a phone call, a date, a memory

I called a friend today — he's funnier than me, often in this sort of dark way, but he's also wise and his thoughts feel well-measured. Maybe but is the wrong operator, because maybe "darkly funny" is something you only get to be if you're a little bit wise and good at measuring out your words. Whatever the case, I find him gentle and tactful when he needs to be. He asks good questions, which is the most important thing in writers and photographers of any kind, and he is both. So I asked him to write with me on a script I’ve been thinking about. He said he'd give it some thought. I hope he says yes. This is the kind of idea I haven't been able to shake for years, but it needs the right team.

I went on a date the other night. I felt almost nothing about it — good guy, good taste in sweater, good cologne, good face, good mustache geometry. Pleasant enough conversation. He explained what it would require, technically speaking, to gene drive mosquitoes out of existence, and why malaria vaccines are a better alternative (I had asked). But I wasn't really in it. The whole thing felt like a task. I had this thought at one point that he pursued a lot of the interests that I thought were cool on paper in a sort of boring way. He asked me if I wanted someone to walk me home, and I said no. 

Instead, I took myself to the bookstore, which was open late. While I was there, I shamefully purchased Rosie Kellet's In For Dinner on my phone while standing in the cookbook corner; it was readily available on the bad app for half the price. I needed to cut corners somewhere. 

I walked out with two things: A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver and the making of a story, Alice LaPlante — I've been in the mood for instruction lately. I made my way home, tiptoeing over ice, happy to be returning to my empty apartment, happy to make tea and think private thoughts to myself.

I fell asleep reading Oliver. In the morning I dragged both her and LaPlante to a teahouse the following afternoon, where I waded deep into the first chapter of the making of a story, where LaPlante proposes a few simple exercises. The first one is a finish-the-thought prompt: “I don't know why I remember…” A single image came to me immediately:

I don't know why I remember driving through downtown with ▭ when I first moved back to LA after that summer I spent living above the garage. Specifically, I remember reaching across the gap between the front seats and thumbing through the hair by his ears.

After a while he said, "You know, you don't have to keep doing that," which I now understand to mean please stop. And I said, "No, it's okay," which I now understand to mean I'm doing this for me, not for you. I was still in disbelief that he was real.  

I stayed home sick from work today and will probably do the same tomorrow, but I dragged myself to the grocery store because I needed some very important things: biscuit dough, green onions, silken tofu, mushrooms, frozen strawberries. When I’m sick I want to eat everything, like my body is burning fuel to heal itself. I mean, I guess it is.

to be specific in our affections

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

to be specific in our affections

It’s been stuck there since this phone call I had in December. At some point, I said something nice. My friend paused and said, “You are very good at giving compliments.” 

You have two immediate options when you get a compliment: shiver it off or accept it. The latter is better. Then you can do what I do and spend your commute thinking about whether it’s really true, and why or why not, and what it really says about you. When people compliment you on giving compliments, it might be because you’ve noticed some small subtle something in them or in the way they move, and named it.

So maybe what I’ve been thinking about isn’t just specificity, but specificity in love. In friendships and in romance, I lean into love that feels specific. It’s easy to forget how actively we can design our affections for every recipient: I don’t want words that could be meant for anyone else; I don’t want to vaguepost. 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, how they matter to him — it’s a comment on how we write about loving the neck and the lips and the eyes but what about the elbows? So much hinges on them, literally.

Don’t bother looking for it. None of the poetry that surfaces on search for love and elbows is worth reading. It's all too ambitious, too corny. I liked that one poem because I think the author understood that his job was simple, was to show you something small.

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. She 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

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 this one breakup, I called up a previous 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 again.

“I have a question.”

"Okay?"

"Do you think you're fun?" 

I started laughing out loud, like with all of the air in my lungs. I cursed at him, and we were both laughing. But 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 laughed, but 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 soliciting past boyfriends for 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 who, to his credit, thought To Pimp a Butterfly was true American poetry; past the star sophomore on the high school wrestling team; and onto a guy at church who liked frisbee golf and street hockey and listened to heavy metal, but only because his cousin did. 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 more like thought exercises and imagination stations 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 got out of surgery a few days ago, 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.