altogether too much of life is mood

how normal, how painless

Joy Laville, Sleeping Woman and Plane (1984)

Spring is doing its routine tease—the early March sunbathing has come and gone, a few days of birds and above-50’s and back we go to our morose little tundra.

I’m listening to Elvis and deep house. I’m not reading. I’m watching White Lotus. I shopped out Walton Goggins’ house for AD, and had no idea who he was when I was doing it. His house is beautiful. Almost exactly what I’d wish for my life—all ancient rugs and wood and Hudson Valley and expensive linens.

At Prema, I sit outside, bundled in a babaa and an ugly Madewell coat with a black coffee, writing on Amazon’s big spring sale, where I have to maintain copy that urges people to sign up for a Prime membership. One of those things a white woman says she hates, while doing it herself, like capitalism, atheism, $250 haircuts, not tipping, ghosting.

A woman comes up to me and asks to sit at my table. She is pushing a stroller with a 9-month old, maybe, and when she sits down she starts pumping milk. I’m laughing at the casualness she took—to share a table and then take her boob out. She hushes her cooing baby to appease me, but I’m not bothered at all by the baby. My life is completely absent of children, their cuteness and simplicity and silliness, the way their presence makes you recalibrate your emotions, ideals, visions of your life. Isabel keeps telling me to stop talking about getting pregnant. Maureen, to silence my weekly requests for her to get pregnant and my threats to do it first if she won’t, texts me: you’re 9 months away from having a baby at any point, if you really wanted to.

I’m not, actually, because my exes are blocked.

From Hinge, I have created a 20-slide screenshot album of men who write “silly” or “silly goose” in their bio: my therapist would say: I’m a silly goose, I’ll brag about you to my friends if: you’re a silly goose, Don’t hate me if I: silly, I’m looking for: silly gooses, Just a silly goose looking for a wifey. I have, also, screenshots of A life goal of mine: I wanna go to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany, and see the entire ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ while under the influence of powerful hallucinogens [three mushroom emojis] and I’m looking for: Rave until sunrise, comfort w silence n slowness, music, being outside and I go crazy for: Lithium.

I find that whatever I’m putting out there is working for the following types: EDM guys, 110-pound guys. I change one of my prompts to I’ll brag about you to my friends if: You have a full time job and 0 working knowledge of EDM. Within an hour someone responds: “Got the first one down! Wanna come see me DJ tonight?”

Apropos, Leeza sends me an invite to DJ Fart in the Club. It’s expensive but going to be fucking awesome… a dj named Objekt is playing let me find link

I’ve met Leeza twice but she brings a similar energy to the world that I do, I think. When I mention this to Kate, she says: no, she absolutely does not. But we are both flighty, intense, always texting “Also” and then something unrelated and ungrounded. We are both loving the concept of DJ Fart in the Club. We are both going through friend breakups. We both respond to disillusionment and emotional terror and ennui by moving far away, and for a while. She’s the sort of person you meet once but think—that can’t be right. We are both very invested in our relationships, perhaps too much so. We can both be hurt about the same thing for a very long time.

An hour before the party I’m at dinner with Eleanor, and he texts me “I actually am gonna bring her, hope that doesn’t deter you from going.” I’m in disbelief, not so much because of this incident but because of our exchange in the past two days, in which he buttered me up, told me twice he wouldn’t bring his new girlfriend to this party. It’s a dagger to the long-standing mutual respect I thought existed between us. We still, occasionally, in our brief catch-ups, text each other I love you. When he’s lonely or has low self-esteem, he texts me for affirmation about his character and potential, which I give him willingly. I think the world of him. “Why are you being so nice to me?” he says to me after the last time. “I love you so much. I miss you.” He sends me a photo of himself in tears.

Anyway, I’m humiliated. And I’ll be humiliated at the party, too, slumped on the couch, drinking punch, feeling everyone’s aware of my fuming anger and resentment, or worse: doesn’t care at all. It is worse. They don’t.

At the party, I ignore him, and acknowledge his girlfriend only when I’m outside smoking a cigarette, drunk, sitting on Eleanor’s lap who I’ve begged to stay so I can handle the evening. There’s six of us on the balcony. She’s not who I thought he was dating—and she does look like me—pinched face, little body, short hair—only she showed up in a fur coat and is rolling her own spliff. I’m alright with that, I think—she seems 21 and I feel 30. Berlin comes up in the conversation, which is awkward because he and I went there together after his first alcoholic episode. We were in London and he got so drunk at Francesca’s dinner party he couldn’t speak or keep his eyes open and I tried to put him to bed. He went through my phone, instead, and found texts I’d sent to Isabel where I expressed things were weird and I didn’t know if I wanted to be together. I’d come back from Maine the month before, to be with him, and the return to New York had felt so hard. I used to wake up to an inlet outside my bedroom door, in a twin bed across from Isabel, and bake from 7 til 9am. Then I’d work from home in the apartment with Ana’s anxious golden retriever, Bunny, who I loved more than any dog I’ve ever met. On our one day off a week, we’d hike to the ocean, jump in the quarry, or drive around in the Tacoma, cook scallops in the evening. We’d get a ride over to North Haven and have “craft pizza” and go to weird parties, and get stranded on the dock and beg anyone for a ride across the thoroughfare. We’d harvest goldenrod for the dining room tables and decorate the restaurant with vintage matchbooks, chat with tourists through dinner service, blast music and do dishes until midnight. Go downstairs to the bar in our backyard and flirt with the bartenders and drink gin and tonics and chat with locals and keep our eyes peeled for Diesel, a fucked-up 5-pound dog that had been stolen by a beefy guy named Tobin from his diabetic, amputee owner who was posting aggressive shit on Facebook, so everyone was just okay with that. Tobin owned Diesel, sure.

After reading the texts with Isabel, he barricaded the door with Francesca’s dresser, brought me to tears, and called me a cunt in front of everyone at the party. He pushed me against the wall while he broke up with me, and said he didn’t love me. He told me I needed to pay his parents back for my ticket to London, for the AirBnb. I had wasted their time, his time. Francesca found me in her bathroom upstairs, sobbing, and begged me to sleep in her bed. I didn’t. I poured him a glass of water and laid out three Advil and laid next to him all night and didn’t sleep. At 7am, I walked to a coffee shop and tried to process what had happened. I’d never seen him like that before. Or, actually, I had, to smaller degrees, and ignored it: at a bar, in an Uber, when my siblings came to visit and he got so drunk he passed out on the couch in Eddie’s apartment between bars. He met me at the coffee shop, cried, apologized. I kept that all to myself for a long time. I really wanted everyone to love him as much as I did. I avoided Maureen’s calls for weeks after London, and finally, when I told her, she said I had to break up with him. I said I loved him and I wouldn’t, and it was so strange to even believe it happened, it was nothing at all like him. I said that every time it happened.

He and I had to spend the next four days in Berlin together—our flights were thousands of dollars to change. We had sex only once, and it felt depressing, detached, like I felt unsafe and he knew it and wanted me to feel safe but there was no way to go about it anymore. We watched that Drew Barrymore baseball movie, and I worked during most of the day. We’d go out to dinner at night, and both felt scared to speak.

“I didn’t like Berlin,” he says on the couch, with his hand on her leg. I change the subject, and ask everyone what animal they’d most like to be in a cage with. “Wanna go inside?” he says to her.

Isabelle and I meet up at Lucien, after three reschedulings, as is customary of life these days. Kanye West had his birthday party here, I remember hearing. I go early to read, and sit between two Jersey girls—who order white wine after white wine, tuna tartare, and gossip the whole evening—and two boys, both beautiful, smoking thin cigarettes and talking about Paris, Milan, poker.

Tamal’s crazy with blackjack.

I just got a poker set, literally.

Dude, bet, $500 buy-in.

I can’t stand them because they hit on our waitress and it works. When she returns inside with their menus, they say to each other: we’re going to get free drinks out of this. One of them is moving to Bangkok, “for fun.” The other looks and talks like Ryan Phillipe. Later, a girl shows up and sits with them. She’s boring, and I feel sorry for her, because I can tell both boys think so. The one moving to Bangkok is the only one asking her questions. She answers his question about being from LA by saying LA’s so laidback, and New York’s so…“Busy?” he finishes. Yeah. When Ryan Phillipe is talking, I can see her trying not to look at him too much.

I make Isabelle talk all night about the evolution of makeup PR, and freezing her eggs. It’s $15,000. She said it isn’t bad at all, but when she describes it, everything about it seems bad. She asks if she’s talking too much and I tell her everything she’s saying are things I don’t know anything about, and that this is exactly the type of evening I want to be having. She keeps ordering wine so I do. I make a joke about ordering the escargot and she orders it, and the crab cakes. It’s a Wednesday.

Walking past us are lines of beautiful women: the glowing forehead, the claw clip, the thin gold ring, the Loewe bags of the married class.

The following week I get home and I’m exhausted, irritated, bored. I get on Hinge and see who’s responded anything clever. One cute guy has. He has a mustache and big teeth and a bike. I DM him and ask if he’s free in a few hours for a drink. “I like your style,” he says, “Text me.” Four hours later I meet him at Mayflower and we stay until close. We go to a second bar. He’s so playful, and easy to chat with and we both agree a first date is never really that bad because it’s so fun to chat, whether it’s romantic or not. But it’s romantic, and we kiss the whole evening. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a man in a long time. How normal it can be, to have a crush. How painless.

Someone ransacked the package room in our apartment, tore everything apart and stole it, even the Nutrafol, but left the Eagles jersey. It’s still there, weeks later, along with a clearly self-published book called Too Tough to Love.

week in the life

Instagram reminds me that nine years ago today I lived on a cliff in New Zealand, in a van with a broken door surrounded by sheep. I was working as a receptionist and farmhand at a hostel I had found through HelpX. I did my laundry on a line. I was 18. Staff came and went, from Germany, Switzerland, the UK. There was a goose who would chase me around the compound biting me, and I was sent to retrieve eggs from the chicken coop because I was one of the only farmhands small enough to fit into it. I was reading Lolita, and Brothers Karamazov, and more impressionable than I’d ever been before or since.

A couple ran the hostel and farm, Sol and Jana. Sol was the sort of man where you can’t tell if he worries about you or wants to have sex with you, or both. He asked me outright if I was a virgin once, and another time if I’d ever been drunk. I resented him because he made me an ingénue by assumption. He was Turkish, and hated America, or American politics and privilege. We often talked about American politics at dinner, them believing Trump would be elected, and my believing such a thing could never happen, but it was good TV. People would look to me to speak on behalf of America, and they shook their heads when I told them I didn’t know anything, I’d never voted.

I dove for paua with Sol, and when we went down to the beach, he gave me a wetsuit far too big for me. I told him to turn around while I undressed. He turned back around before I told him to. I came up with no paua, and he came up with dozens. Back at the farm, me and a Swiss girl named Esmee carved the shells into teardrop shapes.

His wife Jana was tiny, blonde, Latvian. For 9 months they fed me dinner every night, and it always included a bowl of sour cream. I remember when Jana was dropping me back off at the bus station in Akaroa to go to Christchurch, her car smelled exactly like that of my first love’s Subaru, and “Ticket to Ride,” came on, and we sang it because we thought its prescience was funny, considering. Most of what I remember about New Zealand was hiking alone, and trying to protect myself from men without being rude, the sheep, the Hector dolphins, the way the van shook in the wind, and the daily earthquakes.

I spent a lot of time in my first love’s Subaru. In fact, I took my gap year because I was in love with him and I felt there was nothing to do about it. I didn’t want to go to UVa, I didn’t want to follow him anywhere, and I didn’t want to be in love with him.

We talked on the phone every night since 8th grade. We were dates to the 8th grade formal, and when we slow danced, there was a circle of people around us we could feel. My heels were four inches and my dress was from Target. I don’t remember the song. I’m sure it was Rihanna. We met in Mr. Fox’s English class, but I’d heard about him even before I’d started going to school because everyone had a crush on him. He was reading David Sedaris, and I was trying to work on my posture. For 5 years, everyone was always asking me why we don’t date. Because we’re friends, I guess. In high school, I hate school, and don’t go much. He doesn’t either, but he doesn’t get the phone call about after school detention for it. He is depressed in a way that’s much more serious than my kind, but I feel I understand it. We read the same stuff, and talk about it. When he’s not in our history class, or our literary tutor class, I don’t care about being there. I just go to school to see him. We’re on homecoming court, and we walk the football field together. We were voted as having the Best Personality in our high school superlatives. People like each of us in relation to each other. He is going to UVa and I’m taking a gap year because I haven’t applied anywhere, and my parents have me thinking a 3.5 means my options are a state school with a unanimously Christian student population, or no school. He dates other people, and I don’t really. We talk about his sex life and we don’t talk about mine. Boys drive me around sometimes, I sneak out to see them, we make out occasionally, always outside, but that’s all. There is no appeal of a boyfriend to me—I go home and talk to Gus every night, he picks me up and drives me around and we hang out with his niece, and listen to Bob Dylan in his car. We walk the Rivanna Trail, sometimes we watch a movie at his house. We lie around. We just don’t kiss. Sometimes he touches my bare leg in a way that makes me feel insane and raises my body temperature a thousand degrees—and reminds me we could, if I was brave enough to, or he was brave enough to.

I remember everything about the morning after we hooked up because it was the most humiliating few hours of my life. There was warm cantaloupe on the table. It was 8am, and I wasn’t hungover but I was vibrating and empty and nauseous in the way of a hangover. His mother was trying to make coffee with an Aeropress, hands overlayed, pushing with great difficulty. She was in her 60s, which I thought was so old at the time for a mother. She then placed her forehead on top of her hands and pushed with a grunt. I was the only one that laughed, and felt a wave of embarrassment at the sound. The kitchen was beautiful, dirty, terracotta-tiled, and sound traveled through it like a cave.

He had come into the room where I slept at the very earliest part of dawn, so the light was sweet and orange. I turned, and pretended to be asleep. He laid next to me and we didn’t touch, but I could feel his gaze on the back of my neck. He wanted me to speak to him, but my embarrassment and resentment had kept me up all evening and there were so many things I wanted to say, I kept silent, the way you can’t fathom speaking when you feel so wronged there’s nothing to talk about, no surmountable way you could express your fury.

It was prom night. He is prom king, but I’m not prom queen. He once dated the prom queen, actually. I forget why they stopped. I know he ended it with her. She’s really nice, pretty, the band director’s daughter, a talented soccer player. We had started kissing on the couch, then gone into his room and started hooking up. The sheets were shoved to the bottom of the bed and I was on my period. I had told my mom I was sleeping here and she was furious and told me to come home. I didn’t tell him that. We stop hooking up because I don’t know what I’m doing, and when I ask if we can go to bed, he tells me to sleep in the guest room. I say nothing. Then the cantaloupe, the coffee, the silent drive home.

The following day he calls me and asks me what do I want, do I want to date? He means it. I say no, and I don’t talk to him after that. I move to Australia. We never really come back from that, but in the years to come we call once in a while, and occasionally text to say we love each other, and he still calls me his best friend. I see him one more time years later, when we’re 20 and I’m living in New York after leaving school, and he’s visiting from Jersey where he lifeguards in the summer. We spend the entire night walking Manhattan. I pee behind a bush in Central Park. I lay my head on his shoulder on a bench in Flatiron. At 4am, he walks back to his aunt’s place, and I take the train. I think about that evening for months afterwards. It was exactly as if nothing had ever happened.

A month ago, on the High Line, I called him because we hadn’t caught up in a few years. He sounds so good, peaceful, in love, and busy. He lives in Florida, he’s a PE teacher. His girlfriend is in nursing school. He has to go because he’s having dinner with her and her sister.

I can’t stop listening to this song called This Is Real because of the lyric: If you’re not real, then I’m not real. That’s exactly what the suffering is when your heart is really broken. Your reality and personhood and the state of your life become unreal to you. Life is disbelief—disassociation instead of living. Your mind and body feel more extended from you than ever.

On the train I watch a girl in Steez headphones and a Wu’s Wonton King hat listening to her Spotify algoed “Chill Mix” zooming further and further in on a contact I can see is “Marco.” She keeps waiting for it to refresh between stations and she taps both her thumbs on either side of the phone while waiting. She zooms further in.

Do you know that I really think a man will rescue me from my own life? That I still can think that?

But when I’m walking through Greenpoint to meet Leeza, for this second, I don’t feel sick about any of them—I feel pretty, and free, like I escaped everything and built my life anyway. My Hinge date texts me a 35-minute Japanese jazz rap song, which I listen to on the way to the water to call my dad.