The Cockroach Journals (New York)

DAY 0 

A said a curious thing - in a tone I didn't know so well, she said "I'm not like a little cockroach like you, You can take hot or cold, long flights, any sort of pain. I'm not like you."

Me and my younger sister (A) were on this flight together to visit My (Our) Brilliant Sister (1) who lives in New York teaching philosophy, on the second flight after the layover, after seeing Iceland come into view, felted with moss, after running out of snacks and water and patience. Now I meditate on my resilience which I didn't previously know - but there was resentment in that pronouncement too. No matter. I will take cockroach. I will take bug. Recently having watched Metamorphosis in the theatre makes me ponder the limits of indestructibility, and of beetleness. 

DAY 1

Well - a lot to say about our first day, but certainly most of it's the exact standard emotions - exact - a road, grooved, grouted, out for me to run in - about, although surpassing (because they themselves in their bodies cannot support such star-crushing excess) my sisters. 

I won't - I won't document or validate them. 

Luckily the riot ran through quite quickly today, all of it.

(written, later, on psychadelics)

1 is loving, sweet, guileless, cute as a dog, petal, limpid rockpool (shelled crustacean). I love her as helplessly as ever. A knows this and loves 1 less. The thing about 1, as long as you love her first you could destroy everything she owned. Yes, I think I might do that. Sweetly surpassing these tricks is the fact that I know 1 loves me as wholly, as trustingly. 

New York is just like East London, but with less rules. The things for life are impossibly expensive, I say, as a rich tourist. The void of poverty licks its lips under my feet every pad, lending a certain recklessness - sweat - to our every movement by proxy. Beautiful tertiary colours of the Brooklyn buildings all loved all left to rot since 1987. A, my soul, here to impress somehow my own body excelling at being left. Dirt concrete here to hold the print. Tastebuds only to feel all the pain - not mine. Like petrichor. The mundane. 

People speak to themselves and to others on the street so easily, I miss this social life. How are you doing?, from men, completely sincere. 

Pleasure, pleasure, beauty, appearance - all, all, everything - why else would it be hated so? Do I hate it so? If it were not so powerful? 

DAY 4    

Am I going to become a writer instead? No - it's hard work too and of a different nature than you've yoked your body to before. I won't write or speak for a living, not like 1. But then again, thinking of all this pleasure activism, this aesthetic and fun which is all the worth of being - it's hard not to imagine something else for yourself. 

It was a good day even if the feeling - the feeling of being a satsuma pulled in two halves and held by the aorta - the two centres of gravity - A and 1 - does not abate. Well the ache does. Well the division maintains. Let it happen, you wilful girl. The spine pulled out of the salmon which makes it edible. Salmon is only famous for its insides, dead, anyway. To want to keep some of you is selfish. To be understood as holding the world together is enormous and incorrect. 

There is always a third way, you know. There are not always two pullings. You must find your kernel and stick to it. With that seed, oiled and saved for the time of blooming, everything else can slide off.

Manhattan in beautiful weather - 

DAY 5

My religion is that you are destroyed each moment and remade each moment. Believing this is all that gives me hope for my own life, my wormful directions. Flickering in and out with no connection to the dreamt past other than that you force - all that is very hopeful. 

This religion is challenged profoundly by the electromagnetic configuration of A, 1, and I. Even sometimes in speaking to A, I pause and study the textiles of the couch to imagine the other world where I am simply loving towards her - but it fails. At most I can change the tone of voice from patronising, accusatory, to wheedling, pathetic. So we have popped the three of us into this new blank reality and continue to reproduce each other like this - intolerable. Even if all of us disappear and ovulate back into this world in each moment, some thread of elastic sister-memory holds us, falling, failing. 

Yesterday we went to the Met and to Central Park where the Gossip Girls used to sit and Carrie jogs around. I don't want A's confessions, they're too sad. Pleased that I managed to fix a tired evening. 

Reading Aliens and Anorexia (Chris Kraus). I hate her because she believes her rich inner life will make up for her WEAKNESS.

I'd like to live and love here, I keep thinking it. I could make it in Brooklyn, beautiful beautiful place, I could start here alone no problem. The geometry confuses me, though. Like a bird I should know North. As 1 said, this island is not equivalent to America.

Didn't mention yet but I got into Medical School which dealt with the writer dreams quite quickly. Little geode knowledge that I'm good, enough, now.

DAY 6

God give me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, and also to just give up and say sometimes this is not going to fucking work. Your sister A is sick! Despite some appealing laser cut views New York is dirty and it doesn't like you. Get over it. No lemon coloured sky, no luminosity, or even light at all to speak of. 

In the sculpture garden at the MoMA, A turned to me like Christ on the Cross, an accepting face holding pain beyond comprehension, palms out. Then, I knew she was ill. We went home. I laughed and tried to melt my confusion. All these feelings evil feelings hate feelings and she is my younger sister. On the subway here someone pointed at our eyes over the masks and said they could tell we were sisters from that. From our dark eyes. 

Caring for A also creates me. That's OK too. 

DAY 7

Leaving today. Strange how tired we all are. I thought I was young. I am. I am weighed by A, leaden, inert. No, not to blame her. Not expert enough to change the energy, not strong enough to take it. Yet we slept thoroughly, rodent like, in the hot ground floor flat, and we all needed that sleep. 

We have managed to avoid almost any intimacy. Three of us. Three of us. 

Midtown. Raining just a little but keeping at it. The buildings are going to melt and peel away, they can't stand it. Actually, it's already happened and it's under our feet in the grey puddles. A steps fully in one and will carry New York home with her in her socks. 

We get novelty keychains in a little store - #1 KID, MAMA'S BOY, DEVIL, BAD BOY, SWEET THING. A secretes one and shows me the cheap metal in her palm afterwards like an oyster. I expect the shoplifting and am surprised by its smoothness, try to avoid generalisations about character. 

The actual island nature of the city enjoinders a kind of trapped feeling. Just the dirt sea one direction. Just the sclerotic roads another. Impossible to imagine a tree, or field from this vantage point, we rotate on the subways lines left up down right, back home.