Projection

read me to filth

Orilla, Espejo de las Nubes (1988) by Tomás Sánchez

The double doors to Spring have opened: morning clouds, wide bodied and dense, scoops of tangerine sherbert. Pink blossoms expand over my head. Groups of lavender stall tall and erect, absorbing sun and humidity. The grass is short and freshly cut, turning greener by the second. The yellow daffodil turns towards me and its mouth cracks a wide ovaled smile and I feel as if we’re making eye contact. I decide to call her Sally. Neighbors walk by me sproingingly, chit chatting at rapid speed, joy is magnified when shared. The sky’s still pale. Crepuscular rays gleam through the edges of cumulus, brightening up parts of my path. We are all holy today. 

I take a deep breath and focus on pulling the air to fill my lower back. I exhale slowly. The bounty of pollen stings my sinuses. If I tell you I could smell the lavender I’d be lying. If it’s windy, flyaways will get cemented in the aquaphor on my lips. The bottom of my sneakers are moist, sprinklers already hard at work. I see Sally half rotated, her head turned at an angle. I look beyond her and notice her lineage, a tribe of Sally’s all in uniform: yellow petal with an orange corona. The Sally’s are either watching my every move, or floating with the push-pulls of today’s breeze. Since I’m still struggling with my superiority complex, I decide to believe the former. 

I love the allure of spring, because I know what we had to go through to get here. Spring whispers, Let’s start it again, ok? Here’s another chance at something, it’s all going to end at some point so try to be a little more obnoxious. More color! More blooms! More falsetto from the songbirds! 

On my way back from my walk I catch another glimpse of the Sally’s. The Sally’s! a mafia of strong queens! I deem them in that moment. If you look-up the lifespan of a daffodil, google will tell you they live “indefinitely.” Some daffodils were planted centuries ago, and they just keep coming back, sometimes multiplying. If I were a high school teenage girl, strictly committing to crew socks and Air Max’s, a crop top and large hair clip, I’d say “Yas queen slay,” and/or “The Sally’s are giving girlboss energy and I am here for it.”

Do me a favor and learn how to peak the way Spring does, okay? 

The good part about this is that I have gotten enough Vitamin D over the past three days to tell you that my seasonal depression has dissipated into this morning's breeze. My seasonal depression now lives with the birds who are taking good care of it by dumbing it down to a paste that holds their nest together. What I mean to say is, the seasons evolve and so do we. Sadness is always useful, use Spring as a reference for what can come from sadness. There’s no growth without decay. According to my inner Gen Z voice, the Sally’s are now the boss b*tches of the season, but it wasn’t like that a month ago.

Seasons are spectacles of perseverance.

*

I think about your smile lines, a sea of parenthesis across your cheeks. I used to squint to try to count each one. We know where it went wrong but no one wants to talk about it. It all derailed years ago when your self-hatred took new forms. 

Those cornflower blue eyes, hazed with resentment, self-hatred, and really bad weed. Cold and lacking oxygen, those eyes never learned to sympathize with anything, even less when something decides to persevere. You’ve disguised your own brilliance for years, limited your language down to elementary words of anger and jealousy. I’ve watched that smile grow fainter and fainter until there were no parentheses left to count. Yesterday one of the Sally’s told me that if I want to be a queen that slays I must let you go. I can’t tell which Sally said it, the downside of them hanging out in clusters, but whoever said it, said it with discernment and grace. 

The problem is that I have a tendency of understanding people that don’t move with the seasons. I understand the way they live the same day the same way, over and over again: idealizing the past, switching around narratives to favor them, putting people down as a means to exacerbate life within themselves, blaming others for their self-neglect. There’s no growth, just consistent decay. I grew up surrounded by people like this, they make me feel safe. The traumas they’ve bestowed upon me has only made me funnier and prettier, and generally very unserious about most things, but I’m too old to keep up with this. If I want to be a queen that slays I can no longer absorb projection. I think the Sally’s are right. 

*

Three months ago I went on TikTok to try to figure out how to break it to my therapist that I didn’t want to see her anymore. My therapist has beautiful brown eyes and she defies nature in the way she makes me feel so loved and hated at the same time. Somehow she evolves while still staying herself. Somehow she’s so grounded that I wonder if her soul has lived on this Earth for centuries. 

The TikTok algorithm fed me videos that didn’t do me any favors at all, so I broke up with her the only way I knew how:

“I don't want to come here anymore.”

“Oh? Are you cured?” 

“I'm benching 90 pounds at the gym now so yes, something like that.”

In therapy, I lay flat. So at this point in the dialogue I imagine her brown eyes rolling upwards towards the ceiling while giving a subdued exhale. I imagine she does this with a lot of my responses, but I’ll never know for sure.

“What’s keeping you away from here?”

“Sadness lives in everything at all times.”

“Is that my fault?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

Here’s what I have in common with you: we have to claim to hate other people as much as we hate ourselves. 

*

I dont defy nature. I’m comfortably routine. I left therapy because of this. To witness myself change gives me the ick. I’d like to stay toxic, Miss! I think to myself when my therapist asks me why I’m leaving. Respectfully, of course. It’s been almost 6 years of being in therapy and I still prefer to sit in my own discomfort about things. Getting older means my brain is not able to withstand so much anymore. I can’t pull myself into my own muck and sit in it like I used to. I’m really trying to be a queen that slays but perseverance is not for the weak. What I mean to say is, traumas make you a little stupid and I think that’s okay.

Ever since I left therapy, I’ve been calling myself formal names and referring to myself in the third person to make up for the indignity of leaving therapy. Responses within my household now go a little something like this:

“Mrs. Perez-Gurri has a pap smear at that time so unfortunately she cannot drive you to the train station, husband.”

“Mrs. Perez-Gurri will not be going to the drug store to buy more glue sticks just because you decided to lick yours down like a popsicle, son.”

“Mrs. Perez-Gurri? Mrs. Perez-Gurri are you there? No babe, she’s not. Mrs. Perez-Gurri is spending the next 10 minutes dissociating, please try back then” (a newer response I'm working on whenever my husband decides to ask me for something audacious, like a back rub).

What’s nice, really nice, about this is, I can admit that this is about control. I want to control the narrative in therapy, I want to control what comes out of me when I write, I want growth and decay to be a linear process. I want to look into the mouth of the daffodil and tell it to stay. I want nature to help me find more language, I want to uncover it instinctively the way these birds uncover the centipedes. Disappointment is a self-inflicted wound: not everyone grows, finding language is really hard, and being stuck in the muck is written in some people's destiny (maybe mine?).

The Sally’s don’t turn to watch me on my walks anymore. They’ve read me to filth. Those queens left their sadness behind with winter and can’t relate with mine. They’re obnoxiously yellow and giving Spring all they’ve got and it’s working in their favor. But me? I still like to dally in a little melancholy from time to time. Above the cumulus there’s God, shaking his head. He rewatches me on fast forward so he can skip through my emo bullsh*t and predictable excuses. Do you know how good it feels to let yourself be sad? God can’t stomach it sometimes though, so he grabs his remote to push the fast-forward (2xx) button. He’s outgrown all of our first-world problems and has left us to fend for ourselves. If I could say anything to God it would be to stop being so impatient and rewatch us in real time. We are inept and small, digging for language beneath the aftermath of winter’s crunchy leaves and coming up short. 

Perseverance can be about understanding. It’s awkward to know that to accept people for the way they are means you have to leave them. Everyone has their own muck, you can find sadness in everything if that’s what you’re looking for. I tried so hard to save you but your muck is yours to work through. There was so much love and hate tangled between us, like a knot, like a web that’s been weaving for years. Neither of us were soft enough to work through that. Some things can’t be undone and that kind of ruins the mood doesn’t it?

But I’m here to tell you: I liked those parenthesis cheeks the best when they were tinged with sadness. I liked those eyes before they were tinged with red. I liked you best before you erased yourself. 

*

This post was heavily inspired by the girlies: Heather Havrilesky, Karen Russell, and Billie Eilish