A/N: A collection of diary entries from July 2024 to August 2024. The emotional turmoil of these high intensity months presented in entries littered and glittered with friendship, loneliness, love, ecstasy and grief. Unwavering forever, a summer to remember. Just not how I thought I would remember it.
July 4, 2024
Beyond the resistance, another morning.
No dark thoughts, only positivity, love, openness. I dreamt with England again. Traveling. A cold countryside. I don’t know what it means, just a compass pointing EAST.
July 5, 2024
Busy morning but its July and its so hot and life occurs in happenstance.
Beautiful fourth of July with old and new friends. Rolling on the floors in hugs. Getting too drunk on tequila. Throwing up in the restroom and still getting up to do a new moon yoga.
That is growth, adulthood, womanhood, etc.
2nd fourth of July I throw up and I think of nothing. Love is crazy. Its so big, wide, and expansive, meanwhile we’re microscopic. We think and feel in small doses. We perceive love full of scarcity and malaise, but the reality remains bigger, bigger than anything.
“You talked about my soul?!” - me to J.
How beautiful, how big, maybe not blue. Well maybe blue. But it’s like a crystalline blue, a blue as wild as the sea and as clear as a full day with bright white clouds. Resistance, we suffer so much in resistance. Yet when we surrender to the fear, to the deep rooted pain, we arise stronger and we are somehow recipients of the wish we so sought.
My hand hurts from writing.
July 7, 2024
Great sleep!
Painted my nails blue for protection. 10 days til my birthday.
July 11, 2024
Had to skip yoga today to fetch groceries. I didn’t realize how much yoga helped me and supported me. Even though I know, I really didn’t understand the extent of the impact.
Tired, don’t like waking up early inherently (unless on trip/traveling). But for mundane life tasks? No.
Later, on the mat.
I feel an indelible grief for all things.
I passed by a place called Chapman Woods and started thinking of the trees. All their friends gone, there is no woods, no longer. I think of Tolkien, on the indelible grief of war! LOTR could not have been written if the Great War did not exist. “Grief mingled with love”.
Only those who suffer so much write the best of love.
July 13, 2024
Dreamt with a lake in the middle of a dry place (“witch lake”). It was a war zone so there was no swimming in the lake. The water was greenish, sweet.
I sometimes have trouble identifying my feelings, confusing loneliness for solitude or vice versa.
Later, 1AM
I have been using weed for the horrible feeling that pierces my heart at night.
I’m unsure if even friends could soothe it. It’s something that continues to evade me. It’s a deep grief. A grief I’ve always felt. Not unique, not unique at all to the human experience.
I’ll never have a mother so I’ll have to make one. I’ll become one. Every single fucking thing I lack, I’ll have to create. I know the universe will meet me half way, but I’m exhausted, lonely, and just unsure if it all is making sense.
Birthday blues. The day looms like a dark cloud, I don’t trust most things. Certainly not love. Why do I always have to forgive when I just wish to not suffer?
Beyond this window is another world, a fresh perspective. A room with a view, a book lend to a friend. Such suffering! I laugh at my own sensitivity. Little Matilda now lends her most precious possessions to friends. I still can’t watch that movie. It makes me sad. I fear I shall see myself as her. Unchanged. Yet so marred.
By what? I keep giving what I don’t have to give: me.
I put so much force into the paper when I write like Emily Brontë did. If something as beautiful, as pure, as raw as Wuthering Heights came out of solitude, then perhaps it isn’t so bad. Perhaps I feel the solitude when I read Wuthering Heights. Perhaps I feel it behind the words.
Blotted out tears with wet tissue paper. Crying and writing, oh forever!
Waiting for my period, I want release. So it is given. I give myself permission. Remember it won’t always be like this, one day you’ll yearn for all you’ve abandoned. One day you’ll ache for this.
All this to say nothing. I dream with a kind sea and a gentle lover. Maybe. Quizas. Magic exists.
I’ll always believe, unfortunately. Truly.
July 14, 2024
The thing is finding a new place and holding/leaning into it.
I keep pulling the freedom card. Experimentation, change, the end of restrictions. Understanding how self-imposed things often are.
Later, afternoon.
Arcadia, the city I was born.
To the arboretum, seeing a duck clean himself. Other two ducks are falling asleep. The lids of birds are wonderful things. What separates me from the duck that falls asleep in the sun and breathes so deeply? My brain.
Watching dragonflies stand still and a grown man climb a tree. So I take off my sandals to fight off this heat. 3 days til my birthday, life is so strange and complex.
July 15, 2024
A guy didn’t like me, I go trim my white roses. My friends didn’t invite me, I go trim my pink roses. In all these situations, I collect myself and try to do good by the rest of the world.
I hope this scrap of sentience is enough. I hope I’m enough for the world. Wait, I am. I am. I am, said Sylvia Plath. I need those who understand how important it is to be invited. I need my presence to be required.
July 16, 2024
Many messages and coffee for the very tired. I don’t even know anymore, I gave up understanding a long time ago. So now I just surrender.
Might bake a cake rose-flavored. Might make love to a total stranger. Listening to Kate Bush. I am here now, that’s enough.
My mom sends me money, I will pay my fare for a train to the lake district and back.
July 17, 2024
Happy birthday to me! 32, a whole half equals sixteen. To the beach and beyond, with friends. Slept a reasonable amount. Synchronicity, the world, choice.
July 18, 2024
Combing through the events of yesterday. Every birthday the same revelation: you are so loved.
Eating ice cream of pastel colors on the boardwalk, sharing a cupcake on the beach between friends while “everything is romantic” plays, getting your dress wet by the crash of the tide, wearing your crown of stars, your wand as your pen.
love and friendship is forever.
birthday toast, driving on shrooms, being sung happy birthday in italian, my friends adopting a cat on my birthday. All these rituals exists, all these rituals for me, for love, for roses, for everything.
July 21, 2024
very sore in the spine, re-alignment? seeing the reality of my desires. travel, abroad, the world.
As this moon wanes so does my countdown for my trip. Leaving on the next full moon, the one of my birth. Aquarius full moon.
July 22, 2024
Leo Season! The name of the game is freedom and ritual. Experiment! Make friends with the unknown, the void. Trust that you are supported, be open and receptive to love and the world! Have sex!
Later, at the beach.
Read The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Volume 3) by the beach as seagulls flew over me. Truth. Life. Beauty. On a Monday.
July 24, 2024
Painted my nails red and started listening to Alanis Morisette.
In other news, I really need to get laid. The work of dating apps is atrocious but connection is possible to those with a beginner mindset.
Setting yourself up in the morning is only half the work. Staying in the flow, the love, the energy. I pulled the Moon/Luna card today. Flow is paramount, I’m going with the lunar rhythm.
Leo season creates so much heat, but also unleashes creativity. I feel ever so committed to myself again and my craft. I cannot for August and the Lakes and the magic of England in August.
August, always so special! Already dreaming of August and Emily Brontë’s birthday hasn’t even passed. Grateful for the magic I create by belonging to this world. Re-alignment, standing up straight, opening the hips.
July 25, 2024
Dreamt with two boys chasing after me.
My father, alive, driving me to work at the cemetery. We passed a lighting storm.
July 27, 2024
Sleepy but still here. I found Patti Smith’s M Train in the clearance section. A serendipitous find. The energies align and spin.
July 28, 2024
Ideal: a kind man, a man who’s soft yet can play daddy in the bedroom. It’s important to alternate between the feminine and masculine. Energetically speaking.
July 30, 2024
Kate Bush and Emily Brontë’s birthday. Made breakfast to Wuthering Heights playing. Lit a candle shaped like a wine bottle.
Sacred day, what does it mean to be an artist?
For a woman, it’s everything because she’s always denied the dream. Subconsciously we think ourselves not good enough. We are not men, so to make art you must be great. You need to be Virginia, Charlotte, Sylvia, you cannot be merely yourself.
You become a meme, a symbol, an archetype. We believe in aesthetics cause its the only way. The symbol, that’s what we are. Always self-othering to reach new heights and praise.
My name is not my name. What does it mean? That is the eternal question I’ll be answering the rest of my life.
August 1, 2024
Wow, it’s August! Lovely wine and dinner date with E.
Very validating, illuminating, and full of hope. He tells me to surrender deeper and is excited for my process. “The pure-hearted will never lose.”
Indeed!
August 3, 2024
Contemplating on my own friendships but most importantly contemplating on my own self. What do I exactly desire?
The wheel spins and my work continues. I’d like to be friends with other individuals who feel the same as me. Those who are committed to their path and creativity.
Last year was for the heart and connecting and creating community, this year is inward and getting serious about the work. Creating the life of my dreams, what does it all mean?
August 4, 2024
Revelatory dream. Trying to hang with friends and I forego people who actually want to hang out and see me. I misplace my car and I leave my cat locked in.
The intuition is left behind when the ego is prioritized. I don’t believe things are as black and white as they seem. You can love someone and thank them for their love yet still walk the other way.
Nothing negates itself. No absolutes!
Worried about the money for the trip, no savings, just winging it. I just assume the universe will provide and the magic will happen. I am blessed. This life is a fucking gift.
August 5, 2024
Powerful dream!
I dreamt I was in my mother’s bathroom. I was admiring the vanity and how much her taste was similar to mine. Then I turn to the bathtub (I was preparing to shower) and I notice the water is turning red. Blood.
My instinct is calm, “let it bleed, let it clear the pipes.”
If I’m disgusted or worried, I don’t let my emotions take me too far. There are pictures covering the wall that upon inspection have mold behind them. Everything poisoned despite the beauty, yet I felt I could help it. I was worried about blood in the water upon waking but then thinking about the circumstances-
Not my bathroom, my mother’s. An ancestral wound almost. Clearing the pipes.
August 10, 2024
I bought a new pen that glides off the page. Makes me put less pressure into the text. Interesting. The man tells me this is a pen people in accounting buy. How funny. My purpose is entirely different. My aim is art and life and poetry.
Find the center.
Later.
Another Alice, an Alice from a mirror.
The Alice from London asks the Alice from LA what is good to check out around here and there. I had pulled the mirror card earlier today, strange and not so. We exchange information from the other side. From different cities, us Alices.
Trains booked, I leave in eleven days.
August 14, 2024
In a week I’ll be in Wuthering Heights. Strange and wonderful.
I was given keys with a London phone box. Curious omen. The key, this year’s symbol. It’s really happening to me. Like a dream within a dream that’s been decoded.
I got the key to unlock the door, at last.
August 17, 2024
Got my carry on and last day to prep tomorrow! Now, I feel adventure call me by my name and I respond, saying, “Yes, I’m going!!!!”
Thinking of thunderstorms, magic, synchronicity.
August 19, 2024
Dreamt with the desert. I hate the desert, land of my ancestors. I don’t belong and my beloved neither do you.
Pulled Kairos and Wheel of Fortune.
11:53am.
A breakfast burrito with sriracha. Patti Smith. An english breakfast tea.
My plane is 777 with the #7 written on it. On time. Kairos. I could weep if knew what I felt. The very same gate I sat on my first day here.
“London Heathrow,” I said. “I will board you someday.” And I did. Insane that everything I wish for comes true.
Reading about Patti’s love for her husband and a tender husband and wife sit in front of me. He fetched her food, he loves her, it moves me. The very thing I don’t have. But Kairos spins and I settle into this.
This trip is divinely aligned to something greater than myself.
Later, on the plane.
When the plane took off, I was clutching to Patti Smith’s M Train. No holy cross but this. Listening to Alex Turner.
5:51am/9pm.
No sleep on the plane, I hope to sleep on the train. I’ll arrive in a dreamlike state, barely woken, a lucid reality.
11am, still awake.
Ran into another looking glass Alice [a store]. The name of the journal, strange and not so.
British diet coke.
Once I saw those gray clouds, large and angry, looming in the background, I knew. I love it here. I always have.
August 21, 2024
Wuthering Heights.
Too many emotions and little sleep. I can’t describe the picturesque landscape. Except the feeling of it. Peace, bird song, death (tarot card), and a sheep already eating her breakfast.
Gray clouds that give into heavenly blues. Green. Green everywhere. The wind, strong. The weather comes and goes. One minute it rains and then a rainbow appears. More rain. Another rainbow.
If I was the goddess of anything, I’d be the goddess of storms. Violent, strong, evocative. Brontë means lighting. Greek goddess. Makes sense. My favorite weather is storm.
I sleep with the window wide, no blinds.
What within me needs to die? The need to belong. You already belong to this. This world. Warmth and kindness was given to you at birth. You can chase love or you can embody it.
You must live here. England, maybe London but here.
Loads of coffee for today. Top Withens. The Parsonage.
Emily. Emily. I’m in her homeland. I bet she woke up each morning and saw dark clouds over cerulean blue skies. I bet she opened her window just like I did now to greet the morning.
Later, Top Withens.
Roaring wind, cold. Even in summer. Underneath the Cathy and Heathcliff trees.
Wuthering Heights FOREVER.
August 22, 2024
Foggy outside. Tired, just want to remain underneath my covers. Chill day ahead. Train and Windermere!!!!
Incredible. I pulled the World card and meditated on why I bought moonstone yesterday. New beginnings. I thank this wonderful country. God’s own country.
Yes, I feel it. The moors healed me.
Later, 1:03pm.
Train to Windermere. A little kid with a Joshua Tree t-shirt. Playing “the lakes” with friends after a mushroom trip. It’s all meant to be. Irrevocably.
August 23, 2024
Finally slept 8 hours, thank god. I also had a full cry/breakdown around midnight. Letting the floodgates open. A sweet release no matter how it hurts to admit the grief.
Grace through all things.
10:15am.
On a boat sailing Windermere to Ambleside.
A black pool surrounded by green. Gray with a twinge of sadness. The clouds will part and the blue will sweep through. I’m never leaving, not spiritually. Not in the least.
Sun pierces through glittering stars among a black pool, Long neck beasts of pure white, mountains covered in glorious greens Can you imagine another place to die but this? I remember the loneliness of centuries ago I remember what it means to travel alone
And I digress to confess how little it means to live a life unlived. How we chose our battles in eternal suffering. Meanwhile I’m still at the lake. Cold and uncaring to look at a plane.
Later, 14:13pm.
After Wordsworth’s cottage, I feel invigorated. Poetry, the breath in my nostrils.
The classical, the beauty of the natural world. I know why I do what I do. The beauty and peace of the sublime.
How I wish I could continue traveling! I would continue up north, up to Scotland. See that beautiful country.
I must confess the worst part of this trip is the food. Not even the weather, that I’m fond of. But every single meal requires serious seasoning. Nothing savory, everything sweet. Only the Indian inspired food or hybrids have flavor. Alas I’ll admit I’m very fond of the mushroom and the potato here.
Later, again.
Sitting on the edge of a river. River Rothay which touches Thirlmere , Grasmere, and Windermere. I like how rivers constantly move. Ever present flow and ease. Change like its current, constant and unavoidable.
Everything sprouts here, even in ruins or decay. A symbol I love and ache.
August 24, 2024
Now that I’m sleeping properly, I’m incredibly sleepy when I wake up at 8am. Regardless, we are taking in the energy.
Later, 2:42pm.
Castlerigg Stone Circle. Had lunch there. Cracked open a diet coke.
The sun feels so warm. Like a little sheep on the valleys of Grasmere, I laid down on the grass and let time pass by.
The sun feels impossibly warm, perhaps because it comes and goes. Muddy shoes, muddy pants. Grief forgotten, soul came back. Adventure: to walk down a road with no signs, only the belief you are going the right way.
The stones are warm to the touch. I think it was placed here because of the sunlight on this point 4,500 years ago. Ancient, archaic, sublime.
Towards another walk and then home again. Home. Strangely I don’t feel far from home. Picked a tiny yellow flower to take back to California. An old place yet familiar all the same.
August 25, 2024
Left Windermere without much ceremony, just an ever present ache and cold from walking so long in the rain. It is impossible to dry in this weather. It is perpetually damp.
Very sleepy will try to nap between Lancaster and Leeds.
Not much later.
Oddly and not so, everything on this trip brings up something I don’t have: romantic love. Old people holding hands by the lakes, young people meeting each other at the arrival of trains.
But me? Not so. I arrive at every station alone.
I thought about stopping at Carnforth to meet a certain someone, but do these things even happen in real life? So I stay content admiring gloomy skies and vibrant greens where sheep eat. They have never known that kind of grief.
This train will take me to Leeds. I understand right now this is how it’s meant to be.
Saw a little white swan, alone on a pond. Thinking that’s me. Poor little thing, a very fine neck it has and huge white wings made of alabaster cream, made to take flight. I understand why if a young woman would become a bird, it’d be it.
Such grace and softness, such beastly size. Black eyes, black feet, married for life.
Later, 21:18pm.
On a never ending bus heading to London. Very long trip. Thirsty and hungry. My first stay at a hostel, isn’t that exciting?
Passed the land of Alex Turner (Sheffield) and I think I saw Sheffield City Centre. How poetic! One of my favorite songs (the dream synopsis). I cannot help but think and dream.
We’re arriving at North Hampton, wherever that is. A blue light perpetually on allows me to write. The music on this bus just party songs. I don’t know what to make of it. Still more than an hour to go til London.
Tomorrow I board my plane back but first I must see my ladies, Shalott and Ophelia. Pillars of fragility and dreams of the feminine psyche.
Later, midnight.
At a hostel with a moonlit view. A perfect half-moon.
I’m in the tower rooms like a princess. Everything in my life requires romanticization. It never rains when I arrive in London. A moonstone in my luggage, protected, aligned. A secret talisman.
We sleep in the same city, under the same moon.
August 26, 2024
So tired! My body is struggling. Too much walking and running about.
Later, near the Thames, outside Tate Britain.
Having a coffee to try and stay awake. Immensely tired and now its off to Barcelona, Spain.
Saw Lady of Shalott. Her gaze so sad, so wretched, so devastated. I become aware of how much the faces of these women become alive when seen up close. Beautiful to see these figures up close.
Thinking so much of my own fears and shortcomings as a lover. A desire for freedom, disguised as fear or the other way around. I feel unable to make romantic connections. A disgust for the other is a disgust for the self.
To be partnered means to be held back, for how can someone truly understand me? It’s silly but its true. My thoughts at least, not grounded in reality at all. Fear and contempt. Repulsion. What to do about it?
Crack the shell wide open, even though it hurts and breaks everything I hold dear. To be changed is to be loved. I don’t know how to be loved, it often feels like a prison. Asking for change, conditions to be loved. Behave or act a certain way. The only way to be loved, a deep parental wound we need to question.
Everything is so expensive in London. But its pretty and lively, I like that nature is not so far away. Taking a bold risk.
Seagulls are funny creatures, its just a river but they act like its the sea. Maybe all bodies of water contain an ocean known to the soul but lost to the mind. I like a river, a big, a dark river. I can’t even call the Thames brown because it isn’t. It’s a moss green, faded, dark, but rich like brown.
This is the river that Shakespeare saw, Virginia, maybe Sylvia. I forgot Anaïs visited here. I don’t think she liked it much but I do.
It’s a beautiful day in London, no rain.
I always end up by the Thames, in the city of Westminster, birthplace of Alice Liddell. The Alice through the Looking Glass. I’m just a phony, but I get by.
Later, LHR.
About to board a plane to Barcelona, the land of my ancestors and colonizers. Interesting my flight stops there. Then off home.
What does home even mean anymore? Trying to trust myself in these processes.
August 27, 2024
Didn’t sleep, just wandered around Barcelona. Hanging in the park with a spaniard down my throat. I can still feel his tongue kiss, like the roughness after a sour candy. A perpetual mark of being well-loved, burned cheeks and lips from his auburn-color beard.
Light eyes, hazel, or a honey-colored river. How I swooned when he called me “cariño”. How hard and strong his arms were. His pink blush, his prominent nose. Of course, he’s a capricorn.
August 31, 2024
Last day of August.
Woke up early, unknown if due to jet lag or a very strange dream. Potent perhaps. Dreaming with houses. Someone was making my dream house and they added a very zen pool with a waterfall.
Upon waking I thought the waterfall to be too much. But I do concur I always need a body of water. Water nearby. Running water specifically. A lake won’t do, even though it’s my home. It has to be a river or an ocean. Even a stream.
Movement above all. I think I might watch Sailor Moon.