I want to start this mid-year issue of fotocopy the same way I end most pieces by expressing my eternal gratitude to all of you — this is my most consistent project so far and I have you to thank, for reading, sharing, and reaching out. I hope to continue growing and creating alongside all of you <3
What more to say about this week other than it was heavy with rain, and I am on day ten of working, no days off, with phlegm in my throat that wakes me up at six in the morning, to cough a scary cough my throat maintains after sickness, which reminds me I have weak lungs so quitting cigarette-smoking was good for me and one day I’ll fully quit smoking weed, in the transition, I’ll take edibles and go square-dancing with my friends in a vacant warehouse, newly re-marketed as an “event space”, where a friend of a friend had their wedding — which is a thing now, in my life; my friends’ fridges is littered with save the dates and corresponding invitations; the same cream textured card-stocks, gold foils, script fonts that I spend my early twenties designing for thirty-year-old couples who seemed older back then.
So it was raining when I stepped outside of the bar to go home, knowing I had drunk too much again; I felt it in my gait, in my mouth, on my hair and skin, and I was not afraid to walk home as the summer thunder clapped in the distance, and I count and think of the books I read as a young girl, where I learned to count the distance between oneself and the thunder, a life skill I use more than learning about the Russian government, and then comparing it to that of Iran’s or Britain’s, a class I took as a seventeen-year-old, determined to be smarter and better, overall, than everyone else. Look where that got me, I think in the rain, getting wet on a walk home, in a neighborhood I didn’t know existed as a seventeen-year-old, working til three in the morning at a bar and for private clients; staying in their houses, feeding their cats, dropping off the mail, hearing their stories, taking coffee from their machines, using their washing machines, sleeping in their guest rooms, putting my sweaty toes on their deck, in the sunlight, as the wetness of the wood steams off into a summer wind, eating their eggs, watering their plants, buying sterling silver, buying used bras, buying a dress for my sister’s wedding. I don’t have a sister, just a friend who once cut open a pomegranate for me, and I remember the red juice from the fruit on her hands, sticky. We ate breakfast at two in the afternoon, and the sun set before we walked to the fens to watch the reeds blow against the falling white of snow.
I am lucky to have. A warm bed to come home to, an AC I found on the street installed for me, a dead garden on the balcony revived by the rain, dirty sheets to hide my greasy body under, money for store-brand ibuprofen, underwear to soak up the smell of grass, pockets of fake clover underneath me, lucky fake luck. I wait for the hangover to pass underneath what my iPhone labels a tropical almond tree, its branches so low that the leaves can almost touch my forehead, and when the wind passes through the residual rainwater shakes onto my lashes, so I can’t open my eyes. I don’t think so, iPhone, because I know tropical trees, like the ones back home that line the trail to the beach covered in a thin film of grainy sand. I remember when the ocean was cooler than the air. When thunder at the distance of the ocean’s horizon meant nothing, and we would watch the storm clouds hover over the grey water, deliver their bearings, as we ate grapes and read our magazines on an old bedsheet.
I am lucky to have had:
Bigger thighs than the year before, with itchy dead skin piling up beneath my fingernails, itchy so I peel the layer off, itchy so salt water burns, hot showers during a hot day — brown skin pressed up against the hot sun, the layers of my skin sitting on my fingertips like cellophane gifts.
drying flowers on the kitchen counter, blue hydrangeas blooming in the neighborhood
dirty wet towels on my waistband, it’s three in the morning and
tequila racing down my throat
Lucky to know how to
find a running brook from a house to the waterfall / the nudist beach on the digital map
Show a photo of my grandmother to a new person who will never meet her but
I (am lucky to)
Remember the shared room we had, the twin beds separated by a row of linoleum floors but sometimes I’d crawl into bed with her and feel her body, underneath the black she wore, and the afternoon she died in the bedroom we all gathered at dusk to touch her thin face and hair,
and a little lizard perched on the window in the bedroom and my aunt said, I think it’s my mother, but that didn’t make sense. She didn’t like lizards, so why choose to come back as one to say hello?
A correction to Issue 24: the portrait taken of me was by my lovely friend Anne Roffler, not my lovely friend Fredson!
This week I was into:
✿ The How To With John Wilson episode “How to Watch The Game”, which made me cry. Humans are so weird and tender and I love Wilson’s ability to get people to actually talk to him in the middle of everyday life.
I also liked this interview, Stopping by with John Wilson from the Poetic Society of America.
✿ The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett audiobook. It reminds me of the summer before sixth grade. Much like right now, it was also very muggy and rainy.
✿ Reading the history of square dancing on Wikipedia, where I found this very cool diagram. It looks like an old alchemy symbol, and I am obsessed.
✿ Y La Bamba’s 2019 album, Mujeres, especially the songs My Death, Lighting Storms, and Una Letra.
Lastly, the title of this piece was inspired by the Little Dragon song New Fiction.
See you next Monday —
xo, gabito