ibitha

sheesh...

Salvatore Fiume, Il Circo, 35

His eyes aren’t cross-eyed but neither of them point the same direction. I’m next to Candace, who pulls from her bright orange bag a print copy of a bridal magazine. They feature brides from “around the world,” she tells me, but it’s mostly Saudi Arabia. We’re in the basement of a Greek restaurant in Midtown. Before the appetizers have been cleared, Candace has secured a four-night stay with the resort in Mykonos.

While the founder, Dimitris, makes his speech about the luxury hotel, Candace pulls out her chair so it farts across the floor and stands to film Dimitris with flash. He squints in the blue light. She smacks on bread with her mouth open. I can hear the anchovy hummus slap against her tongue. No one is listening to him because we can’t understand him. Something about pottery, something about a local guide. One of his front teeth protects the other.

Candace wears an electric orange blazer with a red brooch. She has frosted tips. I know her children’s names, her grandchild’s name, her cross streets. Just enjoy life, she tells me. What’s for them is for them, what’s for you is for you. She has me DM the wedding magazine’s Instagram account with my number.

We’re waiting for thyme honey dessert. We’re on our third glass of white wine, but wouldn’t know it, because it’s refilled so often and covertly it’s hard to keep track of the ABV. The room is cold, and a single candle flickers in the corner.

Across from me, two people discuss the magic of “Ibitha.” They use the words dichotomy and juxtaposition, the way conversations do when they reach for casual intellect without ever quite working it out. Jean—Irish, I can tell, but she reveals this anyway—tells me with wine sloshing in her glass that Mamdani’s New York is “refreshing,” but that still “we need a revolution,” that “Elon wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.” Across from her, a fan of Ibitha defends the merit of the performance arts—though no one was contesting it—wearing a Rolex too big for his wrist, so it makes a clicking sound as he gesticulates. He defends Porgy and Bess ticket prices. Jean says there’s no performance worth $500. She’s trying to support Black art but at what cost. She looks at me to nod. I say I don’t think anything elitist and mostly inaccessible really ever dies out. I say it to his sagging Rolex.

They’ve given me a $50 Uber voucher for my trip, but it’s $98 to get home from Midtown so I take the subway.

At my transfer at 34th someone spits on my skirt and calls me a cunt. At home, I throw the skirt in a hamper with two soaking wet rags that I used to mediate our freezer leak.

Nothing was hard in the actual sense, but miserable things were often happening; tolerable through will, through Checking Privilege. Tar splattered on my foot while I walked Evie’s long-haired dachshund, Mignonette. I was groped on the subway platform at Bergen St on my way to work: 9:30am, broad daylight. I said “sheesh” and walked farther down the platform.

Other factors: the cluster of baby roaches dead in the kitchen, a bookshelf in the vestibule too heavy to bring up the stairs myself, 13 days off Lexapro, no studio apartments under $2,100.

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I had become haunted by the simplest question: What did I care about? The sense of wanting More that had plagued my twenties had now collapsed and become very much the opposite: I wanted less.

If I was staying here, in New York, and being brutally honest with myself: I cared about being in rooms of influence, I cared about being the influence. I cared about being close to minds and bodies and outfits and brands that were determining the actions of other minds and bodies and outfits and brands. Plainly: I cared about being recognized and validated. Which was legacy, I suppose, though really it was identity marketing, selling your personality, losing your personality by selling it.

I saw an old woman hobbling up the Bergen St. steps, two seconds per stair. I never wanted to be her. I watched parents drag their toddlers and their scooters out of ornate double entry doors on the forested streets in Cobble Hill. They looked exhausted. I didn’t want to be them either. I didn’t want to carry a stroller down the Bryant Park subway stairs. I didn’t want to afford my rent through tech consulting. I felt it was too late to pick something else—that what was now was forever.

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A number of girls I liked were posting about a Meta event. I felt embarrassed to see it, like I had caught them out and didn't mean to—like the feeling you have when you catch someone picking their nose, or shitting with the door ajar, or when a man is trying to show you something in his photos and you see him rush to scroll past his shirtless mirror pics.

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Around the Oculus, I often saw families visiting New York, all sharing their iced lattes and laughing at something together. I would catch myself wishing for a brief minute to have grown up with a big-teethed Tory Burch mother and a bald, Episcopalian father with a tee-ball coaching hobby. I wished for a state school education, a chubby golfing boyfriend, an insurance sales job; a life where I enjoy Nashville and visit my college roommate in New York once a year. I believe in the multiplicity of man—surely she, too, suffers what I suffer—but I did secretly think her life was easier: Julia with highlights, Julia with Bala ankle weights, Julia with a family group chat that sent pictures of their golden retriever to numerous heart reacts.

I felt less curious and more self-conscious. I felt completely unfunny. I felt very poor.

I read something by Ann Friedman:

…To take our own desire seriously, we must pursue the difficult work of rejecting other options presented: the recycled narratives of the recent past, a smattering of “shoulds” and “don’ts,” the easy escape of algorithmic answers. None of these point towards a tantalising future.

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It was like a terrible dream, actually: someone vomiting across the Prince Street sidewalk from the oppressive heat, a man lying on the unmarked stoop by David Yurman with flies circling him, covered in filth, in a grey hoodie sweat through and the tattered remains of his pants exposed his bare ass. I walked behind a girl with a pink-handled Wilson racket, an alo tank, a Skims fanny pack and an Aritzia bag hanging from her hand. It smelled everywhere unmistakably of human shit. Water dropped from the shaking AC units its girlish tenants had installed by slamming the windowsill closed on top of it. This was the beautiful part of town; median rent was $5,500/month.

In Iconic Magazines, I’m looking for the new copy of The Gentlewoman. Beside me is a man in soiled sweatpants shuffling sideways in blue Adidas shoes with his chapped heels out. He’s moaning with a grape soda in hand. He smells like death.

I was always being horrible by living—scanning through magazines belaboring “culture” at $50/issue, while he was slouched, chapped, shaking, pulling coins from his pocket to pay for a grape soda in 100-degree heat.

I paid for the soda, which looked ridiculous on the counter next to a glossy cover of Solange with a bright green $30 price tag punched across her face.

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Olivia and I are sat on a boat docked at Pier 25. I thought there would be dinner but there’s only passed plates of mini lobster rolls and chicken skewers. We take troves of oysters from the oyster bar. I eat between 15 and 20. I tell Olivia I think I want to move to Maine. I suspect slightly that most of my friendships would dissolve if I moved to Maine. The thought gives me an unhealthy relief, to think I could shed my utility totally—no more grafting for an AD byline or a connection through saloon. I built a life and network on the one thing I disliked the most: social capital.

Olivia says: Do you think you might be enforcing that lifestyle, though, a little bit? For example, no offense, but even when we’re trying to get drinks with Willa we have to schedule it with you four weeks out.

I had been racked by utility before: I never kissed Gus in high school because I loved him so much I felt anything physical would diminish me to everyone else who loved him, which was everyone. Instead, I lay on him while we watched movies, or he would trace my leg with his fingers while we talked, or I’d play with his hair until he fell asleep. It went on for so long because I’d come to fear my abstinence was my true distinction, that I had realized one of life’s inescapable truths: intimacy wrought utility. There was much less to like about my body than my mind. We wouldn’t talk anymore, I thought, if we started having sex. That ended up being true, though I don’t know if it was his doing or mine.

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I received an email from another Julia Harrison, titled “Our name.” She lives in New York, too, and asked to grab a coffee, and also could I change my website and my byline everywhere to Julia F Harrison because as it stands, without the F, I outrank her in SEO.

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I’m doing peaceful things. Walking in the morning without my phone. Putting my AirPods in and not listening to music. Putting my AirPods in and listening to a history podcast about General Custer. I’m so bored by social media I don’t reach for my phone in the morning anymore. Catherine texts me that Substack has commodified the internal monologue to its terrible end.