless at not being able to show up in the ways I once did. And so I do other things: I donate, I boycott. I follow my incredible friend Joi Lee’s recs as she builds a directory of volunteer opportunities. It doesn’t feel enough. If you’ve been going through something similar and have found other ways to contribute, please send them my way.

I chop off all my hair. And for the first time in my life I do it from joy, not pain or protest. My first buzzcut was in high school, the second in New York. This time, it is no Britney, just vibes. I buy a shower cap with cherries on it, to protect it in the shower. It leaks, but the cherries are cute.

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can.

Right now I don’t want to accept and so instead I think about the things that I can change. Often in the realm of the things I make and how I make them. My last short film was expensive and time intensive. I think about how to scale down. How can I make the next thing smaller? More simple? How can I make more for less?

I get told No a lot this summer. People promise things, unpromise them, take them back, fall through. A friend tells me disappointment is anointment. It stings but does not devastate me as it once would. And I feel proud at this growth.

I find my patience thin. I find my tongue shaved sharp. It shapes itself into exactly what I’m thinking before I can stop it. I try to be gentle, kind, to let them. Sometimes I feel like there are two people inside of me. One that lives to please, to impress, to placate. And the other that wants to tell everyone to fuck off, how it really go. Recently the second one wins more than the first. I hold my tongue too long. I lash out. I disappoint myself. I promise to do better tomorrow.

I’m briefly in talks with a publisher about writing a lesbian Caribbean romance novel. About a DEA agent and a drug queen pin stuck on housearrest. A romance novel is out of my comfort zone — I’m equally terrified and excited by the idea. It ultimately doesn’t go forward but the idea stays with me, scratching at the back of my cerebellum. Hello? It whispers. Scratch, Scratch. Are you still there? Maybe I’ll share a snippet on here so it will leave me alone and haunt you instead.

LA is miserably hot when I return. I go to the beach, I buy cut fruit from the man dem on the road with the colorful umbrellas. On the car ride there and back I dream, I strategize. About my career, my life, the next move, the state of the world. Something’s got to give here I think. Something has got to give.

xx,

sumlion

Reading

Outline, Rachel Cusk - this book quietly assaulted me in the best way possible, I wasn’t expecting it to. Found myself underling line after line.

Hungry Ghosts, Kevin Jared Hosein — two families connected in 1940 Trinidad and the differences in religion, class, family, and historical violence between them.

Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, Priyanka Mattoo - “One woman’s search for home, from Kashmir to England to Saudi Arabia to Michigan to Rome and, finally, to Los Angeles.” Where is home when the place you once gave the title no longer exists is a question that will always appeal to me.

Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Read — Been recommended this for a while and finally got around to it. Perfect light beach read, didn’t see the twist coming.

Evenings and Weekends — Oisín McKenna — A delightful messy queer london ensemble

Autobiography of My Mother - Jamaica Kincaid

Watching

Not much really — any suggestions?

Hyperfixation

These CBD pills by Cured Nutrition have bandaided up my insomnia. Around 5 or 6 pm, I take one or two of these gummies. At 8 or 9pm I take a CBN pill and two of these valerian root/ ashwaganda pills.(start with the first too) Then a sleep story on Calm. Have I found the root cause of my sleep problems? No. But I am out of ideas and sheep to count.

(This isn’t a sponsored post but it should be)