back in the city i'm just another girl in a sweater
atrophy wife
If I could have decided whether to turn 28 or not, I would have decided against it. It depressed me. I felt, more than thought, I should be prettier by now, richer, more relationshipped.
At 4pm, I get out of bed for a coffee. I don’t want one, nor do I need one, I’ve had hangxiety so bad I’ve been wired since 4am this morning, and even my dreams weren’t quite dreams—they were the lived-out horrors that come to you half-awake.
For my 28th birthday, I throw myself a 30th birthday party. There’s shrimp cocktail, St. Germain punch with maraschino cherries, a banner that says Talk Thirty To Me and huge gold 30 balloons. People bring me cards and soaps, Negro Modelos, a Baby Bottle Pop, bottles of biodynamic wine, a tube of Molly Baz’s mayo, and in each card someone addresses my “wit.” Happy 30th, Julia, maybe next year you’ll even feel 29. Camille wishes me a year of loving more deeply than I ever have before, and a daughter. I carry around a tray of pickle back shots and almost no one knows what to do with them. 30, and teaching my peers about pickle back shots. I’m wearing a pair of pants with a skirt on it, and a concho belt.
This is the last party I’ll throw in my apartment. Neither of my roommates are there. They no longer share their locations with me, so I actually have no idea where they are when people ask. Underneath a painting of two kittens in bibs saying “No Thanks I’m Just Drinking Milk Tonight”—an item of docile persuasion that could be either of theirs—is a stack of shot glasses sticky with Four Roses residue and gnawed-on cornichons, packs of Montauk IPA, the Baby Bottle Pop, a cigarette put out in a plastic glass brimming with white wine.
When I’m grocery shopping for the evening, the basket is so heavy with crudités and french butter and various pepperoncini dip ingredients I have to hold it with two hands. When I’m wandering the grocery store thinking about what to make, I have this weird feeling of being 10 years older and being similarly alone, prepping for my 38th birthday party without someone to discuss menu, or ask: Where the fuck do they keep the French onion soup mix? Do you think small chicory leaves are all that different from endive? They’re so much cheaper. Can you remember if we have onion powder? Do you think you can run next door and grab the St. Germain? Take my loyalty card, there’s $10 on it.
I feel alone all the time now, this weird presence of permanent individuality, some creeping and strange certainty that my life will be lonely in the future, too. Things feel quiet, extremely solitary: the arrhythmic pat of my loafers on marble steps, somewhat muted by Piero Piccioni in my headphones, and a mortadella sandwich at Battery Park, sensory reach lulled by a hundred different kinds of chatter.
He soft launches his illness at 10:30am. We were out late last night, at a comedy show and then having $24 martinis at Nine Orchard, enjoying a free tiramisu sent to our table by an old college friend who works there. I have a party afterwards, and when I’ve invited him earlier in the day he says Ah nice nice. I probs won’t cuz unfortunately I do have a 9a appointment tomorrow and sadly many meetings. We drink a Corona tall boy at the comedy show and when I lean my head on his shoulder he pats my leg. On Tuesday, we saw a harpist at People’s, and he was kissing my cheekbone while I looked at the drink menu, sitting next to me in the booth. But tonight when I wrap myself around him on the subway platform while we wait 17 minutes for the next A train, he texts around my back.
Are you feeling okay btw? He texts me in the morning. I woke up feeling ill, not sure why.
In 15 years of dating, men have a familiar and singular tactic for initiating the denouement: feigning illness. His sore throat confirms hazy and ignored suspicions I’ve come to know of the cowardly type: pierced ears, frequently at the Brooklyn Mirage, subject to a mother’s unfaltering love and encouragement, no student debt and a consequence-free upbringing, pathologically non-confrontational because it would deplete a person’s characteristic understanding of themselves as The Good Guy, to look into the eyes of a woman they’ve been seeing for a couple months, sans condom usually, and telling her this doesn’t interest them anymore. A man’s sore throat, as I’ve said before, means everything but a sore throat.
I respond that totally, I have a sore throat I’m ignoring. I say also: do not feel any pressure to come tonight, it’s obviously overwhelming to meet 40 of my friends and you don’t have to do that. I’m feeling secretly that you were a tiny bit off last night so if you want to have a little chat this weekend abt what’s up I’m very open to that. And if I’m misreading ignore me.
Haha no no i know that, I wanna come just depends how I’m feelinggg.
I don’t hear from him again until 11 hours later—he texts me 90 minutes into my party: truly hate to miss pickle backs but I don’t think it’s in the cards for me tn. I hope ya have the best time.
Over the course of the evening, I’m asked a dozen times: What do you want for 28? To get pregnant, I tell them. Oh, they all say. Really? I don’t know. When I blow out my candles and people are chanting speech I say—much less eloquently, I’ve had five glasses of punch—I’ve been thinking about two things all day: that I’m always moved by the people that show up year after year, by the absence of some and how much that can mean, by the timestamp a birthday celebration creates when you see the fruition of all the relationships you’ve made in a year and a lifetime and here they all are. I say also that it’s one of the most difficult things to feel acknowledged by the world, and finally I do, in some way, like some part of it recognized me as I wanted and meant to be known.
I leave out that I spent so much of the year learning how acknowledgement leaves a slime trail of envy behind it, how many relationships it fractures, too, how deftly you have to navigate any kind of success, and how it feels women don’t know at all how to handle it between each other. That’s a lot of what 27 was about.
I’m FaceTiming Molly and Caroline the morning after my party—everyone is so hungover. We got home at 4am. Molly sent me a picture of Caroline sleeping in her dog’s bed this morning. Ryann sent me a picture of her lying in bed with a piece of white bread on her stomach, three bites out of it. People are texting me apologizing for being so drunk, or for not making it, or divulging their crush. I start crying on the FaceTime because I say I want to take the sex back, and I never want to do that. Yeah, you do never want to do that, says Molly. But I want to take it back because I meant it and it was emotional, actually, and I really like him. It’s so embarrassing to catch yourself having trusted someone in retrospect, especially when you weren’t aware of it happening. He said he had blisters from his new Vans on one of our dates. From your “new” “VANS?” I thought—surely I’m safe. Paramore and always texting “perchance,” and a Lorde stan and a non-profit employee—I’m cooler than this man, he’s not even a music guy, he’s not even living in Bushwick. I suspect he’s never seen a David Lynch movie in his life. It’s possible he doesn’t even know who that is. He has an orange plaid shirt hanging in his closet. When I show up to a date wearing a leather tunic on par with the girls at Vogue, he says I look like a Flintstone. He just doesn’t get it at all. I like him so much for it.
We always talk for a long time after sleeping together. I say on Tuesday the post office is so mean and bad at their job, we should privatize mail. I think he’s going to respond by saying: you’re a fucking idiot, and fight about it—I know his opinion—because if I had a single love language it would be bait-and-catch: to say something contrarian, and have a person respond by being smart, and combative, and playful.
Instead, he literally rolls off me and goes home. I don’t hear from him again until 2pm the next day. I have the instinct he’s looking for someone who drinks less and votes more. Two days later I find out this is correct.
In the interim, I spot several women in graphic t-shirts that make me begin to think the loneliness I suspect of myself has something to do with a growing female disenchantment with partnership. The shirts say this:
And She Lifted Heavily Ever After.
The Future Been Female.
Life’s A Party, Dress Like It.
On a bench in Fort Greene, he says we have different values, so much so that he couldn’t see this for the long-term. But we could still keep seeing each other, he says, I’m having so much fun. Different values? I say. It occurs to me this man might think my understanding of modern economics collapses at Why don’t we just print more money then?
Foolishly, I’ve always felt I could confess to men, without vanity, I was politically understudied. Where this to me felt like an admission of self-awareness and minute guilt, it has been, historically, ammunition. I think sometimes men can be intrigued by a quickness I have and soon start poking holes in it—like I duped them by speaking polysyllabically and liking Consider the Lobster when I don’t know what a labor party is, or anything about the Tet Offensive.
He says if I haven’t yet taken the initiative to consider the political implication of everything, then when was I going to? This feels like such an insane conversation to be having with someone who’s known me for two months and outsized a baiting comment about privatized mail, I have to recalibrate my perspective completely, and on this bench, in the hour before I head to Coney Island for Jackson’s birthday brunch at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. I try to explain that my political motivations are soft because of a myriad of reasons: dissonant political beliefs in my family whom I love and trust and respect, a concern with the immediate over the structural, an ever-changing state address, a general disillusionment with the electoral process because you only ever hear about it being a performance, and everything aside: why didn’t you ask me that? Or ask me how I approach politics? Or mention that it perturbed you how you felt I didn’t engage politically and have a conversation with me about that? Yeah, no, he says, maybe that would’ve been a better approach. Do you want to keep seeing each other, though? He asks. No, I say. Not when I’ve just been told you can’t be serious about me because you think I have poor values. Not poor, he says, different.
I text my siblings: It’s so insane to be someone who’s morally superior but then okay having sex with a girl whose values you don’t respect until she says: How come you bailed on my birthday party 90 minutes into it.
We just come from really different backgrounds, he says. I grew up caring about this stuff. A different background, I gather from our conversations, meaning mine was poorer, East Coast, public schooled, with Republican parents and a religious foundation that perturbs him. A different background that expels myself from possibility of a future with him, because of how differently two white people with private collegiate educations living in Brooklyn can be. I push product to white women with disposable income for a living, and he works for an affordable housing non-profit. I thrive in a capitalist society—it’s in fact, why I’m employed—and while he does, also, at least he has a sense of disillusionment about it. At least he’s read Das Kapital. It’s important to have conviction he says. I’m aghast. I have more convictions than red blood cells. I get up and tell him I’ll see him on the ballot, and cry all the way to brunch.
“Pretty sure ‘lack of political initiative’ was a breakup line Trotsky used,” my dad texts when I tell him. Eddie responds, “if he follows this up with leading a revolution so enormous it establishes a new world power and shifts the global dynamic i will rethink my opinion of him but for now i think he is a douchebag.”
I cry all the next morning because I have no food, I’m too nauseous to get food, and because to some degree I think he’s right about me, and I’m ashamed of myself. But primarily because I have to start over again. My sister just bought a house with her fiancé. They moved in yesterday. I’m sobbing over someone who texts me perchance. My timeline for having a partnered life and children is pushing into my mid-30s, and not by choice. I find myself wondering that if I’d already cracked the Chomsky book I asked for for Christmas, maybe we’d be going to a baseball game this week. I didn’t even mention I asked for that for Christmas. I thought with time he’d just realize those things, that I wouldn’t have to prove my intelligence to him, but I forget in a city of four million women, men are less motivated to really Learn a woman.
Perhaps my behavior, and admittedly some of its ideological laziness, is predicated on the idea that I can’t be that hard to fall in love with. For god’s sake I’m wearing a tiny dress and little hoops and I’m reading Chomsky on my commute listening to Italian Film Jazz. I don’t have what I’ve observed some women do which is sort of a cultural absence of male taste—I’ve seen the same movies (sans John Wick), read the same books, listened to enough of them at gargantuan lengths to understand just what it is they believe and listen to and where they go and what they order—all generally, obviously. The people I’m falling in love with are ones that, to me, are breaking some mold, surprising and thrilling me. Like how we laugh because we’ve just heard or seen something unexpected. Like how he has “new Vans.”
I begin dating from some similar-enough cultural plane that seemingly delights men—that their life doesn’t have so much context to explain. I can meet them in medias res, with a Negroni at a place we both like, order sensibly, talk about Anthony Bourdain, or Narcos, or the Ken Burns Vietnam doc, or How To with John Wilson, and deliver my anti-Chuck Palahniuk rant (they don’t like this), and missing the musical era of that one Ok Go music video, and talk about whoever-the-fuck’s solo side project, no and it is like Fleetwood Mac was better before Stevie, you know, just a totally different sound (not better, just different), and the problem is that physical media is just dying, all around us, and two facts about Gaddafi and knowing where Afghanistan is on a map.
When I began working at AD I wanted someone to tell me that I could maintain the tastes I had previously, the groundedness, whatever of it existed. I could feel that with this job there was a creeping detachment from my world before. When I was dating an ex, he very seriously prided himself on his everyman quality, having just spent over a year roughing it on a cycling trip from the Northern to Southern Hemisphere. Every man, of course, being privately educated, the child of wealthy parents, skiers, multi-home owners, their primary one in Jackson Hole. He used terms like “terminal uniqueness” to describe the plight of my existence, and New York’s. It was funny, actually. I still use it. He offered up ample critique of nepo New York, having been there for the first time that summer, and with me. But when we went to dinner after my first day at AD—I had made us reservations at El Quijote—I could feel him across the table not wanting to ask: how was it? He didn’t want to know. He didn’t like or respect that world, lest I forget he’d been sleeping with wild dogs under dilapidated roofs (if he was lucky) in remote Columbian towns these past months, and wasn’t interested in my becoming part of it. He was this way also about saloon. It was a vanity project. While waiting for him to ask, I decided to talk about it anyway, reminding myself that whether or not I had a boyfriend who was going to ask me about the first day of my new life, I was going to, because a boyfriend was supposed to ask that and I was supposed to have a boyfriend who would. “You’re acting like you’re the first person who’s ever gone corporate,” he said after I finished. We broke up after dinner.
I felt the changing of my taste—I was becoming less relatable to men, my life less funny and traipsing, more driven and serious. There was more to dislike about me because there was more that I had going on. I was busy, career-driven, always at something like an 11-course gelatin dinner seated by famous chefs, influencers, features editors. To women, this meant something—it was enviable, albeit Instagram story-mutable. To men, I could sense, this was off-putting, shallow, absent-minded privilege. They were great thinkers, you know—big readers. Well, not recently, but once—they were getting back into it. Only isn’t it always the same dog-eared Camus on the windowsill behind his bed, even after several months? And my clip on the desk, and the sunscreen I gave him because I could once see the zinc in his mustache.
I never wanted to be an academic, there was nothing honest or beautiful about pedigree to me, and yet I keep dating men who were once entrenched in a deeply academic phase, in conversation with themselves about professorship in the long-term, the crown jewel of their sociology department. So they approach my political levity with a moral superiority, they chose different, chose to read Kant and Orwell, flirted with grad school in a way I’m decidedly, financially against. After all, I’d be paying for it myself.
There was an unhappiness obvious to me about all political people. I have a predisposition to unhappiness, biologically, and as a result my curiosity has been limited. I rarely seek out much to make me feel bad—men notwithstanding—and my interest is rarely piqued by the structural. It’s piqued by feeling and immediate circumstance, by the conversations of 100 people around me, minute human dramas.
It’s hard to believe you don’t have it all, Ryann writes in my card. “All” makes me laugh because it could mean anything: an apartment, a living immediate family, a job, about $2,000 worth of candles in a basket on my bedroom floor. I don’t have: money, STIs, any prospects of a stable financial or partnered future, relationships where I feel I can share anything positive happening to me without being disliked, a flat stomach, inner peace, upper body strength.
A girl walks past me coming from a workout class, red, sweaty, sipping a Diet Coke. She laughs about something to her short, hot boyfriend. I don’t know why this thought occurs to me, but it does, that she might know more about womanhood than I do. And Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America is sitting face up on the table next to my clams, and $16 Vermentino.
Blonde ponytail, blonde ponytail, houndstooth blazer blonde ponytail walking behind coiffed hair in full white outfit and mewing to no one. “My entire family has health issues,” she says, tripping on a cobblestone while trying to meet his pace, “So who knows.”
“She felt [with him] the mix of loneliness and love and habit,” my book says, “the mix that was surely love.” I RSVP yes to the 11-course gelatin dinner, crack open Understanding Power, and begin underlining everything I couldn’t explain to someone else: totalitarianism, client states, the Pentagon Papers, Guatemalan genocide. I make a completely spiteful 4-month syllabus of political theory to protect myself from ever again being morally belittled by a man with earrings and an investment portfolio who weaponizes his paid-for education as being the sort of Good Guy that couldn’t be with someone so morally unmotivated.
At the party he doesn’t come to, someone sees me and asks Isabel for my number afterwards. “He’s a writer,” she tells me. Horrible start, I think, if he’s literate at all. I’m looking for someone who knows how to drive a car, cook meat, show up, and fall asleep on my stomach. I’m 30.
Absurdly good... do you ever happen across a Substack and you feel a little kick of excitement because someone is writing so well; so vividly and so un-vapidly (not a word, but the right way of describing the feeling here)... very happy about your writing. Thank you and happy belated birthday <3
F---ing hell, I'm with Eddie