🫖 Hello, all you beautiful people. My last essay of 2023 uses dubious metaphors to reflect on transitions, writing, and the new year. I hope you like it! Thank you for being here. It’s an honor to write for you. 🫖
It’s becoming hard to remember which year it is and which year it will be. The numbers got jumbled somewhere in the early Twenties when we all got sick and died or maybe even earlier, way back when they used to sell those New Year’s glasses with two zeros for eyes. 23, 24, 25. Yesterday, Annie tried to explain a few elements of numerology. I struggled to understand how my birthday might add up to the number 3. My mom texted me this morning, Happy 123123 ! Lol.
I like to think of New Year’s Eve as a hallway between two closed doors. How did you close the door behind you? With a slam or a gentle click? Did you leave the last room tidy or in ruin? How will you approach the door on the other side? Are you lugging heavy bags, or are your pockets empty, save a crumpled lottery ticket and tube of Aquaphor? Will you ring the doorbell, or enter unannounced? Do you need a key? Are you running early or late? Will you approach with grace or be dragged kicking and screaming?
Many of us will act like crazy fools in this corridor because it represents our last stab at control before facing yet another unknown. We can imagine what it looks like on the other side. We can make arrangements and plans. But our best efforts are an educated guess.
//
This week, Evana and I exchanged belated Christmas presents. I offered her a copy of Fear of Flying and a vibrating rabbit dildo—perhaps, the one true zipless fuck. She handed me Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
At the Metrograph, we whispered over 2015’s Carol. When Cate Blanchett lustily laid her gloves on Rooney Mara’s counter, we giggled and gasped. Everyone wants to be a writer. We snorted. We sat still and reverent during Carol’s letter:
You’ll think it harsh of me to say so, but no explanation I offer will satisfy you. Please don’t be angry when I tell you that you seek resolutions and explanations because you’re young. But you will understand this one day.
A few days later, we met at my apartment to chat over globs of burrata. We admitted that we both couldn’t stop thinking about the letter scene. She had been ruminating about the idea of resolution. The phrase that kept haunting me: because you’re young.
Conversations with Evana never feel like circling the drain, despite our constant entanglement with recurring themes. Difficult loves, squalid youth, impossible closeness. There is joy in repetition, Evana once wrote, I know there’s a lesson in making a mistake multiple times until it no longer becomes a mistake. I think about these lines often.
I have something to read to you! I leapt out of my seat to snatch the copy of Rilke she gave me. The book was beginning to look as though it had been assaulted by a child with a scarlet Crayola. I had been underlining it with lipliner, the first tool I could find when I started reading. I opened it to the only dogeared page and read:
You are young, your life is just beginning. I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers. Perhaps you bear within yourself the capacity to imagine and shape a sacred way of life. Prepare yourself for that. Trust what comes to you.
//
I watched a door swing open on Avenue B. Stepping out, a man said, Fuck that bitch! His friend emerged close behind. I made eye contact with the pair and started giggling. More emphatically, he added, Fuck her! She was so rude.
Fuck that bitch! I agreed. We parted, laughing into the night. Moments like these help me live as though there is something wonderful behind every door.
//
Sometime in early fall, I wrote a paragraph about my bedroom door:
My bedroom door is warped. It closes in an effortless swoop, but struggles to reopen. At the doorknob, I desperately, impatiently wrench and claw like a trapped animal. The door always relents the moment I demonstrate softness. It swings open easily and cartoonishly, as though I had whispered a secret password.
I tried to insert it into several essays—mine all mine, then how to get there. There was something I liked about it, but it struck me as a bit overwritten. Both times, it got the chopping block, relegated to an unruly 16,000-word document where my ill-fitting sentences and ideas go to languish. I’ve been advised to mine this document for my novel. I’m an impatient person, but I’m learning to save things for later. To hold back until the time is right. There is beauty in restraint.
//
It’s a self-serious business to go about naming what you do. What do you write? Typically, I squirm and bargain and justify in too many or too few words. Resolutions and explanations. If I’m feeling scholarly and solemn, I explain that it’s a body of personal essays or cultural commentary or narrative nonfiction. If I’m feeling piffling, I say that I have a girly blog, an ongoing diatribe about my life. All of these descriptions get caught in my throat. It’s not that I don’t feel confident in my writing. Nor do I feel genuinely insecure as a writer.
Where I really feel uneasy is as a representative of the writing I do. I’m a shabby spokesman, and an even shabbier salesman, too nervous and frazzled for verbal eloquence. Can’t my words speak for themselves? And can’t they speak for me?
I don’t know what I’m doing here but I suppose one way to put it is that I am building a house. I’ve written about windows and transparency, but perhaps my essays are more like an unlocked door. Closed but openable. I’ve taken care to polish my doorknobs and grease my hinges to ease your entry. I do not want to be the whitetoothed realtor, promising refurbished cabinets and unparalleled views. The house is open, it’s your choice to let yourself in and look around.
My passive approach distances me from the trespassers that might trample my petunias and manhandle my precious objects with sooty hands.
I recently advised a friend that love cannot be frictionless. Without friction, there is numbness, and numbness is the opposite of love. It’s a vulnerable position, but without lows we cannot have highs. By squashing our inner tenderness, we condemn ourselves to a sedate purgatory. An in-between that is safe, yet excruciating.
I realize that my advice points out a certain hypocrisy in my own approach. For years, I have chosen frictionlessness over potential rejection. In 2023, I changed my locks. In 2024, I will face my fear of flying. I will speak up for my writing, in gratitude for how it has spoken for me.
Recently, I stumbled upon a delightfully simple way to describe this project. It’s memoir. It’s just memoir. It’s always been memoir. I chuckle at my tendency to make a short story long. There is no reinvention. I will understand one day. I am living the questions.
12.31.23 Mixtape
If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know that my end-of-post mixtapes are typically five songs long. Today, I'm doing something a little different. Loathe as I am to reference Sp*tify Wr*pped, one of its insights into my listening habits gave me an idea. Yes, I was inexplicably a Burlington, VT girl but what was more interesting to me was the pseudo-tarot card reading which designated me as a Hypnotist. It read: Your concentration is absolute, friend. You like to play albums all the way through, from the opening track to the final note. This is true! I do this. I love to experience songs flowing from one to the next as the artist intended. Most of my playlists are similarly curated to be conscious of transitions. When I’ve been listening to an album a lot, I become surprised to hear its songs out of context. Within my favorite albums, I crave song pairings for the alchemy that happens in the in-between, the beautiful secret that explains why the ends and beginnings of some songs feel abrupt or drawn-out, too fast or too slow. So, today I share five such musical doorways!
Oberhofer, “Chronovision” - Chronovision to Nevena. Chronovision is an orchestral opener to the album, creating a beautifully romantic sense of tension which is broken fantastically by the audible exhalation that begins Nevena. Ah! It’s so difficult to describe in words, and so fabulous. Just listen. 🎶 Did you know I want you here to warm me? You're the only one who doesn't get me down. 🎶
Orange Juice, “Rip It Up” - Mud in Your Eye to Turn Away. Mud in Your Eye is a nasty, angry little song, sung with complete sweetness. I originally heard it out of context of the album, and actually enjoyed how it ends strangely abruptly in the middle of a pretty instrumental moment. With the context of Turn Away following it, everything makes sense. 🎶 Here's some mud in your pretty eye. But please drop in if you're passing by. 🎶
HOMESHAKE, “Fresh Air” - Call Me Up to Not U. Every transition in this oozy, thwompy album is riveting, and whenever I listen to it, I am delightfully transported to college, when a group of us packed ourselves on a dormroom floor to listen to “Fresh Air” for the first time. Someone got a CD copy from the radio station a few days before it would be released online. The transition between these two songs captures the album’s name—it’s a cold breath of fresh air. 🎶 Maybe you should take a walk and figure what to do. Hope that this'll be the last time I'll hide pain from you. 🎶
ELO, “A New World Record” - So Fine to Livin’ Thing. So Fine is potentially my least favorite song on “A New World Record.” It’s a disco-y series of oohs, las and ahhs. But it ends with a beautiful lingering note on the synth that turns just in time for the incomparable violin opening to Livin’ Thing. 🎶 Takin' a dive, 'cause you can't halt the slide floating downstream. So let her go, don't start spoiling the show.
It's a bad dream. 🎶Simon and Garfunkel, “Bookends” - Old Friends to Bookends Theme Reprise. More delicate notes quivering, carrying from one song to the next. I’ve written enough about bookends. I won’t bore you with more. 🎶 Long ago, it must be. I have a photograph. Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you. 🎶
🫖 Good night! Safe travels! See you on the other side. 🫖
Great transition! Thanks
Moved me so early in 2024. I’d say that’s a good start.