everything and nothing always haunts me

bechdel pest

Tamae Mizukami, Peonies

awww ty everyone for bearing with massive typo <3 i’m upstate and pushed this to pub from my phone which I will not be doing again

Kate and I go to an event for micro-chipped clothing. Huge wooden beads decorate the table, Simon Miller has a few racks along the wall, there’s free onigiri, hibiscus N/A cocktails, biodynamic wine. Saie is giving out free lip glosses. I lose mine within a week. There are crochet mesh hats, influencers, Miista boots. Kate and I sit on a couch and talk to only each other. I notice, through the window, we are across from the Panda Bus station—one of the dirtiest places in New York I used to frequent. I took many a bus to and from Virginia there. The room—that’s what it is, a large room with dirty vinyl floors—is always crowded. I know its geography particularly well, having spent so many hours there waiting for a severely-delayed bus to Richmond or Charlottesville show up. Patrons sit around the room on plastic chairs, listen to the screaming of children and fighting with the receptionist behind glass about their 3, 4, 5-hour delays, non-refundable cancellations. There are always styrofoam tubs of fish on ice, so inside it smells like fish on ice, and hot human breath. In the winter, there is no heat—in the summer, one white plastic fan. The doors are open regardless of season. I have a moment of disbelief—watching a crowd crawl onto the bus across the street, observing it with a glass of free low-intervention wine at an invite-only fashion preview in the Lower East Side.

My life is so different now than it was then—so demanded, and unfaltering, and full. I foolishly, resentfully, make a list of the asks I receive in a day, between 9-5.

Can you send me an example of what the review should look like?
I know you’re a very busy girl - But is there anything I should do to make you a reference for Conde job?
What time works for you?
Do you have contacts at any of the following?
Are you going to be at the reading tomorrow?
What time is dinner? Can we do in Greenpoint?
Do you have a contact at Gem Home?
Can you repost what we just tagged you in?
This Mother’s Day, Kris Jenner is partnering with Amazon to share tips and inspiration for planning a flawless Mother’s Day brunch, without the stress. Would you be interested in a phone interview with Kris on Tuesday, April 15?
Do you have 1 image of you solo that we can include as the opening visual/for social?
Have you heard back from dear friend books?
Do we need a resy for the thing tomorrow? Or are you just planning on doing walk in?
What about The Fly?
I’m down! Is it free / do I need tix?
Would you be down to still help us with locating the space, promoting it, reposting on social etc. even if technically our partnership is done end of April?
Team is now asking me if you’d be willing to do a 30 min zoom and get a DoorDash gift card in exchange. *****YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SAY YES*****
Do you think you’re gonna come tonight?
Should I meet you at home or Theodora?

I’m walking in front of the same Panda Bus station weeks later, on my way to Dirt Candy for dinner with a Brooklinen rep that is now more a friend than a Brooklinen rep. I see a man with an L Train tote bag holding a camera like it’s a new gift and consulting with his friend on the best way to frame his shot of the apartments across the street. She’s wearing an orange Paloma Wool tank and laughing. His arms look nearly too weak to lift the camera to his face. It’s very sweet. Behind them, two wheatpasters put up Bon Iver posters for his new album.

Shannon and I get the wine pairing. Our meal is 8 courses, maybe, but I’m not paying attention. We are talking about her trip to Miami, dating, work, childhood, limerence. Everything is vegetarian. I can’t stop thinking about the carrot falafel, and lose interest in our courses at the broccoli tacos. I’m running 40 minutes late to a third date in Greenpoint.

In the Uber, I accidentally text him a screen grab from Emperor’s New Groove that I meant to send to Molly, who I’m texting frantically about my anxiety that I’ve fucked this up by being so late. I like him because I felt on our first date he couldn’t figure out my deal at all for 30 minutes and then decided it was just me being funny. Then he relaxed and we hung out for 6 hours and when he walked me home and kissed me on the street, he didn’t try to come upstairs. He texts me 9 times in a row without embarrassment. He has an expressive face, an Italian passport, is always wearing black and a little chain. He asked me out again three days after our first date. When I text him a Jeff Beck song he says it’s “too sad” for his taste, and returns the text with an Afro-pop song that I tell him feels perfectly suited to a Miami tiki bar. When I tell him I’ve never listened to Bad Bunny, his jaw drops. I’m exuberant, realizing: I don’t even think this man knows who Stephen Malkmus is. I learn he loves Lorde, Waxahatchee, Lana Del Rey.

He’s my third Hinge date ever. On my first, I met an architect at a bar I didn’t like. We met at 9:45pm on a Friday. He was drawing when I walked in. He told me his job was to check the condition of park bathrooms. He wore his hood up on the date and slouched in the booth. I paid for my second beer. He didn’t have a second, saying he drank too much at dinner. He told me he was starting welding, and I told him I didn’t really feel engaged with anything right now. I was trying to watch Severance, I wasn’t reading, it was too cold to properly be outside. He put his hand in my cowboy boot even though we didn’t like each other. He walked me to Hartley’s to meet up with my friends, and we stopped into my apartment on the way so I could pee. He laughed that I was using an Agnes Martin book as a doorstop. When he dropped me at Hartley’s, we hugged and I went inside.

I don’t text him again, but two weeks later he texts me “hello” and “have you been watching severance?”

On my second Hinge date, I have an amazing time. We drink too much, and close down a bar and go to a second that’s terrible, sit on the patio and kiss. He says something forward about going home with me and I think: okay, yay. We sleep together and in the morning we talk and giggle and I play him Bulgarian choir and he laughs about last night when he mentioned anal probing by aliens and I said don’t say “probing” on a first date. But “anal” is fine, he laughs. When we say goodbye he holds me for a while, and texts me right after he leaves. For two weeks he texts me music and little quips, but doesn’t ask me out again. Finally he says: Will you film my survivor audition?

I said it in passing—you’d be good at this. He’s a “reformed ski bum,” and I’m always thinking about what reality shows people would be good for. I think it’s a come-on, a cute way to initiate a second date. It quickly becomes clear it’s not—actually, he needs someone to hold the camera. He has a Google Doc from two years ago he shares with me called “Survivor audition”—“strictly 3-mins max that shows me and my personality. Survivor likes go-getters. Show how you’re living your best life, the life you want.” It’s 5 pages long. There’s a “stories I can tell” section that includes “Vietnam street soup story,” and “Beatles tripping story.”

I leave work early and clean my house. I haven’t been home properly in a week, so I have recycling in the hallway, a punctured air mattress in the foyer, dishes in the sink, a mountain of clothes on my bed, a rancid hamper. I shower. 90 minutes before our date, he cancels. A “sore throat.” There’s a few reasons a man has a sore throat, and none of them have to do with having a sore throat. I said no to a number of things to film this man’s Survivor audition. It’s too late to put any of them back into effect. I have to remember how to have a good evening inside, by myself, and quickly—before self-pity sets in. I order Indian takeout. I take a bath with a bunch of free shit I’ve been sent in the past few weeks. I write these 500 words in a phone note, I sleep for 10 hours.

At 9:30am the following morning, he texts me a Japanese trip hop song. I don’t respond. A week later: What are you doing this weekend? I feel guilty about ghosting him, but everyone reassures me it’s deserved—it’s my male apologist flaring up. Let it go. I do feel like everyone makes a crime out of embarrassment. Like because he’s 31 and should’ve been more considerate and it made me feel undervalued, he’s condemned. But maybe that is being a male apologist. Maybe the problem is actually just that I don’t mind being undervalued that much.

What keeps me up at night is imagining the things people misheard me say that forever shaped their perception of me as a bad person. There’s a girl from my school who told me I once called her a “slut from hell” at a Heaven & Hell frat party. I put her up for my job at the Sewanee Review when I left, and now she’s engaged to a guy that used to work there. I wonder if she still thinks I said that. I wonder if I did.

When I finally arrive to the date, we sit outside at Pencil Factory and I get the first round because I feel bad for being late. He’s wearing two earrings this time. I think they’re gorgeous, obviously. He tells me about the weekend he’s planned for his mom, who’s visiting—jazz in Harlem, and omakase, and a reservation at Laser Wolf. He texts me pictures of each. He tells me at omakase they show him a picture of every fish he’s eating. At one point when he’s talking his eyes are sparkling so much I nearly lean over the table and kiss him, but feel too shy.

In his room, he has one small shelf of books and two are Sally Rooney. This is either going to be really good, or really bad, I think.

For so much discussion of men, I’ve never dated properly. It’s such a strange thing to me: applying concealer in front of a small mirror at my desk at 7pm, preparing for a Date. Picking out an outfit for a Date. Wondering what the soon transpiring hours will look like. My romantic life has been a series of circumstantial emotional plummets. I was never playing the field, exactly, but just meeting someone and being their girlfriend. There was rarely discretion—it was chemistry and magnetism and immediacy. I’ve loved all of my boyfriends within about two months, and then loved them for a long time afterwards. “You see the best in people,” Maureen says to me, and I reject it immediately. No, I think, I don’t. I’m so judgmental. But then I remember who I’ve loved so much, and how much I love.

On the subway platform, I’m listening to Teenage Dream and a particular line—we can dance until we die—makes me think about the way the song is sort of mocking the intensity of teenage feeling, the invincibility oft-associated with teenagers in the context of unprotected sex and drunk driving. It’s such a time for feeling, our society jests, such aroused delirium. But I remember it exactly as it was, and it wasn’t that. It felt very real, and measured, honest, terrified. I don’t know that I ever left that intensity of feeling behind. The only difference, actually, is that now I feel empowered to act on feeling; impulsive when moved. I feel the exact same intensity of feeling as I did 10 years ago. None of that, really, feels behind me. I feel so strongly about everything.

At the gallery, the art is small, unframed, ambient, oil on linen, ostensibly not for sale. There’s a patio outside full of people in love; everyone is young, and gay. The wine is bad, red, viscous, and free. I’m there with a college friend, now a recruiter in defense tech and venture capital. She loves it. She talks about drone tech, the reason VC-funded defense tech can’t take the risks government-funded defense tech can. You know, the A-bomb was government-funded, she says. Then, “You’re keeping me cultured,” as we look at the art. She pulls out a joint and we share it while she says her mission is to revive patriotism. I laugh, and ask her when she got so Republican. As we’re leaving she says, “I didn’t hate that, but it was like art you hang in your bathroom.”

In the car to the keg party, I’m thinking: I suspect fulfilled people are the ones who can locate and share their unfulfillments. Which is another way of saying confident people can speak honestly about their insecurities. I remember noticing that for the first time at college orientation. We had slept overnight under the stars and woke up covered in dew and my orientation leader said: god, gross, I woke up with boogers all over my face. It changed my whole perspective on what being beautiful was.

My dreams recently have been like: everyone is speaking to me regularly but their heads are cheese crusts I learn are called la religieuse, with their faces completely regularly intact but placed of course at the angle of the religieuse; or, I’m a young version of myself trapped in a sort of open-roofed fallout shelter, very Dune-like, clearly long-abandoned and built around 1800, wide dirt floors. An iron gate about 300 feet high is the only obvious exit, and I have the sense my family is on the other side. But then I come to think similarly young versions of my siblings are inside the concrete space with me. There’s an abandoned barn built into the wall on one side on which I can feel some version of Eddie exists in, and a dilapidated storefront in which I believe Maureen to be. The most chilling feature is the rectangular pit in front of the storefront, the only escape, perfectly sized for my small child’s body. I come to understand these are not my siblings but satanic versions of them, looking to do something to me that I can sense is somehow worse than death. I begin screaming for both Eddie and Maureen, trying to call out their real versions, or to hear some response from behind the gate. Eventually, instead, faced with no other options but whatever they would do to me, I lower myself into the hole and fall.

I wake up hungover. I have an Alkaseltzer, and make my way to Smør for someone else to make me beans, meat and eggs. You have to pay $30 for that kind of care when you’re without-boyfriend. I take the C to the 6 to Central Park and listen to Judee Sill across the park to Cooper Hewitt. In the park, it’s the exact of weather of tourism: the soft chill, early morning sound, cold sweat of a historical walking tour. For a second, it smells just like my mother did when I was a kid, like her hair and her cold sweat, which is still the smell of snow days to me. She used to spend at least 10 minutes bundling me up before sending me out the door. Everything was always too big for me, especially the gloves.

I don’t like the museum. It has all the self-consciousness you’d expect from white-curated exhibits on Blackness inside a Gilded Age mansion. I duck from the rain into Salon 94, another green flag on my Google Maps from indiscernible origin. It has tall ceilings, checkerboard floors, LED lighting, enormous warped metal structures, and a series of influencers setting up their solo shot. On my subway ride home I write the following:

A person only wanders uptown for solitude; to check on the progress of the tulips at 74th and Park, to recall the word pastiche from a million plaques, to see what temporary exhibits hang self-consciously from the walls of another Carnegie, to witness an awning flapping in the rain, the letters of COSMETIC INJECTABLES whipping in the wind; to hate once again the MetLife building for ruining the Southbound view; to wander hungry, delirious from thirst, perhaps relenting to a Sabrett hot dog in lieu of searching for the non-existent better option between 86th and 61st—but at the moment’s precipice recalling its cash-only mandate. Among the silk scarves of the Upper East Side, its marble floors, a person meanders thoughtfully from room to room, hopes that their life in all its ugly parts might look so good announced and acknowledged in ceremonial spaces. But the vitriolic whisper of chinoiserie reminds its greasy tourists that without talent or money a life never manifests in material, or permanence; a life without is only time, memory, ten thousand occasions of feeling, none of them immortalized in wallpaper. From hot dog water unto hot dog water.