Head Games

What gets me through this semester of stress, of having neither enough time on my hands nor enough desire, is fantasy, sure. Sometimes I fantasize about getting new stuff (..the week I fixated on buying an e-reader or tablet). That sounds bad. But I imagine other things, like being in Tuscany, with the faintest tan (and I generally even disapprove of tans), nursing a glass of wine. Or, simply, being back in Berlin. I watch Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and in a way it satiates that burning desire to be out there in "the world" (as though right now I'm not in it, but elsewhere), I become content, and yet sorrowful that the best I can do right now is watch that show. By the way, on separate occasions both Agata and Jackie watched a bit of Anthony Bourdain on TV, and just sort of confusedly remarked "he seems like such an asshole." I personally think he's hilarious and lovable, but what does that say about me, really?

The other thing I visualize, I long for, is being at home and having breakfast dates with my parents. I have the urge to speak to them as though I'm not just their daughter but a confidante. I want to talk to my dad about his estranged brother and how weird it was when we were invited to his cookout this summer. What did they talk about, anyway, when all the guests were gone and the food put away, sitting enshrouded in late summer nightfall, quietly, to themselves. Not like strangers, not like acquaintances and perhaps not like brothers--but I guess precisely like brothers. I want mom to lay out all her stresses and worries and speak in the voice, if only fleetingly, not of a mother, specifically my mother, but of an individual.

I want to have a lunch date with my brother because I worry about him and I love him and I see him enough, perhaps, but we don't speak enough. He's nineteen and I know he has some beautiful, maybe even tragic, wise thoughts in him. I suspect he secretly has the potential to be a poet. I admire the poetry about him, his firm stance against cursing (I think, further evidence of his poetic nature--why sully the world with foul language that voice foul thoughts?), the way he sometimes talks like an old man about "the good old days" and his childhood. I just wish that boy wasn't so damn selfish, though. For my parents sake I wish that.Then I have to wonder, am I any better? I'm equally selfish but I'm less of a source of stress just because they don't have to worry that I'm getting bad grades or won't graduate... I'm just a source of another kind of stress altogether, of course, traveling and all, being a girl in a dangerous world...

Fantasy, fantasy. Daydreams, made-up futures, re-played memories. The key to my escape is in my head, but the things that eat at me (everything: memories, the scary, stressful present, and projections of the future) are all in my head too. It's all in there, all of it, all the time. The answers are the problems, the problems are the answers.