Bella's Room

I thought about Bella's room once before I went to sleep...

I recorder this text in the form of an essay-video that is available here <3 I wanted to also share the unadulterated piece regardless, since this is the form in which it was initially brought to life. Enjoy reading/listening/watching, mwahhhh!!!!!!

I thought about Bella’s room once before I went to sleep. What helped me fall asleep as a kid was imagining myself on some form of reclusive, towering island, a ravine in the middle / in close proximity to something dangerous or all-absorbing.

I as an insulated blob in a vitriolic space, the one exempted from its claws and its fervor.

Bella’s room was punctually that. It allowed me to access the mechanics of my sleep induction years later, when the reasons I find it hard to fall asleep is not the absence of danger, but rather its imminence, a relic of all that’s been engraved/unprocessed. I imagined her, her beautiful hair she would comb for everyone to see in Oud-West, faint light drawing its respective lines over her silhouette. She’d be preyed upon, hunted, vulnerable, but only to the extent needed to ignite the sense of comfort necessary for my profound night’s sleep. I then slept in her bed maybe a month later. It was so comfortable. I played some rap, discordant with the interior, we ate sourdough bread after tacos, we talked about something I forgot. I woke up all wrinkled, heavy but rested, reality still rippling at moments of confrontation. My joints aching and cracking, the street just slightly talkative, a murmur. She moved so calculatedly in her sleep, barely. Her hair remained imprinted in the sheets, she looked like she did not breathe or think about anything in order to rest.

Now I need to find something different to think about when I fall asleep. I wish I did not enter some rooms, let them falter instead in granulated pieces of imagination. I wish I never disbanded life’s poorly rendered halo of hypotheticals. I wish I never had sex with anyone, so its possibility could permeate my nightly routine; a mystique keeping me affixed in a realm of imagined oblivion.

A perpetual danger, a permanent violence, all to be avoided by sleeping in secluded rooms.

Maybe I should never move to NYC, so I could take it with me to sleep; have raunchy imagined romances, walks, affairs, quarrels in the city.

A sheathed body, a city gone aloof; someplace no matter how despondent, where I will never cease to be safe.

My body taking the form of an omen, a preemptive saving for something yet to be bestowed.

I wish I never tasted a miso cookie on a busy street, I wish I never left my childhood room, all suffused with dreary, stifling depression. I wish I never went to the Southern Hemisphere. Now all I have left is the consequences of exceeding this utter, impervious unreality, only to be reckoned with at the risk of everything making sense literally, never symbolically. And everything turns so ugly when literal.

Now I fall asleep in my room with the thought of the ease of a body next to big, inviting windows. I dream of being Bella in a city, combing my hair, moving around my room diligently, being dissolved in the scarcity of a dreamt vignette.

Thank u Bella, Thank u Judith. I love u!!!!

X