slouching towards

this feeling – heavy, slow, flat. extra padding at my hips and belly, as if I’m retaining salt, or made of it. how long has this been going on – since October? since before? only now it’s accelerated, or grown louder. I am not sure if it is a speed or a sound. only that it is, every day, more conspicuous.

crying on the phone with anthem insurance. please it isn’t fair, I need help, I need care. what the fuck is wrong with this fucking system? can you hear me on this recording, you capitalist criminals? shh, shh, the customer service agent soothes me. I’m sorry to yell, I say, I’m not mad at you. I know, she says, I know.

crying on Amsterdam walking home from Knitty City, dark already at 4pm, the day over before it begins. I am listening to frank sinatra; I have never done things my way.

dreading new years, dreading january, dreading my return to work. each day piling up on the next, thick and congested and blursed. All year I had been writing down what I did each day in my slingshot planner, but I’ve let the last two weeks go by blank.

I talk to myself in spanish at trader joes in Duolingo-style children’s sentences. Ahora, tengo que comprar naranjas. Necesito una cebolla amarilla. I am practicing, practicing. I practice piano, I practice knitting. can’t you see that all my hobbies are simply there to keep my hands busy and my breathing calm? that I am pounding minor chords and knitting tighter rows to drown out the ever-faster beating of my heart? It’s 11pm and the void has found me, as usual.

joan didion died, bell hooks died, I fear my friends are dying and I’ll never know without instagram. in fact I am crying now.

I only came here to write because it’s the only generative thing I know how to do. remember when I was a writer, an artist, a brilliant mind? remember when everyone thought I would be someone important, and I thought that life would be great as long as the champagne was flowing and my outfit was cute?

I know, or I think I know, that I am feeling this way because I do not have a vocation, a thing that brings me purpose. I do not have a generative creative practice that reminds me constantly that I am divine, that I am alive. I am not living my right life, at least in terms of what I do all day long. I am not helping others. I am not being who I am.

omg while i was writing that sentence hermes just jumped from the desk to the loft and got stuck and hung there in midair like a daredevil shrimp until I reached him and held him and brought him down. I don’t know what this means but I had to write it down.

I’ve never really done depression; I’ve always been more of an anxiety girl. This slow-heavy, this creature-feeling. I hate it and I don’t know how to get out. I feel the apocalyptic careening and find futurity hard to to fathom, the seeds impossible to plant, the heartbreak and hardship wailing from the toxic yet-to-come.

sabbatical

[a new approach to august, because in a few years august will last half a year, and then it will be all that is left]

I am calling my new Augustian approach my social sabbatical. I follow several feminist intellectuals who are taking sabbaticals right now, or who take them yearly in the hottest months, and I like this idea a lot – a designated time for sluggishness. Since high school I have tortured myself with lack of rest; now I fantasize about puffy beds and melatonin. My protestant capitalist ancestors usually make daytime relaxing guilty and fitful – but a sabbatical? How professorial. How practical. Evocative of yachts and leather-bound books, corinthian columns and Italian sweet oranges. A sabbatical, the word itself, to me feels like permission to rest. Rest as regeneration. Rest as class power. An expensive word, reclaimed by lil’ ol’ regular degular me.

[Also now I have air conditioning, which makes all the difference. I am spending my sabbatical safe in my tower, cozy under a blanket while the world implodes with heat rash. I feel like Ivanka. Is this how rich people are able to deny climate change?]

A “social” sabbatical because I have had enough. Inexplicably I’ve made no new friends in New York and yet every week is jam packed with some kind of wildly expensive booze-centric activity. Just this past week:

• Char visiting from LA and we meet up in the park for wine
• Work happy hour in Soho, frozen margaritas, flatbreads, skyline
• Games at e-bar with Nicholas, mediocre cheeseburgers
• Dinner with Z & M at Double Chicken Please in EV, a whole feast of creative and inexplicable delights
• Drag Dinner at Lips with BJ and Nicholas, at which the total bill made my eyes pop
• Then I fainted – unrelated to the bill
• J comes into town unexpectedly and stays on our couch and it’s a 24-hour adventure on a Tuesday
• Also I have a full time job

And so now I’m over-extended and I hate everybody. I’m tired of spending money, tired of drinking, tired of BJ and their exhausting need to start and win arguments. And of course it’s the pandemic, too, the ghostly remnants and the rapid resurgence. Frankly after a year of home-embodiedness I am finding that there are only so many restaurants I want to sit at, clubs I want to dance in, and trendy barstools I want to sit on. I don’t know what I want but I know what I need: less of all of this. More of my beautiful home, now shared, that has taken so long to set up and assemble. If I must be social, let it be here – my Cancer moon loves nothing more than being at home with friends.

But for now, no one gets in and no one gets out. This is the August vibe. I’m on sabbatical. Fuck off.

[august: a hot flat sticky plane of stillness]

dreamlife lifedream

i am riding the rented bike through the west side of central park, down the hill past sheep’s meadow where hundreds of people are relaxing on blankets and tossing frisbees and as i curve slowly into the part of the park just above midtown i start to pass the horse drawn buggies, plumed and reeking, and i can see all the buildings that make this place into a love song –

the weather is better than you can imagine – so many trees, more trees than i ever had growing up on that hot beige gila monster plane, sepia and creosote and moonscapes, where i used to dream of places like this – green meadows in the evening light, fireflies aglow –

i am rounding the scenic corner of this the most famous park in the world and the sunlight is dappling the trees or whatever – what i am thinking about is silk midi dresses and ruffled wrap skirts and the women in the park with their pinstriped puff sleeves. i am exhausted pedaling this hulking citibike and i am ready to go home and lie down and online shop –

what does someone even wear once they turn thirty? my body is changing and has changed. gone are the artist’s slim pipe cleaner arms, the delicate english major’s collarbone. no, i am a solid heavy thirty, a woman with a full ass and thighs currently at work pumping an old fucking bike who can no longer stand to constrict her soft belly in high waisted denim prisons because she needs to flow free and wild as, incidentally, she has run out of fucks to give –

and who even am i, thirty –

living in this bougie white uws neighborhood where women who have my nose and hair push their strollers to brunch with their girlfriends and maybe even eat the pancakes that they order –

i am supposed to be having the time of my life, but i am tired. the park and the met and the brownstones on my street would have sparkled when i was 23, but now everything is muted [nicholas who loves me says that when i am in one mood i forget that i have ever been in any other]. corrupt & complicit. i don’t feel well. my body bloats, aches, my lower back asks me to sit. i am tired, so so tired. it might be age or it might just be that i am sick or i was or i will be. the more i ache the more i stay home, in my head, online shopping, desiccating myself, imagining everything that will go wrong and remembering everything that ever has –

i have everything, i have everything, this is my dreamlife lifedream, and yet all i can think about are the clothes i don’t own and what that must say about me, that everyone who sees me knows i am a fake and that all of it will end because it’s all too good for me, the job and the man and the apartment and the vacations, there’s no way it can last for someone wearing that, they think –

the busier i am the happier i am because the less time my brain has to pull at threads, but there’s been a heatwave and i’ve been home sick so here i am, burrowing deeper into that old familiar showtune, “consumer capitalism and empire embedded within the individual” –

i am writing new refrains.

lady living alone thing

I feel bad for everyone who doesn’t get to experience this, this living alone in the big city, thirty flirty and thriving, childless & dancing to whatever this album is that has made me feel so mmmmmmmm

not enough het women ever live alone, they go from parents to roommates to boyfriends to husbands and maybe most het men do that too. and really the secret about living alone is that it is so good you really might never want to go back and you’ll always stay up too late

feeling the music in my body. wearing a neon polyester dress. i dont leave my apartment until it’s dark. i speak spanish i speak english. i let my cat gnaw on my forearm. i take a bath at 2pm after meeting with the cloud security PM and then get out to speak with the guys from the hardware-software conglomerate whose name i dare not mention. wearing the shiny dress that makes me feel like a slippery eel and when the day is over i buy a bunch of shit online just for me and wait for it to arrive like a gift from past to future

sure covid gets lonely but some days i am quick and clever and time doesn’t count, light dark who cares, everyone is always online, my social world hums in pixels around me and i’m texting faster than my thumbs can handle, music blasting, gossip spreading, vulnerability begetting excitement and my skin looks clear and it feels fun to leave the house at night to pickup a grip of pupusas just because the fancy strikes and eat them watching trash tv because i never have to compromise

the quality of me: so solid there is no room for all the other opinions to seep in and deflate me

doing things just bc they scare me

life right now feels like a music video for some genre i must have invented

i wanted to make sure i wrote it down so i dont forget what it feels like

Heat Wave

My apartment building seems deserted. I don’t hear any doors opening or voices talking. Usually at this time of day, 4pm, Friday, the place would be alive with cooking smells and weed and Spanish. Now, there is nothing except for one contractor downstairs ripping up the hallway carpet.

 

I keep my curtains closed all day to stave off the worst of the sun. August is the most brutal time of year. Outside, the sky is colorless and sunless, whether from smoke or smog I don’t know. This neighborhood, always so loud and alive, is suddenly throbbing with absence. Where are the cars? The skateboarders? The children?

 

It has never felt more like the end of the world.

 

Inside, I have one fan and I drag it around like an IV drip. I am never not sweating. Everyone around me has gone somewhere else. I missed the message. I stayed. I am always staying.

 

Are some people simply programmed to know what they want? Are some desires truly that strong? I should have left LA years ago but I didn’t have the conviction. Jobs, friendships, apartments, relationships: I am always staying.

 

The backs of my hands burn. The tops of my feet. For someone in a hot place without air conditioning, heat waves feel like the bottom of the world. Like the Purge, nothing counts: action, exercise, routine, work. The end of August is the hollow-eyed gap in reality. Why create, why start, why try. Anyone with sense would have left. Power and privilege. Heat and A/C. My brain scrambled on this page, trying to turn sensation into text, emotion into meaning.

truck

when disasters happen people alway say i keep hoping i’ll wake up from this terrible dream

i’m afraid i’m already in the dream, that if i wake up the terrible thing that could have been will be. as if we live in overlaid, opaque realities, one where you are here and one where you are gone, and somehow this conscious version of me ended up on this side, where in parallel another me is living through something i don’t want to imagine

your car flipped and rolled 10 times going 80 on the I-40 through new mexico. you rolled with it like an astronaut in a tin can and thought calmly this is really gonna fuck me up 

when it finally stopped you crawled out the driver’s side (terrified of an explosion) and you collected your things and a couple stopped and called the police

even your two laptops were okay, the laptops we had packed neatly in the passenger’s seat where i was meant to have been. it was now crumpled into a pancake and you would feel grateful, once the shock wore off, that i had opted out of this grand adventure

i had had a premonition that you would crash. i didn’t tell you because it wouldn’t have mattered, you still would have gone, chalked it up to my anxiety. i knew you would crash and i knew it might be fatal, and when we were kissing goodbye i made it last because i was trying to memorize your mouth.

last night i lay in your bed and wasn’t quite sure you were alive, even though the crash had already happened, even though we’d talked on the phone five or six times since, eating pizza, both of us wondering: how did you live? why did you live? which made me wonder if i was dreaming and maybe it had happened and maybe i’d wake up in hell

i lay in your bed and i couldn’t help it: i felt too close to the boundaries of each world. i thought about what it would be like to never touch you again. i would never be able to memorize you enough to make a last kiss sustain me. i would be greedy for you forever.

is it blasphemous to even write that? am i willing something into being? how do i do a dance of gratitude when i still can’t believe it happened? how do i thank whatever gods there are? with what sacrifice? how do i contain…?

your life is miraculous let’s marvel every day at the fact that you are here for as long as you are

 

my quarantine has shifted

i am tired of mindfulness

i am tired of yoga, meditation, youtube pilates and youtube HIIT and LIIT and barre booty bootcamps

i am tired of cooking, tired of crafting, tired of phone calls, of baths, of journals

at the beginning I thought, my god, it’s what i’ve always wanted

no social pressure, no plans, no distractions

i dedicated my glorious evenings to books, movies, homemaking, yoga, all my solitary domestic pursuits. quiet in myself without even the pressure of pressure: i in fact was supposed to stay home, just like everybody else.

have i reached my tipping point? i’m starting to notice things in myself, the same things that other people complained of at the beginning. insomnia, nightmares, restlessness, gnawing existential dread. longing for the other life. a sudden desperate need to work as long as possible as if work were a flashlight a life raft a torch

tonight i didn’t do any of my good girl healthy quarantine habits, so meticulously maintained for months and months. i binged three hours of Indian Matchmaking and had pasta and beer and ice cream and vodka and fuck it i’m going to live how i need to until something finally breaks

 

 

 

 

snugglemuffinbabyangel

i never trusted pet stories, and i always found them boring, but people change. 

i didn’t adopt the cat because of a “love at first sight” pet moment. i always found those suspect. i adopted the cat because i had just come home from a two-week business trip and i wanted to hold something soft and helpless. i adopted the cat because he appeared in the hallway outside my office, clutched to my friend’s chest, and she set him on the floor and we watched him stumble-walk a few timid steps before getting stuck behind the fold of an open door. He was impossibly small – 3 pounds? – and covered in a white fuzz that the vet said is common for cats who have been through trauma. i adopted him because the person who was supposed to adopt him didn’t show up, and because i speak without thinking, and because my friends needed him out of their house, and so suddenly i was holding a barely-new creature in a cardboard box and introducing him to my apartment.

i could write forever about the cat, mostly because these days he is both my roommate and my coworker and my confidante, a near constant companion. but i could also write forever about him because he, this strange bobble-headed micropanther, ushered in an after to my before.

perhaps tenderness in me was a level to be unlocked by caring for something small and helpless. i don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say i love this cat more than i’ve ever loved anything and somehow that love unlocks other levels of love, like a video game or the layers of security in an underground state-secret facility. i love my boyfriend more than i did before i had the cat. i love my sister more too. i care about my community. i recoil at the thought of meat. i lie on the floor and wave a fake mouse in the air. i make up songs about chonkybois and scawy teefs and derpadoodles and sing them to him in silly voices. i don’t take selfies anymore, i just take pictures of him – spotted-belly up on the bedspread with his tongue poking out, or paws swiping out from underneath my dresser, murder mittens ready for attack.

i guess this is why people like babies.

 

 

what my life is like or was

a year ago today i was walking to the office in Amsterdam and despite the circumstances of my work life i was not so dulled by exhaustion that i couldn’t register the beauty of 400 year-old cobblestones and the skinny fairy-tale canal houses. i had been in central russia the week before, living out the never-dark summer days with reckless joy. who would have imagined i would like working in tech so much. it felt like someone familiar inside of me had come out of hibernation.

even if i did still get lonely.

i feel lonely now, though it’s a different summer. i quarantine within my studio apartment. today it feels especially small. the weather outside looks beautiful but i have nowhere to go.

what my life is and was: i am turning thirty in a little over a month. i have a job in a hypergrowth company where i work very long hours and talk to important people and generally i like it. i have my own place in the heart of ktown, a room in a crumbling building with a heartbreaking brick wall. i have my body, lovingly maintained and moisturized, and my hair, brown again and too long. i have a boyfriend who feels serious enough to be called a partner and is too handsome and brilliant and kind for me but doesn’t seem to notice. and i have the kitten i took home impulsively in october who has grown into a proper cat, handsome and wicked, and is sleeping in the box where i keep my impractical boots.

indoor cats live in quarantine. we don’t give them a choice.

i miss it all. pulsating nightclubs, experimental shows. libraries, bookstores, cozy cafe mornings. piles of friends. all of my friends. zebulon, the prince, the continental club on saturday nights. the bathrobes at hotel zaza, reading vogue in Bea’s hotel room, the week we shared in Austin, sneaking out of sales meetings to gossip and drink tea, spending too much money on beauty products at cvs. travel. i was so over traveling and now it’s all i can think about. poland, new hampshire, places where my girlfriends live, places with more trees.

from the third floor i can see the tops of trees and watch people washing their cars. sometimes i feel like rapunzel. reading my books, doing my exercises, creeping on the neighbors. growing, i fear, ever more isolated.

i am proud of who i am becoming but i am wistful and lonesome and i dream of better summers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

proserpine

What if Persephone was in love with Hades? What if she hated her mother and couldn’t wait to leave?

What if she dreaded the summer and the wheat and the squash and the lowing calves and reeking sheep? What if she hated the sun boiling her skin and scorching her throat?

What if she despised her mother’s close eye and endless instructions? The locked doors, the always never-alone? What if the stone cottage was unpalatable? It’s aching-white walls, every item coarse and homespun and unbearably useful: bare floor, looms, churns, skillets.

Every day she joins her mother in work, and from a distance she knows what a pretty picture they make – long haired women planting and growing and harvesting year after year. But she misses her old stream, now forbidden. She misses being alone, misses bathing in the cold water, the cold air upon emerging, the cold leaves stuck to her wet bare skin. The cold as an antidote to the heat which keeps everyone languid, puddled, and dull. She misses the thick, musky scent of the purple flowers she once picked.

What if she loved Hades, but feared him also?

Shuddered, in fact, at his icy fingers as they traced her warm and living skin.

Above ground her mother watches. She insists they sleep in the same bed, her arm flung over Persephone’s torso as if guarding a suitcase full of money. Persephone is always too hot to sleep. She stares at the ceiling and feels the weight of her mother’s body pressing down on hers and tries to guess the exact moment that night turns to dawn.

That first year she wanted to die.

She remembers the pomegranate, a single seed bursting in her mouth in the always-twilight of the Underworld. A taste like wine and crimson. Her husband, when he returns, will crack open a fresh one and place the seeds over her naked body. He, who so rarely eats, will take his time siphoning them off with his lips and tongue.

What if Persephone was in love with Hades, but feared him also. Dreaded, just slightly, the day when he returns in a chariot laden with furs to wrap around her body during the descent. Feared his silences, his moods. He was almost always lost to her, even when they lay together. He lived deep inside himself the way she lived deep inside his earth. He did not seem lonely, or pained. He did not seem to long for sunlight or friendship or intrigue. He did not seem to long anything except for her body, a longing that was never fully slaked.

He did not laugh, her husband, though sometimes he gave her a joyless smile. She lived for it, she dreaded it. Her body naked on the bed.

In the Underworld, her body was naked more than it was not. He liked her that way. It thrilled her, the cold air against her body, the cold stone under her thighs. Occasionally she’d act as Queen and wrap a fur around her flesh, but just as often she’d rule without it. Naked, breasts gleaming, from her iron spiky throne.

Their bed was a giant stone slab girdled with iron and obsidian, surrounded by walls of  glass. She would lay in bed and look upon their Kingdom, black rock and metal, the translucent Souls swirling below. There were no days, no nights. She ate when she was hungry and slept when she was tired and made love to her fierce and silent husband.

Above ground they were ruled by days and nights. Seasons and cycles. Aches and pains.

Her first year back above ground, she wanted to die. Her mother had ordered all pomegranate trees be burned, and the land lay littered with them. The peasants spent the season hosting bonfires late into the night. They drank malted barley and rutted behind bales of hay.

She watched the fires in her heavy homespun robes and pressed her teeth together until her temples throbbed. Her mother, never far, sat behind her with a hairbrush and talked about wheat. If Persephone ever mentioned Hades, her mother would spit.

He knew death in the way that no one knew death, not even she would lived for half the year among them. The gods who cannot die though they may wish it do not understand him or the land in which he dwells.

Hermes, maybe, was the exception. Friend to all and to none, he sat often at their table and told them stories from above. In this land to which everything mortal must someday come, the stories he told seemed at once frivolous and miraculous. Hades listened as he always listened, like age-old stone chiseled in the shape of a man, frozen at an age that could not reflect his wisdom.

The beauty of her husband. Above ground, she looked for traces of it in the living world. A cave, a glacier, a forest after a fire. A lake where all the fish have died, covered in reeds and flowers. Bare, elegant, regal, still.

The dead do not speak, but they can make good company. Hermes joined them at their table, yes, but so did mortal elders from the time before her mother’s birth. Mortals who had lived free from the control of wheat, barley, harvests. They told stories in the way of the dead, wordless, with memories and dreams. At the iron table where no one ate but Persephone, they spun smokey confections of images and imprints and she allowed herself to disappear in them. She entered a reality in which few men lived but all were peaceful and spoke to the gods and the animals in hushed brotherly tones. A reality in which food fell from trees instead of being wrenched from the unsuspecting earth.