A Wife - Face in Both Hands She Knelt on the Carpet, John Everett Millais (1863)
meditation on: languishing
I think very often of a Fitzgerald quote that says “there are all types of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”1 Fiona Apple echoes the same sentiment in her song “Ladies, Ladies, Ladies”:
Nobody can replace anybody else So, it would be a shame to make it a competition And no love is like any other love So, it would be insane to make a comparison with you
It's a loaded idea, because while it is supposed to alleviate some of your concern that you've lost the one great love of your life, it reminds you also of this: that swarm of life and feeling and warmth, uniqueness, and abnormality that you had with them will not again happen to you the same way. The thing is now dead, drifting, unreachable. You will both go on to forget each other and create something reminiscent of what you had together with someone else instead. And then, against your will, you will evaluate it against what you remember of your previous kinds of love, and hope that this time it's better. That's dreadful to me. I want to love the same person forever, and I've already started doing it, so what a shame I have to forcibly kill it.
Anyway, that's what I'm thinking while I'm sitting peacefully in this coffee shop, having a whole milk latte, soaking up the hot tears on my eyelid before they drop, with the sleeve of the dirtiest sweater I've ever worn. Which is to say: Welcome back.
The hardest part of a breakup is obviously the pain of it, the missing him. Secondly, it’s the silence, the sound of only the air conditioner and your fingers typing “brown suede hobo bag” into your Google search bar. Then it’s the low-light, even mid-day, and the sluggishness, the cooking without music, or wine. Just a white girl making farro salad in a secondhand Alo sweatshirt, crying suddenly and exasperatedly when she scrubs so hard at burnt noodles in the bottom of her roommate’s Le Creuset it saps the last energetic burst she had in her whole being, and she feels that last bit of wavering dopamine slam the door on its way out.
That’s languishing. To burn, to pine, to perish2; to binge Love Is Blind and give up your already-meager exercise routines; to forget cooking, to spend your money on candles called “wet ink;” to buy silver Onitsukas that scream “Ask Me If I’m Okay!”; to double your Lexapro dosage; to maintain the impenetrable facade of being sexy, liberated, and unbothered.
I miss my boyfriend3, not my having a boyfriend. I actually like not having a boyfriend. I am again a raw and open person with no responsibility towards someone else. That feels relieving, easier. But I miss my very best friend and his silly little texts, his smell, his down pillows, his henleys, his playlists and his shelling peas. The little crostinis he would make me in the interim before dinner because it took him so long to make it. This leads me to then realize I miss also my family, my desire to read, or be outside. I miss Virginia in the fall. I miss being interested in things. I used to take long walks, read the Spotify bios of artists I liked, watch documentaries, meditate. When I was 19, I used to pick flowers and walk and smoke a cigarette to recalibrate myself. I also remember a version of myself that would take long runs and reward myself with a vodka tonic afterwards. What a nymph, what a bimbo, what a stupid little woman, and how extraordinary that I ever thought to respond to sadness by being any kind of active or by doing anything beautiful. I miss having a sense of self, and purpose, or possibility. One kind of ending always feels like the end of all things—“a falling frond may seem all trees.”4
In New York, I just recline, languish, weep. I’ve grown tired of even the drama, I suppose, the romance and tragedy of living. I only eat rigatoni and watch TV now.
la langueur
This makes me realize also that, at present, I don’t enter any scene in my life with satisfaction, or desire. I enter with obligation, hopefulness, a little grief. I then walk away having been distracted for a moment, and with a stinging social anxiety that I was a bummer to hang out with.
I download Hinge—as if this will help, to throw myself at the mercy of an AI-generated partner with a profile that pridefully reveals he’s dressed as Larry David for the last six consecutive Halloweens—and find it so depleting, disenchanting, absolutely dreadful to know that there are men in my midst named Rudolph, men writing full I Think You Should Leave bits as a way to advertise their ingrown sense of humor, that anyone in this entire world might think me a readily-fuckable person is presumptuous, and personally horrifying. I delete Hinge.
Tik Tok, omnipotent as it is, knows I’m going through a breakup, and also knows its details: that it is by no means no-contact, that I am by no means no longer in love with the person, that I am by no means over it, that I can’t speak ill of him or dislike him or be disappointed in us for failing to build our relationship further, that I tried the apps and gave up immediately on the apps, that I’m texting my friends about how I can’t remember how single people handle horniness, that singleness feels already as if it’s complicating my platonic relationships. It leads me directly, smartly, to Heidi Priebe.
Her Thought Catalog publication, This Is Me Letting You Go, is exactly the sort of thing I’d usually mock as being pseudo-intellectual, tritely-emotional, Brené Brown bullshit—“you deserve to have a good day” embarrassing Instagram Explore sound-bite fodder, emotions written by a green juice girly for green juice girlies, etc. There is absolutely some of that—chapter 5 is called “For Every Fierce Woman Who Has Tried To Be Tame.” There is also, however, in her writing a totally exacting emotional wisdom, my previous emotional terrors precisely addressed—“the people we meet at the wrong time are actually just the wrong people.” This passage in particular melts my composure:
If there’s anything I wish we could talk more about it’s the in-between stages of letting someone go. Because nobody lets go in an instant. You let go once. And then you let go again. And then again and again and again. You let someone go at the grocery store when their favorite type of soup is on sale and you don’t buy it. You let them go again when you’re cleaning your bathroom and have to throw out the bottle of the body wash that smells like them. You let them go that night at the bar when you go home with somebody else, or you let them go every year on the anniversary of the day you lost them. Sometimes you’re going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there’s nothing pathetic or abnormal about that…You’re not a failure for getting to someplace amazing and still feeling like a part of yourself is missing once you get there. You’re not pathetic for mourning while you grow…It takes time for everything to even out. And it should.
Huge barf! Huge sigh. Inhale, exhale.
review of: Gertie
Brunch is my least favorite meal, for the following reasons:
Women that love brunch generally happen to also dislike me, which I’m glaringly reminded of at these srat-pilled social outings in restaurants called Marie Antoinette or Le Diplomat or Oui Oui Monsieur Omelette, surrounded by freckled hotties in their Sandro tops with $1400 casually in their Venmo accounts
It is always $100
I’m often hungover at a brunch, and I’m one of those hungover types that struggles to function at even a most basic level, the sort that lies face down and moans until 2pm at which point they get up to suck on hunks of cantaloupe, barf those up, and sleep again until 4:30pm
Mimosas make me shit so much
But in the middle of the Venn diagram, between a) women who dislike me who like brunch, and b) me disliking brunch, is c) women who like me that also like brunch. Such circumstance took me this weekend to Gertie’s, a “Jew-ish” diner in Williamsburg next to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Inside, it’s spacious, festive, a little cheugy, and manages to seem lively without the buzzing, manic air of a hundred hot women with tequila soda hangovers BeRealing their smoked fish platter. We sat outside, had coffee and bagels, mine with hot pickled peppers in it, and Kate ordered some fantastic-looking, under-salted grain bowl. Mostly why I enjoyed Gertie’s is because they comped our meal on account of my friend finding an unidentifiable metal object “attached to below my pickle,” or “maybe it fell off my bagel and fell onto my pickle?” as she conjectured its origin story at great length to our quaking waitress. Who, by the way, we didn’t tell so much as she overheard Addie joking about suing and then commenced a full I Think You Should Leave bit of her own, gesticulating and overcompensating by going on like “WOW. What the FUCK? I mean HOW. I mean WHAT? AND THAT’S…AND THAT IS REALLLYYYYY WEIRD.” Overall: great bagel, cute brunch, and free if you find metal “attached to below” your pickle!
recommendations:
My breakup jorts from Favorite Daughter, which I’ve worn, oh, I don’t know, nearly every day since mid-September. These give you the silhouette of someone who will pretty reliably beat a man with a wrench for making a pass at her.
I’m not so much recommending this (it’s sold out, anyway) as I am drawing your attention to the fact that it exists: strawberry salt and pepper shakers from Casa Shop, a website I wish I’d never known about.
This wine that I actually haven’t had for 6 months but I look for every time I walk into a wine store. Envinate, Benje Tinto, 2021. Four little pals studying oenology (the study of wines) together decided to start growing grapes on the volcanic soil of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. The result is a wine that tastes like the volcanic soil of Tenerife—super earthy, mineral, salty. It’s a freak of a wine and the only one I could know the taste of anywhere.
This article from The Nation on the death of literary fiction, that also defines what literary fiction was (from my perspective: fiction written by snooty people for snooty people). Strangely, its expansion into the mass market, and its dissolution thereof, involves Oprah.
I mean this in the least pick-me way possible: I couldn’t give a flying fuck about concealer, but in an attempt to look less pink and paunched in this very distressing personal time, I walked into Credo with my Chase Sapphire card a-swinging and in two seconds they had me pinned down, smearing my exact shade of Kosas Revealer Concealer over last-week’s popped pimple spots. It makes me look like I’ve been sleeping, like I’ve been drinking water, like I have no idea what happened in the reunion episode of Love Is Blind—I was too busy frolicking in Central Park, laughing, drinking a hot chocolate with extra whip, just another hairless, whimsical woman in her mid-20’s.
The following meme created by my brother:
I can’t find for the life of me where this is from, which leads me to fear very much that Fitzgerald never wrote this at all, but the sentiment still holds.
Just to pacify the nerves of the reader a bit, he is aware of—and if not quite supportive, at least tolerant of—this being written.
i have literally never felt luckier to stumble upon someone's substack. will be reading the entire archive obsessively until further notice
The barf/sigh sentiment feels particularly close to home. Love this julipeño and love you!