intenso
like okay, yeah, your roof falls in but then you get a vacation and a boyfriend??
New York Civil Court is across from Bed-Stuy Fish Fry. It’s dilapidated. There’s loose hairs all over the floor, huge patches of peeling paint. The line for tenant issues is 70 people long. My phone is at 9%. It’s humid, smells like cigarettes, and the interior bears a striking resemblance to the Orange County High School corridor where I played their Academic Team.
Two girls behind me plan their trip to Shake Shack after this. The soundscape is comprised of Tik Toks blasting from phones, repeated sniffling, the toilet flushing every few seconds. Cussing abounds, there’s an abundance of limping. There’s an absence of the wailing you come to expect in urgent cares and ERs, but outside of that it feels very, very similar. There’s a fluorescence, a bleakness.
I thought of my old roommate in line—how I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t stopped speaking to me in such silent aggression I had to get out of there. I hope she’s knitting something meaningful these days. I hope she still feels the world is unfair to her because she’s too beautiful for it.
My clerk has half a shaved head and a neon orange blazer. I wait 98 minutes for them to slide the HP Action lawsuit through the service window and send me home. I am starving, I’ve had barely anything to eat in two days, and across the street there’s a Chick-Fil-A. I eat a chicken sandwich standing against the window and review the forms. They’ve given me several waiver forms in which I, the plaintiff, am referred to as “poor person.” The waiver is for $45.
It’s pouring rain. I go in to check on my room. It’s fine, the tarp we’ve put on the roof a week ago is holding up and the recycling bags we’ve taped outside my window are mostly intact, if somewhat torn from wind. I walk with relief back to the living room.
20 minutes later I hear the sound that has now become familiar to me: the sort of water that is impenetrably present, the sound of slapping as it gushes onto my windowsill and floor. By the time I get to my room from the couch, my things are drenched. I rush to the kitchen sink to grab garbage bags, and start pulling all my bowls and pots and a beverage tub we shot for AD from the top shelf. I grab every towel in the house, pulling some out of Eleanor’s dirty laundry. It’s completely useless. There is so much water there is literally nothing to do. Under the downpour I’m getting soaked and dry wall plummets into my hair and down my shirt as I pull everything out of my room and throw it into the hallway. But there is so much water, it begins trickling into the hallway so I start kicking things into the kitchen. My books are ruined—every zine from every goddamn event. I try FaceTiming Maureen, twice, while also trying to empty the bowls that are so full and overflowing I can barely lift them. The entire time I’m getting email notifications like:
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I call 911. I’m trying not to be hysterical. An operator comes on and I can barely hear her, the pouring water is too loud. She says she’ll connect me to the fire department. The phone rings seven times before the operator comes back on and says “We couldn’t get in touch with the fire department.”
For The Sophisticated Spirits Lover: A Botanical Gin Beyond Imagination
Couldn’t get in touch? I yelp. What if there was a FIRE?
They’ll come by when they’re able, she says, monotonously. Do you know when that is? I’m asking, and breathing heavily. No, we don’t know.
The fire department never comes by.
By the time the rain slows, my mattress is drowned, as well as the bed, the dresser, the nightstand. The ceiling has collapsed. Drywall is littering every part of my room. The towels are so saturated, they’re leaking across the floor. My pale pink Le Creusets are full of brown water and drywall, which is the sort of still life that makes any of this the tiniest bit funny. Molly comes bumbling in with three buckets, two tarps, and wearing a pair of boxer shorts. She trips over tarps while she rushes towards my bedroom. I’m on the phone with 311. She walks right past me to unfold tarps across my bed just in time for more drywall to plummet.
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My dad is primarily worried about my books. Any rare copies? Anything particularly special? No, they’re all hardback advanced review copies of debuts by ambling and egregiously educated white women. It says here you can put absorbent paper between each page of a book, he says over the phone, that’ll keep you busy.
That’s a lot of paper towels, says Molly.
Oh, between every 20-25 pages, he says, oh, well good, that helps.
The super’s assistant, Abdul, calls back after ignoring several of my calls, and speaks like a baby over the phone, whining in high pitch: Oh please Julia, let me come fix it, let me come, let me in, Julia. This is just horrible, Julia, I’m sure you’re very very stressed, very upset. I’m pulling together time stamps of my leak complaints, dating back to September.
Me and Molly are making disbelieving eye contact. Fix what? I say, The ceiling is on the floor.
At one point, we can’t help but laugh because the incantation of his voice is so disturbing. At that moment we are trying to quiet our laughter, so much of the ceiling falls in you can hear it from across the entire apartment.
We have to break our lease, Eleanor texts me. Molly and I just get up and walk out on the mess. We get a grilled cheese and a beer and I don’t talk. She knows the time has come: at long last, we’re having a sleepover.
I spend the weekend and the following 10 days at her house.
I’m a really still sleeper, by the way, she says.
I don’t sleep, or if I do I have bizarre nightmares of things like being torn apart or roots growing from under my nails or having to perform something my subconscious is calling “cosmetic intubation” with a sewing needle through human faces. In the morning, Molly watches Great British Baking Show from her bed, and brings me a coffee from the Nespresso. Stormeo or Intenso? she asks me. You’re not going to like Pumpkin Spice.
Hi Julia, just checking in to make sure your caviar arrived on Friday?
I get a drink with a friend of Srishti’s. He’s German, so beautiful, like such a head of hair I have to keep not saying anything about it. He works for Meta so I make him explain it. I spent a lot of time doing the right thing, he says, being helpful and working for the DA’s office, and then it was like—it wasn’t helpful. It was bureaucratic. And now I just eliminate scams at work, you know like for people who use Facebook but in the way that they’re extremely susceptible to scams. So it’s not all bad, actually.
He knows so much about art, in a casual way. Not like he’s telling me something I don’t know but like he’s just passionate about emotional objects. He texts me Jai Paul’s “Str8 Out of Mumbai” to listen to on the subway home.
A few days later, he texts that he loves my writing. I don’t respond for days because of my ceiling crisis and when I do respond I’m so distracted I forget to send anything of substance.
My flight to LaGuardia is delayed to a 4am arrival. I have a ticket booked from Penn Station to Providence. I still have to work in the morning. While Sam drives me to SFO, I’m on hold with Southwest and researching flights into Providence.
How can you still be stressed? Sam asks. You’ve been stressed for, like, 10 years.
The cheapest flight, and the least delayed of them, is into Boston.
I text him to the effect of: what if I needed rescuing…nw if not though. He texts me he’ll get me from the airport. I feel sick when the plane lands, like why did I ask this from him. In his kitchen he leans in and says What if you didn’t go to Providence tomorrow? What if you stayed in Boston, for example?
I catch myself driving 38 in a 50, smiling to myself about something he said. The Tiverton Public Works truck starts honking. His name is everywhere now. It’s a crossword clue, it’s the name of a -ville off I-179, it’s the name of a toddler next to me in this coffee shop who’s just fallen off a bar stool trying to sneak a “wittle tweat” from his mother’s backpack while she’s distracted.
Rhode Island was dull. It rained, it was gray. The beaches were windy and freezing but full of shells. I drove around and took walks in the rock-strewn woods. “That will be so fun,” everyone said when I told them I was hunkering down in Rhode Island while I tried to find a new apartment. I thought maybe I’d write a bunch, maybe I’d cook, maybe I’d start running again. I did all of that in the most non-committal way possible. I barely cooked, barely ran, barely wrote. I watched a documentary on a matador; I watched 8 episodes of Friday Night Lights, and cried to four of them. I made bolognese, I read the plaques everywhere. I pulled over on the side of the road to look at the ocean. I spent the sunsets on any beach I could find. I drove into Fall River for groceries at Market Basket. Everywhere had a no-laptop policy. I worked at the kitchen counter in Caroline’s house for two weeks, and drank Nespresso pods. I started eating kiwis. I texted him all the time.
There’s Hay For Sale, a scarecrow, aggressive drivers, unfriendly cashiers, no background music, small roads, acreage for sale, and everywhere the presence of tumbled stone walls from the Revolutionary era. I take a walk in the Weetamoo Woods (no, weally) and come across Scipio Cook’s home, a freed slave whose home remains were a pile of crumbling rocks with a plaque identifying this place as “the cellar hole where he carved out a life for his family.”
I tried reading about Indian Removal in the bathtub but I was so stressed I couldn’t relax anywhere, or about anything. I got stress pimple after stress pimple and my hair started to fray at the ends, my nails started to have these weird cracks in them because they were weakening. I was always full of snot and never moisturized.
It’s like, okay, yeah, your roof falls in but then you get a vacation and a boyfriend?? Molly says.
I go to Boston for the weekend to see him. He makes me miso salmon and two pounds of rice instead of two cups. It comes out perfectly somehow. We watch half of Heat and don’t finish a bottle of wine between us.
What the hell? He says at one point, Is that a bursa? On Val Kilmer? It’s a huge swollen ball on his elbow. An abnormal growth, basically a fluid sac, he tells me.
We go into Beacon Hill and he almost kills us on the way by pulling out into traffic. It’s hard to drive with you in the car, he says. We buy a mandolin for the potato gratin he’s making. I peel the potatoes on the floor over a paper bag while we watch Parts Unknown. I peel enough potatoes to give me a blister on my forefinger. He so painstakingly puts together this gratin, even transferring it to a larger dish at one point before transferring it back. The way he plucks the thyme takes 20 minutes. Thank god you didn’t give me that job, I tell him, while I set the potatoes down, you would’ve been horrified by the way I would’ve done it. These potatoes are maybe not going to be up to your caliber, by the way, I left some of the weird stuff on them.
His room is spotless all the time, and the Hudson Bay blanket folded just-so on the bottom of his bed. I make it when I get out of bed, an hour and a half after he leaves for work.
When we shower, he washes my hair. I can barely stand it. It makes me feel so aware of my nakedness1. I ask if he has conditioner and he doesn’t. He has 2-in-1. I should get some conditioner, he says, and I say no, your hair is so soft already. For you, he says, next time you shower over here.
He diagnoses me with keratosis pilaris because of the prominence of the bones on my hand. He pushes down on them—does this hurt? No, I say, that’s just my bone.
We have coffee on the back porch. I go in to get my scarf and when I’m walking back out of his room, I see he’s cleaning off the chair for me. I think about how he’s the sort of person who’s been so loved he knows how to love, it’s an instinct for him to anticipate need. Like if he was cooking, he’d cut off a piece of carrot and feed it to me before he went back to chopping—that sort of person.
The Friendsgiving is at a loft in an old piano factory. They have a balcony, two Wassily chairs, a gilded shoji along the back wall, a huge fireplace draped with greenery. Even their paper plates are doing a Ginori 1735 thing. They went to UVa, and love that I’m from Charlottesville. They’re 23, 24, 25.
Sometimes he just appears with a glass of wine for me. He points out the olives when I miss them on the charcuterie lineup. He shows me the balcony and we kiss until we realize there are other people upstairs. I talk to other people for most of the evening, but sit on his lap at the end of the night while we play a game. One of the categories they choose is “best bars on the island.” They mean Martha’s Vineyard. I spend a glass of wine speaking with a 24 year old who tells me she works in private equity, and her current project is consulting on prison buy-outs.
Life could exhaust you back into secrecy. So much could happen to you that there wasn’t any emotional purpose in writing anymore. You just wanted to seek out what was stable. It felt tiring to relive. There was feeling and sleeping, drinking Emergen-C, foregoing the Wi-Fi password.
I spent a full week upstate and wrote nothing. I watched Pride and Prejudice. I made soups. I FaceTimed my boyfriend. I looked back at pictures from the year and thought about how there was so much dread going into your late twenties—missing milestones and recalibrating your reality, a lot of Coming To Terms—but unsuspectedly it had revealed itself to me as a very moving era in which people finally find the love they deserve, land what they’ve worked for, choose a better life where they’re able, shed the dead weight of jealousies and useless dramas, strengthen all their kindnesses. You start to belong to yourself and the world a bit more with every year you embrace and endure it.
I wrote this and thought it sounded familiar and y’all it’s Genesis :/ we cannot escape our foundations we cannot
Huge installment for Molly stans
the carrot really got me