i hate you harry. i really hate you

woe is many

Edward Hopper, Summer Interior (1909)

meditation on: autophobia

I have a single vision of my married life and it’s this:

I am on a deck that stands in line with the beach out ahead of me, though the beginning of the water isn’t visible from where I’m standing—there are small sand dunes and clusters of beach grass obscuring the shore, and no clear pathway to the ocean. It’s an East Coast beach for whatever reason. From the one room I can envision, it’s not a nice house, nor is it ours. I’m standing just in front of the glass door, pulled open, that leads to the deck. I’m barefoot and wearing some transparent, billowing dress, naturally. An oak table is just inside, with salt on the table and nothing else. My partner—also barefoot—is cooking something at the stovetop, which is one of those ones that’s embedded into the kitchen island, so that he’s not quite facing me, but well aware of me. There is a great deal of sand on the floor. We aren’t speaking and my back is turned to him and I’m watching the ocean but can feel him behind me. He’s not paying attention to me, but not ignoring me, and I feel that we are both glad to be in the same room, even if I’m halfway out of it. 

This is it. I have not dreamed of my wedding past its mandatory clambake aspect. I have not imagined my children, though I get irritated when people tell me I will have only boys. I hope our shared house is small, has a wood stove. That’s the Laura Ingalls Wilder in me. And I have never, until my 26 and a half birthday, considered the prospect that this person, or scenario, might not exist. It has always felt like an absolute.

It occurred to me finally, on this most ceremonious of half-occasions, that it might not happen. Is that such a trite thought, so Drew Barrymore in a 2007 rom-com where she’s just days shy of meeting an uncharacteristically emotionally available Ben Stiller? But I’d never considered it before, not with any tenacity. It bored me to hear people talk about Not Meeting Someone. It’s so easy to have a boyfriend, I’ve always thought, you pick someone who you can sense wants your attention, talk about Elliott Smith, draw in the line. I’m not being cruel on purpose, it has just always seemed to me so circumstantial to date, like it has so little to do with the person, and has far more to do with our individual need for a person. I grossly assume you marry who you’re dating around 30 to 35, the idea being that you’ve sorted through a lot of bullshit by then and have more or less narrowed in on someone you can bear for “eternity,” or through two 7-year itches (I’ve also imagined my marriage won’t last much past 14 years. It’s horrifying to see all these dreary suppositions laid out in close succession). I don’t know why I think like this, I’ve been in love a number of times and concur that it’s more powerful than anything, life-swallowing, purpose-giving, the Romantics’ “sublime,” etc. 

But I’ve only really called a relationship a relationship three times in my life, and it was primarily because I had suddenly felt with each of those people a terrible fear of learning they’d kissed someone else. That’s interest enough, I thought, that’s the beginning of love. It actually was, I think, in its own damaged and strange ways, all three times.

The disastrous thread is that I seek out things that are permeable, temporary, and insecure (I mean this in both senses of the word). Woven into the very fibers of these circumstantially taut relationships was their imminent collapse. In some sinister way, I knew that, could tell very well I wouldn’t belong to these people past a year or so.

There are easy reasons for this. I’ll save the gritty details for the therapist but more or less:

1: I resent the demands of men on my future self (post of some future time y’all I don’t have the stamina these days)

2: I don’t know many, if any, happy and adjusted adult couples

3: an incredible amount of my attitude towards sex and romance stems from a militant unwillingness to be a woman left behind

Dido is the first woman I can properly remember being moved by, or appreciating in any sort of an advanced way, and I was like, 7. (Homeschooled, we were being forced to read that sort of thing as soon as we were literate.) I never for a second found her to be dramatic, building her own funeral pyre and throwing herself on it after somebody who promised to marry her slept with her in a cave and then left quietly at dawn. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. I know the shattered feeling, the longing, and I’ve never had it so bad as that. And you know what’s so goddamn interesting? He’s the hero of the story, by the way. 

I’m thinking of this now, again, because I’m reading The Dolphin Letters, epistolary exchanges between Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick. She writes adoring letters to him while he, unbeknownst to her, starts sleeping with a young Caroline Blackwood in England. Elizabeth is back in New York, trying to sell the car, lease the apartment, attend her children’s recitals while her dearest is getting his jock rocked across the pond. She expresses in the letters, between their taxing logistics, an enormous concern for and acknowledgement of being dull, discussing every sexless thing, the way I sometimes catch myself relaying a Heritage Radio Network episode. Only I, in anticipation of my personality, have worn a sheer top and ordered a martini, smeared something gold above my eyelid.

I’m also thinking of all this because I’m 26 and a half and the grays are starting to ramp up and I’m randomly getting eye bags for the first time despite depression sleeping all the time. And do you know that strange sort of period when you’ve broken up with the first person you could actually imagine as your husband and then you’re sitting deflatedly in various Clinton Hill bars looking around you at men in their Aimé Leon Dore and thinking: god, it might never happen. I just have no idea where this person could be but I feel so infinitely sure it absolutely isn’t any of these Le Labo-ed 6’1 shaggy blonde men with an inflated sense of self and a place in Long Island, and if not that, what is it that I want? Why don’t I want that? Why does it annoy me that he’s sitting so close to me?

And all this turmoil just to end up with another mostly bald man who likes his mother too much, putter about in a 3-bedroom and tell people I used to make art. 

No, I’m kidding, life is never so cruel to a woman aware of herself. It’s a 4-bedroom and he’s so rich I have no idea what he looks like, even after all these (14) years.

photo of me 9 days ill and full of nothing but ricola drops and echinacea tea and guess what neither are working

review of: grey gardens

This thing is soooo how do I love thee let me count the ways. From the absolute instant this documentary starts, it has an intriguing storyline, which is: these two old random women live in this crumbling estate upon which the state is threatening foreclosure for its being ransacked by cats and raccoons and violating every plumbing and insulation code known to man. Then their cousin, Jackie Onassis, is like cool I’ll come fix that up and then she’s all on the front page of New York Post or something fixing up this piece of shit house that’s actually kind of a beautiful landmark. That’s just the beginning, and then the Maysles show up to this dilapidated house and start filming these totally fabulous freaks, Big Edie (like 84? Or something? She has a birthday in the doc and I can’t remember which) and Little Edie (50-something and unmarried and no one lets you forget it). Big Edie is twice-divorced and wearing huge spectacles and more or less never has her top all the way on and is always singing Cole Porter joyously off-key, talking about her career as a singer, and screaming for Little Edie to bring her crackers, complaining that she’s being starved or ignored or bullied. Meanwhile she mostly just bullies the living hell out of Little Edie, who is egregiously out-of-touch, inexplicably bald, and always wearing a scarf around her head. Little Edie mostly whines about the life lost to her as she fulfilled the duties of being a daughter to her mother, taking care of her during and after the war and during her multiple eye surgeries. She grieves the men she could’ve married, the lives she might have had as a dancer in New York, and talks a whole lot of shit about their gardener, Jerry, who I of course found to be sort of gorgeous. It was just so overwhelmingly interesting, such a beautiful vignette of a sort of deranged and strained liveliness in an abandoned space, the tautness of our obligatory relationships, the power and resentment of familial love. And the way Little Edie is just dying the whole time to be noticed, and seen, pitied and praised, is so impactful, so haunting. 5/5 stars.

recommendations:

• Okay so I’m watching True Detective which I’m finding out everyone already has an opinion on, whether or not they’ve watched it. Anyway, I watched three episodes in a night after tucking myself into bed at 7:30pm. I’m mildly sensitive to gore and scary shit and generally get super uptight about people’s relationship to “true crime” so I felt a lot was stacked against me with this one, but there’s not anything properly disgusting about it. It doesn’t feel emotionally manipulative. It’s just Woody Harrelson playing the regular pervert he always does, and Matthew McCon-etc being his least hot character ever as they solve a bizarre Christian or maybe Satanist crime, I’m not sure which yet.

• I bought this cardigan from J. Crew which is ON SALE so go get it, but it’s absolutely perfect. So soft and well-shaped and cutie.

• I’ve already touted this on my Instagram but I was really touched by this piece on keeping a diary by Christina McCausland. It’s only sometimes that a woman can recall your little self to you again, and she’s done so really beautifully and with a lot of intelligence.

• I’ve been watching just absolute misses lately (Asteroid City, No Hard Feelings) so in a fit of rage I revisited this documentary my sister recommended to me called Sherman’s March, which is amazing, and nothing like it sounds. A documentarian sets out to record the long haul of W.T. Sherman’s pillaging and burning of the South, but instead ends up making this extremely touching documentary about running into all his old flames, now married, or divorced, or with children. Says a lot about how we grow into our old bodies, and don’t quite make peace with our past loves ever, really.

• Y’alllll this Dansk line (amazing) from Food52 (gross) is so goddamn cute. Bought my sister some little mugs for Christmas (she already has them, don’t worry), and they’re so darling and perfect for that hard-to-come-by crossover between display mugs and utilitarian mugs. You know the one???

My last and final thing: I’m starting to assemble articles about twice a month on my Instagram to try and encourage myself to read more, but also to share the wealth so we spend a little more commute time reading and less Candy Crushing (literally, again, only speaking of myself here), which is to say: please always feel free to send me things to read that you’ve come across and enjoyed! ok ly