Crying On the Floor, Again

Because I have still not figured out how to stop living in the future

I am lying on the wooden floor. It is raining outside for the first time in days. I am beginning to believe that the rain, or the lack thereof, is Seattle’s best kept secret.

There are salty, sticky tears pooling in my eyes.

I am whispering over and over and over again: I just want to stay.

My soft belly pulses as my heart pumps blood through my organs and music continues pumping into my ears.

I just want to stay. I just want to stay. I just want to stay.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot seem to stay where I am.

I am always two steps ahead, or twelve steps ahead. Or, every once in a while, I am four steps behind. But never now. Never staying.

Nine months ago, I was in Seattle, where I am now.

I was writing a story about microdosing psilocybin and endurance running. During an interview with an integrative physician, I heard the term default mode network for the first time.

“Both psilocybin and endurance efforts have the same impact on the DMN,” the doctor said.

The DMN is activated when we are daydreaming, imagining the future, replaying the past, or otherwise constructing narrative about ourselves.

This is the monkey mind, the planner, the storyteller, the one who believes if she just makes one more god damn list than maybe her life will feel contained.

Maybe then, I will stay.

What psilocybin and running do is they slow down the DMN, thereby quieting mental chatter and creating a sense of immersive presence.

It is no wonder, then, why I love running so much. And why I particularly love to run after taking 100-200 milligrams of mushrooms.

Because my mind finally shuts the fuck up and I get to stay in my body for one or two or sometimes three godly, gorgeous hours.

Every brain is designed to simulate the future. But maybe because I am a Pisces, and because I am a writer, my brain flings itself so far into the future and dreams up fantasies so glorious that I have trouble finding my way back. The leaving is so much more delicious than the staying.

I am living in a flat in London. No, a house in the countryside that I’ve built with my own two hands. And I am raising my daughter by myself. No, I’m raising her with that weird, whimsical, slightly unreliable but deeply charming man. I am writing my second book. No, I am writing a screenplay and I am walking a red carpet talking about my book-to-film adaptation. I am kissing him and he is kissing me and he is kissing her and he is watching someone else kiss me and he is turned on by my pleasure.

And it is good and golden, and in those far-flung moments I do not want to stay. I want to be there, wherever there might be.

But just as quickly, my brain turns on me.

I never get the literary agent. I never write the book. My dad dies. No, my brother dies. No, someone dies, and I forget how to breathe. I cannot afford to buy the land in the countryside, let alone the flat. After all of these years of methodically avoiding pregnancy, I find out that I cannot, in fact, get pregnant. I am not a mother. And he is busy falling in love with another woman who is somehow blonder, and younger, and easier than I.

It’s all an unreality. A figment. An illusion.

The other day I was reading a book, and the writer said, I was thinking about myself in the future, as if that actually existed.

Which, of course, it does not. And yet somehow, I color the future so vibrantly that it feels more incandescent than the present.

When is leaving, the portal? When is staying, the portal?

I have written these same words in my journal so many times, I’ve lost count. I find them scrawled across the years — first in the summer of 2024, then throughout 2025, now in 2026, they come back to me again and again.

Each time, like a mantra, the words shape-shift in front of me. Sometimes a question, sometimes a declarative. Sometimes, neither.

When leaving is the portal; when staying is the portal. Leaving is the portal. Staying is the portal.

These futures are so real I can taste them: the always slightly unsatisfying taste of a non-alcoholic beer, the bite of Yorkshire pudding and Sunday roast, his spit in my mouth, the perfect flat white from that coffee shop in Primrose Hill, the sweat licked off my top lip after a run in Hyde Park.

So real I can taste them, until I come crashing back into rumination and reality. Never arriving anywhere.

In March, I was in Paris thinking about when I would be in Seattle in May. Now, I am in Seattle in May thinking about when I’ll be in London in June.

I just want to stay.

Who do I believe I will become when I arrive in London in June, for example? Or Paris in July? Or Italy in August? Or New York in September?

Is she a daughter without a dad? Has she told that man that she actually thinks she might love him (despite all logic) and that she actually really likes the idea of being with him?

Does she sleep well or wake fitfully? No, it is the present tense me that wakes fitfully. The future me, which is to say the present me that I cannot yet inhabit sleeps well. If only, she stopped thinking about the future.

I just want to stay.

When I am walking in the woods here, I stop and I touch every tree. Well, no, I don’t touch every tree because then my walks would take all day, but I touch a lot of trees. The ones that feel like grandmothers and grandfathers, and I press my palms against them, or sometimes I just let my hands float right beyond the bark — the energy from my body pulsing outward into the space between us.

I notice the way the water in the lake laps against the tiny pebbles, the huge dead fish floating nearby, the three geese flying over the water, and the three herons fishing in the tall grasses.

This is when I am here. This is when I am staying.

But it does not last.

As soon as I notice my fingertips and the smell of sweetgrass, I am on a street corner in Shoreditch telling that man that I need him to come home with me. To fuck me. To help me stop thinking about the future. I need him to help me stay.

But, no, that’s not right either. I already know that.

That moment, no, a moment, will come to pass and I will say something and he will say something and I will already be thinking about something else entirely.

When I am in London in the future, which is to say, in London in the present, I will be wondering whether I will be sleeping well in the future. Whether he will spend the night and put his hands in between my legs while I sleep. I will be wondering about my dying dad and what the hospital might smell like. I will be rehearsing grief in my mind, hoping that I will get it right.

Perhaps, I do not actually want to stay. Perhaps I want the future because she is someone I am not yet. Perhaps, I think she’ll show me how to get there.

Funny part is, she would probably tell me: the only way to get here, is to figure out how to stay.

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When I open my eyes, I am still lying on the bedroom floor — tears still stinging in my eyes; throat still burning from when I screamed into the pillow. My skin is balmy from rain coming in through the open window.

I press my fingertips into the floorboards, and a splinter cuts into my skin.