felt anxious, might delete later

Reading my moodrings from the fall or last year is so embarrassing. When Juhi first announced e-worm's creation on her Instagram, before she and I had become friends, Carmelle and I were in an Uber, and I was reading one of Juhi's early-career worms about how Ezra Koenig should be cancelled. I found Juhi's posts endearingly relatable in their general air of wistfulness, whereas Carmelle thought it was cringe--"This is the kind of shit you do when you're a teenager, not when you're 22." At the time, her sentiment was just another example of how far we'd abruptly, confusingly diverged, and in retrospect it's a hilarious posture, given how young 22 is and the whole continent I feel between the person I am now versus then. And what kind of stilted, lame existence are you living if you're not doing earnest and embarrassing shit in your early twenties? Saturday night I had another Instance of Spontaneous Dissociation while in bed after getting drinks with Adam and a couple of his friends in Prospect Heights. My roommates were hanging out in the living room, having just come home from a party, and as I was eavesdropping without my own consent on their conversation and laughter as it came unfiltered through the wall between us, I felt as I lay in the darkness that my room could have been on its own planet. It was hearing Miya's voice that really did me in; even though she probably sleeps over at least once a week, somehow it feels like we've only overlapped a handful of times, and hearing her goof around with the rest of my house was a jarring reminder that she is actually a regular fixture here, in my home, that her presence represents the true reality that is my life now. I am here, in Bedstuy, in New York, and these people who (besides Ashwin) were largely strangers to me six months ago are now the people I live with and interact with most often and even are arguably some of the people closest to me. The last time I felt this sensation so intensely, it was Sunday at Shaker Mountain, and I had done a fun and flirty cocktail of shrooms, molly, and acid the night before. The molly and shrooms hit simultaneously about twenty minutes into Ryan Elliott's set, and as I danced with Alexa and the rest of our crew in the front I wondered if I was about to faint and if Ryan Elliott could recognize the weakening mental/physical state in my face as I squinted at the mixer's knobs and their drug-induced trembling. I excused myself to sit on the stage to the side of the dance floor, shaking as I wrapped myself in Alexa's white North Face fleece. The group followed and lounged next to me, Nick bringing me a freshly refilled bottle of water, so kind and patient and thoughtful even though I barely knew them and had made such a rookie mistake, the type where you smoke too much weed for the first time in college and pass out on the floor of Shuta's dorm room. Much later in the day, as we mulled about our patch of the camping field, packing up our things, I felt my sense of self temporarily break, like two plates sliding past each other along a fault line. Raving can be such an intimate experience, sort of because of the drugs but mostly because of how you totally revert to your bodily senses when you're immersed in the music, the way you disappear into yourself and the crowd and the music for several hours, movements driven by reflex. And here I was, rolling up my dirty clothes into my duffel bag next to people I'd met 36 hours before, about to share a 6-hour car ride home with them. It's just the drugs, I told myself, and kept packing and forgot about it. After explaining my Dissociation Episodes to Adam, I continued to stare at the ceiling while he fell asleep. In Past Lives, Greta Lee's character tells Hae-sung, "That twelve-year-old girl doesn't exist anymore. When I moved, I left her behind with you." Dissociating reminded me of that--sometimes you think you are who you are, that you know who you are, then old versions of you rise to the surface and swallow up your sense of reality. When I was packing up my room at the funeral home, I found a letter that Marie had written me for my 19th birthday and cried a bit after reading it. On Saturday night, wanting to throw up from some vestige of adolescent sexual trauma, I felt like I was sixteen again and that Marie was the person who would have understood me the most in the world in that moment, that she alone knew the person inhabiting me as I lay next to Adam. A couple months ago, when discussing being friends with your exes, Xander was explaining how it feels silly to have invested so much time and effort into knowing someone so intimately then have that all that dissipate just because you've broken up. Although I've never felt this way about someone I've dated, I've thought about it a lot when I'm reminded of people I'm no longer friends with, this phantom impulse to tell them about something they would have found interesting or funny that collapses into nothingness. There's that Jenny Holzer quote, "The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive"....