protect innocence
dish soap, hair, guilt, etc.
🫖 Hello, angels. Today’s essay roundaboutly reflects on innocence. I hope you like it! Welcome to all newcomers. This essay is free, and also includes a thematic mixtape, for paid subscribers only. 🫖
I am worried that my hair smells like dish soap. This is because I have been literally washing it with Dawn. The sun is coming out and I want to be blonde again. I text Evana that being born blonde is a mental condition. She agrees. Blondeness beckons. No matter the potions and dyes, there’s a little girl in my heart who wants to be the blondest in the world. A story from childhood. A playdate. I come down the stairs in tears, wailing: my hair isn’t yellow anymore. Playing in the bathroom sink, my hair gets wet. My parents reassure me that when it dries, yellowness will be restored. Now that I’m treating my hair like dirty dishes, it’s reached a dish-watery color.
My chest is tight from blooming flowers and guilt and a third thing. It’s time to take Zyrtec again. Allergy medication is like heartbreak. Take it each day, and by a slow, imperceptible process, you will one day be less sniffly. Unsatisfying.
I sit in the park. I sit on the patio. I sit outside. Plant debris falls from the sky. Is there anything more lovable than someone with a leaf in their hair?
In a staggeringly gorgeous community garden, I try to close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. My head feels so crowded that I open my eyes with a gasp. Nope, can’t do it.
I have a night in Williamsburg that would have left Holden Caulfield disgusted. I accept free drinks from the father of a three-month-old child. I stay at the restaurant bar too late when the staff clearly wants to go home. I get off on the wrong side of the subway and let a man on the street walk me home. I think he’s looking for sex, but at my doorstep he asks if I have any weed. I close the door kindly in his face and fall asleep on the couch watching TV. I wake up feeling sinister and slink to my bed without removing the remnants of my blue eyeshadow.
In “A Note on J. D. Salinger,” Augustine Martin claims that the author’s books affirm in the profane terms of their environment that there is in man something godlike, an innocence that is indestructible, and that this innocence is just as real as sin.
On a different night in Williamsburg, I have the spring evening of my dreams. Saying yes to every fanciful plan. Chatting easily with everyone I meet. Prancing to the picnic with a bottle in my hand and a flower in my hair. Petting a dog. Talking shit with love. Dancing and laughing and dancing some more. Everyone is being good and sweet to each other. It is jubilee. Innocence is just as real as sin.
Cynthia quotes Tennessee Williams:
The world is violent and mercurial—it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love—love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
Everything is built to spill. We can’t lead our lives unstained. I drag my lavender sleeve through a puddle of lemon curd. A bird shits on my tulle skirt. Perhaps this is good luck, but perhaps it’s just bird shit. There are at least two ways of looking at everything. The world has had its way with me, but unfortunately I’ve had my way, too.
I ask him if it’s ever okay to kill another person. No, we agree. Phew! It’s good to check in sometimes. We are not the burning building. Love might save us yet.
It’s nice to hear a piece of advice that you already live by. Make the same mistake over and over again until it’s not a mistake anymore. It forces Evana and me to look in the mirror of each other’s eyes. Twin flames. Two sides of the same coin. Stubborn girls. We watch each other making the same mistakes repeatedly, while abandoning the shame of fool me twice and should’ve known.
The paradox rattles around in my head. It’s tautology. A mistake is a mistake. It’s contradiction. A mistake is never really a mistake. It’s forgiving. We are destined to never learn our lessons until we are meant to. I am curious to see how our imperfect perfect situations will unfold.
It’s harder to hear a piece of advice that challenges your worldview. Clear is kind, a friend repeats. I squirm. Can’t it be nicer to be vague? Must we always let the light in? On the noble side, I bargain that the untempered truth can be decidedly hurtful. On a darker side, I am a coward. I don’t want to disappoint people. I don’t want to fight. I would rather fade away than go out with a bang. I wonder if I feel guilt so strongly because of how much I value innocence. I am being challenged to change. Some of my mistakes are growing stale.
We take a walk. I am manic. She is depressed. And, he is neither. He tells me that he experienced sadness for the first time at the age of 25. My knee-jerk reaction is to roll my eyes and scream in fury. Deeper down, it’s plain and simple envy. I long for such tender innocence. It’s not just that I want to be happy. I want to have always been happy. I would trade my hardship management tools to have 25 years of happiness under my belt. Any fucking day.
My mom texts me some home videos. You see, she says, you did have a normal childhood!
A very good childhood!
Until it wasn’t! Ha!
Our breakups keep getting better and better. Every time we see each other, we hug as though reunited from war. I love your grey hairs, I tell him. They are multiplying and I think it looks dignified. He says that it’s nice that I like them because he’s not so sure. I think my dad must dye his hair, he says. Oh, your dad definitely dyes his hair, I reply. I tell him that if he ever dyes his hair, to please avoid chestnut brown. Every man thinks his hair is chestnut brown. The reason why there are so many auburn forty-year-olds is because men are never given the vocabulary to describe color. And chestnut brown sounds so manly and dignified. The Hemingway of hair dye.
Two weeks ago, I am looking in the bathroom mirror of a New Orleans hotel and find my first grey hair. I pluck it out to investigate, and am surprised to feel nothing. I don’t feel older or wiser or closer to death. Perhaps it’s due to my sneaking suspicion that all the dish soap is stripping my hair of pigment.
My grandma calls me on the phone. We are talking about hair. She tells me that her mother started greying at the age of nineteen. There wasn’t much you could do about it back then, she tells me. It’s a miracle that my hair has always remained the same shade of brown, she says with a wink in her voice. Sometimes, I can’t believe how old I am. My mother died around my age. I don’t think of myself as old. Just older than some other people. We laugh. It’s beautiful simplicity.
Our hair will turn grey, if we’re lucky to live long enough, but that needn’t exempt us from indestructible, godlike innocence.
🫖 Thus ends my free portion! If you enjoyed this, feel free to like, share or upgrade your subscription. Paid subscribers, scroll forth for some sweet tunes. 🫖
Today, we begin with Let’s Dance by David Bowie, for all my delicate, trembling, springtime blossoms. 🎶 If you should fall into my arms and tremble like a flower. 🎶 Next, we have something new—a bop from two three-name artists that I generally feel so-so about: LDR & FJM. Let The Light In (feat. Father John Misty) by Lana Del Rey 🎶 Ooh, let the light in. At your back door yelling 'cause I wanna come in. Ooh, turn your light on. Look at us, you and me back at it again. 🎶 I must say their combined powers are delightful in this tune. It’s a listless, caterwauling, cyclical love. The same mistake over and over. Another love song: Acolyte by Slaughter Beach Dog. 🎶 Man, it cuts like a dull knife, when you’re young and you’re told: makes sense when you’re older. Darling, let’s get old. 🎶 I love how the lyrics embrace the wisdom of aging—a value I crave in our eerily nubile society. Track four is Call It Fate, Call It Karma by The Strokes. While I was adding this song to the Youtube playlist, I noticed a caption that described this song better than I could: it’s abstract enough to interpret it to your feelings. And ain’t that the greatest kind of song? It could be love or it could be loss. It could be innocence or guilt. 🎶 Can I waste all your time here on the sidewalk? Can I stand in your light just for a while? 🎶 Last, but not least, let’s hear some wisdom from Faces with their 1973 treat, Ooh La La. It’s a message from granddad to grandson, with a satisfying, resounding beat. 🎶 I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger. I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was stronger. 🎶
"I text Evana that being born blonde is a mental condition. She agrees. Blondeness beckons"
Blondeness beckons the unborn blonde too. Beach bum blonded at age 24 after 2 months in Greece and Israel I've hankered for it ever since. Two years ago (more than old enough to know better) I hit the bottle and am now back to blonde and am peace.
"have a night in Williamsburg that would have left Holden Caulfield disgusted"
Neat way to be reminded of one of my favourite characters - must revisit him
"We are destined to never learn our lessons until we are meant to.
Can’t it be nicer to be vague? Must we always let the light in?"
Yes yes yes as I think you say somewhere else so good to see one's opinions endorsed in another's writing.