martyr!
a cold dip
It’s my mom’s 60th birthday. The fall was here, finally, certain of itself. Cold breeze, skipping gold leaves, the sun reticent. I was sad. I was losing myself to the light, I kept thinking, and couldn’t make it sound or feel any less dramatic. Summer was over. We were all going back into the dark. I’m still wearing my flip flops. The smell of the air was so nostalgic, it hurt. Like that anticipatory 6pm hour before you started trick-or-treating, like a Sewanee fall party weekend, like when Katie learned to drive and started taking me to school every morning and afternoon.
It took such intelligence to live in the past. You had to have such a memory, a long haul analysis of your life. I couldn’t remember anything but feeling.
On the evening my sister gets married, I sleep alone in her empty four-bedroom house, which is such an abrasive and obvious metaphor I don’t bother writing about it.
“It’s so embarrassing,” she says to me, just before we do her hair, “to do this skit for everyone.” Maureen is a particularly hard person to comfort because she knows better than you about everything. Any condolence you can offer up is something she’s already thought through and rejected.
Our families both show up an hour late to the ceremony. I try not to wear my shoes down the aisle. Just wear them, Amos says, before we walk down together, and don’t titty twist me while we do this. Eddie officiates the wedding, and when he’s up there, trying not to hyperventilate, he says something I’ve not stopped thinking about:
Maureen is not like anyone you’ve ever met. I spent about 30 years with a fear of who she would end up with because I genuinely could not imagine anyone who not just deserved but understood her. I don’t feel like I fully understand her myself…But I knew if anyone could find what kind of person could figure her out, she could. So I waited.
I haven’t been thinking of waiting as something good for you, I’ve been thinking of waiting as failing.
My whole family is here, back in the town where we grew up. I feel the need to say thank you to Maureen for bringing us all home, but it’s the sort of thing I’d say that she’d respond to with “What?” or wouldn’t respond to. You have to be careful about sentimentality around her. She gets extremely irritated when you thank her for doing a chore, or acknowledge her effort. I try to be like that sometimes, like validation doesn’t matter to me, like I don’t need my service to be noticed. But my mother and I both are desperate for our service to be noticed, we’re desperate all the time to be helped in ways that are deep and emotional, and not obvious. Hi mom, happy birthday. Don’t you think that’s true?
But the boys are always helping me in obvious ways nowadays, bringing my things up the stairs—a 70-pound nightstand, a mattress, some package of four $250 candles I didn’t ask for and don’t know the brand of. It’s such a gift, I tell Eleanor, that your fiancé knows my coffee order.
When I’m steaming my shirt before work, I become concerned there’s nothing radical left about me, if there ever was. I didn’t feel strange. I felt normal. Not bachelorette-in-Charleston normal, but normal of a different kind: long bob, Everlane pants, 9-5, college friends, whole milk latte. I did not feel distinct.
I felt between everything—between being liked and disliked, famous and forgotten. I felt not successful but not unsuccessful, not trusting but not totally alone. I felt I was in glamorous places until socials proved I was not—in fact, I was at addresses far inferior than the glamorous people. I watched women adulate my old roommate on their Instagram stories at a brand event for long eyelet skirts. It’s hard not to interpret the invite list as girls that will repost her Substacks.
It became abundantly clear that what we were all writing about was making something out of everything, which was nothing. We were adjusted, wealthy, therapized—if not directly—through osmosis. In the park, there was mostly talk of “self-awareness.” Everything was performative, myself included, writing on a bench in broad daylight. A girl couldn’t put her hair up without throwing her ponytail around. Creative pursuit was everywhere. Every one of us, solo and occupying a full bench, had brought our craft—a journal, a guitar, a copy of Martyr! There were no slacklines, no afternoon wines, but an electrolyte water for every third, damp, sunning person on the last day of September. The moms wore stripes. The men with bikes were all shirtless. It was so easy to feel disappointed en masse. I see two other women carrying the same Daunt Books tote as me. People weren’t wearing their individuality anymore, only 26 variations of a signet ring.
Klea suggests that I’d have the same opinion as her about weighted vests. I say What? And she says, you know, like life is so easy now we have to simulate difficulty, simulate a struggle. Here we all are wearing our weighted vests for a walk around our fucking paved neighborhoods.
The rain leaked through my ceiling and windows and two holes in my wall. I couldn’t stop texting him. I couldn’t focus on any one feeling.
“I’ve seen a great deal of pseudo-intellectualism within the demographic of younger women,” I read on Substack, “and I’ve noticed that one fundamental flaw is that knowledge, learning, and even thinning have been stripped down to their shell through aestheticization without substance.” On The Moon Lists, the week’s prompt is: What are you doing that mimics vitality but is actually just acquisition or documentation? [e.g.] Buying the plate because it’s the “right” aesthetic. Or standing in a gallery only to photograph (and post) the wall text; buying a candle that smells like Japanese hinoki forest bathing instead of actually going outside, etc.” What was the word for liking to be challenged in your behaviors? Negging? Was I pro-negging?
Did I like behavioral analysis because I thought I was better than the behaviors analyzed? Or did I like things like this because they were clever, challenging—they caught me off-guard. I wanted to see other people thinking about their own behavior. It felt sometimes like a person’s narrative kept them from having a conscience, like those things were opposite.
Wilder returns my journal I left in Massachusetts, along with two laptop chargers and my AirPods. I just kept finding more stuff, he says. The reward for returning the journal, I’ve written in the front of the book, is a “wittle kiss.” Wittew, he says, you literally wrote “wittew.” He gestures with his finger to his cheek.
Molly’s shower breaks, so she walks over to my house to take one. She comes out in my striped towel robe with a striped towel around her head and sits down next to me. You really like stripes, she says, with a slow-batting of her eyelashes. She puts on Vampire Diaries.
Over the weekend, we have an engagement party and two birthday parties. I’ve made Jell-o shots and a bad punch with an entire bottle of gin. We smoke on my roof. Molly wears my slippers. Everyone gets so drunk that I don’t get drunk. Pau and I do jumping jacks outside Sharlene’s because I’m so tired and I can’t be tired, I tell him. Sophie leaves the bar crying. I order tequila shots at midnight for Nellie’s birthday. Sydney hits her head so hard on the bar she gets a concussion. I walk home with a boy (an orthopedic assistant we keep calling a foot doctor—he’s the only person we’ve met in 6 years with a real job) and we get halal inside a place that looks like an ER. We sit in my dining room, his arm around my back, and shovel rice all over the table while everyone else is out somewhere trying to find Sydney’s phone.
How much of your life do you think is boundaried by fear of embarrassment? I ask Hannah. A lot before, she says, less now. But I think it might have dulled me too much already. She tells me it doesn’t seem like I have that. I don’t think I do. I don’t remember being embarrassed of my being until I was 19, and by then I had no coping mechanisms for being disliked.
Do you think you were liked in high school? She says, or do you think you just didn’t know the feeling of embarrassment?
I think I was liked.
You were probably liked because you didn’t seem to be embarrassed about yourself.
I tell her I’m thinking, too, about how I might be the sort of person that’s very slow to friendship. Having a friend is like having a crush, and the excitement of every interaction is that we might be close forever. I never feel there’s any rush. If I keep liking you and you keep liking me back, then in five years we’ll be friends forever. I’ve had so many friendships fractured by jealousy and/or sleeping with my ex-boyfriends that I accidentally developed a glacial approach to friendship. I don’t really trust you for a couple years, I just want you to say something back. It takes a long time before I believe how you describe yourself.
I tell Eleanor about missing Kate, and Elizabeth, and all my ex-boyfriends, actually. I say I’m worried I love people forever, I hope I work through that, and she says that’s a really beautiful thing, Julia, and I hope you don’t.
When I get dinner with Olivia at Kiki’s she tells me as soon as she met me, she knew we’d be friends for a long time. She loves rave music, and her boyfriend of a decade, and brought me a perfume from her new client. She tells me about her whole love life and it reminds me of Susan’s, who I haven’t texted in a month, but who also makes me feel the little crush of closeness. She’s always saying something thoughtful, and slowly. I believe how she talks about herself.
I’ve become used to the act of losing, which is moving, people getting married, things breaking—constantly, friendship breakups, regular breakups, men coming in and out of my life at their leisure. It used to feel so disempowering, and now it just feels like swimming in really cold water.
“its so scary idk how u keep cool” Hannah texts me about a boy situation that’s painful, and irritating, like a hard pinch. “I think it’s good,” I say “Like humbling and a good reminder.” I’m never staying cool, actually, I’m just resigning to the experience.
Molly sleeps over in Eleanor’s bed, and they leave the door open for me while I sleep on the couch. I thought you’d want to feel included, Eleanor says.
You know, this is like, the closest we’ve ever had to a real sleepover, Molly calls out from the bedroom, who hates that I only let Isabel or crushes sleep in my bed. I hate that she won’t change in front of me. She says that’s weird—why are you so desperate to see me naked. I listen to them talk about how it’s so crazy your body is just keeping you alive all the time. What if we all moved to Boston? Why don’t we know any doctors, or lawyers?
I take a walk at dusk in Prospect Park. Why the fuck is everyone wearing a newsboy cap.
It rains again. A patch of my ceiling falls in.
Pioneer Works is having its Second Sunday programming this weekend. These are really sweet, just freaks milling around outside in the fall air. I’m sure something horrifying and provocative is on right now, too, as ever.
I’m reading this Madeline Cash right now. I love it.
Available Works Book Fair is this weekend, also. For some reason Nike is a partner. I no longer ask q’s about collaborations, I just live quietly in this A x B hell, and it doesn’t matter—the book fair will be amazing.
If I had any money to spend on jewelry making and not fixing my multiple leaks, I’d be spending it here.
Just went to this perfume pop-up at Colbo and it’s one of my favorites.
This is a really cool exhibit at Carpenters Workshop, on through Oct. 18.
This is a really cool exhibit 3,500 miles away. London, enjoy.
Everything else I like: here.
I also feel like i’ve been swimming in really cold water. Especially the “evolving friendships” aka disillusionment and forbearance. But it’s like sometimes i take a dip in spa and it all comes melting down. i don’t think it has a purpose it’s just raw material. i mean, after the fact i can do with it whatever i want. anyways, another great entry and i always look forward to reading you. keeping you in my thoughts :)
Wonderful reflections on time and space....also, jumping into very cold water can be good for the heart and the spirit...