January Exposures

I think I know why I write you publicly. It humbles me. Keeps me honest.

It's a form of public penance. Like church. This is how I commune with you.

A sort of ancestor worship.

I like that I can go back and change what I write. It feels like you and I are working on a solution together. I like that I can go back in time and edit the past.

About the sun.

I am happiest when the sun shines against my face.
Right now, it is my only source of warmth.
When it goes away, its absence is profound.
The table gets dark.
It gets cold pretty quick.
Things feel a bit more bleak.
Then a cloud gets out of the way, and everything is bright again.
The muscles in my cheeks lift to a smile once more.
My body relaxes back into the warmth of the sun.
The cat likes the sun too.
Come back.
It gets so cold when you leave.
Your warmth is an antidote for my loneliness. 

Sometimes I am bat shit crazy.

Today, I composed a ridiculously strange email.

It's a long story...

I know why I feel like this and I hate the reasons. It's some woman DNA shit.

It's cold in Detroit.

It's cold in Detroit for obvious reasons. December being the most most obvious. Last week I had two wisdom teeth removed. I have stitches in my mouth, and a hole in my gums. Rice gets stuck in the latter. The hole makes my mouth smell like a sewer which in turn makes me feel like a swamp queen. My friend, who sometimes crawls into my bed to keep me company, often likes to tell me how awful my breath is. It's a good dynamic the two of us have. He makes fun of me, and I endure it because I believe I deserve to be punished. Laurel and Hardy eat your hearts out.

Just one of them days all the time.

I'm so sad. I miss you. What happened? I feel so alone. We used to be happy. I used to feel young. Life seemed pretty good. Why did my dad have to get sick? Why did we move to New York?

Where do I go from here?

Help me. I need you.

Okay. I need to stop writing these despondent posts. Let's face it. You are dead. You are never coming back. I am still alive. Life is hard. A lot of people a far more miserable than me. Get over it.

This is definitely an angry post.

Let's begin anew.

Hello, it's me Miss Eleni Theodora Zaharopoulos.

Adi, you know that my name is misspelled quite often. It upsets me. Sometimes it makes me mad. I should be empathetic, but I am not. Instead, it makes me an incredibly vigilant speller. It also makes me realize I'm uptight. No doubt it's petty on my part. Why should I give a fuck? It's because I'm a proud and insecure person.

Sometimes I want to fit in and sometimes I don't.

I don't like the role I play in other people's narratives.

I don't trust my own narrative.

I often think about what I would change my name to. Sometimes I really wish I had something so good that I just went for it! Something that would make me create a new face book profile. My inability to form a strong enough opinion on name changing gets in the way though. Do I really need a pseudonym? Am I pseudonym material? As do my insecurities.

I almost always form crushes on people who have really good fake names

Familial guilt is another factor. Sometimes I feel like I'd be denying my roots if I were to start going by another name. But then again, why hold onto shit like that? Why don't I start calling myself Len-Len the Panda Lady?

Sometimes I think about giving myself a new name for purely professional reasons because the thought of www.elenizaharopoulos.com makes me cringe.

Our stuff

Our stuff is everywhere.
I sort through things. Make piles.
Give things meaning. Remove meaning from other things.
Organize, move on, alleviate clutter, activate spaces, recycle, reuse, renew, keep going. These sorts of things.

Queenie

Despite the missing set of gems

my curved figure and neotenic breasts

despite dresses and the gestures of my sex

I find myself in the company of kings.