| site seeing: monday-wednesday in 6 items or less |
[18 Jun 2009|10:13pm] |
the jane: this place is only special to me because a couple months ago a certain someone had asked me if i'd heard of it and i'd said no. he always hears of everything first, but turns out it's not what he thought it was, the hotel bar just opened last week, and this past monday played host to the cfda post-party. i describe it to people as a mix between rose bar and socialista: tacky-luxe. i really quite prefer it to either of the above, though. at some point in the night everyone was there and i lost track, but mostly i sat upstairs in the balcony area chain-smoking with carlos and talking about how attractive lazaro of proenza is.
minetta tavern: one of those annoying new york places where you call and they pretend like they have no open reservations through the end of the month, and you walk in and they seat you right away. the food was nothing to write home about despite the glowing review from the new york times food critic. but i did see martha stewart, which is like seeing big foot or something, so that was funny, i suppose. it was drew's first big night back in town, and i, characteristically, was both unbearably exhausted yet antsy.
gates: i'm going to start referring to this as the gaytes. we went to see e DJ, he was without his heels and a little morose. it barely just opened and already has become one of my least favorite spots.
avenue: apparently an ex of mine works here but i didn't catch him. they have a b night on tuesdays, apparently, now (christ, i'm gone for 2 weeks and miss so much). one of the only places i'd been to in recent history where they will light your cig for you instead of telling you to put it out. k is a fantastic dj. and in margiela, no less!
skylight: last year i was sitting on the couch with chinese take-out during the whitney party. i had the same plan this year, but things don't always pan out. instead i lurked near the kitchen at the whitney party to grab at every possible hors d'oeuvre that sailed by (dinner). mostly i liked the blinking sign that went from 'art' to 'party' (get it, there's an art to partying). i met that lead singer of phantom planet, didn't realize it, shook his hand and dashed out into the rain. it was too dark to make out anyone. or to make out with anyone.
sleep please. the weekend is almost here. time to catch up on shut-eye.
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| making lists, or, the weekend in review |
[26 May 2009|09:48pm] |
1. i wrote the first e-mail i've liked in ages.
2. got a little star struck watching alexa chung peel at her fingernails next to me when we were sitting pow-wow style at bevan's housewarming party in williamsburg. i think i made the all-time girl cliche move by saying i liked her shoes. but, studded gladiator sandals, can't go wrong with that.
3. was like the rest of the annoying manhattan crowd by running away to the hamptons.
4. well, montauk sunday and southampton monday.
5. but unlike the rest of the annoying manhattan crowd, did not sit stuck in traffic on the way home. it was chilly on the platform while we waited for the train so i pulled on tights right then and there over an alex wang dress so short you could probably see my bum hanging out of it. but i was still in a beach town state of mind, despite the train coming that would suggest otherwise.
6. while the boys played tennis at the southampton estate, i text on my phone and avoided the beer.
7. can't believe i'm sitting in my room with absolutely nothing to do for the first time in seemingly ages right now. absolute perfection.
8. waiting for a text back. this all goes back to my master thesis in progress, 'how text messaging has changed the landscape of modern love.' still waiting to write that 50 page epic.
9. tomorrow will be the second time i get hooked up with sergio rossi heels--to trek uptown in.
10. i thought of high school when we were driving in spm's suv down 27 in the steaming sunshine (i was sandwiched between 3 boys, also can't go wrong with that, one of which had apparently gotten conked over the head with a water bottle the night before) and jimmy eat world came on. those were the days.
11. leaving town in t minus one week.
12. i've developed a smoker's cough and voice. it's that bad. why oh why at the bodega when i bought mango sorbet yesterday did i also pick up a double pack of camels instead of those tortilla chips i wanted? i think because they remind me of drinking iced coffee while walking from east village to west on a radiantly beautiful day.
13. oh wait! that's right--before i left town for the weekend i bought these amazing tom binns studded cuffs from the newly-opened perry street boutique.
14. 'you love the unavailable ones.'
15. obviously.
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[16 May 2009|08:59pm] |
i had this thought today that the real tragedy of existence is the impossibility of true experience, of events or people or moments to be concrete rather than fleeting, so that, like the inhabitants of plato's cave, we are forever relegated to knowing experience—and, in turn, life, that wicked and elusive thing that cannot be pinpointed or explained—as flickering shadows on the wall. we trace events rather than be in them, and those drawings on the wall of the cave are thus our memories, indelible and etched, of moments that are only available to us as reflections of the "true" experience, which we will never know because we will never re-live any specific moment in time again. so how to prevent ourselves from being confined to plato's metaphorical cave, or to convince ourselves that life is this real tangible thing that can be grasped and known and thus, well, lived? we move from event to event, person to person, experience to experience, so that time seems both fluid and present, and in our hunger to seek out the next thing, the next "step," the next natural "progression" in this life that moves from grade school to college to jobs and marriage and family, we forget that everything is slipping us by constantly, second by second, moment by moment, and the things that we work so hard to obtain minute-to-minute is already disappearing before our eyes, because nothing stays, we move through time ruthlessly on our way to death. or is it the other way around?
the weather was 70 degrees today so james and i took a walk through the west village. we talked about the end of an era. later, when i was home and falling asleep mid-evening, i woke up with a start at the turning of dusk with the same sort of fear that used to grip me nightly when i was younger and impossibly afraid of death, because all of a sudden it occurred to me that in three months, i will be leaving new york, and the fear of that was like death, in that the whole reason why dying used to scare me was because it would be leaving the realms of something we'd always known (life) and going somewhere new, but of course it's irrelevant that death is "new" because, well, you're not conscious when you die. but is that the point? the point always seemed to me that life, this thing that we take for granted because we are in it every day, seemingly endlessly and sometimes wholly against our will, could be taken away from us, and for eternity, nonetheless, and we will never return if just for a day or a second or a glimpse of a moment, to simply observe the people passing by on a street corner or just be in a place, thinking and breathing and feeling the air move about in the day. and that to me was endlessly terrifying, one because i don't think humans could ever grasp the idea of eternity since our life spans are limited, and two because in death and only in death will i be wholly alone, forgotten, and erased.
but what was i saying? new york. why is leaving new york like death? because i think that, like life, i have begun to take new york for granted, and i don't just mean the city—which, stoic, and, unlike people, will always be here for me to return or come back to—but i mean the new york that represents youth and freedom and endless possibilities for me, will be over, gone, a painting on the cave wall. never again will i return and know the same people and go the same places and do the same things, never again will i feel the same liberty that i once did, when, at 19 years old with absolutely not a hell of an expectation of grandeur for myself, i thought nothing of the days to come or growing old, thought only of what party to get dressed up for next and what boy i wanted to see. of course there's something absolutely shallow in that but also—don't you get it?—something incredible, because really, you're only going to be this young and in the best city in the world at the best time in your life for this moment, right now, with not a care in the world and nothing to look after.
christ, i'm graduating in 3 days. i need to say nothing about how much that absolutely pains me than when, sitting in my living room today, my phone rang and it was a perfect kiss, that one track that he had played for me back when we were still teenagers technically, and i had said, 'remember this song? those were the good 'ol days, weren't they?' and apparently as i was saying it, his girlfriend of the moment was sitting right there, and i had no idea, and god, how quickly things change.
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[01 May 2009|07:23pm] |
two things happened last night. one being that someone i work with came over to me and amidst the people and the music and the impeccably attractive young lords DJing behind us, he asked what the hell was up with law school, why i didn't do what i wanted to do, because i could do anything i wanted to and be really successful. the second being that later i was at dinner discussing this with somebody else, and he seemed to be of the same consensus, that did i really want to confine myself to the straight and narrow when there seemed to be so much else i could be doing "creatively." he said this very reassuredly while spooning into his lasagna, and all i could think was, 'christ, could you really expect me to stay here for even another year, or six months, dealing with the same fake friends and the same bad men, men like you?' i mean, isn't that the reason i'm leaving, because of men like him? the idea of having to go through each day as if i were waging some sort of personal, emotional war from within this shell of mine that, all my life, had wanted nothing but to just float along complacently, maybe meet a band member and run away with him, and instead got placed into all these scenarios, none of which i imagined myself in, all of which just sort of happened. 'that's the thing about me,' i was saying at yale last weekend in a roomful of people who, for the first time in a long time, felt genuine, 'everything just sort of happens, but there's nothing i could say i actually wanted.' 'you must want something,' one of them was saying. 'nope,' i said. and that was all i could say.
and while i'm waxing poetic on that, i'm in a sort of date debacle tonight with more bad men. off to the nest foundation benefit at bowery hotel. more later.
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| roman holiday. |
[19 Apr 2009|12:45pm] |
a brief respite from the rain and cold this weekend. yesterday was insanely gorgeous, walked around the columbia campus all day with my favorite boys. pretty much spent all day eating, from brunch with james to drinks with the boys to dinner in john jay for the first time since freshman year. it was just the way i remembered it being—like the high school cafeteria, inordinately warm, terrible food, little cliques. then back downtown and over to brooklyn for a barbeque at the yoko devereaux pad/studio/shop-in-one, a pretty little place in east williamsburg with high ceilings and wonderful clothes. andy of yoko d knows how to make a killer spread—there were petit fours and massive olives and cheese and burgers and french onion dip and chocolate cake and vanilla cupcakes with pink icing. then frank tell, who was my date for the evening, disappeared, so me and hector ran over to the east village for a party at this model martin's apartment. i had been told that martin likes to play dress up sometimes but i swear i thought it was a woman when he opened the door. a very gorgeous one. it was dark and they were playing crystal castles and everyone had glow sticks so it was very much like a rave (they were also receiving drug orders like it was one, so.). there, i ran into an 'old friend.' after we watched the champagne pop, we walked home together along the liquid noise and neon of third avenue, watching cars as they drove past. he pointed out cars he'd like to own someday. i couldn't resist a nightcap at lit. you know it's summer when you see your fave doorboy shedding the big parka for a tee. yeah, he looked good.
now it's 12:45pm on a 60 degree day, what could be better than that? about to go to sunday brunch. tonight: one of my best brits is in town, and we are going to do some damage.
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| 8 items or less : site seeing |
[14 Apr 2009|09:07pm] |
1. le french diner: reni introduced me to this place and now it is my favorite. it's so close to my new apartment, too. i remember sitting there across from her at dinner that night and suddenly i felt like she was so smart and so much older than me. i also just finished writing her bio, too.
2. above allen: across from le french diner. there is a beautiful terrace with a view. ann and i went to a party there a few weeks ago, i had met her there after p scooped me from a street corner in his car. it was raining. i'm going for a ronson party this thursday...
3. cooper hotel: i'd never heard of this place until the save bea party, and now it's everywhere. there are panoramic windows and a sort-of unfinished roof that all the b kids, drunk from the open bar, poured onto at 2am any way. it was misting that day and matt k had asked who my boyfriend was. but i loved when those elevator doors opened and we saw everyone we knew.
4. lil frankie's : i like living in this neighborhood because things like this can happen—you can walk into a restaurant and meet somebody's sister and the sister's boyfriend and really feel like you are on some sort of awkward meet-the-family date even though you've had so many dinners with said person and never felt like it was a date.
5. lit: i know i don't technically live here, but i do.
6. greenhouse: when we walked in for the blackbook party, we didn't see anyone we knew. then i said, 'hipsters like basements, right?' so we walked downstairs. and there.
7. south africa: this is not in new york but this is where i will be going, on an all-expenses paid trip, for refinery. this is also where coetzee's disgrace takes place.
8. 18th & 2nd: i walked out onto the sidewalk at 7am watching him take a package from the postman on the steps in just his shorts. the postman had said his name and i think i blushed a little just hearing it. the dawn was just blooming, i was wearing ann's marc jacobs parka, it was very cold. crossing the blocks to my apartment made me realize it's farther than i thought. there were few thoughts in my head, just some yelle lines and ladyhawke lyrics. all i could think was, i cannot be the girl who falls in love with her friend, because then where would i be? i cannot be the girl. i am not the girl.
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| i've got the spirit, lose the feeling. |
[02 Apr 2009|08:52am] |
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i feel like i'm drowning in this. there is a part of me that doesn't want out because 'out' means so many things. i often think, 'but if i left, what will happen to all that beauty? what will happen to all that life?' what will happen when i am not skipping from tribeca office to soho grand to thompson on the lower east side to beast on the lower-lower-east-side to ray's pizza/east village at 3am where, apparently, he had caught me eating a slice of pepperoni and picked me out immediately, torn jeans, asymmetric black coat, fringe scarf and all. and he had said this at lit on saturday night in between sips of vodka soda and that inexplicable scent he carried, the london accent, the fact that when 'disorder' came on i thought of so many things—how i used to sit around my sweaty hot mess of a room in july watching control and thinking of running away from it all and now here is britain coming to me and fucking with my life and creating a rift in a space that i used to consider home. and now it is 9am and i am sitting in the office because that is the only place these days i can seem to think (sad, ain't it?). i'm thinking many things, namely how i need to stop confusing lust with love, sex with affection, moments of intimacy with moments of kindness. last night at 5am they had stumbled home and all i could think was, here you are, again, dear, when just four nights ago we had been picking songs out at bars (that's my favorite thing to do these days), moving between pulp and ian curtis and the smiths with seamless ease, and now for the life of me i cannot get this heart inside me to start moving properly. i remember once p had something to say about working days, how some days are just easier than others, and that's all she could say. i think what it is for me is that all days are equally thrilling, all days filled with all this promise and questions of why i should be the one to have such nice things happen to. i mean there is nothing more i could ask for, is there? remember when i was describing this dream i had a month ago, about having to choose between conde and all these law schools that wanted me? i mean, in a way, that's happened, hasn't it? five for five and associate editor, there isn't anything better than that. but there are moments, and i think this happens with everyone who lives in the city, where you experience some sort of disorientation from too many late nights or too many people or too much back talk. i think come august i will be both the saddest i've ever been and also the sanest.
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[29 Mar 2009|11:04am] |
sometimes people ask me what it is about girls i am so averse to. i think in the end it comes down to how the stabbing can come so quickly and ruthlessly, with seemingly no precedent, no reason, and plenty of inevitable, unavoidable jealousy and hypocrisy. some girls i have met, the really silly ones, are of the virginia woolf path of mind, in somehow believing that through the mere double x chromosome, there is an entire universe of sisterhood to be found, a universe they so lovingly convince themselves are built on opposition to the male sex and female solidarity, of providing warm shoulders to lean on, of being caring and nurturing and motherly and all that because goddamnit the men sure don't know what it's like to be a woman in this world, and the only people who will ever adequetly get that is each other.
but what i have found in my experience is that all relationships between females eventually prove themselves to be just as volatile, fleeting, and transient as relationships with anybody else. aside from the usual insecurities and hypocrisies and the fact that when it comes down to it, you will wreck your entire wall of females just to get what you want from this one specific male, and that all warm shoulders to cry on always come with some sort of self-congratulatory, satisfactory, 'thank god it's my best friend and not me' tinge of subconscious guilt that the girl providing said shoulder does not want to feel but does, helplessly, any way (god i have always found that idea repulsive, girls holding out shoulders for each other, there is something so goddamn self-defeating about that), aside from that—there is also the fact that if you really found yourself looking forward into the future, or even truly sitting down and thinking about it—how many people in this world can you say will really be there for you? you'd be lucky to name one or two. and if you fool yourself into thinking that you have any more than that, and i mean really, if you fool yourself into thinking there is an entire circle of friends who will be there for you, unconditionally, irrevocably, through life and death and hell and high water and in five years or ten, then i ask why it is that people even bother seeking marriage or love if not as a gravitating pole through which to rid themselves of loneliness, which would never exist had you honestly an entire loving, nurturing, 4-or-5-or-even-6-or-7 circle of friends.
david foster wallace had often said that his writing was an attempt to get at the loneliness between people, that the project of his literature was to close the gap on loneliness, that unavoidable and deathly tragic condition of modern life, the microscopic gulf which cannot be crossed between one human hand reaching out for another if for no other reason than the fact that atoms will never truly touch (there, in that tiny space, is loneliness literalized, the inability to truly and ever fully make contact). and because i am used to moving from place to place and from people to people, because i am used to people coming and going, i am going to argue that there is nothing different from a (girl)friend of three years who drops you flat in one day without word or explanation, or of a (girl)friend who you are standing outside your own goddamn apartment one night hearing the most awful things said about you, words you would never imagine coming out of anybody's mouth let alone that of someone who claims to care about you or nurture you, and the male who is nice to you for six months because they like you or are attracted to you or are charmed by you, and then drop you once that attraction fades. in the end, it's all leaving, isn't it? does it matter if you are dropped in three years versus six months, if the dropping of one comes so terribly and brutally, and the other as a simple fact of life? i opt for the latter. in fact, i remember once julio having said to me upon walking into b, 'but you're here now, with people who love you,' and my only thought was 'how silly, really, to imply that anyone working at a bar you frequent could really love you,' but i am thinking now of all those instances of love—right after the fight, 5am, i called somebody and he offered to meet me in the rain, and now here it is 11:30am and i am having coffee in the hotel where one of my favorite boys works and he is taking care of me—crying on d's shoulder in the middle of lit with the crowds swirling around us, those flowers j sent me on a day sunny and bright—and it's true that there is nothing about an extra x chromosome that sparks sensitivity.
well, that was long.
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[09 Mar 2009|07:42pm] |
of course everything comes into focus when you feel it about to slip away. things like walking into a place and knowing everyone there, or seeing somebody you feel like you haven't seen in ages even though it's only been a week. saturday when it first got beautiful i call d and the minute he picks up he says, 'i know, bike ride.' so we go. down bowery past all the hum-colored cabs and buses turning their blinkers on, down the lonely stretches of stuytown and then chinatown with the pathmark where we buy sunkist by the pack and chocolate-covered pretzels for me. sunday i woke up and it was sunny and i made g coffee and we drank it sitting on the window sill with the sunlight everywhere in his gold hair on my lips. walking down unbelievably gorgeous bleecker at the turning of spring is like getting sight for the first time. rojas and i eat truffled eggs, walk through central park. it's raining so he buys an umbrella for us and when we get to the met the newman catches me dead--'like man confronting god for the first time, on all fours, without the crutches of myth or religion or love to guide us.' (something like that). on the museum steps we share a popsicle and i watch all the people coming and going in their gray coats and long hair that catches the mist as it blankets 5th avenue. later that night i'm skipping up to jeremy at the door and he says, 'where've you been? haven't seen you since last week' and then inside of course it's the whole world, the end of the armory show, that yelle song i love that reminds me of a certain person on new year's eve when he came bearing champagne, stella, and a kiss (he was wearing a clean-pressed button-down then, i now remember, and when ce jeu came on i danced through my then empty apartment like a little girl or someone in love).
people ask me if i could leave this behind, and the obvious answer is no. truth is i could stay and do this all my life and meet everyone there ever is to meet and be editor and everything could be fine. but harvard and yale--who would've expected it? certainly not me. certainly not the me of 16 who thought only about boys in bands and running away to go on the road, who had no expectations for herself, life, the who-what-wear-whens. and now it's like something has opened, an endlessness strange and mysterious, a life i could've never imagined for myself. would you believe me if i said it seems, to me, any way, a girl at 21 with no delusions and no illusions but certainly little hope for anything in the future (there is no hope, just living), that those two places represent some strange, magical sector of life that i thought was not meant for me, could not be meant for me. and now here it is, and new york in springtime is beautiful, and this time next year i'll be gone.
you know, like that movielife song.
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| the past week. |
[25 Feb 2009|08:52pm] |
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cold went from bad to worse from no sleep. indochine for vladimir restoin-roitfeld exhibit afterparty a clusterfuck. justin timberlake sighting. i skip seeing the virgins with my two best girls on valentine's day (free ticket, sold out show) and go to le baron instead with my best boy. at 3am we eat pizza at ray's and he is taking photos across the table. skipping down second avenue early morning with all the streetlamps on talking libertine and trovata makes me think i can never leave this town, and sometimes i still think maybe i never will (but let's be honest, come september this is all history). mischa barton two nights in a row. i develop a crush on jimmy fallon. no michelle o at jason wu. preen is so good it sends shivers down my spine. kanye stalks me around fashion week. during y-3 timo and i are benched on the bleachers (no kidding, really). missed leighton at the erin wasson x rvca presentation, probably because i was 7 jello shots in. phillip lim is a rock concert. got a job offer. oh, and yale called. chloe tonight and then sleep all weekend. too tired to post pictures even though i'd meant to. hello d.c.
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| fashion week. |
[14 Feb 2009|09:34pm] |
ok, so i almost never do this. meaning, i like to keep my journal in a bubble that runs somewhere between fantasy and fiction, so other than writing romance into bad love stories or love into seedy beach towns, i'm no good at blogging. but, it's my last fashion week before cambridge in the fall, i'm addicted to twitter, and--why not?
follow my/refinery29's twittering at:
www.twitter.com/refinery29
today was: patrik ervell, vena cava, alexander wang, frank tell, threeasfour, elise overland. in that order.
at patrick ervell: mcginley models, somebody from columbia, a new crush, lots of cute boys, terrence koh in amazing sunglasses.
more later..
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| alright harvard, you and me. we'll make a place. |
[11 Jan 2009|01:58am] |
lately i've been on the fence, tossing around options, trying to decide. and i think i've decided. i need to leave this city. not for me, not for cambridge, not for harvard. for my sanity.
but knowing me, psychopaths have a way of finding me. does something about me scream, 'if you're a jerk, please, come to me. please'?
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| last night, at an opening at the team gallery. |
[09 Jan 2009|11:21pm] |
we are standing in front of some perhaps-hipster-downtown-cool-kid-concocted piece (which makes what i'm about to say all the more ridiculous, but perhaps the artist wasn't a hipster, well, at least i'm hoping not), a giant thing of yellow and black. one part yellow. one part black. diagonal. i'm not sure what made me react this way, what made me decide to say it.
'it's kind of devastating, don't you think?'
he stares. 'are you kidding?'
'no, i mean only slightly devastating. but nonetheless.'
later we're walking around looking at everyone instead of everything and i say, 'well perhaps i should do all my new pick-ups in art galleries.'
'yeah, sure, you should stand in front of a mcginley and say, it's kind of devastating, don't you think?'
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| i'm great at simulating instances of intimacy. |
[09 Jan 2009|11:15pm] |
rarely do i think about how little meaning everything holds until i start to pack my things. i do this often because i am always moving from place to place. packing is a process because i own many things, two closets worth of dresses, 36 boxes of shoes, a suitcase full of purses. i am careful with my possessions because i have been told that i do not treasure things enough. sometimes with my parents i will do a show-and-tell in the middle of packing, 'this is a vintage balenciaga, here is a fall '08 herve leger that i purchased for a grand at the boutique on madison.'
i remember i had been at a party once and somebody had come up and said, 'i know about you.' just like that, no hello, nothing, just i know about you.
'what do you mean?' i had asked.
'you are the kind of girl who defines herself by the clothing she wears and the places she goes and the men she’s slept with. what you don’t realize is that one day you will lose all that beauty and nobody will want to sleep with you anymore, and then what will you do?'
i think i walked away then and left the party and hailed a cab and went home and crawled into bed and cried for a while. then i searched my room for traces of self-definition: a movie stub from a first date, a plaid men’s button-down from a brief fling, a belt from my first high school boyfriend. i thought about throwing them away. instead i tucked them into a box and marked it EMPTY. that box does not ever come out during show-and-tell. i do not like to think about it as i pack and unpack.
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| goodbye, columbus. hello, east village. |
[03 Jan 2009|04:56pm] |
i like him best when he is sleeping and still, i realize that night in his room when i am enclosed between the narrow wall and his body. in chemistry you learn that two atoms can never fully come together because they will always repel each other. i place a finger on his skin and hold it there and wonder about that, the microscopic gap that i cannot see. the indirectness of experience, claudia rankine called it. in the morning when the alcohol has worn off he will start on trying to get me out of his room, will work hard on getting distance between us, will keep his eyes on the ground like a dog who knows he has done wrong. there is a terrible horizon in him beyond which he cannot leap, michael ondaatje had written. i reconfigure this sentence in my head quietly. there is a terrible horizon in him beyond which I cannot see. best to keep moving, i think.
second avenue is wonderful at night. i am still thinking of that moment, when we are walking home 3am against the green of the stoplights and the stop-and-go of downtown traffic.
(home.)
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| hello, cambridge. |
[25 Dec 2008|01:54pm] |
a week or so ago i was sitting at beast with someone who has lately become one of my favorite people and he was explaining to one of his friends, 'well xiyin here just graduated, got a new job, is moving into a new apartment.' and the friend said, 'it's like your whole life is starting.'
but now i'm left to wonder if my whole life is starting, or if these next 9 months will be, in some way, an epilogue to what i can only now perhaps sentimentally and rather melodramatically, didion-style, refer to as four years of magical thinking. i was walking through campus the other day, taking everything in, noting the curious beauty of the way the trees rose up into the sky and the clouds scraping against the pillars of low. i was thinking of how miraculous columbia is. you cannot distill the past three and a half years into one instant if you tried, but i am thinking it has something to do with closing the gap on closeness.
'do you find,' he had asked me that night in a very narrow bed that wasn't made for two (yet the narrowness of those beds is what i loved about it, the forced shoving together of two people who would have no excuse at closeness otherwise), 'that you often confuse friendship with love and sex?'
well, i thought, why shouldn't i, if that's how i've learned to grow up?
later after beast with prior-mentioned favorite-person, we went back to his brownstone and at 3am stood in his kitchen drinking vodka on the rocks and i thought, 'god, could there be a time and place in my life when i would not be walking out into a east village morning to catch a cab at 4am and go home to sleep? could there be a time when i am not moving between lounge to club to cab to hidden-basement-door?'
the new york landscape is like a volcano ground--always shifting, always changing. if i were to leave for three years and return, it would be a whole different city.
and yet isn't that what i've been so good at all along? isn't it time to move on? i wrote a piece recently in which i compared people and cities. 'and men are just like cities, each one brief and stunning. you get to know a city from the inside out. and when I leave, i like to think of them as the way they were then, as a destination or a return that can be reached and held again if only I could go back in time. but we all know that time is merciless, that it inexorably moves forward. so why try?'
(and this piece sold out a lot of my old friend-love-objects, i had a thought that maybe i would post them here and really sell them out. maybe i still will.)
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[14 Dec 2008|03:47am] |
in 5 days i'm packing up my things and i won't come back. all i'll have is the memory of being in his room, back when i was 18 and the world seemed open and full and every street corner a distant memory of a place i'd known but was also discovering for the first time, every open window an outlet into somebody else's life, our open window a journey into illicit love, forbidden and foreign and new. we used to kneel on the bed, knees skinning the mattress, and kiss until we got heady, i remember it was october and the leaves had changed and the only thing i asked for that night before i made the move was his sweater, not if it was okay or if the room was too cold or too warm or too awkward for his liking. all i'll have is the image of butler in my mind, before it got too collegiate and boring and stuffy, back when the steps to that goddamn library meant a boy leaning against some imitation of an ancient roman pillar, book in his hand (was it homer or foucault or woolf? god all the core courses blend together), like waiting through endless hours of classes just to have somebody to go home to. all i'll remember is the freshman dorm building and how it used to mean endless afternoons of death cab and interpol and tv on the radio spinning through the long threads of sunlight that dangled rays of gold into our hair as we pulled the covers over us and inside it was a new world, shot through with sun, translucent with laughter.
and then all i'll have is these words in my head, 'look who i brought!' and how river meant something completely different, how, back last december when everything felt ugly and cold and dead there were 3 boys who saved me from all of that, and i mean from all of it, simply with one perfect record of a perfect kiss which i used to beg him to play over and over again for me, hearing every single synth chord in its highs and lows, wondering how out of all the songs in all of the world this boy could discover this one like he was some deranged genius who spun magic out of vinyl. they would drink beer and do drugs and there would always be just one light on, very faint and yellow, they really hated light, and i loved to stare at their shadows, thin and gaunt, as it moved across the wall, as if i were in a new and mysterious land that only smelled of cumin or cinnamon or something heady like the way i imagine spice racks going if you spilled one across the supermarket floor. like if you had stumbled across a heap of ancient treasure and only left with the best of the gold. like if you took his skin (and god i mean back then his skin was all i thought about, how it stretched across soft and god-like) and ran your hands through it as if you were remembering your mother's favorite velvet dress, the pure comfort of it, the coming back to your lost object from childhood.
but really is that all i'll have left from what supposedly is supposed to be the best time of my life? i think i do this thing where i'm really dying to grow up but every second of this dying to be older i keep looking back and i'm just killing for moments in the past, i'm talking 14 and drawing hearts on windows in steamed-up cars overlooking the lake or 17 watching the boys at band practice thinking i'll never meet a more perfect set of good lookers as they sauntered about in sauconys and tight jeans with caribeeners dangling off the belt loops (green and silver what a sliver, to this day i will gravitate towards anybody with a caribeener, it's a thing i have) or 20 and licking opium off my fingers from the edges of a hagaan-daaz carton (vanilla chocolate chunk). last year i used to sit in his room drunk until the rest of the boys came home and one of them had this saying, i think it was 'what are we going to do now gang, what are we up to now gang,' i loved the sound of that word 'gang' as if we were all a part of something. and this year he only has one chair, in front of his computer, where sometimes i like to sit as i watch him in his bed, thinness and bones in an american-apparel hoodie with the sleeves flipped out. a few days ago he really went at it and said perhaps this was all an omen, that if we never saw each other again it would be for the best, and i did my trick in which i looked up to the ceiling to keep from crying but apparantly guys had picked up on this trick that girls do a long time ago, he figured it all out, this looking up and letting the eyes dry out.
because in four days there will be no more of this watching. no matter what they tell you just remember this: being 21 is no fun, it's no pleasure at all.
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[16 Nov 2008|02:04am] |
"you can take the girl out of d.c, but you can't take d.c out of the girl."
apparently, the reason i'm having issues is because i've been so thoroughly spoiled in high school by having the best possible looking friend group ever? it's true that i haven't met guys more attractive since.
so right now i could either take the plunge and do this and make my 16-year-old self proud, or i could...not.
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[01 Nov 2008|11:10pm] |
in disgrace, coetzee's anti-hero, professor david lurie, is found saying one thing after having been accused of forcing sex upon his student, which was that he found the whole affair "enriching."
i'm thinking of small moments now that accumulate to something larger. like: the room was dark and he had just put on cause=time. he comes in the room with a tie looped askew around the nape of his neck, pulling at his skin with one hand, smelling of comme des garcons cologne. i sit up and ask, 'who is this, again?' it was the first time i'd heard broken social scene. i was 16.
or: letting the sound of his voice fill up inside my brain, treading space in between the lightness of his fingers and the yearning lilt of his voice. in the dark he looks exactly like the person i had wanted five years ago, back when i was younger and less bold and impossibly romantic.
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[26 Oct 2008|08:30pm] |
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all i have are these memories, and i want to remember all of them, each of them, forever.
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blinkmexo's journal