natalie kucken

diary 18 (december 13)






Fell back into the habit of not knowing what to do with my free afternoons and not being able to get out the front door. I don't understand the tendency for seclusion I had picked up and I don't know what I should do with it. Kept having reoccurring nightmares where someone I haven't seen for a long time has red all up and down their arms. I got a tattoo. Would only be able to fall asleep during the early evening in my upper living room after not sleeping all night in my bed. The camera I bring out with me broke. I found out that without my camera always with me I feel exactly the same, I didn't wish I had it nearly as much as I was anticipating and I didn't secretly love its absence because it's heavy and I often miss real life things because I'm photographing them. Went to my friend's birthday party in Harlem and started singing until everyone else did too, my friend's music show on 11th street and sat quietly backstage with my hood up. Walked from east village to the west water of manhattan and ended up at a show with peeling walls painted with clouds. Would leave my cafe almost every evening to walk and meet up with different friends in different places and venues. I had no business meetings and hardly answered my email, would walk down flushing avenue in the afternoon light. Crossed the street purposefully at night to walk though the christmas tree sale paths with boom box music and strung up ornaments over the sidewalk. I overheard a conversation about rain watering flowers and a boy late at night who i handed flowers I was carrying said "Now I know how girls feel carrying flowers, it makes you feel mad helpless". The exterminator liked the snowflakes on my apartment ceiling. Felt as I was leaving New York this year that I wasn't going home but leaving my home to visit family and friends. All the seams of my fur coat ripped and I kept dropping things from my pockets in Pittsburgh in a daze, thought too much on the red eye buses. My father talked about how my mother died two days before his birthday and twelve before Christmas and how Decembers were no good. There was an ice storm in Michigan, I slept through Christmas morning on the living room couch. I drove all day from Washington DC to Atlanta with my favorite people to stay with 40 people from  for a week. Slept on the floor and in piles and lost my voice, was handed a vitamin c tablet every morning. Explored abandoned homes during the day and ran between the groups of people in the big house we all stayed at late into the night. The last day of 2013 was my most favorite last day of any year, I kept kissing everyone with my teeth and screaming.




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diary 17 (november 13)





I had three shoots that had to do with music, I’m not sure about that or how it happened and I’m not sure if it’s where I want to go with my work but it’s what I’m working on. When I woke up early in the morning on the 12th it was snowing, the colors of the graffiti in my neighborhood look nice and bright against snow. I’ve never been conscious of being cut out of a life but I finally know it, it feels like a square and there’s a neat dashed line running from the top right to the bottom left corner of it. The cold seeped into the subway stations for a few days, but then left again and was replaced by little puddles in the yellow lines. Hope the cold makes it to my bed soon so that I feel less comfortable in doing nothing at all. I heard someone say “your mood ring is broken” to someone else, there are four staircases in my apartment. Spent  every free day I had in a cafe that has a nice empty courtyard and a long entrance. One morning with very grey light I was walking and listened to a line of lyrics and everything was very clear like the grey light all of a sudden “god makes problems just to see what you can stand before you do as the devil pleases: give up the thing you love”






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