meditation on: crushing
It’s been over a year, you know, that I’ve spent grieving a relationship that was only 8 months uninterrupted, and then another four and a half very interrupted. Last Valentine’s Day I literally do not dare think of what I was doing or how I was. I didn’t have many of the people I have now. What a distressing thought. How distressing to think of a Julia who couldn’t conceptualize there was anything left to come.
I’m sitting in the dark of my office, at a job I thought I would have long left by now, having an emotional lapse prompted by Valentine’s Day posts, (of all fucking things, Julia, and you can’t stomach this) and too much Piero Piccioni. I’ve mistakenly finished all my work at 3pm, which means I have two hours in this 12-foot by 12-foot box to dwell on why it is he still has to hang around the periphery of my life—e.g. a weekend where his ex-girlfriend is pouring herself a glass of punch in my living room at the same moment he accepts a suspiciously motivated invite to a party thrown by girls from my college because of the fucked-up way separation theory works. I spend 3-5pm dwelling on fearfully summoned scenarios of the girls that sulk and bat their eyelashes for him, flip their dark hair around as their nipples compete with each other for visibility.
I feel so violently about him, or about him being mine. I think I sometimes feel that more than I even properly remember how it felt to be with him. So, anyway, I channeled my petulance into kickboxing on Valentine’s Day, dragged my roommates with me and found out I can only do four push-ups without collapsing. Which is to say how this journey of Moving On feels, besides its violence, manic and desperate, so fucking embarrassing somehow, and his so treasonous.
The impetus for pretty much everything I do lately comes from trying to feel less violent, less hurt, and push through the period of hellish boredom and mental illness that comes from no-contact.
I am, these days, actually, chronically bored. Listening to Radiohead bored. Making videos of myself pretending to cut my bangs at work bored. Walking across the street to buy a coffee despite not needing it, calling my sister for an hour and grumbling, phone off do-not-disturb, reliving a hookup from three weeks ago, drawing flowers on my fingers with a green pen, texting ex-boyfriends, typing in a Google Doc because I’ve exhausted everyone with my texts and I need an output, refreshing my email, exhausted by online shopping, clicking on the bulleted, click-baited articles under a New York Times story bored. Kickboxing bored, $75 weaving class bored.
Almost all the time now I want only to dance and kiss and go somewhere and yell about things. I want to go to a concert where people are so drunk and happy it’s actually sort of scary, like you’re in someone else’s loud, feverish dream and there’s no exit for you because you’re existing in the subconscious of a mind in the crowd you can’t locate. I want someone to drive me around and pick the music and hang my head out the window like a dog. I want to go swimming, to the ballet, finally, to Mexico City. A date on a weekday and vermouth sodas and a long makeout afterwards; to read one single book I like. Wear no makeup, and leather pants, and cut my own t-shirts like it’s 2015 and I’m living melancholically in my childhood room during the only unemployed summer of my life. I want something to happen, or surprise me; I want to be found or noticed or swept up. I’ve never in my life felt closer to a tiny neck tattoo.
It’s insufferable, how I am right now, completely. I’m 19 but with the baggage of knowing better.
In between this teenage malaise, to make it worse, I’m writing emails like this:
Hi Rashi, I’m writing to ask that you submit your transfer transcript from Syracuse University. Unfortunately, we cannot move your application ahead until we have all your materials! All best, Julia.
Parents are always saying, when you’re a kid, that only stupid people can be bored. Well, I was, and am stupid, and I remember thinking that defensively when they would say so. Well I am stupid, and I’m also bored, so why can’t we go do anything? Why can’t I watch daytime television or play Marble Blast Gold or go to public school where no one is ever bored because how could they be with a million other people in the room and at least one of them is cute? No, just peanuts for snack and outdoor time. That’s what being homeschooled is like: lonely, full of peanuts, and waiting for your parents to pick you up in various church parking lots; being shuffled outside all the time for your personal growth. Being homeschooled was a boredom I don’t believe real-schooled people can ever really know.
In the midst of complaining about being so devastatingly bored to Isabel, she pointed out, sort of tersely, which is irregular for her, that “maybe you’re bored because for the first time in five years a man isn’t ruining your life.” Gulp :)
Life without a crush to me is life without a current. Still water, a mosquito swamp. How we talk about that is shaming—living for a crush (i.e. mutual and suspended romantic tension) is to be a guy’s girl, or “slutty” in an abstract or sometimes less abstract sense. How we talk about loving someone or wanting love (especially that of a man) is that it’s a disease, that instead you should Focus On Yourself and Self-Love and EmRata out your asshole, and have you tried pole-dancing, and you’ll love this thing Tinx said, but the interest in crushing for me doesn’t exist from a lack of self-love, or needing the validation of it. It’s that I want to do something all the time and feel something all the time and think about something all the time—and crushes are challenges and characters and the something strange and exciting about life.
And before you diagnose me: I also find it exciting when I have a really good piece of raw fish! It’s also exciting when I go out dancing with my perfect roommates, to host a dinner party, or when the sun comes out or the DJ is good or my latte is less than $6, or whatever it is, but a Crush is levitating. A crush is an intersection of worlds and brains and bodies. It’s the only reason we like Jane Austen, or teenage television, Sally Rooney, Taylor Swift, like 80% of movies—the whole thing is about tenuous or taut crushes.
My sister accuses me often of over-narrativizing my life. And she’s right, that without a story I feel sort of lost in my own life—I feel it needs shifting characters and plot, a diverse series of scenes, an overarching artistic element and a trickling intentionality underneath all its moving parts, and I have to believe I’m moving all the time toward a sensible closure. Everything feels (has to feel) like Something, and I’m always folding everything into serving some narrative purpose.
In other words: I feel I understand the story between me and him to be over, I guess. The last threads of it now are just peaceless reflection, and violent fear. And without him, a love to give shape or form to the empty romantic spaces of my life, there’s just the dissolution of self back into the embryonic fluid of all possible narratives.
This bears a shy resemblance to something I just read of Timothy Leary’s about ego death—which is a bit what this feels like, in literal terms—that it takes great courage to subsume ourselves back into the collective consciousness. Here, there is no individual or narrative, no push or pull (no crush!). On Earth and in our bodies “we seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we seek and find what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting to know that all evil and all good is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be conquered, punished, destroyed or enjoyed.” And to some of us, love is Earth and we live for it. And it does, in fact, take courage to let it go wandering off without you into the sinewy arms of the Lower East Side while you reabsorb into the pulsing flesh of space and time, for example.
Dead in my wistful, wanting tracks this morning I read this from Annie Dillard: “The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and even God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.”
Right. Which is why I’m writing about loving to love and be loved while on hold to reschedule a gynecology appointment for the third time. The mind wants to be thrilled and to expand and to know love and god and eternity, return briefly to its collective consciousness if only to know the boundlessness of Something Else before being spat out and into the arms of Paul Mescal. And the mind will settle instead for her afternoon cod liver oil pill, a glass of tepid water, and a third email to Rashi asking him to please for god’s fucking sake just submit your transcript so I can push your application to the mean old bats in Architecture.
Here’s me reading this (barf) for my auditory learners and very busy people at the request of Isabel. one take ladies and gents and it’s sure obvious
review: no
I am really so tired from writing that ^ but I did find this on FB marketplace this week
recommendations:
I love everything Sofia Bolt makes so much and this is her new single which does not disappoint
Continued on my Bogdanovich journey and just watched Paper Moon and highly recommend this to people like myself who can’t stop watching emotionally complex and heartwarming road trip movies (awww and listen to the song too, so cute)
I found another Spotify crush and this one has assembled a playlist called “uruk hai workout” which I can’t so much recommend as just introduce you to it existing
Can’t believe I’m saying this but I was gifted this showerhead from Act + Acre and it’s……awesome….I’ve also never had a nice showerhead so maybe this is just what everyone else has been regularly experiencing but it’s so luxury I’m taking one shower a day (that’s a lot for me) just to experience it
I’ve been in two situations recently that called for punch en masse and decided on both occasions to make an amaro spritz punch with differing results! First time was fine and normal, delicious, second time I barfed all over my sister’s shower and was hungover until 6:30pm the following day so please consume at your own risk! Recipe is: dump a bottle of Forthave amaro in a bowl and add three to four bottles of prosecco or champagne or whatever you want, juice of three huge oranges and then slice up some other oranges and leave em floating in there. bon appétit
For the record, they were mixed nuts, salted. I love your voice and I am amazed you did that all in one take. Lovely. Oh, no tattoos please.