August 29, 2025 :: 00:19:09 :: I paid my rent on time...
...but now my phone is dead. For real dead.
---
August 28, 2025 :: 16:05:33 :: My heart is breaking
Eden just commented on my Letterboxd.
~~~ :: 10:23:33 :: ...Horsehead!
Often in my dreams I fly back to Oklahoma City to visit my family. It’s a different Oklahoma City than the one I know. There’s a subway and buses and lots more people out on the streets. I take walks to art galleries and ride my bike around and spend lots of time with my mom and dad.
There is a continuity to the dreams, which I can notice every time I go into the backyard, where a large, severed horse head is hanging from the laundry line, clothespins in its mane. I come outside and talk to the head, and flirt with it, and spin it around. Each time I have this dream again the horsehead is a little more rotten. The night before last its skin was green and falling off and it no longer had eyes in its sockets. I spun it around again and talked to it, and it didn’t talk back, but I giggled. I took a picture of it with my phone, but a Snapchat filter was automatically switched on that made the horse head have comically large cheeks.
When I was younger and talked in my sleep more often, my dad would notice on our family camping trips that I would often mumble “A, B, C, D, E… Horsehead!” in the middle of the night. That was plagiarism! That’s a line, more or less, from a children’s introduction to poetry I read as a kid. It was an absurdist poem, with a lot of dead ends and weird detours through the alphabet.
Yesterday was difficult again, mostly because the day before I went to bed at three in the morning. I had hung out with my new friend all night (good) but then got stressed and overcompensated for the utter lack of free time I had (not good). I slept well, but not enough, and that combination is probably what made me have the vivid visit to the horse head again.
I didn’t stay at home all day. I had a meeting with the Vegetarian Chef, which was nice, but otherwise I was infected by the usual fatigue that made it hard to move or breathe or keep my eyes open. I had mercy on myself and slept in my bed instead of on the floor. I got up, I went back to bed, I ate something, I had faint dreams during the day, then it was evening already, and I had to go keep my promise and see my friends. I forced myself to work for thirty minutes and then I went out the door.
It was warm and cool at the same time, it was humid, it had just rained and everything smelled delicious. As I walked down the street to the metro station I had the feeling that everything was different, as if I had slept so hard I was now walking through a slightly different world. Nobody was familiar, the buildings were all a slightly different color than I remembered, everything had shifted one centimeter to the right. There was a slight breeze that flew over my head, but I’ve already gotten used to the feeling. After just one week my hair’s grown out so much already.
I stood there at the stop, under the railway bridge covered in pigeons and on the metro platform covered in pigeon shit, and thought about my life. Sometimes everything feels so fragile. I don’t have enough money to pay rent this month. I’m going to have to bum off of someone I know and love. There is a dramatic chain reaction I imagine sometimes, usually before sleeping, where a combination of just the right bureaucratic, financial, and interpersonal fuckups lands me back in my parents’ house with no money. I’m loved and people will support me through all the challenges I have to get through in the next year, but in the end love alone isn’t enough. I have to deal with this shit myself.
---
August 23, 2025 :: 10:05:00 :: Licorice rope
Am I sexy, walking bald through the rain with a lime green jump rope? I’ve taken it upon myself to do exercise in the park, in public, in front of other people this morning, which is unlike me but I’m rolling with it. I like these random life urges I’ve been getting the last few days. I have to be at the public library every day, I have to shave my head, I have to jump rope in the park!
It’s Saturday morning, drizzling, fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit (14 ˚C), gloomy, wet, wet, gloomy, gross. The only other living beings in the city are presumably dog walkers, joggers, and cruisers. I have proof of the dog walkers already. Germans love to have giant, beautiful, evil dogs that they never train and walk through the city without a leash. I walked past some big black beautiful beast already, snarling and barking at me while its owner held it back on its flimsy pink leather leash. I haven’t seen the joggers yet, but it’s a weekend morning so they’re definitely running around somewhere and just haven’t made it to the park yet. The cruisers I can infer from rumor and hearsay and tradition--I’m walking up the hill now to the playground, and a man is smoking a cig and staring at me from inside the little forest on the eastern side of the park. Am I sexy, walking bald through the park with a lime green jump rope? This area is known throughout the entire city as Cologne’s Number One Cruising Hotspot. Probably it’s not very active on a rainy Saturday morning, but whenever I see people hanging out looking suspicious on that side of the park I wonder, I just wonder…
Jumping rope is fun. I find a nice spot with some tree cover from the drizzle and get right to it. It’s nice to find a rhythm and see that a skill I haven’t done for so many years is still there in my body somehow. Or maybe it just comes naturally to the human being to jump rhythmically over a revolving rope. I find it hard to breathe steadily and it sucks me into an internal world of focus as I count up, forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven... Last night I read online that two hundred jumps is a good goal to stick with for beginners, but I end up at three hundred, since I noticed I still had some energy. I take an unplanned pause at the two hundred mark, because a band of rowdy joggers needed some more space to get around a narrow turn (See? They made it eventually!).
I make such a big deal about my appearance (bald) and what I’m doing (jump roping), but actually most people don’t care at all. I’m shielded from the usual fearful thoughts about the world around me because I have to focus on breathing while jumping up and down nonstop. Even in this state, though, I notice that none of the joggers are interested in me, and no one walking through the main part of the park under the hill even realizes I am alive. They’re all struggling to stop their giant, beautiful, evil German dogs from breaking off the leash and running away and eating me. When I finish with my three hundred jumps, I look to the left (east) and see the last of the joggers disappear into the forest, the Number One Cruising Hotspot.
When I get home I realize that my fly was down the whole time.
---
August 21, 2025 :: 12:39:03 :: One bag of various baked goods
I’m in Kalk, on the other side of the Rhine. It was a strategic position for my spontaneous morning plans and my non-spontaneous planned-out-for-a-week evening plans with Q, and my boyfriend, and the anarchists. It’s fun to be on the other side of the river, I don’t get many chances to come here in my daily life. The public library is also really nice. It’s full of right angles and pillows. It reminds me of Alice, since we came here to study together a couple of times. This whole side of the Rhine reminds me of her! I wish she were still around--no one else is as good of company to take walks with. But she’s still around in my heart, and indirectly, my life--just the other day my brother was at her birthday party.
Before I came to the library, I stopped in an Aldi to get some baked paraphernalia to snack on. My pizza and cinnamon roll and spinach börek all cost three Euro altogether, but I still felt a bit guilty for spending any money at all. As I was putting it in my bag just past the self-checkout stations, I saw a guy walk in. Light blue shirt tucked into dark pants, the same outfit all the official security guys wear. That was the same guard who was there at the immigration office, who told me to come back Monday and then I came back Monday and on Monday I waited for three hours in a line just to be told that I could wait up to two months to get the document I need to legally work or leave the country. All of my anger projected onto this random security guy. I thought “You’re the goddamn reason I feel guilty for spending three Euros!” But in reality he has nothing to do with it. He was probably buying a snack during his lunch break, anyway.
When I went to the bathroom to fill up my water bottle, I was startled by the view in the mirror. An orb of pale flesh with two large eyes was staring back at me. Kind of like when you learn a weird new word and start hearing it everywhere, my eyes keep locking on to other men with buzz cuts in the train and on the street. Feeling the water on my head was interesting, so was feeling the breeze. I have the feeling that I am very sweaty, probably because the sweat on my head can be cooled and carried away by the wind for the first time in my twenty-five years of owning a head. It was just as freeing as I expected it to be.
---
August 19, 2025 :: 17:13:39 :: I am not my skin
I’m going to take a walk around the neighborhood tonight and pay really close attention to the wind flying through my hair. In about twelve hours I will be bald, and I think by most people’s standards it won’t look very good, but I have the feeling that I just have to do it. I want a different life and the only way I know how to move towards it is in baby steps, writing one thousand words a day until I’m done with my papers and can breathe, shaving all my hair off to remind myself that I am not my skin.
---
August 18, 2025 :: 17:42:55 :: The week of yellow leaves
“Hold on, Voluptua,” I say as I take off down the road. “We’re about to cross the intersection.” Voluptua responds, not in human language, but makes a metallic groan to let me know she’s ready. Both of my hands in hers, we crisscross with surgical precision through a row of cars, forgoing the labyrinthine bike lane to skip straight to the promenade along the Rhine.
I rode Voluptua thirty minutes from my boyfriend’s house to one of the public libraries this morning, because I guess that’s my idea of fun. Now my thousand words for the day have been written and I’m making the thirty-minute journey back home. In the end it’s going to be more like fifty minutes, because I don’t know the way and it’s the very start of rush hour. I also keep almost crashing into things, which is a common problem when I’m in charge of any sort of vehicle, unfortunately, but this time it’s kind of Voluptua’s fault. I try not to make people feel judged or shamed for features that they’re born with or that are otherwise out of control. But the only bike I’ve ever ridden with pedal brakes is Voluptua. She is a worthy and loyal companion and I’m sure we’ll get to know each other more and more and work better together in turn, but for now it’s still a bit awkward.
I was introduced to Voluptua by my boyfriend; she came over with him to my place one day. They had had a working relationship in the past, and when Voluptua found herself without a job, he figured she could work for me. I had been looking for some help getting around the city for some time already. I think my boyfriend was also sick of me walking twenty minutes over to his place when it takes just five with a bike. Voluptua isn’t really one to talk a lot, but you can tell she’s always thinking. She’ll make a comment about the bike line every now and then or will cuss the cars out. We’ve had two whole conversations in the few weeks we’ve known each other. The first was when I showed her around her new place in the courtyard. The second was this morning, when we took the bike path right along the Rhine heading south. Voluptua said, “I remember sometimes.” And I asked, “You remember what?” She was quiet for a while, and then: “I remember what I used to be.” There was a tinge of sadness in her voice, or maybe nostalgia, and I didn’t feel like I knew her well enough to pry. The promenades along the Rhine have existed since centuries, mostly unchanged, all the way from Basel to Arnhem. I wondered if Voluptua had maybe been here before.
***
Summer is on its way out, according to the plants, at least. The German Weather Service keeps meticulous track of what plants bloom when and in what order, and the elderberries ripening counts as the first stage of autumn. In North Rhine-Westphalia, that should be any day now. The last two weeks of summer were already ushered in by the apples growing ripe on the trees on August 2nd, apparently, two days ahead of average.
I’m obsessed with this kind of stuff, but it makes me self-conscious. A mean voice in my head says, “Stop talking, Tigerlily, no one cares about the elderberries!” But I care a lot! I love to see the world around me spin through its cycle one more time. I enjoy the feeling that there are very different days ahead. A couple days ago, while standing in the kitchen about to pour boiling water over my tea, there was a big gust of wind outside. I raised my head to see a curtain of yellow leaves shimmer through the air. The tree in our blocks’ courtyard, whatever it is, has noticed that the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting cooler. That is a reminder to me that someday soon I’ll be able to fall asleep without overheating, to wear my favorite sweaters and scarves, and that there is a time on the horizon where I’m doing more than just sitting in the library writing all day every day.
I’ve never been able to confirm these phenological rules, that apple fruits = end of summer, or that elderberries = start of fall. Maybe Voluptua and I can go adventuring in search of confirmation someday soon.
---
August 14, 2025 :: 16:51:26 :: Beyond the back cover
I just finished the book I’m reading with my college friends. It was good, and I’m all hyped up now, I’m walking around in circles in my room, I’m walking around in circles in the kitchen while I heat up my leftovers, I’m walking around in circles with the bowl of rice in the hallway. I stick my head out the kitchen window. I look to the right (southwest). The university soccer fields are awash in golden light, and people are screaming and cheering while they play whichever ballsport it is this evening. I look to the left (northeast). A neighbor from my block is standing, back turned to me, butt-ass naked in his kitchen.
It’s this same feeling that I get every time I finish a book, that I run into some sort of invisible wall. I want to scream and rave and talk with people about it for hours on end, but the people who know about this book are in a small frame, a messaging program on my laptop. My family is living seven hours ahead of me--my brother is working, my mom is in the waiting room, my dad is getting cut up under local anesthesia (I called just before to wish him the best). I want to text some sort of imaginary group chat in Cologne that doesn’t exist, and tell all my friends to come over QUICK and come sit on my balcony with me, drinks in hand, and we can talk and giggle until it gets dark. Like how Thing 2 (who’s been back for a few days) does sometimes.
That kind of platonic intimacy is really missed in my life right now. Discord calls and FaceTimes are great for staying in touch, but it’s a weird feeling to hang up and return to my analog reality where I haven’t talked to anyone in person for hours. I remember it really bothered me when I first moved to Germany. Now these quiet days (almost every day this week) seem a little bit more beautiful to me, I’ve been forced to hang out with myself again and I read, I doodle, I remember that I love to learn languages and discover music from all over the world and these little hobbies and pastimes worm their way back into my life. But it bothers me, still, that my butt-ass naked neighbor who I say hello to in the stairwell every now and then is functionally anonymous to me. It bothers me that the closest thing I have to a community is the same cloud of people sitting in the public library with me every day. I guess I would like a community of people whose names I at least know, even if we’re not friends and don’t drink a soft drink on my balcony (which is really a fire escape).
Through this extra time with myself I’ve come to realize that this invisible wall I run into when I’m sprinting towards the friendly horizon of connection is fear: The same useless emotion that pins me in bed in the morning, locks me in my room, traps me in my mind, and holds me so tight I sometimes can barely function. If I want friends that I hang out with every now and then, if I want a job, or volunteer responsibilities, or to know the names of my neighbors, clothes or otherwise, who I see standing in their kitchen every day, that might not be 100% in my control. But I have the agency to reach out and say hello, to reach out again to people, or to break whatever silence already existed in the space (maybe not in a public library). That’s scary, though. It’s scary.
***
I’ve gotten a lot of work done since I built up this little library-study routine. It’s helped me get much more acquainted with some of the parts of downtown Cologne that I don’t usually hang out around a lot. Example 1: Schildergasse. This is the main shopping street with brand name stores packed together in the blocks and tourists all walking as slowly as possible directly in front of you. I sort of avoided this street but mostly I have no reason to go here, because I don’t buy brand-new Levi’sⓇ jeans that often. Now, though, there’s kind of a nice appeal to it. I leave the library in the evening, walk through the sun and the phallic fountain, feeling the heat rise up from the concrete ground, just one of many people in a big city.
I walk through Schildergasse directly to Example 2: Neumarkt, where I take my public transportation of choice home. Neumarkt is one of those big empty concrete spaces that sometimes hosts a flea mark or jewelry exhibition but usually ends up being a very ratty place with a lot of trash and rugs where people wait to catch their next bus or train. Neumarkt and especially the directly surrounding streets are one of the crack hotspots of Cologne, and the place has come to have a really bad reputation. The city is trying to clean up that image, and installed a fountain and put down a bajillion bright red chairs so that people can wait. There were maybe, like, 6-12 benches before (this is the busiest stop in all of Cologne’s metro system). I approve of this project, because I think people should be able to sit down in public.
Also on Neumarkt they’ve installed a strange little yellow stage, where different artists perform or recite something every night. I went to one of these events on Tuesday. A dance historian was giving a presentation about Valeska Gerd, who seemed pretty badass. The author talked into a microphone which amplified her words and sent them to the headphones that most people in the audience were wearing. I hadn’t taken a pair. The biography of a famous dancer mixed together with the background noise of the fountain running, kids screaming, and the trams screeching into their stops. I grew up near a highway (as I will reflexively (obnoxiously) tell you, if you ever ask me if it’s too noisy to sleep somewhere), and the noise helps me focus. That day I looked out of the right side of the stage (to the west). A middle-aged man was struggling and failing to pull a massive black dog out of the fountain, who splashed, jumped around, and barked in protest. I looked out of the left side of the stage (to the east). A woman with a pony tail, ratty-looking in the way that people at Neumarkt sometimes are, had been looking around curiously at the new stage before walking off. We made eye contact. She smiled and waved bye, and I waved bye back to her. I felt like one little leaf on a large tree.
---
August 11, 2025 :: 10:45:23 ::
I would like to be able to keep more than one good habit at a time.
---
August 7, 2025 :: 11:24:48 :: Me and my bus friends
When you go to the public library every day, you see the same people. You get a different drink from the vending machine but the same people are sitting around studying together. Sometimes at the exact same tables, too. I feel a sense of solidarity in these situations.
Nowadays I just take whichever bus I manage to catch, but in Bonn I took the exact same bus almost every morning. It was either the 610 or 611, the lines colored blue on the public transport maps, which drove [and still drive] north through the ornate neighborhoods of Bad Godesberg (the borough where my host family lived), past the big park on the Rhine and to the central station. I saw many of the same people in the same bus: a mom with red hair and a stroller, a guy with big hair reading from a book, an older chubby man with a mustache and polo shirt. We would all get off the bus together at the main station, and I would start my speedwalk over the cobblestone and parks of downtown Bonn. If it were a Monday, I would hop over the patties of puke which were still drying, and hurry to the campus of my language school.
But then we changed campuses, because the dastardly exchange students from Virginia needed to take over our half-timbered house. The new building was a little more north in downtown Bonn, and I got there a different way. In the mornings I would walk to the subway and take it all the way to the city hall. To go home, I would take the line to Robert-Schumann Platz, a weird, concrete, bureaucratic nothing-space where a lonely and empty bus would stop to pick me up and bring me home.
The only time we were at the old campus again was the last day we were in Bonn, for our goodbye party. We all met in the morning to get the old house we used as a school ready for that same evening, and I jumped into a 610 again. Everyone was still there: the mom with the red hair and stroller, the guy with the big hair and the book, the old man with a polo shirt. We all made eye contact and I had the feeling that I was very recognized in that moment.
---
August 6, 2025 :: 23:57:03 :: One very important thought
I worry about so much all the time and actually it’s all going to turn out okay. I put in a lot of effort into life and things almost always go well, or at the very least find their place in my life.
~~~ :: 10:40:13 :: A cocoa-based drink
She stares at me with a smile, cup placed directly under the lips, not yet drinking. The glint in her unnaturally blue eyes draws me further into her world. Tantalized, I reach out my hand and hit the button labeled “HOT CHOCOLATE.”
The drink machine starts to hum and liquid shoots into my cup. Let’s be accurate here: It’s not a hot chocolate, it’s a “CHOCOCREME.” The other option was a “COCOA-BASED DRINK.” I wasn’t sure what the difference was, but now, as I see a second stream of mysterious white juice squirt into my cup, I realize that the “CHOCOCREME” has milk and the “COCOA-BASED DRINK” probably doesn’t. Alas: I have broken my record of a grand total of twenty-four hours without cow milk. Tomorrow the struggle will go on.
I came to the public library to work on my final papers, instead I’m sitting here writing something completely different. Many friends’ messages are waiting for an answer in my WhatsApp inbox, and I’ll have to attend to them before actually reading what I need to. That’s frustrating!
At least the central library is calm, and by “calm” I mean “full of the sounds of construction and kids crying.” I mean that positively and sincerely, though. I like the background noise. In the main university library I feel painfully separated from the world, I get lost in my own thoughts (something I should probably get over). In the main public library there’s not just students, there’s also really old people and little kids. And you can get yourself a “CHOCOCREME” or a “COCOA-BASED DRINK.” I have the thought and feeling that in the public library everyone is more “normal,” a word I need to investigate and define. In the uni library everyone is perfumed and shiny, they wear baggy jeans and dangly earrings and fun knit sweaters. Right next to the grocery store in my street is a private dormitory, and on occasional journeys to grab another knob of garlic I’ve found myself surrounded by a bunch of people wearing black leather and lots of gold rings like if this were an Instagram reel or a B-list club in Berlin. I’ll see them again when I go shopping for dinner tonight.
---
August 5, 2025 :: 10:05:58 :: You can do amazing, wonderful things
When I got home last night I fell down to the floor again and started crying. I stifled my sobs into my blanket, because my window was open and the whole courtyard would hear me otherwise, and the voice in my head started crying in my place. It said: Help! Please help me! Please don’t let me lose it all. I don’t know who I was asking for help from. Sometimes I can see the road I’m going down and I get flashbulb visions of me hitting rock bottom, losing family, friends, and loved ones, getting stuck in a dark and dusty room again and never having the courage to come out. It feels sometimes as if not everything is up to me and that’s when I start asking for help.
This time I got sick of lying there pretty quickly and I propped myself up on one arm. I took as deep breaths in as I could so I would stop sobbing. My glasses were lying on the floor and the world had turned into one large multicolored smudge. I looked deep deep deep into that smudge, as if I were on a mountain looking down at the world, and started to talk with the voice in my head, very clearly and deliberately. I said: People like you and they want to spend time with you. They came up to you at the film festival and introduced themselves, and made it a point to say goodbye when they had to leave suddenly. Your friends in the USA miss you and think about you a lot and hope you’re doing well. You can do amazing, wonderful things: You have traveled the world, you write research papers in foreign languages, you make people laugh and want to live and you hold them when they’re crying on the floor. And so on.
When I had recovered, I went into the kitchen and quickly made the weirdest falafel wrap in world history. Mere seconds after I had wrapped up my nutritional abomination, I saw Thing 1 smiling at me from the hallway. I was a bit surprised, since I thought I had been home alone. We chatted about our weekends, the respective festivals we visited, and the joy of German dialects. He only ate a peach and drank some tea. It began to dawn on me that he hadn’t come to cook. He might very well have heard me enter the kitchen and joined me just to say hi and chat.