sophomore

a and I likened our twenties to high school. 20-22 is freshman year. 23 and 24 is sophomore, 25-27 junior, 28 and 29 senior. As a freshman you try and flail. I flailed up right center. We were babies, learning how to walk, and still we feel like crying. I tried a lot on and most nothing fit, but that which did: delicious, really [New York, writing fiction]. Now we’re rising sophomores. 

Summers have always been hard for me. I am and have always been with Lana. Summertime sadness is the greatest one. I reread blog entries from last year; it’s all there. [I can get so tired of reading writing. Voice, style, it can all be so embarrassing. Clarice stands above all in her deployment of style, but it’s the absence of Voice in her work that makes it great. She writes automatically (a method I am partial to), one can tell. Can someone send me My first book. I’m curious.] 

All I want to do is take a roadtrip, though not now.

Sometimes I think I’m running in circles, sometimes in an upside down cone and that's terrifying: the thought of running in circles, lap after lap after lap after lap, at a downward tilt. Not spiraling, I must make that clear. My fear is that it’s gradual. It's far harder to correct that way.

I’m not sure yet what sophomore year is about. Digging your heals in? Realizing the path? My prediction:

filtration

Clarity

Greater quality (minor but meaningful)

Probably more flailing

 

Ah, another year. I’m pretty tired, excited for my birthday to be over, but desperate to be loved on it in all the familiar ways. I will cook a leg of lamb in celebration. Renewal, redemption!!!!!!!!!!!!

wood wool paper

I’ve begun to worry about my upstairs neighbor. At first his hacking was annoying. It reminded me of the Chinese woman and man I rented from and lived with in Chinatown. They used their whole body to clear their throat, always, after they brushed their teeth. The man living above us makes the same noise but to the nth degree and all day long. I first called him our bulimic neighbor. Now I’ve begun to suspect he wakes up every morning wanting to kill himself. He swallows a lethal dose of some poison you can find in the cupboard—a thousand apple seeds, a cup of holly, some herb—and then changes his mind. He spends the day sticking his fingers down his throat in an attempt to live. The hacking slows down around 3 and picks back up at 8, though to a much lesser degree. This is the final round, a final clearing, just to make sure—and perhaps this is more a survival instinct than a conscious decision, because when—he does indeed wake up the next morning; he curses every finger he put down his throat the day before, every single one of yesterday’s hacks. The torment. Hopefully he’s just a drug addict trying to get better. Whatever his marathon hacking is a product of, the sounds disturbs me. I play music to drown him out from a playlist called sci-fi scapes. But his chest must be deep shades of purple and blue, and his teeth eroded half way to his gums. 

Sometimes, most of the time, maybe only sometimes actually because these moments tend to be transcendent, I think that things are the only way they could be, and these moments the way they are were destined ever since, well, I could never know. For example:

Yesterday I bought a table. I woke up in the morning and decided to bike, and because we are furnishing our apartment I decided to bike to a used furniture store. I walked around the warehouse a few times in circles, and then saw the table. It was stacked atop another one in the middle of the store, and it gleamed. I ran toward it, and for maybe 30 minutes I traced its legs with my fingers, fingering the peels and dents in the wood and becoming more and more nervous... I become apprehensive when I like something very much. After too long of my perverted groping an Eastern European grabbed the table's pretty legs with his big hands and said I think I’m gonna take this one. My face fell and I gasped. He took his hands off and said good. You’ve made your decision. I hugged him tightly.

I can’t describe the table to you. All I can say is its round, the movers took its legs off to get it in my apartment, and I’m sitting at it now as I will every day from here on out. Each day I don’t I will be sad, but still I will thank it (God?) for letting me look at it and choose it and bring it home with me. I feel this way about people I love, loads of things I keep in my room, and the job I found on craigslist. I like to think I can tell when a thing is placed firmly.

I dream each night of sagas, and the characters are the people I miss most. My dad, a, s, i. But life is very good. So good c and I went to breakfast, to a hotel, which is my favorite place to eat breakfast. A woman drank a latte and ate a salad alone and slow, and we talked about what material our husbands would be. I said wool. She said steel. The man upstairs, from what I can tell, is made completely of very, very fine paper.

cracked

I’ve been kind of without a home, but now I have one. At the same time a is going to spain for 2 months, and she’s become something of a home. Goodbye lovely! I almost went with her, but I decided to get on top of my credit card bill. 

My new apartment is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived. The floors tilt in every direction. There are checkered tiles in the bathroom. There’s a crack in one of the windows. Classical music flows through. We have a big mirror, 2 chairs, and a stereo on top of a tv tray. I can see the whole city from my bus stop. 

I feel like I can finally breathe. I can read again. Maybe I can write again. We are testing this out.

The last few months have been day-to-day. I scraped by. The skin of my teeth wore thin. It was grim. A dungeon with a fluorescent light around which moths swarmed. When I started to stay with a, life started to brighten., glowing things seemed to fall around me in slow motion, and they drifted in a way that felt right, and I didn’t worry because I knew that when they landed, they’d land safely and fit together. I started sleeping hard and heavy. My dreams were deep and warm. 

I’ve been in many such situations, that deform your nerves and shave years off your life, but I tend to remember them fondly. In dire straights, you’re cracked wide open. You're dramatically present. You bleed. And the wonderful come along to patch and infuse you with all sorts of light. I’ve experienced quite a bit of that recently. I am lucky

confession

Yesterday I talked to d, the guy who always has brunch with Someone Famous on Sundays. I remember the first time I talked to him: It was brunch, about a year ago. Death had come up somehow, and I mentioned death doulas. I had volunteered for Sundance a few months ago, where I’d watched a documentary about one. This I wanted them to know. The death doula was Jewish and a woman, a type the pair seemed to have some experience with. Before d went on about the subject, he raised his eye at me, precautionarily—You’re not Jewish, are you?

d likes to mention how old he is. Someone Famous does not. Someone Famous looks like he listens to Andrew Huberman and has regular chemical peels. d looks like a writer who’s lived in Brattleboro 40 years. I told him about the four months I lived there when I was 19. He told me about the friends he has who pathologically lie and live more or less on the street. His substack subscribers love them. I told him about the walks f and I took at night after probably two bottles of wine, during which we took a stray cat home and once coaxed a guy off his proverbial edge. He was down by the train tracks and his girlfriend had just thrown him out. He was drunk in a can’t-talk-straight, slurring-his-steps kind of way. We talked to him for awhile and f did most of the comforting—I’m not so good at that sort of thing, and I used to be worse. I probably said something like yeah, she seems like the worst. Eventually he agreed to sleep it off in his truck, and we kept walking. 

I told d about my blog and lied about how often I post. Lied, or rounded up. I wrote my email on a piece of receipt paper and gave it to him before he left. Hi, d. Sorry I lied.

Margarine

Fiction drop: https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/margarine

suckers

Five or so weeks ago I left my room in Bushwick. 

For three weeks I drank, worked, and cried a lot.

Two weeks ago I went to New York for a job interview and stayed at Alausi’s place in soho. We all had dinner on the floor and drank beer. I saw an apartment in Chinatown the next morning. The landlady asked me if I was single. I said yes, and she offered me the apartment.

A week ago I worked easter brunch and moved into the Chinatown apartment. Now I live with sometimes up to five other people. Three of us have rooms. My landlady made me lunch while it rained. I’m so happy to be back.

This past week my landlady went to China. Her husband went to North Carolina. I became gravely ill and took the train home. I melted honey in hot water and squeezed lemon into it. I bought a pink nightgown.

These elixirs are healing me, that and advil. 

Today I feel a little better. My throat feels less full of fiber glass. I finished a story.

Tomorrow I will start house sitting again.

The next day we’ll drive up north to see the eclipse.

The day after that I will answer phones at a glass shop.

In a few weeks Ellie will go see the horses race in Kentucky. I want her to wear my hat because it was made for such an occasion. Then I’ll find another subletter. Move somewhere else. I’ll intern, help Ellie move to London, go to Vienna or Portugal. And then what?

I’m such an ends justify the means person that I forget the means are all my life is made of. I always think the future will be better, which is sweet of me. But then I make myself suffer in the meantime because historically it pays off? that’s what the stories told me. Pay your dues. If I accepted my life as is, I think I would be a happier person. Life neutrality. But that’s for suckers.

baby brain

I'm so young I'm just like a baby. Just past a year old screaming and crying hurt so bad cus I don’t like to lay that way ouch. A baby brain inside a grown woman. I have her impulses. Abandon! Investigate! Revel! Nothing can hurt me. I will skate along on the charm of my big bug eyes. If I were to go missing, they would go on the flier: The girl with eyes that bulge! Thank God for these eyes of mine, because surely they’d be missed. I can also see from miles away. Only in front, though. That’s the issue. You hear all these things about hindsight, but I never look back. That 20/20 is different from mine. I see very clearly, but seeing is different than knowing. I don’t actually believe hindsight is 20/20. I very rarely make sense of things. The past is so dreary. Visual delights gone by are nulled by bitterness. I am so focused on focusing on the road ahead. Rumor has it I can pave with thoughts alone. 

Rumor has it there’s a solar eclipse. I fear I won’t be able to help looking it straight in the eyes, and it will be the last thing I see. Would that be so bad? How lovely it would be to possess such big eyes that can’t see a thing. Facial ornaments. We have other organs that don’t function, but they aren’t beautiful or at eye-level. I would need someone to dress them up for me. Hang ornaments from lashes. Rub smelly creams underneath. Smudge pastels on lids. I want them so beautiful no one could ever imagine them being of use. Trouble is I would never get to see.