to be specific in our affections

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about specificity. There’s this clause that’s attached itself my brain like a barnacle, and I notice it whenever I get into the elevator or the shower: 

to be specific in our affections

It’s been stuck there since a phone call I had in December. At some point in the call, I said something nice. My friend paused and said, “You are very good at giving compliments.” Now, there are two main categories of response to compliments: shiver it off or accept it. But when people compliment you on giving compliments, I think it’s a signal that I’ve noticed and appreciated something specific, maybe small or overlooked, that makes them feel seen and appreciated. I like hunting for those things. 

So maybe what I’ve been thinking about isn’t just specificity, but specificity in love. In friendships and in romance, I’ve learned I crave love that feels specific. Oftentimes I think it’s useful to remember that we design our affections for each other: I don’t want words that could be meant for anyone else; I don’t want to offer platitudes. I want a love that’s conscious of my quirks. And when you have a love that exists specifically between two individuals, this creole of affection starts to emerge. The love gets wonderfully weird, and then it becomes durable. It develops resilience. How can two people constantly designing their love to welcome the weirdness and specificity of the other do anything but last?

There's this poem I think about a lot but can never find, which I think I encountered in an anthology when I was in high school. The poet writes about his wife's elbows, and how we write about loving the neck and the lips and the eyes but what about the elbows? Are they not also deserving?

None of the stuff that comes to the surface when you look for this poem is worth reading. It's all too ambitious, and I liked that one poem because I think the poet decided his job was simply to make you notice the specificity of your love.

a night to myself, friends in town

Last night, I came home from work early. The milk at work may have gone bad, and I had two big milky coffees. Oops. I took a nap and woke up feeling like everything in my stomach was going to keep going in the right direction.

I thought about calling my friends, which is usually what I do at night, but I've been feeling so inward lately, and last night I really wanted to just watch YouTube videos and do my nails. I pulled up the imaginary calendar of my week and saw that on no other night would there be any guaranteed evening to spend on taking care of myself. I set up my station and chose nine different colors. The white is actually a cool grey chalky color, kind of like #FAFAFA, with a layer of milky jelly white on top of it, and there's no way to capture the translucence on camera, but it reminds me of really thin porcelain.

Anyway, I let myself take my time. I didn't do much but carefully, meticulously sculpt each nail, and for the first time in months, felt very satisfied with the process. I remembered my posture. I sculpted and filed and refined and resurfaced until each one was basically perfect. 

I watched this episode of Sad Boyz and let my brain go into art mode. I really like it when Jarvis gets into tech commentary. 

My friends are in town! I got into DC on Sunday afternoon and spent the day cleaning my place, then had Ethan and Elvira over for cookies and ice cream. Elvira tried on a bunch of my clothes and took home the $400 Tory Burch turtleneck I picked up at a Virginia Goodwill for $6. Elvira pointed out that I'm always finding things. This is true. We also discussed the theory that everyone's allowed one crazy ex, and you're allowed two crazy exes under one of two conditions: (1) they're crazy for completely different reasons, or (2) they're crazy for the same reason, and you were able to discern the pattern.

I woke up at 6:20am this morning to meet Elvira for morning yoga, and we had breakfast and coffee nearby. In our sleepy state, we got speculative about the future, as usual. Tonight I'm taking her and Ethan on a tour of the National Mall. We will be bundled up, hot drinks in hand, then probably stop somewhere for for pizza.

songs of surrender, a drive through the sticks

Savannah drove me to the Park & Ride today so that I could take the Logan Express to Boston for my flight home. It was close to three when we left, sun already low in the sky, coming in through the trees, casting a soft auburn glow, battling back the gray. Savannah gave me a tour of Florence Welsh’s new album — unmistakably her, but way more literal, more resentful, more mournful, more raw. I realized that when she’s angry, her sound is almost bellicose. We spent a lot of the ride listening, reading road signs, tracking headlights. I think there’s a sound so distinct of a woman’s grief that any woman acquainted with grief herself can pick it up immediately, no matter the genre. 

This one song came on, You Can Have It All. I thought about how I’ve seen this sentence make tons of appearances in the music in my life — all over worship songs, and then in secular love songs (Adele, lots of Adele). Always in songs of surrender, a type of song I find so fascinating. If to surrender is just to give up ownership and control, “you can have it all” is both loss and release. Much of the time I feel like these songs are about surrendering stuff we never had in the first place. Or about offering ourselves up completely.

I was thinking about this when And Love, the last song on the album, came on. I think it’s my favorite on the album, and this one is an even more direct meditation on surrender. If I could ask Florence Welsh anything, I’d ask her to describe how grief and surrender and love are knit together in her life. I’ve at least been thinking a lot about how they are in mine. 

[Verse 2]
And love was not what I thought it was
More like an animal crawling deep into a cave
Than a romance novel heroine being swept away
More like surrendering to something
And more like resting than running

And then I was at the bus station in Braintree, hugging Savannah goodbye in the little bus terminal, making plans to come up to Falmouth at the end of summer. 

One of the things I love about our friendship is the familiarity. This is a friendship that welcomes visits from afar to sit on the couch for a week and do very little, to tell each other what we’re getting each other for Christmas and end up getting each other the same thing, to FaceTime on the way to the grocery store. A casualness that is the product of diligently showing up for almost nine years. 

finding a way out, portuguese stoneware, and my face

The other night, Savannah and I watched the Deathly Hallows Pt. I and II, and we sobbed, sweater cuffs to eyes, when we watched Snape's memories play back in the pensieve. I think there's a lot JK Rowling doesn't understand, but I do think she understands tragic love.

Immediately after that we watched The Hunger Games (But Better), and I went to bed. Except I stayed up and watched the entirety of the first Hunger Games film and cried when Rue died and District 11 rioted. It’s possible I needed to cry for other reasons, and this was just the way out. 

Savannah's dad took us to Portugalia, where we saw all this food in huge crocks. This is how life is supposed to be, I think. I also want basically all of the stoneware for my kitchen once I break more of the Dansk plates I have, which I found out are entirely American.

For the duration of the trip, I kept looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and thinking, “this is your face now.” As in, “this is your face at this very moment,” and “your face really does change with time.” Maybe I will think this every time I look in the mirror for the rest of my life. 

my current face

i don't have much to say tonight but i did make this stupid cake

I went to trivia tonight at PLAY, this fantastic barcade in New Bedford, MA, the neighboring city to my dear friend's hometown. I ordered the chicken tenders and a side of pickles, which I absolutely dusted, and a skillet of mac and cheese that I couldn't really taste. I went through two big sides of pickles before the waiter came back to our table with an 8-ounce cup and told me that he was cutting me the fuck off after that. 

Christmas Trivia was good. I screwed up a few critical questions and we ended up in third or fourth place. At the end I took off my alcohol wristband and started twirling it around my fingers, and then I realized if I pulled it really gently I could turn it into a wand. And that it looked sort of like a candle. 

We tore up the rest of our answer tickets and the question tracker and I bit the middle out of my last pickle chip and voílà. Cake. One of the waiters looked over while I was trying to make confetti out of the waxed paper from the cinnamon pretzel basket and, like a kindergarten teacher practicing gentle parenting, observed, "that's a lot of paper in that mac and cheese." And just kept wiping his table. 

After all that we drove home and watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This was the first night since coming to MA that I haven't had to bring my laptop out at night to work. It felt really good.

it's scary to just be and not be useful

50/50 - Sylvie

As I mentioned previously I've been working on this big old writing project that I've been unable to progress on. I think the scope is just too open: I was going to try to write a bunch of little articles and arrange them together as a little magazine-style writing project on things I wanted to tell my friends about. Stuff like what's going on at my job, what I've been doing as I've been building my studio, life in DC, a review of the things I've learned and discovered this year. Ways I've grown. Explorations of questions that have been gnawing on my brain. 

But every time I sit down to write about any of these things, they become cartoonishly large, imposing, impossible to describe. I lose track of what I was trying to say in the first place.

It's stupid because I do have a lot to say. I really have learned a lot this year, for example. Like the fact that pie crust really is much better if you use real butter; the store-bought stuff weakens the quality of a pie by about 25%. I learned how to explore a major city on foot. I learned how to face tremendous amounts of bodily anxiety on my own. I learned which bangs suit my face and how to cut them (mostly). I learned how to stop cooking for two or four and acclimated to cooking for one. I learned I quite like doing creative strategy in an undersaturated field like policy. I am becoming acquainted with hard things I never wanted to learn: What it feels like to watch the adults in your life really age. What it feels like to lose friends, and for it to be your fault. What it feels like to be angry at someone you love, and for there to be no right way forward. 

And sometimes we learn things that are bad for us. I realized recently that these past few years, and even during my last relationship, I may have learned some bad social habits around trust — I'm not sure I know how to let people serve me, which is tough, because I desperately desire relationships built on reciprocal service. But I know that I'm afraid of being let down. It's much easier to not find out by just doing everything I want and need for myself than to wait and see. And, to be fair, there have been a lot of let downs this year and last.

I realized earlier this fall that I've spent the last several years thinking the only way that I know people will love me is if I'm doing things for them, and it terrifies me to wonder what might happen if I stop being useful. One of my friends exasperatedly told me that of course that's not how it works; people love me because they love me. And I know this to be true about everyone else in my life, so why am I having a hard time accepting this of myself?

After a breakup once, I called up another ex-boyfriend and asked him if something about me makes guys want to do crazy shit after we part ways. He said nothing came to mind and hung up. 30 seconds later, the phone rang. It was him: "I have a question." 

"Okay?"

"Do you think you're fun?" 

I started laughing out loud and I cursed at him. We were both laughing. But then I really started thinking about it. We picked at it together. 

"I want to see you have crazy fun this year," he said, and prescribed me a slew of nights out dancing in New York City. I thought: My definition of fun is pretty constrained. I was, at that time, a person riddled with anxiety.

We hung up. I called one of my dearest friends to tell him that I'd just discovered that I'm no fun, and that I had to fix this immediately. He told me to pay that question no mind. He did a good job of showing me why, even if no one else agrees, he thinks I'm fun. He also said that I should stop listening to past boyfriends' analyses of who I am. 

I believed him then, but the worry that I'm not any fun tickles the back of my neck every so often, and I think this may have helped inspire the belief that people are less likely to love me if I stop trying to be helpful — If there's no fun there, then am I not just a burden? So the thinking goes. Anyway, presuming I can be helpful is itself a stretch in a lot of cases, as I've also been learning. 

the coldplay post I wanted to be able to write when I was twelve

When I was in middle school, the boy I adored (and thought I loved) was into Coldplay, so I studied their discography. Immersion-learning everything that mattered to the people whose love I wanted, training myself to inherit their perspectives and their interests — this came naturally to me. 

Mylo Xyloto came out in October of sixth grade. I remember really not getting it at first. And then coming back to it over and over again, searching it for beauty, hunting for whatever Coldplay Boy had found to love in this music. I thought that maybe if I mined enough, I'd uncover some detail I could use to accessorize my personality until I resembled something he'd love. "Us Against the World" and "Up With the Birds" were the best songs on the album as far as I could tell; they illustrated the loneliness I felt. Unrequited love will do a lot to a twelve year old. 

With time, the music grew on me. I found myself playing the album late at night while I texted my cousin and tinkered away at school projects. And one night it just clicked. I got it. Coldplay was good. I'm not really sure how that happened; I bet I'd just gotten used to hearing it.

I think I was maybe fourteen when Ghost Stories came out. I was in high school then, having migrated well beyond my obsession with Coldplay Boy, past a baseball-playing eighth grader and a star sophomore on the high school wrestling team, onto a guy at church who liked frisbee golf and playing street hockey in roller blades. I had liked a lot of boys at that point, but none of these crushes ever fruited into relationships that gave me real experience with heartbreak or guilt or fucking up irredeemably. So I listened to "Ink" and "True Love" and felt around inside the empty space that was supposed to hold the feelings these songs were written to soothe. I wondered when I'd know these feelings myself; I knew deep down that all of these crushes had been thought exercises more than anything else. And it confused me that there could be so much dimension and variety in an album about Chris and Gwyneth's relationship ending — why wasn't it all just horribly, flatly, invariably sad? How had this grown man done so many regretful things to someone he wanted to be with so badly?

Tonight I'm sleeping in Massachusetts, in my dear friend's childhood home. She's just finished getting surgery, and I'm here to keep her company and aggressively prevent her from doing shit like lifting objects that weigh more than a paperback book. I laid down to write, and it was going to be a stream of consciousness about the loose confetti of observations I'd collected over the course of the day, but I for some reason had "Magic" stuck in my head, and then I really wanted to hear the album. And so I paused my Emma Chamberlain video. I stretched on the bed in the dark, as I do every night, and I listened to Ghost Stories, starting from the top. And I noticed that empty space that I used to feel had been filled.