Weekly Diary: Natalie Chang

5.5.20

Lately I’ve been having these jarringly vivid memories of when I was a depressed little teenager and wondering how to write about the absence of things, namely: imagination, intuition, sensation. I remember hearing my sister talk about lying in the sun with her friends, salt water drying on their arms, and I couldn’t understand that, I couldn’t summon whatever feeling that image should evoke. How do you write about nothing happening, nothing washing over you. I used to sleep for either 20 hours or 20 minutes a day. I buried my hands under my pillow when I thought about going outside. I floated through my house like a ghost.

Some people think that being miserable is creatively productive. But all I remember doing is taking pens and pressing them into my palms until they drew blood, the extent of my productivity. Depression is the absence of everything and you can’t really make much out of that. That’s why sometimes as I’m writing these I get so pissed off at myself, like, who the fuck cares what you have to say, why are you trying to string a pretty sentence together about your neighbors dying, about confines, the world is ending, and you’re in a Google doc.

I wish I could say I had been a more compassionate depressed person, but I wasn’t. I felt little for myself and probably less for other people. They were all paper figures on a screen I was too tired to watch. Maybe that’s the difference between then and now.

A rat got into my apartment this weekend. Spencer did the hard part. It was terrified, he said. It’s still just a little animal. I felt a little twist of envy, that he had the spiritual capacity to think that. He thinks I’m a good person but when I saw that rat I didn’t give one thought to its pending death, only to how I could make it happen.

Sometimes I know I expect ludicrous things from him. Acts of mind-reading. A shared consciousness. I’m trying to figure out what’s ludicrous and what isn’t. I’m starting to wonder if I have this weird cowardly desire to outsource the act of having a relationship with myself. Like, know me so that I don’t have to. Understand me so that I don’t have to. Love me. So that I don’t have to.

4.29.20

I did not think I would be checking my email during the apocalypse.

When I was younger I read a book that defined the passage of time as measurable only by the transference of energy; every other form of quantifying it is a silly human joke. The only thing that disturbs me about monotony is that the inability to differentiate between days feels like an early stage of psychosis.

I watched the third season of Twin Peaks again and I remembered why I liked it and why so many people didn’t. The third season of Twin Peaks imagines the world as a closed box, time as a loop, people as flies in a jar. Laura Palmer is always going to be dead, wrapped in plastic. Dale is always going to be in the Black Lodge. Bob is always going to be at the window.

There is another theory of time that imagines it as a sphere, not a line. I have always interpreted this in a way that I suspect is incorrect, which is: every pair of events is the same distance from each other. What happened “yesterday” is just as far from current me as what happened “when I was twenty years old.”

I think about the sphere when it comes to the dreams I’ve been having. I read somewhere that everyone’s dreaming about the same things now, mostly the things you would guess, like dying, and I imagine all of our sleeping bodies floating in the same viscous collective consciousness, each of us as close to/far from each other as anyone else.

You could think of any moment as little more than an image you could, in theory, recreate exhaustively. A moment is dictated by a number of variables that is vast and diverse enough to be incomprehensible, but not infinite. These variables include: what you were wearing, the song in your head, the angle of sunlight on your hands, the way it showed you the floating dust, how hungry you were/were not, the taste in your mouth. A point in a plane dictated by enough dimensions to be unimaginable, but not impossible.

Mitski said, my body’s made of crushed little stars, and I’m not doing anything.

It feels like I’ve been shut in my apartment forever and it feels like I will be forever. I have to remember that the distance between now and before is the same as the distance between now and after. It’s funny because as I was writing this something from my past found me and grasped me by the throat. It might be okay because even if time doesn’t change, if the world doesn’t, if my mistakes don’t, I think I do.

4.20.20

I am not going to get high. I stopped getting high when I started crying uncontrollably every time I smoked weed. This, in some ways, was an encouraging moment, the realization that being outside of my head was finally worse than being in it.

I am not going to get high. The last time I was high I cried and fell asleep on Spencer’s couch at like three in the afternoon and dreamed of: an ocean of silver rings, the texture of carved wood, cruelty.

I am not going to get high. It’s so selfish.

I am not going to get high. My brain already feels too taut, it recoils like a snake at every new sensation. If I get high I am going to inevitably think about It, and about what I’ve already done to my lungs, and about all the things I touched today, and about how my mother always said my baseline temperature is higher than average, so how will I really know if I have a fever?, and about Spencer losing work, and about whether It could survive in my hair, and about the man in the grocery store who called me a chink, and about whether I’m gaining weight. I guess I’m already thinking about it. I am going to get a little high.

Natalie Chang is a writer and editor in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, she tweets, under @natalietchang.