the center for short-lived phenomena

suffered, bestowed

Edward Hopper, Morning Sun (1952)

I’m at work, eating a spicy tuna roll in the cafeteria and writing about the “best pajamas we’ve tested.” My ex-boyfriend texts me a song, which is not usual or unusual. It’s “Headliner” by Pretty Sick. I text him back, “So. Good. I love Dumb by her.” and then, “It’s so annoying we can’t ever hang out again.” We broke up in 2023, on 9/11.

We got a coffee in Bushwick a couple months ago. I spent over a year avoiding him, RSVPing no to anything he might be at or around. I’ve called him once since we broke up, last June. I was in Fort Greene park and recently 27. It was really late dusk. I was lying in the grass and I suddenly missed him so much I felt like I’d swallowed an entire walnut in its shell.

He doesn’t drink coffee, and he also no longer drinks. So at the cafe, I get him an earl grey tea. We talk for about 3 hours and every time we brush knees under the table, we apologize. When we wrap up, he walks me to the station. We hugged, and when I pulled away I said: “Well,” and he said “I love you.” It was resigned, gentle, and basically platonic. It was said as a feeling within your control and not the thing that runs and destroys your entire life. I felt myself accidentally giving him a half-second look of vulnerability: I was going to smile and act impenetrably casual and then cry extremely hard on the subway. I felt he was very aware of that.

We texted playfully for three days after that until I had to tell him to stop because I can’t help but love him when I’m around him. We dialed back to Instagram reels infrequently after that, and texted only about things we didn’t have other people to text about: the Yung Lean interview by

Meaghan Garvey

,

gunkyard

lineup, having to see each other at Jed’s party.

After we broke up, I lost a lot of my friends. It wasn’t as if anyone picked a side, exactly, but I couldn’t bring myself to be around him and he could bring himself to be around me, so he went to things we were both invited to and I didn’t. My friends from school grew closer and closer with him, and a group coagulated that included the girl that he slept with right after we broke up, and a couple of other girls who don’t like me at all, and that was that, really. I don’t see much of anyone anymore. I invite them still to my parties, not as a courtesy, but because I miss them, and they don’t come often. Everyone in my life here is new. That’s always affirming until you feel lost again.

He then texts “also Julia,” and I know exactly what he’s going to tell me and I send back “No NO” as fast as I can. And he says, “I won’t bring her on Saturday.” I know what her name is because he mentioned her at coffee. I mentioned I would be at Frog that week and his eyes got wide when he said: which day? I said Tuesday and he said Wednesday and I said you have a date, don’t you. He said, yeah, I think so. Would you let me know what the pool table situation is? I said: Absolutely Not.

I see her name on a Partiful invite for a college friend’s birthday—another person I don’t see anymore. When COVID happened, and we were evacuated from school, I stayed at that friend’s house for a few days because we were sleeping together then. Met his parents, and dogs. I just stopped talking to him, I think. It’s telling I don’t remember. And then a few months ago he moved into my building, onto my floor, two doors down from me. Life is always like that.

She’s pretty. She doesn’t look anything like me.

At work, there’s layoffs. I have no awareness of this until 2:30pm when my boss calls a sudden check-in. The room is extremely reverent, and I’m thinking about how when I was crying at my desk, they must’ve thought it was because of this. When I hear who it is, I don’t cry at all, I want to punch an executive.

Everything lately is feeling suffered or bestowed. That’s why writing is bad for you, it makes you think like that.

I’m booked every Monday-Friday. Coffee with a PR rep on Friday morning, and some kind of showroom event on Tuesday or Wednesday or both. In the evenings, there are dinners, cocktail hours, launches of various kinds in SoHo showrooms. I see my close friends more rarely than I’d like. I take three or four days to respond to a text. I cook myself dinner less than once a week now. That has looked like: a dinner for a paint brand at a restaurant that reminds me exactly of a California Pizza Kitchen, down to the smell of the elevator, but then serves me perfectly cooked lamb on a sword. I sit, of course, amongst content creators, one of whom tells me he could “listen to me talk forever.” I’m stunned by the kindness of the statement and then think: why is it always strangers that are affirming? There’s also a PR lunch at Fraunces Tavern where I act with zero professionalism because these girls are all 27 also, coffee with the Our Place founder at The Ned in NoMad where I act with as much professionalism as I can muster because this woman co-founded the fucking Malala Project, a launch for an electric kettle at Public Records where Eleanor, Molly and I stick mostly to gossip and arancini; drinks at Tiny’s, coffee at Partners in Williamsburg, a showcase for Baserange’s new line in a Chinatown walk-up so janky, I nearly turned around, an event for Veja where Ryann meets an influencer she admires and builds a morning-after group text that I suspect will quickly meet its oblivion.

At my desk, writing on the best vacs for lifting rug stains, I am stunned to hear from my cracked window the sound of a bird. I don’t remember when the birds stopped singing, and was truly shocked to hear the sound again and remember.

On principle, I’ve begun to spend all Saturdays alone. I wake up at my leisure, have a cup of bad coffee in my grandmother’s Zabar’s mug, read my coffee table books in bed and watch all the reels Molly’s sent me throughout the week (there are dozens). I walk into Manhattan, I look around.

On the fourth floor at Jacqueline Sullivan gallery, I hear a woman with a thick French accent conversing with the gallerist about how everything in Tribeca is Sophie Lou Jacobsen now. Their kid is 7, I hear her say, and he points out that the light fixture in the gallery looks like a Calder. “Kids love that one,” says the gallerist. An American woman in a rolled mohair hat arrives and remarks to the woman that she has to see the Nick Cave show, it’s just a few blocks down. One floor down is another gallery showing a Scottish artist that’s very: found stick, black square, white frame around white square, debossed.

I’m picking up pants from the Jenni Kayne store in Tribeca, a neighborhood I’ve been to probably less than 12 times. I see an ad of Patti Smith in designer sunglasses and catch myself considering her a sellout. I pass a restaurant called “beefbar,” their sign in Zapfino font, now open for brunch—for beef brunch. Because we had extremely limited internet access growing up, I’m very good at recognizing fonts. There wasn’t much else to look at on the computer. This was also why and where I began writing, on Microsoft Word. When you’re homeschooled, there’s 8 hours a day your friends are busy that you have to fill with—I suppose—school, though I didn’t do much of that. Both my parents worked full-time, so I rode my bike, did chores, drew leaves at my father’s instruction, read Joy Hakim’s History of Us and retained very little of it, and watched my baby brother Sam, which mostly meant plopping him in the front yard, forcing him to pose in scarves and berets for digital camera photoshoots, kissing his perfect little forehead, and hoping he didn’t poop until Maureen’s shift.

I catch myself thinking it’d be nice to have a 2pm beer in the sun and cold outside a bar right now, but I don’t know anyone that would like to do that, or hang out with them anymore, anyway. I tell Molly—I haven’t had a boyfriend in months. Haven’t heard someone use the term “scrub through” in months, or watched YouTube videos on a caseless and cracked iPhone in bed until noon, or been corrected on my knife technique, or heard my front door close and known a broad-shouldered man was carrying a bag of fresh fish in hopes of love languaging me into a good mood.

For a long time, it was not in my nature at all to have a boyfriend, but always to have one or two poorly-defined orbits of feeling. Then it was in my nature to always have a boyfriend. I realized I could speak to men without fear, and I couldn’t speak to women without it.

I go to the Whitney for the Edward Hopper paintings. When I see a Georgia O’Keefe, I realize some people have world visions so certain and ambitious, we’re drawn to their work for the sureness of it. Artists whose work we adore, whose flimsy prints we have hanging in Amazon frames, are those that pushed other worlds out to make their own. I don’t have that. Instead of having a clear world vision, I live in other worlds. It’s why I like walking and eavesdropping so much, sojourning other voices, other rooms. It’s why I also can’t design my bedroom even half to my liking, because the world of it doesn’t speak to me the way it does others, who can tell, for example, the exact right wood to chrome to travertine ratio, how to create fashionable storage, and keep shit off their dresser; people with enough courage to consider curtains, of which I consciously never have.

There’s a man who’s famous for lurking SoHo and asking people what makes them confident. I’ve thought about my answer before, the way you imagine your Oscar speech. My answer is time alone makes me confident—I like the way my mind sees the world, and feel it’s a separate and dear creature to my body. I can spend a long time with myself because I have a strong considering muscle, certainly an intense discernment but also so much touches me. I am always and forever moved by children and their mothers interacting on the train, siblings or friends where one has their head on the older’s shoulder, asleep, watching couples listen intently to each other, or walk with their dog to nowhere, or recently I happened to be taking the same route as a couple in FiDi, and I came upon them just as the man was leaving Starbucks with a drink for his girlfriend, in sweats and with a big dumpy-looking dog, and I watched them walk to the Fulton St stop where they said goodbye and kissed and he went off to work. I felt a completely inappropriate pride for them, that among all the things life surely gave them (sure, yes, the joggers would suggest perhaps much less than others but no life is without its tragedies), they fell in love and kept it, and got a dog together as a kindness to themselves and a gesture of commitment to each other, and that after the significant amount of time they’ve surely spent together, he still drops into Starbucks to grab her something in the morning, and she still walks him to the station. Maybe it comforts me because I’ve never had something close to that—not so gentle and instinctive, anyway—but I see it exist everywhere. Yes, right, I project some of the narrative—perhaps they fell out of love long ago and have this dog now and a shared apartment and miserable jobs and life is a series of errands and obligations. But it didn’t look like that. It looked like love.

One particular feature of Condé Nast that couldn’t be more Condé—which, if I may, has a lot of random and useless indulgences—is that “C1” is something you can press on the elevator to take you down into the Oculus, so you never have to go outside to reach the train station. You simply walk through the Oculus. I almost never do this—firstly because the Oculus is designed exactly like the sort of thing that would cave in and bury you, secondly because there’s a part just before the Condé Nast doors that smells so strongly of grease trap I’m brought barreling back to my falafel job in Melbourne and it makes me horribly nauseous, but thirdly because I like to see, every morning, so many families and couples bundled beyond belief and for some ghastly reason touring the 9/11 memorial at 8:45am on a weekday. I suppose the day could only get better from a freezing cold perusal of a concave death memorial. Anyway, they look happy. Hunger and biting cold haven’t set in yet, maybe. Maybe New York is what they thought it would be, though I can’t imagine that.

I could sometimes feel between worlds—one of which was real life. People that lived normally and intelligently and authentically. My sister and Isabel and Molly lived here. Another was the scene-y part of New York which I associate now and permanently with Lauren, who, when I met her, knew everyone in the Lower East Side even before moving there. She could text someone to get a seat at Nine Orchard or a res at 4 Charles. She showed me Nightmoves and introduced me to a bartender there whose name I still use occasionally to get in. My old roommate Stevie was part of this world, too, the beautiful, impermeable women of ambiguous sexuality who work in food and bev. Another was the world I fell into once moving in with Iz and Kate, which was very perpetual girlhood-esque, influencer-forward, content-heavy and competitive.

When I arrive home from work, Salt & Stone has sent me a PR package labeled “JULIA HARRISON - PROMO/INFLUENCER.” I leave the box unopened and pour a glass of wine.

I feel myself wanting a community outside my life, uncompetitive, nonsexual, strangers to my context, with whom I could chat about things intensely. I don’t know at all how to find them. All interactions feel like they have the steam of tension, or jealousy, utility, or strangeness. I keep all plans and developments to myself, and throw myself into each after-work activity with an openness unlike me.

I’m trying to pay more attention to what I feel like I’m seeing every day, outside my control, because it must certainly be a reflection of my life somehow. I’m slightly desperate to see my life in its tangible parts.

A dog pooping on the street. A white man in harem pants who looks stoned and stretched out and is selling me something. A pair of Tory Burch flats. Chicken bones on Fulton Street. Little dogs with a zest for life. A girl with high blush and a slicked bun and that one oversized leather jacket from Zara. Someone walking as if the whole world is watching, and I feel, cruelly, embarrassed for them because no one is watching and they spent $600 on their Acne Studios jeans in such a delusion. Pret a Manger takeout.

When I feel trapped by my life, I visit Isabel. Me and Willa see her upstate, go to Stissing House, and I keep saying this is the best day of my life because I’m so happy to be out of the city, napping in the backseat when two people I would crucify myself for are gabbing up front. We order artichoke, ribs, scallops, two cocktails, two desserts. Isabel gets us the employee discount. After, we go to a bar in Hudson Isabel shot for. Our drinks are free and I make the New York skyline out of Wikki Stix. Jacob drives us back to Coxsackie in his minivan, and we go to the town bar Ravish, where I cradle a little dog all night and drink white wine and lay on the couch and Jacob eats a cup of chili. In the morning, we go to Cafe Mutton, a paradise for meat parts, where we order the lamb belly and tongue tartine and I have to take the first bite because I’m the most hungover.

Kate’s boss has us over for dinner. She’s so tasteful it makes you ill—like reevaluate your room and home and wardrobe and instincts sick. Her girlfriend Jane is there, equally tasteful, who looks to me like my mom when she was young—freckled, small, bright eyes, would-be precious features except that she speaks so assuredly. They pour us wine and we admire Juliana’s home, which is full of antique vessels and pieces of Mexican folk art. She has a chaise in her room, a moss-colored couch, fiddlehead flatware, a dupe of the Ingo Maurer lamp. They bring out lemon potatoes, asparagus, and chicken and cabbage. Jane and Juliana drink vodka on ice from silver cups.

Substack enters the conversation and I feel heavy and quiet. Everything comes back to Content, paid subscriptions, subscribers, attention, attention, wealth, notoriety, attention, influencers, Substack, content.

I talk for too long about my frustration with how the tastemaker economy has zero interest in giving credit to the source. Everyone wants to be the first to have discovered something; no one takes issue with regurgitating someone else’s taste without acknowledgement. Jane says it’s because it feels shameful, being honest about how you use the internet—like how the verbiage is “stalking” a profile.

I have this creeping feeling, too, about the economy of recommendations—these ubiquitous interviews of “tastemakers,” where the author isn’t producing any original thought. It’s just: X’s skincare routine, X’s meal prep, X’s must-have basics. It’s a lazy, economic way to enmesh yourself in the content of someone with greater market capital, and draw traffic to your page based on the reputation of someone else’s lifestyle. It feels like it’s milking the dark instinct of women to assume someone else’s womanhood because we constantly live in pursuit of being better than our lives. But then sometimes I do want to know what eye cream works.

At a brunch in Hudson last week I was considerably hungover and told the table it felt like my personality was hovering above me, but upon further thought it had nothing to do with the hangover—I’ve just been feeling that way all the time. I don’t feel inside my body at all.

I think unfortunately I have to start reading poetry, and become a regular somewhere, and do a craft that’s all my own and people don’t know about so I don’t feel compelled to make content out of it. I walked into Saraghina this morning extremely sad because I’d woken up assured that I wouldn’t experience love again for a long time. I felt shy asking if there was a no-laptop policy because I was hoping to write, and the maître d responded “You can do whatever you want! Maybe we put you at the bar where nobody bothers you? I’ll put you by the outlet.” A completely unnecessary and striking kindness. When I sat down and the waitress poured me a cold glass of tap water, I teared up. It’s 11am and the only other person at the bar is by herself, too, eating a plate of calamari and watching something on her phone.

But I’m always tearing up.