June 9th: Josie Levin
I don’t always dream. But we’re in luck because whatever electric current leads to it visits me in the early hours of the morning. I dream I am fighting some girls in the parking lot of a strip mall, the big kind between short apartment buildings. Location is very fluid in my dreams so we are also on a school bus and in the stores and in the woods as well. I might be a child and the girls I am fighting definitely are. They are girls I went to school with, maybe. And they jeer me until I collapse on the ground and howl. But I also know they are just jealous, maybe because I have a Polly pocket in a long rubber sleeve wet suit, ripe for the chewing. And then the dream recedes to be only the Polly pocket in her wet suit. I peel it off her because I love to strip the clothes off of dolls. But underneath she wears another swim suit, this one a normal one piece. A chunk has been bitten off at the thigh.
I am not normally this orderly but the specter of being recorded does me some good so at a little after 9 I get out of bed and check on the wet clothes I left in the bathtub. Everything is still wet, even the socks. It was pouring last night but has completely cleared up now. The potato plant on the sill in the bathroom needs water but so do a lot of the plants. I water the rubber plant whose leaves have been dropping a lot, first. I have to consult the book but I’m afraid it doesn’t like the full sun anymore. I am not usually this proactive but I stop typing to place it on the floor. I am almost certainly imagining that it perks up immediately. I saw an Instagram reel one time where a woman pretended the fig tree in her yard could hear and hold her. It’s delightful for me to pretend something I want to be true so badly. I have a monstrous spider plant that I do experiments on. I’ve been trying to bonsai the main plant, slowly. That’s not how you are meant to do it but spider plants are incredible survivors. I’ve removed several plantlets and now keep them in water. Two of them have sprouted massive roots but even the ones with none are still alive, drinking presumably directly from the cut stem. I also cut some full reproductive branches and buried them in the dirt. I braided them together because I thought that would look nice but one strangled the other two. Such is the way of this beast.
I want to paint the plants but the recording makes me clean dishes instead. It feels like having a visitor, so I scrub hard.
Then breakfast. Two tangerines first. Add the peels to a pile in the trash. It’s funny that only now, two months before moving, am I breaking into the scented trash bags a coworker from an old job I quit more than a year ago gave to me. The tangerine peels are the first to go in. I eat two sandwiches and lean against my plants. If I get close enough to them I can smell the outside world.
I’m in the last leg of an obsession with an iPad game that is home decor adjacent. I have an 8-floor house and four cats, the maximum of both. There isn’t much else to accomplish. But I still dutifully open it to collect my daily rewards this morning. I’m trying to make one room into a dark room but all the furniture is too expensive and I’ve lost the passion that I’ve had for the last 4 weeks.
I’m trying to move into a bigger place at the end of august. There’s no way to do this cheaply but by chasing reasonable pricing I feel oddly tortured. I know that this is what it means to move as much as any other discomfort of life but I always give in to the urge to panic at some point and today is the day where I email 13 different property managers and even walk down my block taking pictures of the leasing signs on buildings there.
I call my mother out of an abundance of caution because every apartment asks me if I make three times the rent and I am largely a freelancer without an individual paycheck. I ask her if she’d be willing to cosign if it comes to that. It’s an awkward conversation because I’ve called her and I’ve begun to avoid calling her because I am asking her to prove her desire to speak with me. I dream about doing this with a lot of people, some I don’t even know, some who are already dead.
I want to go swimming very badly after eating but can’t because under the sopping wet clothes I ran home in are all my bathing suits, re-wet. So I go down to the shore in my pajama shorts and wade until I’m knee deep. I like this almost as much as swimming. The waves are strong and the flags on the lifeguard towers are yellow. There are only a few gulls and even fewer people. I walk on the repatriated private beach where normal people now sit and stand. I love the shore on rough, cloudy days like this because everyone distressed comes to the same place. I see people take calls and angry naps, holding their heads in their hands and making significant eye contact with the gulls. I like to surround myself with troubled people and watch them out of the corner of my eye. They are not gulls and do not like or at least submit to meeting my gaze. I walk by a guy playing music on his speaker and taking an animated call with his toes in the water. I wade deeper and he is surprised, like most people exit the water to walk around. But my priorities are different.
My beach leaving ritual is basically science. I walk out of the water in front of the sand catcher and walk the wet sand lightly. When it gets dry my steps get heavier and my feet sink underneath. There is sand and debris up to my knees. I shake it off on the walk back and in the elevator and outside my door, but a large amount still shows up in my bed at night. I sift through it when I lie down for the night. Going back and forth between being grounded by the sensation and driven insane. Presumably I fall asleep at some point, but don’t dream.
Josie Levin (he/him) is a visual artist and writer whose visual work appears in a variety publications, including So To Speak, Mud Season Review, and carte blanche. Josie is currently a Poet-In-Residence at The Chicago Poetry Center. You can follow Josie on Instagram @bemusual.