🫖 A series of half-truths for your Sunday evening. Hope you enjoy! 🫖
On the first day,
Wake up between the hours of 4:00 and 5:00. Remember how baking used to make you feel before you were in the weeds. Consider how much you can get done before the clock even strikes 8:00.
Bake like no one is watching: no one is. Be slow, methodical and unaesthetic. Stop browning the butter to go see the red and grey sunrise. Return to finish what you started. Revel in the beauty of creating something temporary, unremarkable and repeatable. This is the value of sweetness.
At 8:00, be hungry for lunch and feel like a basket of rags. Instead of taking a nap, buy shampoo and conditioner on the internet and peruse Airbnb for a trip that will come too soon after the one you are currently taking. Ignore the knocking at your door. Put on headphones with no music as an alibi.
At 10:00, take a shower to feel better. On the tile floor, embody the ultimate pantomime of despair. Feel considerably cheered by your own drama. Play hide and seek with the kids like you promised and let your heart race at the safe thrill of vanishing with the assurance that someone will come to get you soon.
Call the doctor with the certitude that you’d like to get an IUD when you get home.
On the second day,
Wake up between the hours of 5:00 and 6:00. Reach for your phone and delete Twitter: you never hated anything or anyone enough to fit in there.
Delete LinkedIn. This needs no explanation.
Delete Hinge and Tinder, despite last night’s speed round supernova—three heads craned over one phone, blue light refracted in three beers. No yes no no no yes no no no no no no NO nO No no!
Don’t worry about TikTok. You already deleted it a month ago.
Last, but not least, delete Instagram. This will not be easy, as you’ve given the app a comfortable home on your screen for ten continuous years. You fed it stories (too many lately), and it fed you false idols and idle falseness. Your daily cries of existence never made you feel like less of a ghost.
They won’t forget you if they weren’t supposed to.
Get up and bake again. This time muffins. Step out of the oven and into the bathtub. Take off your nail polish, not because it is chipped but because you are shedding veneers.
On the third day,
Consider the audience. Disregard the audience. Take drugs for the only right reason: no reason.
Appreciate the volume of things going on at the same time. Consider that you don’t need forgiveness for eating the pear in the icebox. Remember that Yossarian said death to all modifiers. Or was it Major Major Major Major? Or was it superlatives? You are already too late to class to be rereading books.
The radiator is hyperventilating: tell it that it’s going to be okay.
Hope, ye unhappy ones. Ye happy ones, fear.
Resist larger truths. Laugh at human folly.
The song makes you wanna do bad things.
Feel startled by this message and change the music. Look up the song and sigh in relief that those were the actual lyrics.
Everything goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.
Consider that what you aren’t thinking about is just as instructive as the thoughts that take laps around your mind. Do the most rebellious thing you can think of in the comfort of your own home and let your friend take a picture. Enjoy the fact that the photograph can nestle, unshared, in your camera roll forever. Come down, unchanged.
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways.
Hug your friend goodbye and swallow a little dinner. Look in the mirror and smile that you are still you.
Be not solitary, be not idle.
Accept another friend’s invitation to get the most expensive drink in New York. Share every dessert item on the menu. Walk a few blocks and get a little cold to continue the conversation. Make verbal plans and split up. Smile at how the evening reflects the cozy image of adulthood you envisioned as a child: friends in charming layered outfits, strolling on city streets and departing for bed at a reasonable hour. You always thought it would be San Francisco in your youthful reveries. Maybe your children will dream of New York.
On the fourth day,
Spend the most gorgeous bender of a 6-hour date with your new best friend who also doesn't believe in best friends. Keep saying yes to each other. Consider the art, but not too seriously. Go buy the actual most expensive drink in New York. Talk about everything and nothing. Assure each other that you are doing okay. Walk for miles, through the least loved neighborhoods, saying yes to another couple blocks at the checkpoint of each subway station. Go to the grocery store together and touch cheeks in lieu of a hug because all four of your hands are full. Leave her and walk back east alone.
Reheat the Indian food that gave you indigestion yesterday, but it might have been the other thing.
And, finally, silence. Consider that you are actually alone for the first time in a decade. Consider yourself lucky. Lose an eyelash and make a wish to the world:
Forget me not.
Song of the Week
“Ride Into the Sun,” Lou Reed
🎶 Oh the city, where everything seems so dirty,
But if you’re tired and filled with self-pity,
Remember that you’re just one more person who’s there. 🎶
🫖 Arrivederci, Roma! Float me your questions, comments, or ideas anytime—I’m all ears. You can respond to this email, or leave a comment on the website. Have a nice week. 🫖
"They won't forget you if they weren't supposed to." !!! precisely🙌♥️
this dog sketch and caption is fantastic too lol i love it