Now that it's June, we'll sleep out in the garden
& if it rains, we'll just sink into the mud.
Mamma Andersson, Sömnlös, 2021.
Dear reader,
June—how she came and is almost gone.
I read a lot, and I rested more than I realized I needed—and all of that meant I wrote and wrote and wrote.
Trying something new here with this post, inspired by Harrison:
Fragments, thoughts, little excerpts, diaristics from the edges of midsummer—
June 01st, 2025
My June horoscope said: Slow down. Let more available space show up in my life. Soften enough to notice it. Stop trying to fill every gap. This is the time to establish a new structure.
June 02nd, 2025
Don’t call me darling (I like it).
June 03rd, 2025
I want to take my time with things. I think of Sarah Sharma’s temporality, how time clings unevenly to different bodies. Next time it rains, I'm going to the bog. There, nothing is wasted. Rot is not failure but foundation. Saturation is a form of memory. Everything seeps. Time pools in layers—moss, peat, rain, bone. The dead do not disappear; they press down, carving out the hollow where newness can begin.
June 04th, 2025
I heard you stayed, found a steadier kind—someone who tucks in the edges of time.
June 05th, 2025
I love the rebuilding. The aftermath, the hush. The silence that comes when the crash is over and everything is in pieces on the floor. I love to watch it shatter—brutal breakups, jobs gone cold, identities moulting off like old skin. I’ve lost every part of myself at least once. I’ll lose more. But there’s a strange devotion in the rebuilding. I don’t want to reach anywhere. I just want to stay here for a minute, barefoot in the rubble, naming each shard.
June 06th, 2025
A restless searching—Lauren Berlant calls it cruel optimism. That structure of feeling where the very thing you think will sustain you is also what keeps you unfulfilled. Maybe it’s closer to what Bessel van der Kolk writes: that trauma reorganizes the nervous system toward vigilance, toward seeking, toward never feeling quite safe enough to settle.
June 07th, 2025
Do you think two people can feel when they’re thinking about each other?
June 08th, 2025
I was watching a film today where a man was given clear proof—the very answers he’d been seeking—and yet he still said, “I need more proof.” (Sugarcane, 2024)
June 09th, 2025
I throw my breath into the water, and it comes back. I call out—anyone, anyone—and feel how my breath stammers against the cold, the drifting bark, the absence of anything solid beneath me. How little it matters to the current. We make room for the days when the body floats, and for the days it folds quietly under. In staying, I misplaced what used to tether me to wanting. Now I gather only small flashes. It feels useless to measure the distance between almost and again. I’ve thrown my breath into the broken river that keeps forgetting my name before. Everything else feels too quick to vanish before I can call it mine.
June 10, 2025
I’m crying in my room, and across the street, the neighbours are blaring Apple Bottom Jeans, Boots with the Fur.
June 11th, 2025
It’s strange, not having social media. You don’t realize how much you’ve gotten used to being seen, pinged, tagged, messaged, acknowledged. The constant notifications made it feel like you were never truly alone. When you step away, it’s quiet, unbearably so sometimes, but you belong to yourself again. Your attention is finally yours. I’m still figuring out what I mean by this. Maybe that absence reveals presence in a different way. In that absence, you start to re-encounter yourself.
June 12th, 2025
The movement of time both excites and scares me. Because I’m always moving away from something, and toward something else.
June 13th, 2025
There are days I feel like a cup too full of words, sloshing at the edges, looking for a mouth to pour into.
June 14th, 2025
He pulled the ten of swords and said: It’s time. But endings aren’t clean when the story is recursive. Then the sun, reversed. Said something about joy, but I was already thinking about light folding in on itself, about how want gets dimmed into theory. Sagittarius is supposed to want more. To reach, I think. Aren’t we always reaching? In line at the pharmacy, refreshing the inbox, halfway through a sentence we don’t mean—reaching. I don’t know how deeply I root into tarot or astrology, but sometimes it really does land, sometimes it mirrors something I’m already working through, and sometimes it’s just nice to hear it said out loud.
June 15th, 2025
Call me a sapiosexual. I only get turned on by theoretical frameworks that ignore my lived experience. I know, I know, the joke lands badly. Yesterday, I made an edging joke in a research paper, so clearly I’m not well.
June 16th, 2025
In the introduction to Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed opens with a deceptively simple question: “What does it mean to be orientated?” For Ahmed, orientation is about how we find our way in a world that takes shape differently depending on the direction we face, the bodies we inhabit, and the objects or people we are drawn toward. She writes, “To be orientated is also to be turned toward certain objects, those that help us to find our way.” These objects, what we recognize, desire, or move in relation to, become the landmarks of belonging. What am I turned toward? What am I turned away from?
June 17th, 2025
My eyes betray me every time.
June 18th, 2025
He said, "I just want to eat you up. 'sif you're a wild strawberry."
June 19th, 2025
I read five books this week: Motherhood, Pure Color, The Argonauts, Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth, The Breaks. Common themes: philosophy and ambivalence, meditation on loss, what it means to be good in a collapsing world, how to give without losing the self, embodiment and memory, identity in flux, the body as a site of transformation, motherhood and refusal, art as interruption, care and its limits, voice as process, grief as atmosphere.
June 20th, 2025
Maybe we have a table set beneath a birch tree. The linen is wrinkled. There’s sill in tiny glass jars. Potatoes with chives and knäckebröd that crackles like thin ice. A pie that smells faintly of Västerbotten cheese, and strawberries—smultron—so small and sweet they stain your fingers. “You forgot to mention sandwich cake,” he tells me over the phone.
June 21st, 2025
I saw a woman on the marketplace today, and everything she sold was round—Bundt cakes and rotary saws, coiled filters and spools of copper wire—just circles. I stared at them longer than I meant to, trying to place the feeling it gave me. Something about repetition, about things without edges. I wondered if she knew. Suppose it was a coincidence. Perhaps, a quiet devotion? Maybe she liked how the round things fit in the palm, if the world felt safer that way.
June 22nd, 2025
Midsommar Fest. I wove a flower crown as I do each year, clumsy with clover and birch branch. Kissed the Dalahäst hello. Stood in line for gravlax and pickled herring, ate salta fiskar, and looked aside to the maypole, tilted slightly, ribboned in motion. The Polish folk dancers moved in bright skirts that flared like poppies, boots striking the stage in time. It reminded me of my family, before this country washed our culture thin. I want something more for my future. Jag önskar att du var här. This day, the longest day, a threshold. A turning point.
Until next time,
Kay