Sunday, August 16th

I wake up at seven all alone in my fluffy white bed. My mouth tastes like blood and it hurts to open my eyes and there’s this dreadful lingering feeling left over from last night’s dream like I am being watched or something. I reach one arm out from under the warm duvet into the frigid atmosphere of my crypt and blindly feel around the nightstand. Locate Tom’s Prada sunglasses and put them on. Locate a joint and light it. Smoke the thing. Pet the cat. Let the high settle in, wait for my nerves to follow suit, then push the blackout curtains open three or four (courageous) inches.

Push the laptop open too, and quickly commence the nauseating weekly ritual of rereading and rewriting last week’s events to avoid giving my brain the chance to figure out something less pressing to address. I edit fastidiously for three consecutive hours, only breaking at the sudden onslaught of a shrieking choir of electric gardening tools floating in through my open bedroom window from the yard below. Homicidal, I slip on ballet flats and the pair of Los Angeles Apparel capri sweatpants I have lately become emotionally dependent on and flee the premises.

The air outside sits hot and low over Hollywood and I feel lonely. So I call Cal and talk quietly into the phone while slowly pacing up and down the narrow aisles of Playboy Liquor, where an industrial-sized fan oscillates by the register and “Hung Up” by Madonna plays softly overhead.

Hi, I whisper.

Hi. Why are you whispering?

Because I am in an empty store and I feel shy.

Then why did you call me?

Because I am in an empty store and I feel shy.

I keep the phone pressed between my shoulder and ear while purchasing pink coconut water and yerba mate from the fat Indian guy, who, after six weeks straight of telling me no, sorry, at last has five percent virginia tobacco Juul pods back in stock. I tap my pointer finger against the glass display case containing them, smiling excitedly at him. He lifts two packs, waves them at me and smiles excitedly back. What a tender moment. I press my card against the till and listen while Cal tells me that he wants to go shoot his new Beretta later this afternoon at a gun club somewhere up in Santa Clarita.

Do you want to come with me?

Is Simon meeting you there?

Yes.

Then no.

What’s wrong with Simon?

Nothing is wrong with Simon.

Do you want to come over later?

Maybe.

I lay in bed with the curtains shut and the air conditioning running from noon to sunset. I listen to the Henry Mancini Breakfast at Tiffany’s soundtrack on a loop and edit my diaries slowly, getting high a lot and wasting precious time a lot and getting up and going into the kitchen a lot to stare into my refrigerator full of mostly rotten food. I eat a thick slice of raw cheddar cheese, three dates and a piece of Tartine toast coated in probably five hundred calories worth of salted French butter for breakfast at eight p.m. I drink cold coconut milk straight from the cardboard carton and then return to bed, where I write and writhe around some more until eventually, thank you God, the work becomes legible enough to publish.

And just after it’s published, I feel good and light another joint and pick my phone up and switch Do Not Disturb off for the first time since who knows when. Two missed calls from my mother. One from Cal. And, spiking my heart rate to the moon, five from Tom. The first at two o’clock, the second at six, then three in a row, fast, at a quarter to ten. I blink at the call log. His name in bold red text. I get wracked with paranoia for an hour, then sadness for two.

I imagine him all alone in his sad apartment with his sad dog, reaching deep within himself for the will to bypass his own colossal ego and (irrationally, in my opinion, but that’s an aside…) hurt feelings to pick up the phone and call me five times. Involuntarily, the psychological mechanism my brain has long relied upon whilst engaged in conflict with a complex man activates. I begin to picture him as a child. I imagine Tom at nine, crying over his dead father. Getting hit by the man his mother started dating a couple of months after the funeral. Running away to his grandmother, who had no plumbing but did have a tiny kitchen counter television that could play Nickelodeon. I imagine him small and afraid. Vulnerable and innocent. I replace adult Tom with the baby he once was and become so overwhelmed with compassion for him that it becomes nearly impossible to do anything but forgive him. It’s like a magic trick.

That little black and white first-grade yearbook picture of my father that I stole from my grandmother’s vanity when I was ten or eleven. The way I kept it in my nightstand to look at before bed. I’d hold the little wrinkled print in my hands and stare into my father’s tiny first-grade face, at his smile and his eyes (which have always been the same smile and eyes), at his school uniform bowtie, think about him and cry.

Monday, August 17th

It’s ten in the morning and so hot and bright in my bedroom. I wake up sweating with no memory of falling asleep to all of the lights still switched on and the air conditioning not running. The cat looks at me and meows. I meow back, get up to feed her, then crawl back into bed. Roll and smoke a joint. Try and contemplate what to do about my boyfriend. But none of my contemplation results in any quick conclusions, so I give up fast and resolve to forget all that. Why focus on ‘what to do’ when I can focus on remaining radically passive instead?

Later, after an hour or two of languishing around my slovenly apartment, I begin to feel sick of the state of things. Sick of lying in blood-stained sheets, sick of looking up at cobwebs. I think about tomorrow: my birthday. I picture myself at midnight, one year older and surrounded by the same squalor and filth. The picture debases me. I decide that the least I could do for myself (spiritually speaking) is clean up a little, pull my capri sweatpants back on over my underwear and leave the mess in pursuit of bleach, laundry detergent and caffeine.

The early afternoon sky above the courtyard is baby blue and warm and everything smells like jasmine. I cross Franklin, wander up a winding little street into the hills until I find my car, then hit the gas and drive east down Sunset to the big Target on Western. A Miles Davis song plays on KJazz 88.1 FM and my mood evens. I park on the top floor of the big structure and keep Tom’s sunglasses on while I shop. I look at no one. Speak to no one. I tap my card against the self checkout robot for twenty-something dollars in exchange for one gallon of Clorox and one gallon of Tide.

Once returned to my apartment, I become almost immediately possessed with the spirit of sterile, neurotic perfectionism and am unable to exorcise it until everything inside is bleached, dusted, washed, dried, arranged in its place just so and practically gleaming. I wash and dry the bed linens, the bath linens, the kitchen linens and two loads of clothing. I collect four or five full-sized trash bags worth of empty cups and empty bottles and empty cans and empty Juul pods and torn off price tags and receipts and bags and to-go boxes and crumpled tissues and paper towels and broken hangers and scraps of paper and disposable razors and dust bunnies and then stuff everything into the already over-filled courtyard dumpsters outside, crudely and quickly, hoping none of my neighbors are watching. I clear out the litter box. The refrigerator. Each of the hall closets and the bedroom closet too. I sweep every inch of floor, countertop and baseboard. I vacuum up every last cat hair and silky bit of cobweb. I empty each and every bathroom cabinet, wipe their interiors with bleach, toss half of the nonsensical products previously stored there into the bin and then rearrange the necessities in a way that aesthetically pleases me. I repeat this process precisely with all of the cabinets in the kitchen, a particularly punishing phase of the afternoon’s undertaking, given the number of cabinets (twenty-two, I count) and volume of nonsense stuffed within them.

Particularly punishing but particularly gratifying, too. As it goes.

And by the time I feel satisfied with the newly ascetic state of things, it’s half past eleven and I’ve ingested six cups of Bustelo espresso via the Bialetti and smoked so many joints to stabilize the mood and inhaled so much sodium hypochlorite and ammonia and synthetic fragrance and formaldehyde, probably, and eaten so little and hydrated so infrequently that I am trembling, on the verge of collapse. I see stars in the kitchen and nearly miss slicing the tip of my left pointer finger off with a butcher knife whilst halving myself an avocado for dinner. I eat it out of the shell with sea salt and a spoon, sitting on the cold, clean kitchen tile with my back against the sink.

The phone rings at 11:59 p.m. and it’s Cal.

Hi, I sigh.

Happy birthday.

Thanks.

How does it feel?

I wasn’t born until 2PM. So I don’t know yet.

Well, it will be midnight in about five seconds… four… three… two…

Tuesday, August 18th

…one…

I can’t feel it.

What are you doing?

Nothing, cleaning…

Do you want to go to Fluffy’s?

No, I’m fat.

Later, after hanging up with Cal and then sitting for an uncharacteristically short soak in my newly immaculate bath, I feel slightly restored from my cleaning induced ailments. I sit in the bathroom sink wrapped up in my towel with my knees crossed, plucking my eyebrows meticulously with my forehead pressed against the mirror, vaguely restless.

Half an hour or so into the tedious ritual, just a few minutes before one a.m., there’s a knock at the front door and I do not have to wonder who it is. Tom. I watch my own eyes widen in the mirror and then quickly crawl down from the sink, turn the lights out, lock myself into the bedroom and try to remember whether or not I shut the big window in the kitchen. I creep over the creaking hardwood floorboards slowly, paranoid, imagining Tom outside on my doorstep somehow defying the physics of sound, hearing my footsteps. I fasten the blackout curtains closed tighter than they already were and then lie still in bed. I press my hand against my chest and stare into the darkness, paralyzed, listening, alternating between feeling afraid of him and cruel for not moving towards him.

He knocks insistently for a while, stops, then starts up again. The scene continues on and off and on and off until nearly two a.m. And when it finally ends, it takes another hour for me to quit shaking and catch my breath. The fear dissipates slowly and so does most of the guilt, and by the time I am tranquil enough to remember to get high again, my mind is empty of everything but useless hypotheticals. Maybe I miss him. I lie in bed sleepless. I get stoned and don’t feel anything. I spend a little while fantasizing about ways I might get my hands on a bottle of benzodiazepines before giving up and cursing my hermetic lifestyle and strange, antisocial tendencies for making it difficult for me to quickly acquire drugs in delicate moments like these.

At five a.m., before the first light of dawn can break, I tire of lying awake with myself and crawl out of bed. I flip all of the lights back on in the apartment and set “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” by Stereolab to play on a loop and do not feel anything about the potential of waking my neighbor, who never seems to feel anything about the potential of waking me. I brew a six cup pot of espresso on the stove and drink half of it, black, sitting at the kitchen nook with my laptop until I become dizzy and nauseous and desperate for air.

And when I get up to push the living room windows open, I see something pink and puffy sitting in the fresh light of the morning on my doorstep. I unlock each latch of the front door and find a pink and white striped cake box, a few dozen pink peonies, a bottle of champagne and a little cream colored box containing a handwritten letter with my name on the envelope and a glossy 4 x 6 print of a picture Tom took of me in Palm Springs. I put the cake and champagne in the refrigerator and the peonies in a vase with water and flower food on the kitchen table. I bring the letter he wrote back into bed with me and read it one thousand times before folding it up and slipping the envelope beneath my pillow. I cry a little. Sigh a lot. Look out at the shimmering palm trees and the sunrise through the bedroom windows, sky like orange sherbet.

My mother calls at seven a.m. to wish me a happy birthday, and when I pick up she sounds surprised.

You’re awake?

I am.

What time did you get up?

I haven’t slept.

Are you alone?

Yes.

Are you still coming to Las Vegas?

I don’t know yet.

Is there a chance?

No. Maybe. Yes. I don’t know. I just don’t know yet.

What are you going to do today?

Um. Can I call you back?

My father calls and I don’t pick up. My aunt calls too, and so does Gabriel, for the first time in months. Also Jack and my brother and my gay cousin and Cal, again, who leaves a voicemail asking me to send him a picture of the couch whenever it gets delivered. I pick up the phone for none of them. Jamie texts me something nice, and so do a random slew of other lost friends and acquaintances with extraverted spirits. The type of people who make a point to acknowledge the birthdays of even the most distant of friends. I am not that type of person.

The only person I pick up the phone for all afternoon is Ricky, the delivery guy from St. Vincent de Paul, who calls at three o’clock to tell me that he is twenty minutes away from Hollywood with my couch.

Incredible, I say.

Yes ma’am.

Do you think you could carry it inside for me? For like, twenty bucks?

Yes ma’am.

And twenty minutes later, there Ricky is, idling on my street in his big truck with my fluffy white couch wrapped up in tape and plastic. He wheels the thing inside on two dollies, positions it where I want it in the living room, then waits awkwardly by the door while I rummage through my purse for the cash I promised him. After he leaves, I remove the plastic, disinfect everything, send a picture to Cal with a message that says thank you baby, then collapse into the cushions and sigh. Feels nice.

I am not sitting there for more than two or three minutes before there’s someone on my doorstep again. And I’m thinking it’s Ricky, must be, but it isn’t. It’s Tom, looking right at me through the open window. And something about the scenario is so ridiculous, all of that crying and trembling and hiding from him I did last night, only to be caught face to face like this in broad daylight. I start to smile, I can’t help it, and Tom starts smiling too. Here we go again.

I unlock the door and let him in. He’s wearing blue jeans and a white tee shirt and his hair is clean and he smells like marijuana and laundry detergent and I decide that maybe I do still love him. Neither of us say anything, we just start kissing on my brand new couch, take each other’s clothes off and have sex. And when it’s over, he apologizes for last week like he means it, tears in his eyes and everything, a truly touching performance, then looks at me seriously and tells me that I don’t have to forgive him right away, but that I do have to decide, quickly, whether or not I want to join him for the evening he has planned.

Okay, I shrug.

Okay? He looks stunned.

Fun over principals, I say, nodding.

And he nods too. Slowly at first, then fast.

Fun over principals, he repeats, grinning.

I grin back.

He instructs me to feed the cat a generous dinner and pack whatever I’d like to spend the night away from the apartment.

Spend the night where?

I can’t tell you that.

Then how am I supposed to…

Can I do it for you? He asks.

So I let him. Light a joint and sit in the center of my bed feeling vaguely amused by the sound of him clanging the hangers and drawers around in my closet. And when he reemerges, he’s holding the pair of Jeffrey Campbell tortoiseshell heeled slides my mother bought me at Nordstrom earlier this summer and a tiny black dress with a short hemline and a halter neck.

That’s it? I laugh.

That’s it.

I follow him out through the courtyard in my sweatpants and bralette with nothing but my bag, feeling kind of hollow and detached from myself and the world around me, the palm trees and the cracked asphalt beneath my feet. I sink into Tom’s passenger seat and watch him merge onto the 101-South, headed towards Downtown. He plays “Junk Of The Heart (Happy)” by The Kooks and turns the volume up loud and yells over the chorus to tell me that he spent all of last week away from me pouring over my music, looking through all of the playlists I made on Spotify (Do you… realize that those are public? He asks. There are hundreds of them and some are… strange…) and listening to the songs and wondering what I like about each of them, wondering what they mean to me, thinking of me, missing me, wanting to feel close to me.

You stalked my music? I ask.

Yes.

Romantic.

Yes.

Tom pulls into the valet of the InterContinental Hotel, a huge and smooth canopy driveway made of glass that sits right below the sleek, looming glass and steel curving skyscraper. I get out of the car with a lit joint and the feeling like I am sinning but having fun doing it in my stomach.

The tallest building on the entire West Coast baby, Tom says. Fuck it, I am bringing you to the top of the world for your birthday.

And it’s not the Chateau Marmont. No, certainly not. And it is not very me either. But it is very expensive. And deeply Tom.

I watch him hand the keys to the valet, a very old and very bald man who instructs us to take the elevator up to the seventieth floor, where we will find the lobby.

Seven-TEE-ith, the old man pronounces carefully, as not to be mistaken for seventh or seventeenth.

Seven-TEE-ith, Tom mimics quietly into my ear, pulling me into the elevator by the bra strap.

The ride upstairs is fast and nauseating, but all of that nausea is quickly forgotten or at least replaced with vertigo and awe upon stepping out of the elevator doors and into the lobby: a huge, viciously modern space with spotless floor to ceiling windows and a perfect, three hundred and sixty degree view of Los Angeles.

I feel like Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation, I say to Tom. But Tom has never seen Lost in Translation and he is unsure of who Scarlett Johansson is. Bless him.

The atmosphere is sterile and grey. Like an airport or a hospital or a sanitarium, a really expensive one with private funding, or maybe a modernist building at a liberal arts school. And then there’s the view, so dramatic that it almost doesn’t register as real. The man at the front desk asks for Tom’s ID, hands him two key-cards and points us towards the elevators. Floor sixty-five, he says, winking.

So I follow Tom back into the nauseating elevator five floors down and through the long hallway to our room at the end of the floor. Tom clicks the key card to the lock and swings open the door, revealing a sprawling one bedroom suite with glass walls and a giant bed and a fireplace and kitchen counter covered in champagne and pink roses. I scream. Tell him that he’s crazy. Then immediately sit on the ledge of the floor by the massive window-wall and let myself become disoriented, staring down at the city below. The smog is thick and the rooftop pools glitter like tiny sapphires from up above.

Just wait until night time, Tom says, popping the champagne.

We connect Spotify to the big television and listen to Curren$y and undress and lie together by the window, taking turns swigging straight from the bottle despite the glasses sitting in the kitchen. I get drunk quickly and feel dizzy while Tom tries to engage me in a serious conversation about the state of our relationship. We watch the sunset through the window, drunk and in awe, then have make up sex on the bed and on the living room couch and on the carpet in front of the window till dark. And when it’s over, I stand on the cold marble tile looking in the mirror and find my neck, arms and thighs spotted with thick pink fingerprint marks I suspect will quickly turn to bruises.

Wednesday, August 19th

At midnight, we eat magic mushrooms for dinner and then wander downstairs and all around, through the empty, vast first floor of the hotel and then out into the dark streets of Downtown for a few frightening minutes before becoming overwhelmed with the dominating feeling of the big buildings and all of the suffering people that live and sleep on the concrete below them. We return to our paradisiacal suite to stare out the view and undress and touch some more and eventually drag the big expensive mattress off of its wooden bedframe and push it up against the big bedroom window and fall asleep there tangled up together, still shrooming, sometime around four a.m.

I sleep like a drunk princess and wake up on the edge of the world with a tender throat from being choked during sex to Tom’s eight a.m. alarm. He leaves me in our floor-bed to take a work call from the living room. I push the comforter low and lie still in my pink bra and underwear on the mattress, sweating champagne and staring out the window and going in and out of consciousness until ten a.m.

Later, breakfast at the lounge in the sky. Tom and I sit across from each other in our pajamas at a tiny white table on top of the world in a room that looks like it belongs somewhere inside of Cedars Sinai. We drink orange juice and cappuccinos and eat eggs with sausage and bacon and all kinds of fruit. Pineapple and mango and papaya and cantaloupe and honeydew. We ask the guy at the front desk to extend our checkout till noon and he smiles at us passionlessly and says will do. So we take the elevator back to our sixty-fifth floor room and fill the cavernous bathtub with hot water and Byredo bodywash and run the jets until the tub is filled with fluffy white bubbles and get in. We hit our vapes and drink fifteen dollar minibar Modelos and discover that the bathroom mirror has an inlaid television. Delightful. We put South Park on and turn the volume up and laugh and don’t get dry off or check out until the maids come knocking.

In the car on the way back to Hollywood, Tom looks at me and smiles.

What? I ask.

I was just thinking… you know… feeling kind of sad that we have to leave, but then I remembered…

Remembered…?

Tomorrow night we are going to Las Vegas.

We’re still going to Las Vegas?

Of course we are still going to Las Vegas.

You didn’t cancel it?

Of course I didn’t cancel it.

You’re insane.

What did you say yesterday? Fun over principals?

And we laugh.

Tom parks his car on my block in Hollywood a little before two. I lead him inside and he compliments the sterile state of things, tells me that he didn’t get the chance to address the newfound cleanliness with me yesterday, when I first let him in. There were more important things that needed attention. But holy shit, he says, pointing at the spotless kitchen sink. He sits at the wooden table with his laptop while I brew espresso on the stove and pick through the refrigerator for lunch. I slice an apple and the rest of the raw cheddar cheese and collect the last three figs and a few dates to match and lay everything out on the glass table in the living room. We migrate to the couch and sit on opposite ends with our laptops and pass a joint back and forth and graze. It’s so hot out and nothing makes sense in my life but the mood is good and the light is lovely and the pepper trees are swaying and weeping against the window panes, shedding tiny pink berries all over the doorstep.

Just after sunset, we leave Hollywood for the west side. Tom speeds down the 101 and then the 110 and then the 10 while I stare out the front windshield at the baby yellow moon, perfectly split in half and hanging low in the sky. Cal texts me a picture of his hands gripping the steering wheel of a Ferrari on set somewhere in Burbank. Gabriel texts call me back. I sigh, flick Do Not Disturb on, close my eyes. Tom and I walk the dog for an hour around Venice in the dark, passing no one but a homeless guy near the library. He is moving fast, pushing a Ralph’s shopping cart wrapped in bougainvillea and Christmas lights. When we cross paths, he looks at the dog and says hello baby. And the dog wags his tail back.

And later, sometime around eleven, after two joints on the black leather couch and an hour of missionary sex in his bed, Tom and I head back to my apartment. We listen to “LES” by Childish Gambino in the car and he laughs at me for knowing all of the lyrics.

What? You were never a teenage girl in California, you wouldn’t get it.

And there’s nowhere to park within half a mile of my apartment, so we park way far down at a meter on Sunset Boulevard and then run up the hill to the bungalow together holding hands. Inside, we undress and take the cake he left on my doorstep the other night out of the fridge and eat it in bed with pink plastic forks. We smile a lot and talk about tomorrow, Las Vegas, while 2001: A Space Odyssey plays without sound on the TV. We fall asleep intertwined in our underwear with the pink and white cake box smashed between us on the mattress right before Hal gets homicidal.

Thursday, August 20th

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It is four o’clock in the morning on Sunday, August 23rd and I am writing to you from Las Vegas, Nevada, currently posed like an odalisque in my baby rib thong on a seafoam velvet loveseat shaped like a seashell in the middle of a twelfth-floor room with a fountain view at the world-renowned Bellagio hotel with my toxic boyfriend. You know the one. I haven’t seen Los Angeles since Thursday and I haven’t slept, at least not really, since my birthday and my head is still swimming with last night’s hallucinogens. I have a deep desert tan and a sex bruise the size of a clementine on the left side of my neck.

The journey that precedes this present moment is something that I would like to call indescribable but won’t, because I did in fact spend all week describing it in my notes and will most certainly be sharing those noted descriptions with you, my dear readers, very soon. Very soon, yes, but not today. Which is the disappointing thesis of this postcard.

But do not fear. Next Sunday, I shall return with double the words. This week and next’s entries, all compiled into one egregiously long epic two-week long tale of drug abuse, rough sex and tender moments. The diary will span three cities, three hotel rooms, a series of altered states, a stockpile of vapid epiphanies and one thousand bad decisions. And it’s coming to your inbox soon. I just need a few hot seconds to recover first, okay? My body is filled with magic mushrooms and tequila and room service and regret.

The truth is that I am in love with Las Vegas and all of her whorish excess. She is abject and remorseless about it. So seductive. A nocturnal being. An inhabitable dream. A plastic fantasy. A luminous hologram in the middle of the sterile, silent desert that undresses for you, spreads her legs and begs you to touch her, all the while knowing your fingers will pass right through. (Love that trick. Fall for it every time.) She is made up of illusory material. She is all special effects. All neon lights and lab diamonds and smoke and mirrors and money. She will never fulfill you but you love her anyway. Give her everything anyway. All of your money. The deed to your house. The key to your diary. There is just something about her. The kind of girl that makes you want to leave your whole life behind, believe in brand new things, holistically reinvent your way of being. Her presence is a narcotic. To love her is to choose fun over principles. And it’s all too easy to choose fun over principles when you are a girl like me. In fact, it’s practically irresistible. I am never not looking for a good reason to suspend my disbelief, abandon my moral judgement and give myself entirely to something fleeting. And Las Vegas is such a good reason. But more on our sexless lesbian relationship next week.

But for now, since I love you so much and would rather die than let you go hungry, I have compiled below some incredibly blurry and poorly shot images I made with my new camera to accompany the delayed text you will see next week.

I hope you like them. Or at least can make them out. I’m working on it.

Pray for me,

Girl Insides

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Sunday

Following a hot and sleepless night full of bleeding and bloating and abdominal spasming and wincing into the pillow and dreading all of the editing I left myself to do for this morning, I wake up at eight a.m. sharp with a headache and an acute desire for solitude. Tom senses my awake-ness and comes to. Stretches. Lights a joint. Tells me that he dreamt of me all night and that in his dream, we travelled to the edge of the world together. It was the edge of the world, but the subconscious rendered it to look kind of like Kauai, he says. He tells me that his mother was there too, and that the three of us were standing in the middle of a big crowd. There was a moment where we were separated, and his mother pointed me out from afar and said to someone, that tall girl is Tom’s girlfriend. He always wanted a tall girlfriend but I never thought he would have one.

Around eleven, sick of squirming around the bed with my diaries in a pool of my own blood, how fitting, I ask Tom if he’d like to walk to the liquor store with me for tampons and yerba mate and pink coconut water and he does, so we leave the bungalow together quickly in our pajamas and purchase those things exactly from the fat guy who never has any good news for me about the Juul pod stock. Tom and I walk back uphill and then lie side by side in bed, sipping yerba mate and discussing what to do with the afternoon while I roll a king sized joint on my laptop. The cat naps in the open windowsill and the air coming in feels tepid and lovely. Tom tells me that there are some things he’d like to take care of around his apartment this afternoon, then presses his fingers deep into my lower stomach and says that since I am not feeling well, he won’t put any pressure on me to come with him. I make my face into a frown for his sake, lest he question my desire for togetherness and ruin the day, then spend the next hour or so bracing for the pressure he says won’t arrive. And to my shock and awe, it truly never arrives. He leaves at one p.m. without causing a scene. He gives me a kiss and promises to see me later and then departs with a tender normalcy so atypical in our relationship that I can hardly comprehend.

I spend the afternoon and evening alone, making progress on my diaries slowly but happily, moving between the kitchen nook and the bed. I eat refrigerated dates with organic peanut butter for breakfast. Bleed. Decline a call from Cal. Text him call you back soon, miss you. Get high. Watch lesbian porn and finger myself to orgasm twice. Run the AC. Eat peppermint McConnell’s ice cream standing in front of the open freezer, no spoon, licking the top of the pint with my tongue. And a little after nine, when Tom calls and tells me that he’s on the way back to Hollywood, I feel a little depressed. (And then a little guilty for feeling a little depressed.)

Tom gets in at ten and I don’t finish writing until eleven. And when I do, I feel so good and free until I realize that Tom has been in the kitchen for an hour, silently putting dinner together while waiting for me to finish. I go into the kitchen and sit at the bench and watch him pour vodka into a saucepan. I stare at the right side of his face, searching his expression for anything that might help me determine whether or not he is content with me. But the night is quick and quiet and ends before I can determine anything. We eat angel hair with boozy tomato sauce out of jade bowls in my bed while No Reservations plays on the TV, then get stoned and fall asleep accidentally, episode still playing, dim red lights still on, curtains still open and jade bowls still sitting half full and stacked between our bodies. Which remain fully clothed.

Monday

Tom’s alarm goes off at seven and he leaves almost right away. He kisses me, whispers something I am not conscious enough to understand, then gets dressed and walks out with his things, closing the front door behind him before I can fully blink awake. How strange. I set an alarm for eight a.m. to avoid street cleaning, roll over and shut my eyes again.

And when “This Charming Man” starts to play, I get up and feed the cats and put a tank top and baby blue and white striped pajama pants on over my underwear and wander outside and down the hill in the warm and beautiful morning light to find my car. I turn the engine on and tune the radio to KJazz 88.1 FM. “Don’t Go To Strangers” by Etta Jones plays and I sit still for the duration of the track, not moving, hardly even blinking, just staring out through the windshield at the weeping branches of the pepper trees, watching the pinnate leaves flutter in the wind and shed pink peppercorns onto the asphalt and concrete. Then “Don’t Go To Strangers” ends and I wipe a tear I never felt accumulate from my eye and switch the car into drive and take Sunset to the Gower Gulch and sit for a long time there instead, doing nothing, not ordering, just looking at my phone sometimes and out the window others, out at Sunset Boulevard and the people walking into that ghastly Denny’s and the nail salon, listening to the radio and feeling alone and happy.

But then my phone starts ringing and it’s Tom. I pick up and he says where are you in a way that floods me with paranoia. Getting…coffee… I say, looking around like he might be hiding in the hibiscus bushes, watching me. Where? He asks. And when I tell him, I can’t tell if he sounds relieved or like he doesn’t believe me. He changes topics regardless. Tells me that he argued with his sister over the phone about money, ate microwaved polenta for breakfast and thinks the dog may need to get his balls chopped off soon. He tells me that he’s looking forward to seeing me later, and when I say when is later, he says maybe two. I order my espresso, roll my eyes. Tell him that I think I am going to go to Lazy Acres after this, if that’s okay with you, and ask him if he wants anything. Surprise me.

I walk a slow lap around Lazy Acres, collecting things in a green basket, biding time till closer to ten a.m., when street cleaning hours end and I can return to Hollywood with parking immunity. I checkout with only so many things (two bags of air fried kettle chips (one salt and vinegar, one jalapeño), two boxes of Nature’s Path cereal (one corn puff, one peanut butter corn puff), four coconut granola macro bars, four apples, two passionfruit, a carton of black figs, a bag of lime tortilla chips, store-made guacamole, store-made salsa, one bottle of mint terra yerba mate, two bottles of pink coconut water) and feel very little when my total reads $77.47 at the till.

I bring my groceries inside and look around at the slovenly state of things. Cat hair everywhere. My hair everywhere. Dirty dishes flooding the sink. Dust lining everything. Expired food in the cabinets and the fridge and maybe even the freezer. Soap scum around the bath and both sinks. Dirty towels. Dirty bedsheets. A hamper that piles higher every day with clothes to wash. I collapse into bed and try and make a plan in my head to start cleaning but quickly become overwhelmed with boredom. I get high and go into the bathroom and open up the medicine cabinet instead, look at all of my products and throw some things away and then rearrange the way everything left sits on the shelves. The minor, vapid task exhausts me so entirely that once it’s complete, I have no choice but to leave everything else a mess. Get back into bed. Re-spark my joint and get stoned again. Eavesdrop through the open window while my neighbors argue. Look at pictures on my phone, all of the beautiful images I took over the past few months and wonder if publishing images to the blog as a complementary element to the weekly batch of text would be interesting.

Around one, Tom calls again and tells me that he’s on the way back over an hour earlier than he said he would be. He tells me that he has the dog with him and that he wants me to get dressed and be ready to leave when he arrives.

Ready to leave for what?

The forrest.

What forrest?

I haven’t decided yet.

I put on Dr. Martens hiking boots with thick socks and a baby blue mini skirt with a white tank top. The forrest, I think, stuffing a sweatshirt under my arm. I lie on my bed with my boots hanging over the edge of the mattress and wait for Tom to call, but instead there’s a knock. He comes inside and tells me that the dog is in the car outside with the engine running and the AC on. We smoke two or three bowls in bed, have sex quickly and without getting undressed, then take two bottles of pink coconut water, a carton of dates and a bag of air fried jalapeño kettle chips from the kitchen and depart.

Tom fills his tank at the Shell on Sunset Boulevard and then we drive fifty miles east past LA County to Crystal Lake. We sip pink coconut water and eat dates and discuss our experiences with operating heavy machinery on psychedelics. I tell him about that time I drove Julia out to the Valley to buy mushrooms from some guy and made the mistake of splitting ten grams with her in the car, right there outside of the dealer’s apartment, unable to conceptualize just how long and harrowing the drive would be back to her place in Echo Park. And then I tell him about another time, a time before that time, when I took LSD alone and then drove half a mile from my dorm room to the Claremont Trader Joe’s, thinking the acid couldn’t possibly hit before I made it back, but it hit before I could even get inside of the store. So I spent probably five hours tripping alone in my car at the Claremont Trader Joe’s. Tom nods. Then retells that story he’s already told me ten thousand times before, the one where he took mushrooms with a girl he didn’t want to fuck, freaked out on her, ran out of her apartment and into the rain and drove straight to his ex wife, who was working at an iPhone case kiosk at the Century City Mall at the time. He showed up tripping balls and she was so shocked, she couldn’t believe that he’d found her, they hadn’t spoken in months. The first time he told me that story I found it romantic, kind of. But right now, in the passenger seat of his car on the way to the forrest, the details settle rather dark. How did he know she would be there that night if they hadn’t spoken in months? How did he know I wasn’t home this morning? If he didn’t know, why did he call me, asking where I was?

Tom speeds past the army of skinny palm trees that line Azusa Avenue deep into the canyon and then another twenty miles up into the mountains on a winding two-way road. We pass hardly anybody. We’re going eighty and he’s drifting the switchbacks and I’m trying to pray but “Quantum Physics” by A$AP ANT is playing too loud and I can’t think of anything to pray except please God, I don’t want to die on the way to Crystal Lake. We fly past an old blonde hippie woman with wrinkly tan skin and long braids who appears to either be attempting to hitch hike or simply standing at the edge of the road in a fugue state. The short glimpse I get of her leaves me feeling strange, and when a cop car passes us on the empty road, I feel even stranger. Then another passes. And another. And I wonder if the old hippie wasn’t waiting for them and start to worry.

Tom’s car climbs five thousand more feet and I stare out the window, watching the trees get thicker and darker and denser as we ascend. As we pull into the Crystal Lake trailhead parking lot, Tom points at the only other car parked in the lot. They have a pass for camping… do we need that? He asks. No. Definitely not. The air is cooler in the mountains than it is in Hollywood, but not by much. The ground is dry and everything smells like pine. I look around at all of the dark grey and dark green and dark brown, at all of the rotting picnic tables and paved trails and metallic trash bins and find it hard to feel charmed.

I go into the little wooden restroom and have the most repulsive, gnat-infested pissing experience of my life. The scene is harrowing. The walls are yellowing in some spots and browning in others and the buzz of the gnats echoes and roars and the reek of hundreds of rotting human shits piled on top of one another beneath the toilet seat nearly incapacitates me. I pull my skirt up instead of down and do not dare touch my bare thighs to the sticky looking lid. I try and breathe through my mouth to avoid the smell, but the idea of the fumes entering my mouth, such an intimate space, disgusts me even more than the stench. And the gnats are everywhere. Landing on my lips and neck and shoulders and arms and chest and buzzing between my spread thighs. I keep one hand in the air, swatting around my face, and the other on the hem of my skirt. I kick the door handle open with my boot and exit feeling like I survived something.

I look at Tom and say I just got molested by like, five thousand flies and feel horrified when he gestures around and says same. I look closely at the sky, at the air surrounding us and notice with terror that everything is moving, everything is alive, everything is completely coated in a giant inescapable blanket of droning flies. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, I say to Tom. Should we, like… still go? I ask, nodding hesitantly towards the trailhead. Yes, he says. So I unhappily follow him down the ugly path towards the lake. The gnats get denser as we approach the water. Fucking biblical, I say. They collect around the dog’s asshole and eyes in disgusting little colonies and Tom keeps stopping every few minutes to futilely wipe them away. I push Tom’s Prada sunglasses up high on the bridge of my nose like a shield and cover my nose and mouth with the neck of my sweatshirt. I really think we should just go back, I muffle through the fabric. But Tom presses on. We came all of the way here, we have to see the lake, he says.

But there is no lake. Just a green and slimy cesspool brimming with bubbling pockets of toxins and dying microscopic organisms. Someone died here, Tom says, disgusted. Definitely, I agree. We turn around and take the trail back to the car at triple speed and feel relieved until we see two fat men with one fishing rod heading towards the un-fishable cesspool. What the hell are they fishing for, Tom whispers. Nothing. The rod is a prop. They came here to kill someone and bury the body. We get into the car and sanitize our hands three times and speed away laughing. Your feet will never touch the ground of that place ever again in your entire life, Tom promises me, drifting back down the switchbacks towards Azusa Avenue. We open the elevation-inflated bag of air fried kettle chips and delete it by the time we are merged onto the freeway headed back to LA. Perfect blue and yellow and orange and pink sunset sky, colors blending together like sherbet. What a relief. Downtown, in silhouette, out my window to the left. And the big gold coin of a sun dipping into the ether between two Culver City high rise buildings in the distance. Tom is driving fast and as we race towards the west side, past the Overland and Robertson exits, the sky suddenly turns apocalyptic, all grey and puffy and low with little beams of bright pink light breaking through the thick clouds. Tom and I look at each other and say maybe it will rain, but it never rains.

And on the way back to Hollywood, after two or three languid late evening hours of getting stoned and listening to music in Tom’s apartment and walking the dog, I braid my hair in the passenger’s seat and count six helicopters in the dark sky over the 101. This is not a regular night, Tom says, gripping the steering wheel and hitting the gas. No music plays. We listen to the sound of the engine and the tires against the pavement and the wind and the sirens and the rotor blades spinning up above. Stare out at the constellation of red brake lights and concrete overpasses and big green exit signs illuminated by the torrent of bright headlights. We circle for parking while I revive my childhood hobby of assigning personalities to cars based off of the faces I see in their taillights. I point at an old Camry. See, okay that one… he’s like… he’s totally stupid and dumb. I point at a Kia. He has jowls, yes. But only because he spent so much of his life joking around and laughing. I point at a Tesla. Oh my God. He is so evil, super evil, whatever you do, don’t look into those eyes…

Tuesday

Wake at seven to Tom’s alarm, semi-consciously watch him snooze till eight. Then rough sex, followed by a kind of manic rush out of the house led by my perhaps untreated boyfriend, who shoves track pants and a sweatshirt into my hands and says, rather cryptically, we have to go, before the light changes. I slip ballet flats on and his sunglasses too, then follow him across Franklin and up into the hills. Can we get coffee first? I ask, rubbing my eyes. After, he says, steering me uphill fast. Fine. I braid my hair while we walk and resolve to enjoy myself. And it’s beautiful for a little while. We wander the quiet, narrow streets and critique the mansions. Most of my critiques are compliments, especially for the houses that look at least one hundred years old. Perfect. Wouldn’t change a thing, I say, pointing at a crumbling baby pink palace with rotting windowsills and an overgrown lawn adorned with miniature classical sculptures and all kinds of sumptuous architectural detailing. So old… looks like there would be cobwebs, mold… Tom says, cringing. The light outside is rich and we cross paths with hardly anybody. An old man in a bathrobe. Two or three gardeners. I take off my sweatshirt and continue in my bralette. We wander far and get lost until we find ourselves in front of the lower entrance to the Whitley Terrace Steps. We take them all of the way up and then wander back down the hills towards Franklin and get spat out on Highland, where we are presented with the choice to either walk back to the bungalow or continue south towards Hollywood and enter the disorder of that intersection.

For the sake of coffee, we choose to enter the disorder. Waiting beneath the looming gothic arches of the Hollywood United Methodist Church to cross Franklin and Highland, Tom squints at a bus stop full of suffering people and announces that Hollywood is great, but only for rent. I would never buy a house here. Not even in the hills. He tells me that he’d rather be in Beverly Hills, where all of the lawns are manicured and the landscape is irrigated.

A forrest of green, he says, just so much nature.

Nature? In Beverly Hills? I ask.

He nods.

That’s like, insane. There’s so much more nature in the hills we just came from.

But he doesn’t agree with me. Despite the steep undeveloped slopes we just wandered and the chaparral we just passed, all of that unbeatable (in Beverly Hills, at least) continuous span of natural habitat.

I like it when nature is clean, he says.

Nature is like, definitionally unclean, I argue.

I don’t care, I am trying to tell you what is important to ME.

I roll my eyes.

I would never buy a house here. Not even in the hills, he repeats, not looking at me.

Well that’s like, really sad for me. Buying a house up there sounds like a dream.

Maybe we have different dreams.

I sigh. Hit the vape. Feel bored by his catastrophizing. Stare out at the cars speeding by. Think about the hills, the wild thickets of jasmine, the rotten palm trees, the weeping pepper trees, all of that bougainvillea and angel’s trumpet flower, all of that silence and beauty and privacy and mystery. There is nothing mysterious about Beverly Hills. There is nothing mysterious about Beverly Hills at all. There is nothing mysterious about a manicured mansion with a lawn. I want an old crumbling one, something benevolently haunted and high up in the hills with a perfect view where nobody can hear me scream.

Tom begins to argue that he doesn’t want our children to be raised in this area, gesturing wildly around Hollywood and Highland as if I’d just explained to him that my dream is to purchase a home at this hellish intersection and not somewhere tucked away deep into the paradise up above. I get the sense that he misunderstands me purposefully and begin to feel enraged. Waiting to cross Hollywood, things get tense and silent between us while a homeless guy starts fighting his own reflection in the mirrored windows in front of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! He’s screaming FAGGOT! FAGGOT! FAGGOT! over and over again and slamming the window really hard with his palms and fists and knees and bare feet and sometimes head. I stare at the man and feel thirsty and hot and sick of my sweatshirt being tied around my neck and don’t reply for a long time when Tom looks at me and says I don’t know why you’re getting so upset.

I take my time. Really ponder the question. Then say, I don’t care if you don’t agree with me about Hollywood or if we have different dreams or whatever, that’s… not the point… it’s just like, when it starts to feel like you’re intentionally misunderstanding me, you know, disagreeing with me just to disagree, disagreeing despite, like, the facts of things, just… making… points that make no sense…

I’m not doing that.

Oh my god…

I’m not doing that. You can’t just announce to me that I am doing that.

Whatever, I don’t even care… you interrupted me and all I was going to say is that I don’t care… we aren’t going house shopping today, or maybe ever. So who fucking cares. This is so fucking stupid. What are we even fucking talking about. Who fucking cares.

He stops walking, instructs me to relax and then says fuck it, let’s go back, I don’t want a fucking coffee.

The walk back to the bungalow is silent, and when we get inside, Tom immediately collects his things, gives me a sterile kiss on the cheek and tells me that he thinks it would be best for him to work from his apartment on the west side until later this evening. I nod. Say okay. Think amazing. Lock the door behind him and feel light. Spark a joint. Try and decide what to do with myself and my suddenly liberated late morning and afternoon.

Things I Decide to Do With Myself and My Suddenly Liberated Late Morning and Afternoon:

1. Languish in bed for two hours with my laptop and my phone and my vape

2. Finally rise

3. Eat a coconut granola macro bar standing over the kitchen sink, feeling faint, looking out through the window at the white sky and into the neighbor’s yard

4. Collect all of the dirty dishes from all around the house

5. Wash them

6. Collect all of the ashtrays and candleholders from all around the house

7. Wash those too

8. Dry everything by hand with a rag

9. Lie around getting stoned

10. Answer a call from Tom around two p.m., who interrupts my beautiful and lonely afternoon to coldly announce that he is in the car, on the way back over to my place

11. Say okay. Hang up

12. Sit in silence feeling full of dread and irritation and an intense aversion to his impending company

13. Picture the long and hot and boring afternoon I will spend with him in bed, the long and hot and boring drive we will predictably take to the west side around seven p.m., the long and hot and boring walk we will take the dog on around his neighborhood, the long and hot and boring drive back to Hollywood, the long and hot and boring night spent smoking and eating and looking at the television screen together or maybe arguing in my bedroom…

14. Feel so claustrophobic about my boredom with him that it briefly sends me into a panic. I imagine next week, driving through the desert to celebrate my birthday in Las Vegas, trapped inside of an expensive suite at The Bellagio with him, and even feel bored by that. I press my hand to my beating chest and stare at the wall with wide eyes until it dawns on me: why should the boredom make me panic, the boredom is fucking heaven sent! The boredom means that I am over it, I am really over it! I am so fucking bored and over it! He is boring me half to death! I can disappear now, whenever I want! I am so bored, so fucking bored, so fucking bored and over it!

Tom shows up around two with three new fluffy white pillows for the bed stuffed under his arm and a thinly disguised bad mood. We sit in my bedroom and immediately begin to argue. At first the argument is mostly just a continuation of this morning’s argument about our diverging desires and tastes, but then it transforms into something even more familiar, something about my hesitancy to move in together. This poor dead horse, for fuck’s sake. Tom tells me that he’s killing himself driving back and forth every day to deal with the dog and sinning every night he sleeps in my (much more spacious, much more charming) apartment instead of making use of the rent he pays monthly. He tells me that he doesn’t understand why I won’t just pack up my things and the cats and agree to end my own lease and live in his tiny grey box with him indefinitely, as if that is a scenario that is spatially realistic. He tells me that my unwillingness to sacrifice my beautiful apartment unless the sacrifice is being made for something that I deem more beautiful makes him feel insecure, makes him feel unsure about me, makes him want to refuse to pay what it would cost to move anywhere more beautiful with me, a woman who is unwilling to meet him where he is at.

But meeting him where he is at would require me to plummet, I think to myself. He hates himself. I know that. But still, how could he love me and ask me to do that? I manage to stay even for about an hour until I recognize the rage rising up in me and remember the way I screamed the other day and threw something at his head a few days after that and make the conscious choice to cut the conversation short. He’s in the middle of saying something stupid and vaguely hurtful when I interrupt him, say, I don’t think we should keep talking about this right now. Which, of course, incites him to get dressed and pack his things and walk toward the front door. I don’t follow him. I don’t get up from bed. I just keep sitting at the edge with my spine against the metal frame, naked beneath my bedsheet. He slams the door hard behind himself, then calls out to me through the open living room window. YOU ALWAYS DO THIS, WHENEVER SOMETHING IS IMPORTANT TO ME, WHENEVER I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY, YOU DON’T WANT TO TALK ANYMORE. I roll my eyes. Think yeah, right. Continue to lay until I’m sure he’s far away, then get up and shut and lock all of the windows and pull the blinds closed and resume my afternoon alone.

I wash and dry some more dishes, reorganize the kitchen cabinets and discover a tiny piece of magic mushroom in an empty coffee mug. I remember placing it there, just not why or when. I set it in my mouth and swallow without thinking too much, then lie back down in bed and smoke a joint and eat salt and vinegar kettle chips and look at things on my phone for a long time until I begin to feel strange and wonder why. Then I remember the tiny mushroom I ate and think oh, that’s right. I watch a thirteen minute long TikTok tarot card reading made by a woman who looks like she did prison time and then get very depressed for about thirty seconds at seven p.m., when the light starts to soften. I let two or three tears fall from my eyes, then force myself up and out of bed and into jeans and out of the door into the mild, pre-sunset atmosphere to acquire Juul pods and a bit of clarifying air. The instinct is never to sit with myself. The instinct is always to suppress, modulate, temper the feeling.

I walk down the hill to the strip mall and wipe my eyes. I buy a four pack of virginia tobacco Juul pods from the autistic white guy I like, then walk down to Hollywood until I find a dispensary. I purchase half an ounce of weed from a middle aged woman with short red box-dyed hair in a tiny shop. I am the only customer inside and when she rings me up, I watch her apply a thirty percent discount to my total and smile. She looks at me with raised eyebrows and says, semi-eerily and in a thick accent, because you have been here before.

I have been here before? I blink.

You have been here before. Once before.

And you… remember me? I ask, feeling so disoriented by the experience that I begin to suspect the woman may be trying to communicate something psychic or perhaps paranormal with me.

No. No. We do the discount for second time visit. You have been here once before.

Oh.

I walk back to the bungalow and watch the sky get dark from my bedroom window. I roll three joints and smoke them all. I organize the files on my computer, watch lesbian porn and then think about the tequila in my freezer and pour some into a glass and mix it with pink coconut water. I take a sip and it’s awful, nothing like I imagined, completely nauseating. I toss it back anyway. And because I really do believe that desperate times call for desperate measures, I fill the cup up again and toss that back too. Then I get back into bed with a bag of air fried kettle chips, dinner, turn all of the lights out, pull the blackout curtains shut and press play on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season fifteen reunion, part one of three, and feel rather happy. I was taught these things. I am my mother’s daughter, most certainly.

Wednesday

At two a.m., I look at the time and begin to worry. I sink into the pillows Tom brought over yesterday and feel sad on and off in short, potent intervals. When part three of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion ends, The Real Housewives of Rhode Island begins to autoplay in the middle of episode three, where I presumably left off months and months ago, back when my life had extensive room for indulgent television. Right before My Trouble at the studio, right before I became codependent with Tom. I watch the women argue for two or three minutes and feel tortured, unable to continue. There’s something so depressing about it, I can’t stop thinking about the way things used to be, the person I was when I watched it before. It was a tortured time, of course, but everything with Tom was still undiscovered, still new and exciting. There were foreshadowings of pain and suffering even back then, yes, but mostly it was a thrill, something raw and alive and interesting. I turn the television off. Resigned to sleep. Triggered by a specific franchise of Real Housewives… what a stupid and modern problem.

I wake up at noon feeling pleased and a little bit strange about having slept in. Something so decadent about it when it isn’t something that happens all of the time. And even when it is…

I sit quietly with myself successfully for about ten minutes before deciding to leave the apartment immediately to avoid any further reflection. I put on jeans and Tom’s Prada sunglasses, which I feel thrilled to find left behind on the nightstand. I find my car and route myself to St. Vincent de Paul. Where else? I am seeking a new object to use as an emotional anchor.

I type these words into my phone from the clogged 101, waiting to merge onto the 110 where I can speed freely. I am typing and driving and also smoking half of a joint I found under the floor mat and there is a helicopter circling up above and everybody is braking so much and I hate them for it, just go please. It has been a long time since I typed while driving because it has been a long time since I drove alone. I used to drive alone all of the time. And when I say used to, I mean like, four months ago. Making myself sick with nostalgia, thinking about typing while driving four months ago. What a stupid thing to be: nostalgic for four months ago. But that’s me:

1. 5’8.75”

2. Brunette

3. Cancer Moon

4. Nostalgic for Four Months Ago

I park in the St. Vincent de Paul lot and spend two meandering hours inside the air conditioning-less warehouse, walking in circles until I’m nauseous. I stare at an old iMac that is priced at $80 and want to buy it but ultimately do not. I find a clean, fluffy white couch with deep seats and low cushions in perfect, stainless condition, then look at the four figure price on the tag and feel depressed. I leave with a beautiful iron chest with pierced handles and three extra large shirts from the men’s section. (Subconsciously coping with my newfound boyfriendlessness, maybe.) A mustard yellow tee shirt that says BRAZIL, a baby-soft one-hundred percent cotton long sleeve and a green and blue plaid flannel. I place my new things in the backseat and then drive farther south to the Los Angeles Apparel Factory Store, wanting to spend more and perhaps counterbalance the masculine purchases I just made with feminine clothing. And when I walk inside, the lights are bright and everything looks so clean and “Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second” by STRFKR is playing. Which makes me sick to my stomach, obviously, given the fact that I’ve loved this song dearly and held it close to my heart for some terribly long amount of time. A decade, maybe. A decade at least. I collect a pair of cropped grey sweatpants, a white cotton tube top, a baby yellow halter top bra with baby blue piping and a pair of matching underwear, a candy pink bralette and two pairs of jelly flats, one in glitter and the other in mint. I stand in line at the register with my colorful things stuffed in my arms and look around at everybody else shopping. The place is full of hot twenty-something women of varying ethnicities dressed in provocatively fitting cotton basics, holding hands with their twenty-something boyfriends, who, also dressed in cotton basics, walk a pace or two behind the women slowly, sometimes fingering the clothing on the racks but mostly just keeping their fingers somewhere between their lover’s waist and ass. Los Angeles Apparel is for the sexually active, I think, watching a black guy in sweatpants fix his hand around the back of his tall Asian girlfriend’s little neck.

Feeling hot and faint in the car (and perhaps craving one last hit of financial damage to fill the void), I pull into the Lazy Acres parking lot for sustenance on the way home. I go inside and purchase half a dozen eggs, three types of cheese, a baguette, a carton of medjool dates, a bottle of chipotle habanero pepper hot sauce, black pepper la panzanella crackers and a thirty-two ounce bottle of pink coconut water, which I did not know existed and feel quite charmed by.

The drive down Franklin to my apartment is quick. I idle outside the courtyard gates and take three trips bringing all of the things I purchased inside. The little iron cabinet and thrift store clothes, the big brown bag from Los Angeles Apparel, then the things I bought at the grocery store. I get back into the car and circle for parking and find a spot close by, feeling happy and lucky while walking back uphill in the sunshine. But then I unlock the bungalow and look at myself in the bathroom mirror and think of Tom and watch my eyes well up. I am not sure what is right with me now that was wrong with me before, but I just can’t picture answering if he calls or knocks on my door. My birthday is in six days and Tom thinks we are going to The Bellagio and Cal thinks we are going to The Roosevelt and my mother thinks I am coming to Las Vegas for sure. I lie in bed and light a joint and consider each reality and decide that probably I will end up all alone, right here.

I spend the hours between three and midnight doing very little. I graze the kitchen. Listen to music. Finger myself to lesbian porn and feel guilty about it. Google things like signs my boyfriend is going to kill me for breaking up with him and is breaking up or disappearing better if my boyfriend is a crazy person? (But Google doesn’t get it.) Sit inside with the shades drawn and feel paranoid that Tom might show up. Get stoned. Look at things I want to buy online but cannot afford and wonder if I should find a job. Apply for one, a bookselling job on Melrose. Then scroll through some others, get depressed by the descriptions and give up. Think about how soon, once Tom realizes it’s really over, I’ll have to get my own WiFi set up. Sigh. Write a list of desires in honor of the Leo new moon solar eclipse in my black Moleskine. Eat an apple with peanut butter for dinner in bed at ten p.m. And, a few minutes before midnight, despite the fact that Bret Easton Ellis was hardly involved as far as I know, decide to press play on episode one of Ryan Murphy’s brand new abomination: The Shards.

Thursday

Read more

Sunday

The first hot argument of the first hot week of August occurs within minutes of waking and concerns, of all things, the air conditioning. I wake up late with dilated pupils and a vaguely feverish feeling between chakras two and three to Tom sitting on the edge of the bed in a conversationally aggressive mood. He complains at length about his poor quality of sleep, blaming his restlessness on my preference for sleeping with the air conditioning running.

It’s painful, he says.

It’s painful? I ask. Genuinely incredulous.

I don’t know why you are doubting me. Sleeping with the air conditioning on is painful to me.

It’s summer.. we’ve been sleeping with the fucking air conditioning on for weeks… months.. weeks..

So what if it took me a long time to say this.

I’ve just never heard of anyone being brought physical pain by an air conditioning unit…

And I’ve never heard of anyone using the fucking air conditioning as much as you, but…

It’s like, scientifically proven that it’s better to sleep in a cold room…

I don’t give a fuck about the scientists!

He shuts himself into the bathroom and showers while house music plays loudly on his phone, then dries off and goes into the kitchen nook with his laptop to work alone. Good riddance. I get stoned. Part the curtains. Open my laptop and connect my wired headphones and set a Flying Lotus song to play on a loop and pray to God that all of the diary editing I need to do before midnight gets done easily, painlessly, quickly and without much nausea involved. After about ninety minutes of good work, good flowing work that I prayed for, thank you God, Tom starts pacing around the kitchen, loudly packing his things. I remain calm in the eye of his childish storm, keep working until he comes into the bedroom and announces that he is going to leave, work the rest of the day from his apartment. I say okay and he shrugs and then tells me that he hasn’t seen his wallet in days and thinks it might be in my car. So I pull on a pair of jeans over my baby rib thong and follow him outside in ballet flats and a little white tank top with no bra. The walk down Franklin towards our cars is long and hot and silent. I braid my hair in two at a long red light and do not break the quiet. We search my car for his wallet and don’t find it and then stand on the side of the asphalt looking at each other, not saying anything until he asks me what I am going to do with my afternoon and I tell him that I want to find coffee and a good parking spot, then work till all of the work is done. He says okay. Gives me a cold hug goodbye. Gets into his car and pulls away. I wait for him to disappear and then pull away too, drive east down Franklin to Gower and south down Gower to the Gower Gulch, feeling light and happy inside despite all of the words waiting to be sorted through before midnight. Think maybe even because of the words.

The hours between twelve and nine pass neither particularly slow nor fast and are spent doing the following:

• Editing, editing, editing

• Editing some more

• Eating half a white nectarine until the taste mysteriously turns medicinal and begins to nauseate me

• Smoking one thousand bowls

• Ignoring my petulant boyfriend, except for at five p.m. when he calls to tell me that despite having left in an unexplained rage this morning, he is no longer upset with me and is, in fact, very much looking forward to seeing me later

• Eating dry Cheerios for dinner and thinking dog food for girls

• Publishing the diaries to the blog

• Feeling so fucking free

Around ten, an hour or so after I wrap up, Tom calls and shoves all of this morning’s ambiguous troubles under the rug and tells me that he just got off of the phone with Rose, who offered to take the dog for the next few days before Callie goes back to school after summer break. Tom says that he wants to drop the dog off at Rose’s house tonight, deep in the Valley, and that he wants me to come with him. And even though I’d mostly rather die than see Rose tonight after my complete and utter disappearance, after several months of letting her calls and texts go unanswered, after never ever explaining to her why I left the studio or why I lied so many times about Tom, I tell him that I will come and see her. I look in the mirror. Touch up my concealer without washing my face. Retie my braids. Pull my jeans back on over my hot pink underwear, button up a cardigan over my bra and, when Tom calls and tells me that he’s outside, slip my ballet flats on and run out into the moonlight.

I reckon with my anxious conscience in the car, feel anguished in the check out line while Tom purchases dog food at the Ralph’s in Van Nuys and nearly faint in the dark on Rose’s doorstep, waiting for her and Callie to appear. Tom says relax ten thousand times and offers to hide me in the bushes while he takes care of things. I’m kidding, but I’m also not, he says. Can you handle it? I do my best to quit cringing and put on a normal face. The half hour or so we spend inside of Rose’s house begins with a shot of tequila. I swallow and then feel grateful when Callie immediately leads me into her bedroom, leaving Tom and Rose in the kitchen alone. Callie shows me her stuffed animals, the tie dye tee shirts she made at camp, and her new class yearbook photo. I point to a blonde girl with pigtails and say she looks like a bitch and Callie says she is! and then points out all of the other bitches, then all of her crushes, then all of her friends. I think I hear my name in the conversation happening between Rose and Tom in the kitchen and start to get paranoid. I pull Callie out of her bedroom and into the kitchen and, when no one but Tom is looking, motion to the door with desperation in my eyes like let’s fucking go. So he ties things up quickly and cleanly, squeezes my hand hard all of the way down the driveway, pushes me into the passenger seat, lights a joint, routes us twenty miles south to the In-N-Out by Hollywood High and says when you look at me like that… there’s nothing I can do, there’s nobody who can stop me, nothing matters, I have to take you, we have to go.

We find princess parking on my block right before midnight. The moonlit sky looks so unreal, so like a movie set or a painting or the ceiling at Caesar’s Palace that it’s almost unsettling. We undress and get stoned and eat cheeseburgers and fries and sip Diet Cokes in bed while No Reservations plays on the TV. Try and forget about what happened in the Valley.

Monday

Awake and in a terrible mood at five a.m., having an impossibly hot time trying to sleep through this August night without any air conditioning to appease my sensitive boyfriend. I lie and writhe and turn from side to side and boil inside with resentful rage until I can’t stand it anymore, get up, crawl over Tom without caring if I wake him up and lock myself into the bathroom. I spread my cheetah print robe across the cool tile like a rug and lie there looking at my phone and hitting my vape until the sunlight starts to get bright. I finger myself to orgasm twice and don’t get up or return to bed until my phone dies.

And when I do, Tom is on his back, blinking awake from a dream. He tells me that it was a nightmare and that I was running away from him, as usual, and that his family was there and everyone around him was warning him that I didn’t love him. I take his hand in mine and lie my head against his chest but he’s rigid. There are a few moments of quiet and then he breaks in with a series of rapid-fire accusations posed as questions. He asks me why I slept so far away from him last night, why I spent the whole time time at Rose’s house locked up away from him in Callie’s bedroom and why I didn’t call him as soon as I finished editing last night. He tells me that I mistreat him, that I’m unkind and that I love him much less than he loves me. I sigh. Say nothing for a long time, then give up and start screaming. In the heat of the moment, I pick up a lighter and toss it across the room, nearly missing his head, which rightfully elicits him to pack up his things and abandon the premises immediately. I sit quietly with myself in the wake of his absence, contemplating my regressive behavior, picturing the way he ducked my projectile and alternating between finding the fact that I threw something at him funny and humiliating. And before I can settle on a feeling, not five minutes after he left, there’s a knock on the door and when I open it there he is, standing on my doorstep, smiling like a crazy person. We have sex on the living room floor and when it’s over he says get dressed and pulls me out of the bungalow and into the car and sets the GPS to Joshua Tree. I imagine that endless stretch of hot lonely desert and can’t help but ask, wait, you’re not taking me there to like, kill me and dispose of my body, right? He laughs.

The drive up interstate 10 is flat and hot and dry. I light a joint and look out at the cloudless baby blue sky through Tom’s Prada glasses and sigh. I am wearing white socks and blue Adidas and the black Cou Cou midi slip dress I shredded into a mini a few months ago, and when Tom asks me if I’d like to find a hotel somewhere in Palm Springs, spend the night, I say alright even though all I have with me is my wallet and my vape and my keys and my phone. I text James asking if he’ll use the spare key to feed the cats, and when he says yes I sink deeper into the passenger seat. There is so much smog blanketing the Inland Empire that we can hardly make out the mountains, and as we fly past Arcadia and Azusa and San Dimas towards Claremont, I ask him if he’d like to pull off by Scripps for coffee, take a short tour of the place I lived and suffered for four years. And he does, so we pull off on Towne Ave. and park in the village and order two cappuccinos from a busy place on Foothill and then take a slow lap around Scripps, through the green lawns and the old white buildings and the orange trees. I show him the koi pond and the oratory chapel and my name inscribed on the wall of the rose garden. When you were here, were you happy? he asks. No, I don’t think so… I mean sometimes, I guess, but like… not really.

Before we pull back onto the freeway, we purchase ten one gram sativa joints from a dispensary, two four-packs of virginia tobacco Juul pods from a smoke shop and two four-shot espressos over ice from Starbucks.

We pull through the toll booth gates guarding Joshua Tree at precisely five p.m. The car thermometer reads one hundred and eleven and everything outside is dry and hot and aesthetically identical to Las Vegas. Feels like home, I think, and feel pleased. We drive deep into the park and pull off on a remote trail to climb boulders and explore the landscape. High up, we find a cave carved by wind and water into the side of a giant slab of sandstone big enough for us to crawl inside. We lie down, light a joint, discuss rough sex as a potential therapeutic solution to our relationship troubles and then French kiss until sunset.

The dark drive out of Joshua Tree and into Palm Springs is hot and haunted and lined with a dense army of enormous windmills, eerily spinning in the dark. Which do you find creepier, I ask Tom, the ones that spin or the ones that just sit there, stopped? He looks out the window at the sea of white spinning arms, contemplates. The ones that just sit there, stopped. Tom steers the wheel with one hand and books a one-bedroom suite at a sprawling resort in Palm Desert with the other.

Ten p.m., one hundred and two degrees. We check in at the empty front desk, wander around the giant hotel room (you’re insane, I scream at Tom upon clicking open the door with the card key), drop our few things on the enormous bed, then get back into the car and drive thirty minutes back into Palm Springs for dinner. We are starving, ready for anything, but the city is vacant. We route to a Mexican restaurant that is supposed to be open and find it dark. We park on the main road and walk down the warm empty sidewalks all alone, hoping to come into contact with a hot plate or even just a sign of life, but we walk and walk and find nothing. Just a couple of empty bars playing loud music for nobody, the cicadas, the big low moon and the relentless blowing of hot wind. Green traffic lights as far as the eye can see. We give up on hot food and route to Ralph’s instead, old reliable, to collect a basketful of potato chips and beer and fresh fruit.

Later, near midnight, tucked into the crisp sheets of our plushy white King, Tom and I fantasize before falling asleep. Let’s get married and buy a house in Palm Springs… yes… it’ll be so cheap… we will have a big pool and a big backyard and so many bedrooms… so much space… fill it with babies…

Tuesday

I wake up at nine with a new tan and sore calves in my underwear in an unfamiliar room to Tom pulling open the hotel curtains and filling the deep bath with cool water and kissing my face all over and lighting a joint inside of the suite and bringing it to my lips in bed. We take pictures of each other in the heat, smoking naked on the balcony underneath the palm trees. We soak in the bath with the jets running and then have wet sex on the giant bed with the first-floor balcony doors swung wide open. The heat is wild and the cicadas are roaring and when we look out through the big doors, we find a man-made lake we didn’t know was there, couldn’t see in the dark last night when we arrived. We run the shower cold and get in together and press white tea scented shampoo and conditioner and soap into each other’s bodies. I use his razor to shave my legs and he uses my little tin of Kiehl’s to moisturize. We dry off quickly in the natural hair-dryer that is the city of Palm Springs and check out of our room at exactly eleven minute past eleven. Tom routes us back into the center for breakfast at Farm, a little French restaurant tucked into a plaza on Indian Canyon with a lush garden. We sit at a little shaded table outside underneath a mist machine, drinking fresh orange juice and cold brew with cream and splitting a breakfast sandwich with fried potatoes and showing each other all of the explicit pictures we took over the past twenty-four hours and sighing and saying things we don’t mean like we should stay here forever, I think. By one, we are back on the 10-West, flying one hundred miles west past the windmills towards Los Angeles. I play “Sweet Lady” by 03 Greedo, a song Tom has never heard before which understandably blows his mind. Fuck it, set it to play one hundred times, he yells over the sub-bass. We sail through the Inland Empire and when Tom’s check-engine light flips on, he changes the destination on the GPS from Hollywood to the car service center on Wilshire, revs the engine, hits the gas and says whatever. We make it to the service center exactly one minute before closing (to the chagrin of the bored and tired mechanics) and are back in the middle of Hollywood by seven. We feed the cats and undress. Have sex. Kiss and wax poetic and bask in the post-vacation feeling and eat potato chips and nectarines for dinner until midnight in my fluffy white bed.

Wednesday

In my dream, I accidentally show up to my own wedding, groom unknown, with no clothing on. And when I wake up, it’s almost nine o’clock and I feel disoriented and there’s a crow croaking loudly somewhere close by. I part the bedroom curtains with my toes to peek and there he is, looking right back at me, sitting on the power line.

I lock myself in the bathroom to look in the mirror and take issue with what I see. A wild halo of baby hairs. Grey follicles sprouting from the crown. Dark eyes. Splotchy skin. Puffy nose. Bloated abdomen. I wash my face and moisturize all over and comb my hair and roll perfume oil on my neck and feel no better. So I get back into bed with my ugly mood, and when Tom comes in to say good morning I pick a fight that quickly escalates into a one sided screaming match in which I am the only one screaming. In the middle of my rage, he calmly asks me to quit swearing so loudly, to which I reply with a blood-curdling, top of my lungs, Final Girl scream. Which deeply scares him I think. He blinks at me. Asks, are you fucking crazy? And I nod. Yes, definitely.

He leaves with his things and I lock the doors behind him and collapse back into bed, exhausted by my own theatrics. Desperate to kill any feeling of emptiness produced by Tom’s absence before it can even arrive, I light a joint and call Cal. He picks up and I spend half an hour listening while he talks about himself with the desperation and fervor of a person who has not been presented with the opportunity to talk about themselves in a long while and cannot, at any cost, let the current opportunity slip by. His voice sounds deep and lonely over the phone. He describes an argument he had with his mother last week, complains about work, tells me that a guy we went to high school with’s younger brother might have brain cancer, tells me that the cat has gotten fat, tells me about his new workout routine, about all of the protein he’s been eating and the new rifle he just bought. And when he runs out of things to say, he sighs and does not ask me any questions about myself. He does not ask me any questions at all, except for can I come over later? To which I reply something like yes… maybe… I just need to clean up* a little… call me later, I’ll let you know…

*eliminate any and all physical evidence that may clue him into the months long torrid love affair I have been busy carrying on with another man

I lie around for an hour or two waiting for the will to clean up for Cal to arrive but it never does. So I call Tom and he picks up right away and I say sorry, what was that, oh my God RE: this morning’s psychotic behavior and to my surprise, instead of taking the rightful opportunity to chastise and torture me, he simply says don’t worry about it baby, just come over. I blink. Say okay. Then hang up the phone and make no moves, lie around some more. I fall asleep around three and don’t wake up again until six. And when I do, there are two missed calls on my phone. One from each boyfriend.

I pull on a white long sleeve top and tiny white shorts and hiking boots with white socks and leave the bungalow in big sunglasses at a truly beautiful hour with nothing but my Corto Moltedo bag and duplicitous agenda. Puffy white clouds patchwork the baby blue sky. The mail lady blasts oldies from her truck, parked beneath the pepper trees. I get into my car and drive up Franklin towards Beachwood without thinking really. Numb feeling. KJazz playing. I park on the corner of Beachwood by Cal’s apartment, walk up to the gate and call him. Say, are you home? I’m outside and then wait at the bottom of his steps for him to appear. And when he does, he looks so tall and so beautiful and so happy to see me. I touch his long hair. His arms. I kiss him and it feels strange. Feels… not Tom. And when I sit on his couch and he tries to touch me, take my clothes off, I let him until he starts spreading my thighs and I have to push him off. Not really for the sake of my self respect or loyalty to Tom, but simply for the sake of not liking the way it feels when he touches me.

After a little less than an hour of lying around Beachwood with Cal’s blue balls, bullshitting, drinking sparkling water in his living room, talking about nothing, I tell him I have to go and let him walk me to my car and kiss me and then speed away from him fast. I stop at the ARCO on Franklin to fill my tank and purchase a glass bottle of mint terra yerba mate, then merge onto the clogged 101-South and route myself to Tom. I wash Cal’s tongue out of my mouth with tea and look out at the beautiful pink sky and all of the golden light reflecting off of Downtown and feel guilty. I park on Venice Boulevard and trudge up the stairs to Tom’s apartment feeling paranoid until he swings open the door and rushes out in his briefs with a big grin on his face to scoop me up into his arms and carry me over the threshold. He sets me down on the black leather couch and kisses me and tells me that as punishment for my bad behavior this morning, he cancelled the trip he booked to Vegas for my birthday in secret, but then rebooked it an hour or two later and upgraded the suite. The Bellagio baby, he says. Fuck it, fountain view. Then he stuffs one thousand dollars cash into my purse without explanation, eats me out until I orgasm and says for dinner tonight, let’s have steak. He pulls me downstairs into his car and speeds us to a steakhouse in Marina Del Rey. We eat filet mignon and caesar salads and fries and drink tequila sodas until we are drunk. He slides into my side of the booth midway through and squishes my face in his hands and says you are so fucking crazy, I love you so much, the way you screamed at me this morning holy shit… my crazy girlfriend… I love you so much… craziest girl I’ve ever met.

Thursday

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Sunday

I wake at ten with an aching below my ribs and a burning between my thighs and the psychological weight of five thousand words to edit before midnight pressing against my chest. I get fucked by my boyfriend, take a king-sized joint to the face, then crawl out of bed. The plan is to make it outside as quickly as possible, forage the world for caffeine, return to the crypt and lock in. But I wander into the bathroom and feel unhappy with my reflection and climb up into the sink with a pair of tweezers and pluck my eyebrows for half an hour instead. Tom sits on the edge of the tub, yawning, looking up at me. The burning feeling between my thighs won’t abate and neither will the newly persistent urge to urinate. I am a wise enough woman to know what this means. Tom catches me wincing and asks me if I am feeling alright. I explain. Say, remember last week, when we ate mushrooms and then had sex for like seven hours straight? Feel debased by the torturous coupling of my afflicted pussy and writing deadline. Imagine myself spending the day in the bathroom, naked on the toilet with my MacBook on my lap, leaking pink urinary tract infection piss and editing simultaneously. My eyes well up at the image and I begin to cry. If this is my divine punishment for last week’s gluttonous amount of premarital sex, please God, forgive me. Tom and I leave the bungalow at noon for Intelligentsia. I order a croissant and a triple shot dirty iced chai despite what the caffeine will do to my afflicted pussy. Figure I can’t afford the migraine. The beautiful girl at the register is sweet to me because my eyelashes are still wet with teardrops, I think. I sit across from Tom out on the little concrete patio in my miserable mood while we wait for our drinks. The atmosphere is coated in one big low-hanging cloud, suffocating me and the rest of the city beneath an eighty-five degree blanket of heat. Feel faint and desperate in my little dress. Back in my bedroom, I strip. Turn the air conditioning up. Close the curtains. Get high. Drink one liter of still Mountain Valley. Then another. Get up to piss one thousand times. Edit my diaries and pull my one hundred percent cotton underwear low around my hips. At five, Tom calls the dog walker and asks her to tend to the dog so that he can tend to me. He feeds me Thai food for dinner in bed at seven p.m. with all of the windows open and “Forever Ever (feat. Young Thug)” by Trippie Redd playing on repeat. We get stoned over and over and he naps while I type and then I nap too, sometime around nine, and don’t wake up again until a few minutes before midnight, head swimming with words left to rewrite.

Monday

I don’t press publish till one a.m., and when I do, I feel no relief. Feel depressive and jaded and lonely. (And desperate to stop feeling depressive and jaded and lonely.) I shut my laptop, turn the lights out, lie down beside Tom and try to sleep. Thirty restless minutes of listening to Tom snore pass before I make my mind up to turn the lights back on and climb on top of him. I kiss his face until he wakes up and then convince him to get dressed and go for a walk with me. We both leave the bungalow in Los Angeles Apparel hoodies and loose fitting jeans. The streets are dark and warm and empty. I grip Tom’s hand and dodge cockroaches in my ballet flats. We walk to Playboy Liquor looking for Juul pods, but Playboy Liquor is all out of Juul pods. Like, forever? I ask the fat guy behind the cash register. He shrugs. I pull Tom down Wilcox to 7-Eleven instead. The floors inside are filthy and the Indian guy behind the counter is blatantly drunk. He’s blaring sitar music and swaying unsteadily with his hands gripping the register like he’s steering a big ship. He charges us seventy-two dollars for two four-packs of five-percent virginia tobacco pods and blows us each a kiss goodbye, cackling to himself about nothing. On the quiet, breezeless walk back uphill to the bungalow, a jacaranda petal falls on my head, rolls down my chest and lands on the top side of my foot.

And after three or four hours of dreamless rest, I am up again. I spend the morning writhing and squirming around the bedsheets, lamenting the relentlessness of my UTI and my own pigheaded inability to do what’s best for my health when doing what’s best for my health dares to disrupt my total devotion to hedonistic living. I think about all of that spicy curry I ate for dinner last night and all of that smoking and fucking I did all day and get flooded with self loathing. Stupid, stupid girl. I sit on the toilet and cry while an online doctor prescribes me nitrofurantoin from a chat room. I set the prescription to be picked up at a pharmacy by Tom’s apartment, peel myself out of the bathroom and follow him into the car. I stare out the front windshield with tears in my eyes, pushing my back deep into the heated seat for relief.

The pharmacy parking lot is beige and empty. I pout in the car while Tom runs inside. Watch a couple of fat seagulls flutter and squawk around a mound of trash. Ten minutes pass, then twenty. Pure misery. Text Tom: what’s happening. No response. Another ten minutes pass. Feel agitated. And just as my agitation settles in, Tom appears with a grin and my little paper prescription bag in his hand. I kiss his cheek and say thank you but my voice comes out cold and hollow, like I don’t mean it. Ever sensitive to my each and every shift in mood or tone, he stiffens.

The air is hot and dead in Tom’s apartment and I am trapped in a hot and dead mood to match. I oscillate between feeling tormented by my urinary tract alone in the bathroom, alone in bed and alone on the black leather couch. Tom checks on me intermittently, offering fresh air, food, water, nicotine and weed. I decline everything, fall asleep curled up like a cat in a hot patch of sunlight on top of his duvet and don’t wake up again until seven, when I feel Tom’s mouth pressed against the wet back of my neck.

Later, in Hollywood, sometime around eight, I slice an avocado in half and dress each part with olive oil and sea salt and share it with Tom for breakfast. We sit across from each other at the kitchen nook and eat without talking. I think about the way he spent most of the day orbiting around me and my pain and subsequent bad attitude and feel sorry. I put my spoon down, look up at him, reach across the table for his hand and do my best to apologize. Sorry for being a brat all day… it’s just… I’ve been in so much pain… But his hand feels rigid in mine and he doesn’t look up at me and somehow my apology turns into a fight that doesn’t end until he takes his things and leaves my apartment. Typical. So typical that I sit alone with my half eaten avocado in the wake of his absence and feel nothing. I light a joint and remember that my car is parked outside of his apartment all of the way across the city and sigh. Fuck. Without thinking too much, I order a Waymo to pick me up and take me there so that I can retrieve it right away. Seventeen dollars for a twelve mile, forty minute driverless ride and a little peace of mind.

I wait two minutes on the curb outside of the bungalow for the robot car in the moonlight. And when it arrives, I slide into the backseat, buckle the seatbelt behind me to cheat the sensor, extend my body across the leather from door to door and press start ride. I spend the first few minutes in a kind of fugue state. Then the car makes a right onto Santa Monica Boulevard and I begin to cry without really knowing why. I look up at the huge moon and connect my Spotify and play “Forever Ever” on a loop until my eyes dry. I open my laptop and turn on the PhotoBooth camera and make a twenty-one minute movie in the robot car, and by the time the doors unlock in front of the liquor store on Venice Boulevard, I feel good, numb, balanced, desensitized.

But when I round the corner onto the residential street I last parked my car, I get blinded by a familiar pair of headlights. The night is so bright and breezeless and the streets are so wide and empty and there is this general surreal impression to the scene. Am I dreaming? I stop in the middle of the road and blink. I watch the driver’s side door open, watch Tom get out and walk towards me. How did he know? There’s this hard look on his face and he stops before he can reach me, leaving three or four dramatic feet of asphalt between us. He clenches his jaw tight and asks, did you come here for your car or did you come here for me? I can’t speak. He repeats himself, this time slowly. Did you come here for your car… or did you come here for me? The truth is that I came here for the car, of course, but that’s not what he wants to hear and for some reason I am having an impossible time lying. Not for moral reasons, but because I do not want him to have the satisfaction (not even the faux-satisfaction) of believing I came here for him. I let him repeat the question six more times while I hit my vape and stare ahead at the big moon over Venice in silence, petulant. Before he repeats the question a seventh time, he says I am only going to ask this one more time. But before he gets the chance to begin again, I look up at him and say I am never going to answer this stupid fucking question. Which incites him. He walks away from me fast, disappearing around the corner and presumably into his apartment. I unlock my car, start the ignition and peel out fast.

I make it back to Hollywood a few minutes after eleven. I park in a spot that I shouldn’t, unlock the front door, undress, sit in the middle of my bed alone and get high. Feel free, mostly, but also a little bit like I might cry. I get out of bed and start filling the bath, ready to sink into myself, but just as I am about to, there’s a knock at the front door and I know that it’s him. I wrap myself in a fluffy white towel and go to the door and there he is. I say hi and motion for him to come in, but he won’t come in. I roll my eyes behind his back, slip on a pair of ballet flats sitting by the entryway and join him in the dark on the front steps. He is furious with me but also so obviously obsessed that it makes it very difficult for me to take him seriously while he attempts to dangle me over the edge. Being dangled over the edge used to really freak me out, but now, thanks to Tom, I find the experience to be quite relaxed. I dissociate in my bath towel while he says things about breaking up that I know he doesn’t mean. I stare into my neighbor’s dark window and think about that scene in Girls where Hannah’s publisher dies and she and Adam are arguing over her lack of grief. Adam says something like if you died, I wouldn’t know what a tree is and then Hannah explains that if he died, she would be very sad, sure, but she would also naturally worry about logistical things like how to pay the rent for their shared apartment.

Tuesday

Around one a.m., after two hours of arguing loudly with Tom in a bath towel on my doorstep, I say something banal that he interprets as malevolent and he leaves again. I watch him walk all of the way through the courtyard, through the front gates and out onto the street. I feel nothing. I go inside and lock the door behind me, shut the windows and all of the blinds, run the bath again and finally sink in. I exfoliate everywhere and shave everywhere and moisturize everywhere and it feels nice. I wash my face, apply tretinoin from tits to forehead, roll perfume oil across my wrists and neck, comb my hair, brush my teeth and get into bed. Turn the TV on and let The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season two play on mute all night while I rest.

After a dreamless sleep I open my eyes, reach my ankle towards the blackout curtains, part them with my foot, look at the light and try to deduce the time. The light is pure, fresh and bright. Too early, I think, and force myself back to sleep. When I wake up again, it’s noon. Better. The full moon is tomorrow and Cal’s twenty-eighth birthday is tomorrow and my phone is still dead and there are sirens speeding by and helicopters whirring up above and I can hear James roaring his stupid fucking leaf blower around below in the yard. I sit up, shut the window, close my eyes and picture myself perfectly still at the center of it all.

And just as I am beginning to feel serene, there’s a knock at the door. My pulse gets fast and my chest gets tight and my body goes frozen. I sit very still and stare ahead at the wall with wide eyes. The knocking gets louder, then softer, stops for a few seconds, then starts up again. This goes on for five minutes, maybe, until it stops completely. I count to one-hundred in my head and then feel safe to get out of bed. I sneak down the little hall into the living room in an XXL Gold’s Gym tee shirt and baby rib thong feeling like I’m being watched until I turn the corner and remember that I shut and locked all of the windows and pulled all of the blinds closed before bed last night. Thank God. I push the front door open an inch and peek out into the courtyard and feel relieved to find it empty. Emboldened to investigate further, I slip my ballet flats on and go out into the sunshine in my tee shirt and underwear. I check the backyard, the little wooden bench beneath the bedroom window, the laundry room, the storage room, the alley. I go all of the way out to the front gate and peer out over the iron spikes to the left and right. Neither Tom nor his car are there, but my neighbor’s boyfriend is. Guy around my age with glasses who is always wearing a plaid button down and smoking a cigarette on his girlfriend’s steps, which are right by the recycling bins. He inspects me inspecting the street. I let him through the gate.

Blonde guy with a neck tattoo in a BMW? He asks.

Yeah… he… I stammer. (Shy at hearing a third party description of my boyfriend.)

He just left.

Right…

Are you okay? He asks.

Yeah. I think so, yeah.

I laugh, then he laughs. I am in a tee shirt and underwear and cannot make eye contact with him. I ask him his name, less because I want to know and more because I am running out of things to say. He tells me and then I tell him mine and then we say nice to meet you, officially and he goes up his girlfriend’s front steps and I go up mine. Lock the door and lie back down. Blonde guy with a neck tattoo in a BMW. I look for my phone, find it, remember it’s dead and feel completely disinterested in bringing it back to life. Wonder how long I can go on with a dead phone before my mother orders a wellness check on me. And before I can decide whether it would be days or weeks, my cortisol spikes at the sound of Tom’s voice calling out my name from what at first sounds alarmingly like somewhere inside of my apartment. Then I remember the little bathroom window. Curse myself at having left it open with the shade pulled up. Sit still for a moment, figuring that Tom must have left, come back, entered the gate code, snuck up and around my back steps past the kitchen door, paced up some more and shouted straight into the open bathroom window. He’s saying my name over and over and he’s getting louder and louder and I’m nervous the scene will turn embarrassing if I don’t face him. So I get up and stumble into the bathroom and there he is, face framed in the narrow window screen above the shower head, looking coldly at me. I squint up at him, blink a lot and rub my eyes, pretending to be freshly conscious from a dream.

Were you sleeping? He asks.

Yes. I even yawn. (Perfect actress.)

Can I come inside?

Sure.

I let him in through the kitchen and then guide him into my dark bedroom, where he sits at the edge of the bed and apologizes for yesterday without apologizing for anything specifically. I stay quiet throughout the ten or so minutes he monologues, too busy pretending to be sleepy to say anything. He says we have three options… either you say something, I leave, or we go get coffee. I blink some more. Wait. Pray for a fourth option to arrive, and it does. Or, I can just run to Intelligentsia for us, come back with chais, he says. That sounds nice, I say. I lie in bed, watch him put his shoes on and leave, then get up and go into the bathroom. Tie my hair back. Spray rose water on my face. Roll the last few drops of Malin+Goetz Cannabis on my neck. Assess myself in the mirror. Puffy cheeks. Red splotches from stress. Dark under eyes. (Which I like.) And this terribly empty impression behind the irises. I smile at myself with no teeth until I get my eyes to crinkle in a way that looks sincere.

Later, Tom reappears with a giant croissant and two iced triple shot dirty chais. He stands over me and looks at me gravely and says I need you to be honest with me and then asks me if I am sure I didn’t hear him knocking at my door before, sometime around noon. I blink. Lie. You knocked? I didn’t realize. He tells me that he knocked and knocked and knocked and then did circles around the apartment, inspecting every window of the bungalow except for the two in my bedroom, which are impossible to reach. Thank God, I think, until he says but I was already coming up with ideas for how to reach those too… find a ladder, maybe… I picture him setting a ladder against the bougainvillea and palm fronds that line the back wall, climbing up through them towards my bedroom, wrestling the window screen off of it’s hinges, mussing his body through the blackout curtains straight into my bed. I picture myself screaming, pushing the ladder back and watching him fall. If I killed him, nobody would blame me. Officer, he’s a total control freak! Tom tells me that before I came to the bathroom window, he was already taking a closer look at the screen, wondering if he could remove it, and if he could, wondering whether or not he could fit his body through the open pane. My eyes widen. A little frightened. (A little intrigued.) He notices my widened eyes and says what, you think I’m crazy? I nod. He laughs. What, you think you can tell me it’s over and I’ll take no for an answer?

Tom goes into my kitchen alone to take a meeting on his laptop, which he brought. All along planning to find a way inside… all along planning to find permission to stay… I lay in bed and can’t help but laugh at the absurdity. I plug my phone in. Wait for it to come back to life. And when it does, I find a million missed calls from Tom, of course, and one long message breaking up with me at four in the morning. I smile at the message, imagining the desperation and fury with which he must have crafted it, then the desperation and fury with which he must have abandoned himself, gotten into his car and sped his way back over to me.

At two in the afternoon, I lay alone in my fluffy white bed and put 8 1/2 by Federico Fellini on the TV. I set the air conditioning to high and let a little bit of heavenly light stream in through the parted blackout curtains and light a spliff to solidify my numb feeling. I listen to Tom’s voice on the phone in the kitchen and watch 8 1/2 on mute. Such a sumptuous movie. I like the eyeliner and the bedrooms and the way that the women dress. I like the candleholders and all of the fire, and the way that all of the fire looks in black and white. I like that elegant woman in the low back dress sighing into the phone of the hotel lobby, I forgive him for everything. I like that scene where Guido’s tacky lover has a fever of one hundred and four degrees and she’s convulsing in bed in a lace nightgown while he forces her to drink water and wipes sweat from her busty chest with a cold cloth. She’s suffering but her eyeliner is perfectly intact and the beads of sweat dotting her face look like rhinestones. It’s all so Man Ray. I like the beautiful confessional booths and I like all of the discussion of catholic consciousness. I like the way the older women look and act. I like it when His Eminence says to young Guido, why should you be happy? That is not your task. Who told you we come into this world to be happy? I like Luisa with her short hair and thin glasses, smoking cigarettes in her crispy white high-collared blouse. I like it when Tom comes into the bedroom to visit me, looks up at Luisa on the screen then back down at me in bed and says, holy shit, you have the same face, because I find her pretty. I like the Grand Hotel La Fonte. I like Jacqueline the seventy year old showgirl’s last dance. And then there’s the perfect ending, where Fellini essentially spends twenty minutes losing his mind trying to answer The Question: WHO THE FUCK AM I TO MAKE ART OUT OF MY ORDINARY LIFE?

The credits roll on 8 1/2 and Amarcord begins to autoplay. Tom leaves his laptop in the kitchen, undresses and lies beside me in bed. We share the croissant he brought back from Intelligentsia and watch. Amarcord is no 8 1/2. There aren’t nearly enough beautiful women but I do like that part where the schoolboys are getting interrogated by the priest about masturbation. When there are ten minutes left in the runtime, Tom reaches for the remote and hits pause. Mushrooms? He asks. Yes.

Before the mushrooms get the chance to psychoactivate and encourage a certain bedridden hypersexual agoraphobia in us, Tom and I leave the bungalow with nothing but my house keys. We cross Franklin and wander up into the hills underneath the giant freeway overpass on Ivar. We make loops around The Dell in the evening sunlight and touch each other’s solar plexuses as the familiar inner glittering arrives. We pass the lush Vedanta Temple and then pace slowly down Vine, which, through a chain link fence, offers quite a romantic view of the city and sky over the 101. It’s a little after seven o’clock and the temperature of the air feels the same as the temperature of my skin and the sky is getting pink and the mood is so nice. If only we could be on mushrooms all of the time… yes... if only we could be on mushrooms all of the time, this relationship would sustain itself just fine… At the red light on Franklin and Argyle, I turn to him. Heaven or hell? I ask, pointing west down Franklin towards the bungalow when I say heaven, pointing south down Argyle towards Hollywood when I say hell. Hell, he laughs. While passing a couple of homeless addicts sitting close together, lighting something on fire up high on the nearly vertical concrete slab by the entrance to the 101-South, Tom clutches his chest with both hands and yells SO FUCKING ROMANTIC! We laugh until we cry and kiss one thousand times while swimming down Hollywood Boulevard towards the sunset through a sea of freaks.

And when we finally make it back to the bungalow, he does a long exhale and says it’s like we really just went through something. Which brings both of us back to crying laughing again. We lie on the hardwood floor of my closet together in the red light, undress, have sex in front of the mirror, then lie there kissing until he suddenly pulls away, takes my face with both hands, looks at me like he’s afraid and says S*******, I think there’s something… I don’t want to say it, but something… dark… that comes over me… like last night, it came over me, and I can’t control it… I just love you so much… it drives me fucking crazy… if I could just figure out a way to trust that you won’t leave me…

Wednesday

Tom’s alarm goes off at a quarter to eight and he gets out of bed straight away. I sink deeper into the duvet, shut my eyes, sleep till nine. And when I wake up again, I sit up quietly and listen to his voice talking loud and fast at somebody on the phone, listen to his footsteps pacing around the kitchen. There is something comforting about this. I look at my phone, note the date and feel my heart sink. Cal’s birthday. Nothing comforting about that. I sneak out of bed and lock myself into the bathroom and call him. He picks up and the tender conversation leaves me depressed. I whisper into the receiver. I whisper I love you so much. I whisper I was with you the day you turned twenty-four and the day you turned twenty-five and the day you turned twenty-six and the day you turned twenty-seven… and… today… (voice cracking, tears welling) today you are twenty-eight and... I start to sob. He doesn’t ask why. Just says baby, don’t cry and tells me that in his dreams, next year and all of the years after that will be different, better, together. That we will forget about twenty-eight. That twenty-eight will shrink in comparison to the rest of our lives. The rest of our lives. The haunting concept of spending THE REST of my life with Cal momentarily sobers me. I wipe my nose and eyes, try to make things normal and nice. I ask him if he has any plans for today and he tells me that he doesn’t. Which makes me cover my mouth with my hand and start to choke back sobs again. And when he shyly asks me if I’d like to celebrate with him, have dinner together tonight, (somewhere nice, anywhere you want, he says) I lose it completely. Mute myself to wail into a towel, then lie. Tell him the first untrue excuse that comes to mind, which is, ruthlessly, that my grandmother is on the edge of death (perdóname abuelita…) and that I cannot go to dinner with him for his birthday tonight because I am in Las Vegas, tending to my ailing grandmother and also my father, emotionally, in this time of familial crisis. (There is something very wrong with me. I know this.) I let the guilty pit in my stomach expand into a guilty blackhole and swallow me. I rush off the phone, unable to digest any of the sympathy he offers over my farcical tragedy. Before saying goodbye, I ask him to send me the code to his front gate so that I can have something delivered to him and he tells me that he’ll send it over but never does. I get back into bed, bury my wet face into the pillow and cry, cry, cry until my body shows mercy on me and falls asleep again.

At eleven, Tom wakes me from a dream, kisses my spine and asks if I feel up for a morning walk and cup of coffee. I tell him that I am, find a baby blue terrycloth dress shoved beneath my pillow, pull it on over my head from bed, comb my hair with my fingers and follow my boyfriend out through the front door and then the front gates into the sunshine. Eighty degrees, slightest breeze. The sky is bright and cloudless. We cross the street every time there is a chance to stay in the shade, keep out of the heat. Tom is wearing the grey pair of Los Angeles Apparel sweatpants that Cal and I used to share. In line behind a pretty young Italian girl and her middle aged parents, I touch Tom through the heavy fabric until he gets an erection. Neither the pretty young Italian girl nor her parents speak any English but luckily for them, the new twink barista with curly hair and glasses who kind of reminds me of that British gay guy in The Talented Mr. Ripley speaks Italian.

I drink my iced chai and read Joan Didion in bed, then spend two hours in the shower, diligently shampooing my hair and thinking about what she said. CALIFORNIA IS A PLACE IN WHICH A BOOM MENTALITY AND A SENSE OF CHEKHOVIAN LOSS MEET IN UNEASY SUSPENSION; IN WHICH THE MIND IS TROUBLED BY SOME BURIED BUT INERADICABLE SUSPICION THAT THINGS HAD BETTER WORK HERE, BECAUSE HERE, BENEATH THAT IMMENSE BLEACHED SKY, IS WHERE WE RUN OUT OF CONTINENT. I pick all of the black gel polish off of my fingernails and then dry myself off with pruned hands, moisturize everywhere, apply cuticle oil and then a strengthening clear top coat to mitigate the damage. I comb through my hair and massage raw coconut oil into the ends. I gua sha my face and tweeze my eyebrows some more. I feel better. Temporarily detached from all of the ambient CHEKHOVIAN LOSS.

Tom and I spend the afternoon and evening hours in bed, fucking despite my afflicted pussy and smoking bowls and eating sungold kiwis with the skin on and bathing in the air conditioning and listening to music and looking at beautiful apartments available to rent on the internet. At sunset, I put on a soft racerback tank top and cotton track pants over my white bralette and hot pink baby rib thong and leave Hollywood with Tom for the west side for what feels like the first time in a long time but is really just the first time since Saturday. We listen to “Forever Ever” on repeat and speed down four freeways, the full moon so big and so clear and so soft yellow in the sky. Tom drops the top, slows down and grips my knees while I stand up in the passenger seat on the 405, making a movie.

Our nightly walk with the dog around Venice is unusually social. I wait on the curb with the leash and discuss a number of banalities with the security guard while Tom patronizes the dispensary five minutes before closing to purchase us a blunt. We smoke one half of it with the security guard, then the other half of it with Ravi, the guy who owns the liquor store across the street. I remain silent throughout the vast majority of each interaction. Smile. Hit the blunt and my vape. Stare at the dog. Squint at Tom like, can we please go now, can we please go far, far away? We walk two miles in circles, kiss the dog goodbye and then get back into the car. We spend twenty minutes of the ride discussing what we should do for dinner before impulsively pulling into the parking lot of the West Hollywood Gelson’s and purchasing a large bag of organic tortilla chips, store-made guacamole, store-made salsa, a carton of dates and a wedge of brie cheese. In line for checkout, a few minutes before midnight, I get faint. Steady myself. Touch my hipbones through my track pants. Try to recall the last time I ate. Remember that it wasn’t today and feel pleased.

Thursday

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Sunday

For seemingly no good reason, Tom’s alarm goes off at nine. But then he turns to me and says baby, there’s a two-thousand square foot apartment on the tenth floor of a historical building Downtown that I want you to see. He lights a joint and puts his phone in my hands and I blink awake, looking at the listing. Massive windows, concrete floors, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big rooftop, high ceilings, complimentary twenty-four hour valet parking and a doorman. Tom says we can go anytime between now and noon and I say okay but then we continue to lay. We talk and smoke and fuck and stain all of the linens with blood and other bodily fluids until half past noon, when Tom looks at the time and says shit and calls the leasing agent and asks if we can come see the apartment at one instead. The leasing agent agrees. So I open up my laptop from bed and publish last week’s diaries to the blog (immediately muting blog notifications in an attempt to brace for impact AKA the influx of negative reader feedback RE: my latest life choices/blatant sex and love addiction/bad habits in romance/whatever they’d like to call the psychological mechanism embedded into my brain that makes me so passive, curious and generally boundary-less) and then sit on the hardwood floor in front of the mirror and finger-comb knots out of my incredibly voluminous sex hair.

Despite the relentless heat, we both leave the bungalow in jeans. He wears his with a white tee shirt and white Nikes and I wear mine with a tight fitting polka dot top and black kitten heels with an explicit amount of toe cleavage. We sit on the clogged 101 and then the clogged 110, getting stoned and listening to the radio. Finding parking by the building takes forever, and when we finally do secure a spot, I open up the passenger side door and miss sinking my right kitten heel into a disturbingly large pile of (clearly) human shit by less than inch. I point at the pile and say look to Tom. Tom looks, winces, shakes his head a little and says things like this… when I imagined Los Angeles from my country I never imagined things like this…

A fifty-something year old guy named Guy greets us in the lobby. He has a thick neck and a sunburn and blindingly white veneers and a perverse inability to keep his eyes away from my polka dot enshrouded b-cup tits. Guy lets us into an ancient looking elevator and tells us about the building’s history as a textile factory while we slowly creak and shake our way up to the tenth floor. He unlocks the unit and says if you’d like, I can wait out in the hall and give you some space to look around, to which Tom immediately replies great, pushing past Guy and the threshold with my hand in his, leading me inside and shutting the door behind us.

The apartment looks even bigger and more luminous in person than it did on Tom’s phone this morning. It’s beautiful. I fantasize first, then worry. I picture piling the concrete floors with Persian rugs, filling the living room with beautiful leather furniture and incandescent light. I imagine bathing in the master bathroom, which really is spectacular. A bright, austere space dominated by glossy white square tiles that cover the walls and ledges surrounding the deep soaking tub built in beneath the enormous industrial window. It’s so clean that it almost feels clinical, softened only by the abundant natural light streaming in through the glass panes. Outside the window sits another historic building, tall and all brick with elaborate white terra-cotta ornamentation and repeating arches and decorative Gothic detailing. Tom takes a picture of me sitting on the tiled ledge, making a face like holy shit, then says you’re falling in love with it, aren’t you? And I am, or was, because something about his verbalization of my falling feeling puts an end to my falling feeling entirely. I quit picturing being happy in the apartment and start picturing being miserable instead. Miserable with my Persian rugs. Miserable in my beautiful bathtub. And so when Guy comes in to ask us if we like it and instead of saying yes Tom says Guy, it’s perfect, except when we were walking up here my beautiful girlfriend almost stepped in a pile of human shit, I feel so relieved.

I stand between Guy and Tom in the elevator on the way back down to the lobby, feeling a little bit depressed about the perfect bathroom and jealous of whoever will get to bathe there, but mostly just feeling free. Tom and I say goodbye to Guy, who takes one last long loving look at my tits and tells us to call him quickly if we happen to change our minds. It’s a hot commodity, he reminds us, somewhat pathetically.

At my request, Tom and I walk a few blocks in the hot sun to Bottega Louie for lunch. We sit on the same side of a tight black leather booth and order cappuccinos and freshly squeezed orange juice and fried eggs with fresh bread and bacon off of the brunch menu. We kiss and eat and try to talk over the echo-ing shouts emanating from the bakery area, where twenty or thirty people are gathered at a bunch of little two-tops in front of a rolled-out television for a viewing of the final World Cup game. The aesthetic juxtaposition is bizarre. Messi jerseys and macarons. Think: Who are these people? What kind of person comes to Bottega Louie to watch sports? Tom asks me which team I am rooting for and when I say neither he says isn’t one of your grandmothers from Spain? and I say sure, but what does that have to do with anything?

We leave Bottega Louie and spend half an hour meandering in circles looking for a dispensary. We walk to three different locations that appear on the map but do not exist in actuality. Reminds me of that warm afternoon weeks or maybe months ago, can’t remember, when I was pacing up and down that street alone in Beverly Hills, killing time while Tom took a meeting, and I kept routing myself to bookstores I found on my phone that were nowhere to be found. The sun is beating down hot and my slingbacks keep slipping below the achilles and so we decide to give up on finding weed, eat the rest of last night’s mushrooms, find the car and get to the west side before they can hit. And we do just that, but the shrooms never really hit. My mood is nice and if I focus really hard on being sensitive, I can feel a faint glitter in my solar plexus. A micro dose at best. We take the dog for a long hot walk up and down Venice and then lay around his apartment on the black leather couch beneath the open window, drinking cold water and eating refrigerated peaches until sunset.

Later, just after sunset on the way back to Hollywood, I look out at the sparkling valley over the 405 and try to feel the glitter in my solar plexus but can’t. I look at Tom just as he is about to exit for the 101 and ask him if he’d like to keep driving north instead, straight to the strip mall parking lot off of Canoga where we can get what we need to reignite our fading micro doses into proper doses. He immediately grins and agrees. First call tomorrow at eight a.m., fuck it, he says.

While Tom speeds through the Valley, I peek at the blog. Read a comment that says this show is getting hard to watch. Feel vexed and poignantly misunderstood and quickly write back THIS IS NOT A SHOW THIS IS MY LIFE, I DO NOT DICTATE THE PLOT WITH YOU IN MIND.

Because it’s true. This is not a show and this is also not a cry for help nor a call for advice. Maybe it fucking reads like a cry for help or a call for advice, but it is neither of those things. It’s a live archive. It’s almost like some readers are participating in an ongoing moral drama whose outcome they believe they can influence. It really depresses me that almost none of the comments are about the writing or the project itself anymore. All of the comments are about my choices, what should happen to me next. Like I’m fucking Truman Burbank. The readers want to know how it’s going to end. Some of them even want to save me, I think. Which is nice, I guess, but also completely missing the point. Saving me has never been the point. I never asked to be saved. Everybody thinks my new boyfriend is satan incarnate. Everybody defends me and despises him, lets my unreliable narrative go almost entirely unchallenged. I write about lying to him, missing and seeing and kissing and fucking my ex behind his back, saying one thing to him and meaning another, acting generally duplicitous and occasionally psychopathic, and yet nobody ever really identifies me as the problem, as toxic, a manipulator, a user, a liar, a cheater, a hypocrite. I admit to being all of those things, and yet somehow, against my will and also kind of against what is simply true, I am deemed by the readers to be one hundred percent victim, clueless, romantic, damaged, lost, in danger, a damsel in distress.

I split five grams of mushrooms in half with Tom and forget about it.

Monday

The alarm goes off at seven. And despite the fact that we spent the hours between ten p.m. and five a.m. awake and hallucinating in bed, he gets up and showers quickly and dresses and then reaches for me beneath the duvet, tells me that he’s going to let me sleep, work the first few hours of his morning from the west side. Feel astounded and excited by his willingness to temporarily separate. Take the gift. Don’t question it. Kiss him goodbye. Close my eyes.

Things I do while my boyfriend is away, between the hours of seven a.m. and one p.m.:

1. Sleep till ten

2. Look at my phone in bed

3. Bathe, shave, exfoliate. Too lazy to shampoo my hair

4. Sit for an hour in the drained bath, moisturizing and gua sha-ing and looking at my phone some more

5. Apply perfume oil

6. Smoke two joints in bed

7. Look at the blog and get irritated and feel misunderstood again. Delete a comment that says do you keep going back to him so you have something interesting to write about? instead of writing back what a stupid fucking question

8. Wonder if my period is due soon

9. Feel ravenous. Eat an Erewhon seeded bar for breakfast standing naked over the kitchen sink

10. Put on a black and white polka dot bralette and matching underwear and lay with my laptop underneath the AC

Tom returns with gifts. Four shots of espresso over ice, another six pack of Buddha beer, a family sized bag of air fried kettle chips, dish soap, cat food and two glass bottles of mint terra yerba mate. He tells me that he’s hungry and so am I, but I pretend to be disinterested in food because I already ate earlier, and God forbid I eat twice before like, sunset. I redirect my appetite by toasting two slices of country bread and spreading them with a calorically intense amount of crunchy peanut butter and fig preserves. I place the slices on top of each other and cut them in half and serve the sandwich to Tom on a jade plate. I sit across from him at the kitchen nook while he eats to watch.

I waste the hours between one and six drinking Buddha beer and smoking joints and playing dress up alone in my closet. (Which doesn’t really feel like so much of a waste considering all of the fun that I have.) I find and try on things I haven’t seen in months, years, forgot I had. A pair of black leather Prada boots with four inch heels and pointed toes and a silver zipper that runs all the way up the calf. A pair of suede chaps with fringe that I purchased as a teenager in Ojai. A cheap rosary made with hot pink beads and a golden crucifix dripped out in synthetic crystals. I slip the rosary around my neck, unzip the Prada boots and get into bed. Tom follows, then sex. It’s a bit athletic and in the midst of the act, the hot pink rosary beads break and scatter across the white bed, roll onto the hardwood floor and disappear everywhere.

We get high and drive down Hollywood Boulevard in the dark to the In-N-Out across from Hollywood High. We order cheeseburgers and Diet Cokes and fries and eat in the parking lot with the roof dropped, listening to the radio and looking up at the big yellow moon. “Gentle Persuasion” by Keith Mansfield comes on and I close my eyes. Spark a joint and take Santa Monica Boulevard all the way to Venice. The night is warm and breezeless, even on the west side. We walk the dog for an hour in the moonlight, lay around his apartment getting high and listening to music, then pull back onto Santa Monica Boulevard and hit every green light on the way back to Hollywood. We park in the hills, take our clothes off, brush our teeth in the bathroom side by side, turn the lights out, get into bed and fall asleep holding each other with the AC whirring.

Tuesday

Tuesday passes swiftly. We wake at seven, fuck, get high, clothe ourselves and leave the bungalow quickly to move Tom’s car for street cleaning and find coffee. Summer morning, seven a.m., seventy degrees. The air feels like nothing on my skin and Hollywood Boulevard is empty but for half a dozen or so sleeping homeless bodies tucked between Walk of Fame stars and the facades of shuttered buildings. We go into Intelligentisa, order two triple shot hot dirty chais and two chickpea curry puffs, sit on the patio kissing while we wait and then walk back to the apartment. At eight, Tom sits at the kitchen nook with his laptop to work and I do the impossible: take the first basketful of laundry down to the basement and begin running the machine for the first time in months. Feels amazing. The entire morning, afternoon and early evening get eaten by laundry. I go in and out of the kitchen door every thirty minutes or so, spend the entire day walking up and down the stairs, washing and drying and hanging and folding seven loads. In between washes, I kiss and fuck my boyfriend, finish my coffee, eat half a chickpea curry puff for breakfast, pluck my eyebrows into oblivion sitting in the bathroom sink for half an hour, lay in bed, pet the stray cays that live in the yard by the laundry room, get a little pink in the sunshine, run the AC relentlessly and get so high. And just a few minutes before sunset, all of my clothes are clean and hanging and I feel reborn, brand new. Tom shuts his laptop and gets into bed with me and lights a joint and falls asleep in his jeans before we can decide on something for dinner. I crawl over his sleeping body and creep into the kitchen to eat graham crackers and dark chocolate and drink Buddha beer in my underwear. I smoke a joint in the bathroom to encourage sleepiness, wander around the apartment aimlessly, look at my closet and feel pleased, put on freshly laundered underwear, get back into bed, lay my head on Tom’s chest and fall asleep.

Wednesday

I wake naturally with the sun at six, sneak out of bed and close myself into the bathroom. Inspect the soft skin of my naked stomach and thighs in the mirror, which is covered in deep red creases from sleeping pressed up against Tom’s jeans. I get back into bed and when he wakes up and asks me if I want to come with him to Venice, spend the morning working in his apartment, I say yes. Which pleases him so much that he gives me two orgasms before we leave.

On the way to the west side, we pull off at the Target on La Brea past San Vicente because my eye is suddenly red and twitching and I want contact solution. We go inside, do two laps around the tiny store and purchase a big blue jar of Nivea body cream, stain remover, a bottle of eucalyptus scented hand soap, a miniature bottle of contact solution, a miniature bottle of hand sanitizer and two bottles of pink coconut water. The sky is thick with smog on the 10 and I am wearing yesterday’s jeans and yesterday’s tank top without a bra. Tom weaves through red traffic with a joint lit and no music playing, windows cracked to ash. I stare at the rear of the car in front of us, decorated with two bumper stickers, an upside down cross and an American flag.

After five or six morning and early afternoon hours of lying around Tom’s apartment, getting stoned and falling asleep a little bit in his bed and playing with the dog and looking at my laptop, pretending to work but mostly just reading things and looking at pictures while Tom worked for real, we leave Venice for Hollywood again. This perpetual motion. We stop at the Starbucks on Venice and Centinela for four shots of espresso over ice. Early Psychosis Intervention billboard on one side of the strip mall parking lot, Andrea Bocelli at the Hollywood Bowl advertisement on the other. I point to Andrea Bocelli and ask Tom if he knows him. He says of course and I say I was conceived after his show in Las Vegas, it was one of my parents’ first dates and he says whoa, romantic, no? and I say I guess so and imagine my parents full of love and hope in the cold desert fall of 1997, watching Andrea Bocelli sing “Bésame Mucho,” or whatever, and feel depressed. Should we go see the show? Tom asks, staring up at Andrea Bocelli. No.

Back at the bungalow, Tom sits in the living room to work and I lock myself in the bathroom, run the bath and soak. I fill the tub, recline till it gets cold, drain it and refill it over and over again until my fingers are pruned and I start to feel nauseous and pressed by the steam. I dry off, open up the door. Moisturize all over and comb my hair and roll perfume oil. And when I emerge in my towel, sometime around four, there is a perfect Zankou falafel plate with pita bread and tabbouleh and cabbage salad waiting for me on the kitchen nook table.

The work day ends and the early evening passes languidly between the kitchen and bed. We smoke and fuck and talk about love and money and pet the cat and eat fruit in our underwear. At eight, I pull on a very soft and thin white tee shirt and loose fitting jeans and the black ballet flats my mother bought me and follow Tom up into the hills to where he parked his car. The light outside is pink and dim and the higher up into the hills we wind, the quieter it gets. The drive to the west side is nice. Traffic is light and we listen to Yung Lean and take Santa Monica Boulevard all of the way so that we can keep the windows rolled down without the wind making things sensorially overstimulating. We pull into the parking lot of the dispensary off of Venice to procure another ounce. The security guard we like is at the door and I stand outside with him on the curb while Tom goes inside. He tells me that he thinks he’s going to adopt a German Shepard puppy next week and I say wow, that’s so sweet. But then I ask him if he’s ever had a dog before and he says oh, yes, twenty or thirty, probably. I am from Afghanistan, you know, and dogs are very popular. For fighting. I get a stomachache. Look at Tom through the big window and telepathically will him to hurry.

We walk upstairs, take turns taking bites out of a Bosc pear, undress, brush our teeth together over his big jadeite bathroom sink, shut the blackout curtains over the bed, crawl under the duvet and fall asleep.

Thursday

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Sunday

I spend the hours between midnight and nine a.m. in bed, sleeping and editing in shifts. I fall asleep with the laptop warming my stomach at two, wake again at four, work till six, sleep between six and eight, come to consciousness again in a panic, edit for half an hour and then think: better rest for an hour before saying goodbye to my mother over breakfast. So I set an alarm for nine and don’t snooze it, but when I call my mother she picks up and says guess where I am? and I say where? and she says Barstow. Halfway back to Las Vegas. She broke her promise just like I suspected she would, but there is no time to feel wounded. I tell her that I’ll miss her and ask her to drive safe, to please not play online scrabble on the road or text her friends.

At noon, I break from editing again and leave the bungalow in a soft white cotton slip skirt with a lace hem, seeking caffeine, sustenance and a better parking spot. The air outside is skin temperature but kind of thick and the sky is all puffy and white. Feels nice. Think it might rain. Wouldn’t mind. Didn’t check the mirror before I left (because I was afraid that what I might see would take me out of the mood for leaving), but by the way things look in the distorted reflections of storefronts as I walk to my car, I feel pretty.

And as I’m sitting in my parked car at the Gower Gulch, listening to the radio and waiting for the Starbucks app to notify me that the four shot hot americano I ordered for pickup is ready, it does begin to rain. Gently. Sparse little drops on my windshield that never become heavy or rapid enough to require activating the wipers. I go inside and take my coffee off of the counter and drive up Gower to Franklin and up Franklin to Western and pull into the Lazy Acres parking lot. I sit in my parked car without going inside for a very long time, listening to Famesick over the car stereo. Lena and her complex lover Craig are taking a weekend trip up to Santa Barbara. I’ve been enjoying the story very much and there are only forty-four minutes left in the audiobook and when it’s over I am worried I will feel depressed.

After half an hour in the parking lot, I muster up the will to enter the grocery store. I take a cart instead of a basket and go inside and buy rainier cherries, half a dozen organic free range large grade a brown eggs, two cartons of Pacific Foods unsweetened coconut milk, a wedge of Swiss Jarlsberg, a wedge of raw sharp cheddar, Straus Family Creamery organic plain whole milk Greek yogurt, grass-fed salted butter, organic brown rice crackers, four heirloom tomatoes, two avocados, two fuji apples, three passionfruit, three yellow peaches, four sungold kiwis, pure carrot juice, pure beet juice, a pint of McConnell’s vanilla bean ice cream, a twelve pack of limoncello La Croix and a six pack of Lucky Buddha Enlightened beer. I spend $192.56 and leave feeling high.

I burn through the entire afternoon and evening oscillating between getting stoned, fingering myself to lesbian porn, crying, petting the cat, looking at clothes on the internet, missing my boyfriend who is not really my boyfriend, not missing my boyfriend who is not really my boyfriend, feeling abandoned by my mother, not feeling abandoned by my mother, eating cherries, eating ice cream, drinking beer, picking my cuticles and editing. After the first pass through last week’s diaries I think: God, this endless cycle. And after the second: no, no, it’s not a cycle at all… it’s a spiral!

Monday

I publish my diaries to the blog a few minutes before midnight and then stay up late, till two or three a.m., reveling in the relief of the task’s completion. I watch Love Island alone in my bed and look at the internet on my laptop and feel a general sense of numb contentedness.

At nine, I wake up to my neighbor blasting “Cinderella” by Mac Miller and for some reason it hits me as the most depressing song I’ve ever heard in my life. That twinkling piano. It’s so emotional, so tragic, and it’s twinkling its way out of my neighbor’s open windows and into mine. I shut them. Then my eyes. But I can’t fall back to sleep and the song continues to seep in softly through the cracks regardless. So I open up the windows again and light a joint. Attempt to stabilize the feeling that way instead. Doesn’t work. Cry anyway. Think of Tom. Cope with ideas. Think: you can call him anytime, see him anytime, make the wrong decision anytime. And really that is why I cry, when I cry. Not because I think I can never see him again. I know that I can. But because seeing him again will never not be the wrong decision.

But I still have his sweatshirt and his face wash and he just had that new internet installed for me (and still pays for it) and nothing has been said at all, there was no breakup, it’s just that after that terrible but also kind of placid and ordinary phone call we had that ended in him hanging up on me, I never called him back. And he never called me either, or showed up to my place in the middle of the night like he has in the past. He hung up on me on Thursday and now it’s Monday and I am not sure what happens next.

Around one, I begin to feel suffocated by the slovenly state of my apartment. I leave wearing the same white slip and top that I’ve been wearing for days. Both wrinkled from the unusual amount of time I spend in bed and both greying from all of the spilled ash. I drive to the Gower Gulch and pick up four shots of espresso over ice with a quarter inch of cream. The parking lot is full but there is hardly anybody around. Sunshine glitters through the palm trees above and when I look up at the kitschy facades, I feel so charmed. Smile to myself. Feel good, a little too good, a little manic maybe, like the world is mine, like I have so much time, like I am the luckiest girl alive. There is so much to do and everything is wide open and all up to me for what feels like the very first time in my life. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, for everything to be wide open and all up to me, and also one of my deepest fears, and now it’s come true. And at least in this moment, I feel pure bliss. The fear still lingers deep somewhere, I’m sure, and lots of other ugly emotions too, but it doesn’t matter right now. I can’t feel them.

I smoke a joint and drink my espresso in bed and look around at my filthy, perfect apartment and think: where to begin? Seven or eight loads worth of dirty laundry waiting to be done, coating the hardwood floor of the walk in closet like a rug. Shit, generally, piled everywhere. Empty cans and Juul pods strewn around the bedside tables, the kitchen counters, the bathroom sink, the living room floor. Litter needs to be changed. Ashtrays need to be emptied. Dishes need to be washed. Dried. Put away. Cobwebs on the windowsills. Cobwebs on the ceiling. Everything should be vacuumed and all of the counters should be wiped. Mirrors too. And something really must be done about that massive bouquet of roses Tom ordered to my doorstep a couple of weeks ago, which now sit and rot and crisp in a slosh of yellow-grey water in a vase atop the refrigerator.

But I look around and think where to begin for too long without ever getting up or beginning. I smoke another joint instead, lay around. Eventually go into the kitchen. I eat Greek yogurt with sliced yellow peach and passionfruit and raw honey with a big spoon out of a jade bowl over the sink, looking through the big window out at the pepper trees.

And later, for dinner: Lucky Buddha beer and vanilla bean ice cream in bed at five, with the curtains parted and Love Island playing on the television.

I eat too much ice cream, get bloated with self hatred and dairy and put myself to bed a little bit before ten. I do not wash my face or brush my teeth, just switch the lights out from my phone and close my eyes. Think of Tom. Feel like I could cry but choose not to. Fall asleep worrying that I’m falling asleep too early and therefore will wake up too early and be forced to spend too many hours awake and conscious, alone with myself in my head.

Tuesday

I fall asleep at two and wake up again at five to my neighbor playing “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes. And I thought “Cinderella” was bad. I open my eyes and immediately begin to cry and experience involuntary sad emotions about missing my boyfriend. Eventually the song ends and some other songs that are less emotionally excruciating play and I try to fall back to sleep but it’s taking too long and I am mad at my neighbor for provoking me and I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts anymore so I light a joint and go back to Love Island.

I am asleep again by seven. Awake again by eleven. Out of bed and the bungalow by eleven-thirty, miraculous, with my teeth brushed in my sullied slip skirt. I have not been in the shower or shaved my legs in days and the body hair is beginning to grate on me but it will certainly not stop me from wearing the skirt I have a current unhealthy dependency on, nor stop me from driving to Erewhon Silver Lake for coffee.

I park in the shitty lot across the street and walk up the steep hill inside. Busy, but not overwhelmingly so. I order a cowboy brew from the tonic bar and while I wait, I do a lap around the store and impulsively purchase a bushel of bananas, a sack of coconut flour (with which to make banana bread, along with the three-four bananas out of the bushel I imagine will rot before the desire occurs to me to eat them), two boxed salads (one vegan Caesar, one kelp noodle), and a loaf of rustic country bread. And when I get back to the shitty parking lot, heaving my bag, there’s this couple making out in the parking lot and it brings a tear to my eye. I drive home fast listening to KJazz 88.1 FM with the windows down, wondering what Tom is doing. I look at the time and see that it’s noon and imagine him taking a break from work, walking the dog down Venice Boulevard with the phone pressed to his ear, joint in his mouth maybe, talking loudly to someone on the other line in a language I don’t understand. I dry my eyes on Hollywood Boulevard, find a good parking spot and bring my nonsensical bag of expensive groceries (that I bought simply to feel something, clearly, as I just took a cart full of bullshit home from Lazy Acres yesterday) inside. I take my sweatshirt off and then my shoes. Light a joint. Press play on Love Island. Megan Thee Stallion is there for some reason, wearing a purple corset, and for some reason the contestants are being made to jump out of cakes. Feel disoriented by the things happening on the screen. Think I may have let an episode or two play in my sleep. I do not understand what is happening, remember Megan Thee Stallion arriving, or recognize some of the surgically altered faces jumping out of these cakes. I let it play anyway, get back into bed.

At four p.m., for breakfast: the same jade bowl of Greek yogurt with yellow peaches and passion fruit and raw honey that I consumed yesterday.

At six p.m., for lunch: Erewhon Caesar salad and a sungold kiwi.

And at eleven p.m., for dinner: vanilla ice cream in bed.

The afternoon is languid and so is the evening. The whole day passed languidly, really, and now it’s almost ten p.m. and I am exhausted. Which is bizarre. Exhausted from what? Exhausted from Love Island, all of that second hand emotional torment I am consuming in order to avoid dealing with my very own first hand emotional torment.

Wednesday

Wake up naturally at six, think: no fucking way, force myself back to sleep and don’t wake up again until nine. Think: better, alright. Right below the surface there is the instinct to immediately, upon waking, panic and cry. But then I breathe in and part the curtains and decide that there will be no need for all of that.

At nine, Cal calls and we talk for ten minutes. He says good morning beautiful, I didn’t think you’d pick up, rough start, and then we talk about his birthday, which is coming up. End of July. He says maybe I can book something, maybe we can do something nice. After we hang up I feel better somehow, but the better feeling is synthetic. Look at me, I am not all alone after all, and here is proof: a deep voice on the other end of the line who calls me sometimes and says things like good morning beautiful.

At one, I put a tee shirt on over my comfort skirt and walk to the liquor store. Before I leave, I brush my hair and put Malin+Goetz cannabis on my wrists and neck for the first time in a few days and the scent hits me like a truck, brings me quick, random visions of the back of Tom’s neck, the sound his car makes when he’d lock it from the inside, his hands. I blink a few tears down my cheeks, wipe, forget. It’s beautiful outside and the sky is so blue and there is a wam breeze and nobody around, really. I go inside of the liquor store and buy three glass bottles of mint terra yerba mate and a tiny carton of cream.

At three, for lunch: a couple of half smoked joints from the ashtray and Erewhon kelp noodle salad.

I look in the bathroom mirror and dislike what I see so much that it motivates me to do the impossible. The power of vanity. I run the shower and shampoo my hair and exfoliate everywhere and shave and wash my face and brush my teeth and feel better. I listen to “Shangri La” by Freddie Gibbs on repeat and feel good, watching the cheap single blade baby blue Larchmont Beauty Center razor glide over my shins, leaving them soft and barren. I dry off. I moisturize. And for dinner, at seven, I toast two pieces of Erewhon rustic country bread and spread them with crunch peanut butter and fig preserves. I drink two mint terra yerba mates in a row and feel a little bit lonely but mostly just pleased, self-indulgent, content with the state of things. After all, it’s only seven o’clock and the light outside is softening a bit, sure, but there is still light.

I spend the hours between sunset and midnight lying in bed, wasting, smoking bowls, lamenting the lack of joints or papers with which to roll joints and also the lack of a boyfriend to go out and buy me some more. Around ten I get restless. I go into the closet and sort out all of the dirty laundry lying on the floor into empty shopping bags. I fill an empty LA Apparel bag with bras and tights and underwear. An empty Nordstrom bag with tank tops and long sleeves. A second empty Nordstrom bag with pants. A third with more pants. A Brandy Melville bag full of shorts. The sorting process thrills me for about twenty minutes and then leaves me tired and bored. So I give up for the night. Brush my teeth, wash my face. Go into the kitchen, retrieve a can of limoncello La Croix for bed. Turn the lights off. The AC and TV on. Press play on part one of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion. And feel numb, mostly, I guess.

Thursday

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Sunday

It’s two o’clock in the morning and I am dreaming something about eating a McDonald’s ice cream cone on what appears to be a spaceship when a pounding sound begins to shake and crack the walls of my dreamworld and wake me. I open my eyes and realize that the pounding sound is not a figment of my dream but something very real, so real that it is coming from the real front door of my real apartment in real life. I know who is standing on the other side and I feel afraid but I get up anyway, go to the door in my underwear, unlatch the lock and let Tom inside.

We sit across from each other at the kitchen nook in the warm lamplight and quickly split a lukewarm bottle of white wine. He apologizes and then I apologize too, kind of, and it’s nice between us for a little while, half an hour or so, until I say something he doesn’t like and we start to argue. We argue between the hours of three and six a.m., fall asleep, then wake up at nine, light a joint and argue again. Think: pointless, pointless, all of this, and wait… didn’t I break up with him?

At noon, we attempt to momentarily put our differences aside for the sake of getting a little sunlight and caffeine, but halfway down the Walk of Fame towards Intelligentsia, he says something that I don’t like and I’m sick of him anyway so I turn around and start walking back the other way. He doesn’t follow me. (And just because I’m sick of him doesn’t mean I don’t feel wounded when he doesn’t follow me… of course I feel wounded when he doesn’t follow me…)

I make it back to the apartment alone, spark a joint and call my mother. I ask her if I can come over with my laptop, lie around in the living room or the backyard or her room together while I finish editing. She says yes please. So I snuff the joint, shampoo my hair in the shower, dry off, get dressed and drive to Burbank. But when I arrive, there are all kinds of cars parked outside. I walk in and find my mother and my aunt and all three of her sons and all three of her son’s partners and children and my estranged uncle too and I feel so overwhelmed I could cry. I kiss my mother’s cheek and whisper I didn’t think it would be such a full house and she whispers back I know, pinching my arm. And then: let’s get out of here.

We sneak out through the kitchen door and get into her car and when I say I feel bad she says don’t. We drive to the Studio City Erewhon and buy four bags of tortilla chips and four clam shell containers of guacamole, three of which she takes for herself and one of which she sends home with me. She parks her car in front of my aunt’s house and squeezes me and tells me to go home and finish my work and not to worry. I nod and feel grateful and can’t look at her because for some reason tears start to crest in my eyes, and I feel embarrassed. The histrionics. I tell her I will see her in the morning and go. Drive off over the hill to Hollywood in the yellow evening sunlight. Think about Tom. Wonder what he’s doing.

And when I get back to my apartment, I don’t have to wonder what Tom is doing anymore because I know. He is sitting at the wooden table in the living room, waiting for me. I push open the front door and feel briefly alarmed at the unexpected sight of him before remembering the way I walked away from him this morning and went back to the apartment alone and left (with the door unlocked, so he could take his things) for Burbank without speaking to him, figuring he’d come in for his laptop and go home. But I guess he never went home. He stayed, and the way he looks up and smiles at me is so tender that it disarms me. Stupid, stupid girl. He picks me up and kisses me all over and carries me into bed.

Monday

I wake up at ten all alone in my dark bedroom with a pounding head and a poor grasp on reality. The curtains are shut and so is the bedroom door and I missed a call from my mother. A text, too: LACMA at eleven? I rub my eyes, light a joint, reply: yes! I crack open the bedroom door and find Tom at the kitchen nook, working on his laptop. I sit in his lap and say good morning and tell him that I am going to go to the LACMA with my mother, see The David Geffen Galleries. He stiffens a little and nods and doesn’t say anything except, and after that, when do you think you’ll be home?

And at eleven, I run out through the courtyard to the curb in a tiny striped halter dress and beat up black ballet flats with a long sleeve black top tucked in my bag, in case the museum is cold, and get into my mother’s car. At the ticket office, she asks the goth teenage girl behind the glass for two tickets and then says wait, no, one ticket, and for my daughter, one annual pass. The goth teenage girl nods and hands me a thick museum booklet called WANDER: Exploring LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries with a picture of The Artist’s Garden by Monet on the cover. My mother and I put our entry stickers on and walk to the miniature Erewhon. It’s tiny and crowded and very dark inside, like an airport kiosk. There is a shallow refrigerator stocked with the tofu I like and a variety of prepared sandwiches and puddings and slices of cake. There is a full service tonic bar too, and a glass case full of pastries. Cute. My mother purchases two bottles of pink coconut water, tofu, a banana muffin, a piece of zucchini bread and two four shot cappuccinos from a gay guy in a bad mood.

We sit at a big metallic table in the shade in front of the Pavilion for Japanese Art and pick at our food while discussing the aesthetics of the enormous, barren concrete building we are about to enter post-breakfasting.

So gray, my mother says. It’s like a freeway overpass or something.

I know, I thought that too. Like a freeway overpass, so LA. Also a little bit like a tomb.

Do you like it? She asks.

I do. Very masculine. Do you?

Not really. But I like that you do.

We decide that the pastries aren’t worth the calories, finish our drinks and ascend an endless staircase up into the sculpture of a building. Inside, the gallery is a pathless maze of concrete and glass, designed to be roamed leisurely without direction or aim. Think: only in Los Angeles could a museum this meandering exist. And the gallery really never lets you forget about Los Angeles. All of those floor to ceiling windows, looking out over the LACMA campus and the hills and the traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. Benches and labels are sparse.

The collection is strange and beautiful, and a few pieces move me so deeply in an aesthetic sense that I have no choice but to capture them on my iPhone 17. Run Up, 2002 by Ken Gonzales-Day. Rose-Marie Ormond Reading In a Cashmere Shawl, 1908 by John Singer Sargent. Psyche Abandoned, 1796 by Augustin Pajou. The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, 1635-37 by Georges de La Tour. Altar Cross (Cruz de altar), c. 1560 by Pedro Hernández Atenciano. Otahi, 1893 by Paul Gaugin. Nude on a Chair, 1904 by Édouard Vuillard. Tea, 1919 by Henri Matisse. L’Écureuil (The Squirrel), conceived 1960, editioned 1969 by Meret Oppenheim. Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries, c. 1625 by Clara Peeters.

My mother and I spend an hour and a half circumambulating. She hates Fernando Leger but loves Pablo Picasso, even the Picassos that could maybe, from a distance, pass as Legers. She stands in front of Coney Island, 1934 by Paul Cadmus and cringes viscerally. Disgusting, she sneers. She is bored by Jackson Pollock, the dadaists, and everything archaic. She likes Diego Rivera very much, especially Flower Day, 1925, which is the first work we see after ascending that endless concrete staircase. She likes Giacometti and, generally, any and all depictions of Christ. She records the entirety of the Model Lives in Baroque Italy exhibition on video. She loves the impressionists, especially Cassatt, Gaugin and Pissarro. But most of all she loves Amedeo Modigliani, and when we round a corner and find Young Woman of The People, 1918, she gasps. When I see her, I see my mother, she says, tearing up. And after I’m gone, when you see her, you will see me.

In traffic on the way back to Burbank, I play “My Sweet Lord” and my mother knows every word and loudly sings along, except for the parts where George Harrison says Hare Krishna, during which she hums instead. And back at my aunt’s, we spend two hours laying side by side on two chaises by the swimming pool, talking about whatever, looking up at the fig tree and lamenting the lack of ripe options until I start dreaming about getting high in my bed with my boyfriend. Or whoever he is.

And by eight, I am getting high in my bed with my boyfriend, or whoever he is, just like I dreamed about. We lay around and talk and have sex and for dinner, at eleven p.m., eat one sungold kiwi each and share the rest of my pink coconut water in bed.

Tuesday

Tom’s alarm goes off at seven. He touches me and kisses my shoulders and fingers me until I orgasm and then fucks me and when he says are you enjoying this morning that I designed for us? I ask him what he means by designed and he explains that he set the alarm an hour before it needed to be set explicitly for sex. And at seven-fifty eight, another alarm goes off and he gets up and goes into the living room with his laptop. I light a joint and smoke half of it before remembering that I parked my car at a meter last night. I put ballet flats on and walk down the hill and a few blocks east in the warm morning sun to my meter, which is right by Solar. I go inside and order two cappuccinos and fix my tangled hair in a big mirror hung on one of the walls. I wait on the patio beneath a lemon tree and call my mother, who says come over whenever, and bring your scanner. So I deliver one of the cappuccinos to Tom at the living room table and put a long white cotton nightgown on and roll perfume oil all over to get rid of the smell of that half of a joint I smoked and walk out into the living room with the scanner in my arms. I lean over to kiss Tom and he doesn’t lean back. I tell him that I will see him later and he doesn’t look so happy with me, maybe, but I leave anyway, say love you, pretend not to notice anything.

I spend the hours between noon and five sitting at my aunt’s palatial dining room table with my mother, scanning the hundreds of childhood pictures she brought with her from Las Vegas onto my laptop. Some of the images make me cry. There’s this one of my father and I. I’m only one and he’s only twenty nine and we are standing in the snow with our red cheeks pressed together and my father is smiling but there’s this haunting expression spread across my little face, like something in the distance only I can see has just gone terribly awry.

I leave my aunt’s house just before dinner is served and nobody is mad at me. Feel nauseous and vaguely guilty about choosing to spend the evening with my boyfriend despite nobody being mad at me. I listen to “Crush” by Tahiti 80 in the car, and as I’m waiting at the red light to cross Pilgrimage Bridge, Tom calls and tells me in a kind of manic tone that he is ten minutes away from my apartment. Think: fuck. Say: perfect timing, baby.

Tom shows up to my apartment a few minutes after I do, and he shows up in a decidedly shit mood. When I inquire after his shit mood, all he says is I’m hungry. So I light a joint and put it in his mouth and tell him to come sit in the kitchen nook and eat leftover Zankou with me. I ask him innocuous questions about his day and he replies to me with the interest and energy levels of a teenage boy replying to his mother in a movie. So I give up on my good mood and slip into a bad one too. Think: exhausting, what’s wrong with me, should’ve just eaten arroz con pollo with my fucking family. I look out the window and don’t touch the food while he eats. And once the plate is empty, he stands up and goes into the bedroom without saying anything and I follow him, watch him lie down and nod while he says I just need thirty minutes of rest. And it’s only 8:30 p.m. but I pull the blackout curtains shut for him anyway. I pick my laptop up off of the bed and before leaving the bedroom to work in the kitchen, turn back towards Tom and say I love you. But he doesn’t say it back. So I pause in the doorway. Ask him if everything is alright, to which he does not reply. So I set my laptop down in the kitchen and return to the bedroom, crawl into bed and lie, sleepless, beside him. Forty minutes pass like that until I can’t take it anymore, turn to him and whisper I am going to get into the bath. He nods a little and then sighs.

I lock the bathroom door and spend an hour in the bath, soaking and exfoliating and shaving my legs and vaping and looking at shoes on my phone and, at the end, once the water drains, bending over on all fours until the water flowing out of the faucet over my clitoris makes me orgasm. I dry off and escape the steam and go into the bedroom feeling faint. I crouch in my towel beside my unconscious boyfriend’s sleeping body and drink half a bottle of Essentia without taking my mouth off of the bottle. Then I lie on top of him, touch his face until he wakes up, but he just groans and rolls over again. So I light a joint and look out the window and sit there smoking and crying silently until I feel like I can’t stop. I get worried that the silent crying will turn into loud crying, so I climb over Tom and leave him sleeping in the middle of my bed. Put on a big sweatshirt and take my cheetah print bathrobe off of its hook on the back of the bathroom door and lie it across the one of the kitchen nook benches like a cushion. I lie down and relight my joint and plug my headphones into my laptop and start to cry. Think of Cal. Think: how many nights have I spent precisely this way, lying on top of this very robe on this very bench in the dark while a man with whom I am in a contentious relationship sleeps peacefully in the middle of my/our bed?

Wednesday

And when my laptop dies at midnight, I feel stoned and sedated enough to leave the kitchen and go into the bedroom and crawl under the duvet and lie beside my control freak boyfriend. I feel capable of putting my bad feelings and our blatantly doomed fate aside for the night. I feel capable of being tender. So I pad into the bedroom as quietly as possible with the intention to do just that. But right as I come in, he sits up and stretches his neck and looks at me coldly in the dark without saying anything, gets up and walks past me to go into the kitchen and sit where I spent the last few hours sitting. I hear him light a joint and feel enraged but follow him anyway. I sit beside him instead of across from him and say hi but he does not say hi back. And then neither of us say anything at all for a very long time. The silence makes me crazy but I can’t think of anything to say, what is there to say? So sleepy. So sick of being in trouble all of the time.

And just as I begin to accept the possibility that the silence between us will stretch on past sunrise, he clears his throat and starts in. I spend two hours at the dark kitchen nook, staring blankly into the backyard next door through the window and sometimes vaguely nodding while Tom critiques my desires, habits, beliefs, values, intentions and personality. He keeps saying I can’t believe it, you got out of bed when I wanted to take a nap without saying anything at all, who does that? And I keep saying but I didn’t even do that, I drew the curtains for you and told you that I loved you and when you didn’t say it back I understood that you were upset, so I lied back down, never left. But he doesn’t see it that way. He doesn’t see it the way it is. I become overwhelmed by the absurdity of it all and at some point, an hour or so in, this sensation arrives that I am not myself, but an actress in a scene. This sensation is a relief.

Tom’s alarm goes off at eight and the temperature of his mood is, once again, ice cold. And dear God, I am so fucking over it. He goes into the living room and starts to work. Think: go home, go home, go home, if you hate me so much why don’t you just go home. I light a joint and it summons him. He asks how are you in an accusatory tone and I say well, today is complex and he says how so and I say it’s my brother’s birthday, the one I loved, the one that died, and also… well, you know… everything going on with you, between us…. I trail off. I do not reciprocate the question because I already know his answer. Bad. Or something close.

I lock myself into the bathroom and call my mother. I describe the events of last night and this morning to her in a whisper. I tell her about Tom, say I think he’s like, a crazy person, and apologize for not being all that honest with her about him before. She screams on the other end of the line that he’s totally out of his mind, a control freak, like your father but on steroids! She says if you can, run away fast and don’t look back. Which makes me laugh. I ask her to come pick me up soon, come save me, and she says she will, but not until noon.

And at noon, I run out through the living room in a little brown dress and tell Tom that my mother is outside and that we are going to go find something to eat and then touch the ground where my brother died and then maybe go shopping. He looks at me blankly. I ask, is that alright? and he shrugs and looks away. I ask, will we see each other tonight? and he nods, eyes on his laptop. I touch my hand to his shoulder and he stiffens, so I turn to walk away. And only then does he reach for me.

My mother drives us up Franklin to Sqirl. We sit across from each other at a tiny metallic table in the little concrete courtyard and drink cappuccinos and share the new pancake, which is life changing. My mother says I can’t believe this, I really can’t. We eat until the plate is clean and talk about Tom, Tom, Tom. Afterward, next door at the market, we buy two bags of Kolsvaart elderflower fish and I recognize the woman at the cash register as the owner. She looks deeply into my eyes and strokes the Kolsvaart bags in a strangely sensual way and says these are my favorite. In the car, I tell my mother that the woman who checked us out was the owner and she says she was looking at you like you were naked.

My mother asks me if I know a good thrift store and so I route us to St. Vincent de Paul. We go inside and spend half an hour pacing around the big warehouse. She leaves with a heavy silver serving tray with little angels lining the edges and I leave with an armload of short dresses, each of which I tried on in front of the big mirror in the far back corner of the store, slipping in and out of my own dress without ever being nude. My mother said I think you learned that from me and I said true.

We drive back to Silverlake and pull into the parking lot of the strip mall where my brother died four years ago. My mother cries a little, pressing her palms against the asphalt he died on. I put my head on her shoulder and try to feel anything other than guilty for not feeling anything. After a little while, my mother wipes her face and exhales dramatically, laughs a little and looks at me and says, how far away is that amazing mall in Century City?

On the long drive to Century City, my mother drives twenty miles per hour, rides every lane line, breaks for confounding amounts of time at every four way intersection, answers texts and emails with her foot on the gas and even plays a round or two of internet scrabble. She refuses to read the map directions on her giant dashboard screen, preferring to ask me where am I going? every three or four minutes instead. I pray for patience and grit my teeth. And when we make it to the mall, it’s such a relief. We go into Nordstrom and never leave. My mother purchases me six (six!) pairs of shoes and a pair of AGOLDE jeans that fit like they were tailored for me personally. It’s like Christmas morning.

On the curb outside of my apartment, I kiss my mother’s cheek goodbye and squeal while struggling to carry all three big bags full of pretty new things inside with me. I set the bags down on the hardwood floor of my closet, open up the bedroom windows, take off my shoes and lie down.

Cal texts: I am having the worst day, only feeling better when remembering you. So I call him for the first time in a long time and tell him that I was just thinking of him. And at first the sound of his familiar voice is so nice, so warm, but then he launches into one of his self-aggrandizing, high-decibel rants about how everybody is retarded and he is a genius. I shut my eyes and sink deeper into my pillow and think: what a mistake it would be to spend even one more second of my life commiserating with this bottomless pit of a man.

I get stoned and start to feel paranoid and lonely and when Tom calls at seven, I answer. His voice is cold, a little bit put on and withdrawn, but I try to ignore it and when he asks me what I’m doing I say nothing, come over. We hang up and he texts me that he can’t wait to see me, that he is in the car and will be here soon, and I begin to dread and cry, regret inviting him. There is something very wrong with me. I know this.

To destress, during the half hour it takes for Tom to make it from the west side to mine, I:

1. Finger myself to orgasm in bed, imagining lesbian sex

2. Remember the tequila in my freezer and take a shot (chased with a date and refrigerated bite of pita)

3. Listen to “Hard To Say Goodbye” by Washed Out on a loop

4. Smoke a bowl

And at eight, he’s at my doorstep in a frighteningly balanced mood. I feel nervous, following him out of my apartment and into his passenger seat. He lights a joint and passes it to me and I inhale and try to fix my face into something that will convey comfort and normalcy. I am wearing the little brown dress I’ve been wearing all day with the wedge sandals my mother bought me this afternoon and the sky is beautiful and Tom is playing “Hard To Say Goodbye,” loud, just like I was at home, and we are on the 101-North heading fast to who knows where. It doesn’t matter, really, so I figure why ask.

Tom parks the car on Vineland Avenue and guides me across the street into The Front Yard, a restaurant with a big menu and lots of string lights hanging overhead. It belongs to a hotel called The Garland and so everybody around us is a tourist. The hostess seats us at a big table by the unlit fireplace. To my left, a sunburnt eighty year old man staring at me with a gaping mouth. And to my right, a sunburnt eight year old boy staring at me with a gaping mouth. Tom orders two tequila sodas, French fries, a terrible salad, brussel sprouts with freeze dried strawberries (what an irrational and blasphemous culinary concept), and an assortment of charcuterie. I eat three crackers, one dried fig and nothing else. I drink my tequila soda quickly and once it’s drained, I reach for Tom’s and drink that one quickly too. I apologize and order two more and when the waitress sets them down, Tom pushes his towards me and smiles and says both, for you. And by the time dinner is over, I feel like Paz de la Huerta. Wasted in public with unbrushed hair, wearing naked wedges and a tiny wrinkled dress.

Thursday

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Sunday

Tom’s heavy arm lies across my ribs while he sleeps and I am starting to lose feeling in my abdomen. I get claustrophobic and sneak out of bed, bring my laptop to the kitchen nook and sit for two hours staring at my diaries until I decide that my willpower is mediocre tonight and resolve to finish the work in the morning. Give up, get back into bed.

At nine, Tom wakes up and kisses me all over and tells me that he wants to get coffee and take a drive to the west side but I am not so sure, feeling suffocated by all of the editing I have left to do. But there won’t be any traffic, he says. And his face gets a little tense at my resistance, so I put a hoodie on over my little dress and follow him outside and down the block to his car. June gloom continues. Sky thick and puffy with grey clouds. We stop at Intelligentsia and he orders us two hot triple shot dirty chais, a chocolate croissant and a chickpea curry puff. To split.

We walk the dog in an enormous square around Venice Boulevard under the tepid grey atmosphere. Feels nice. Like a cashmere sweater.

Back in Hollywood, I spend the hours between three and nine battling opportunity for distraction after opportunity for distraction while working on my diaries at the kitchen nook across from Tom. For example: an hour long conversation with him full of sentiments I’ve heard before at three p.m., the gardener leaf blowing in the yard at four, two king sized joints on the back steps at five, a sore back at six, a migraine at seven, and dinner (falafel, pita, chicken, hummus, pickled radish, grilled tomato, tzatziki, cucumber salad, cabbage salad and tabbouleh) ordered from Zankou, at eight. I don’t finish editing until half past nine, but when I do, it feels so fucking good. I am sleepy and my eyes are heavy and I ask Tom if nine thirty p.m. is an insane time to go to bed and he holds up another two king sized joints and says not after this.

Monday

The first thing Tom does after he opens his eyes is criticize the way I slept. He imitates the way I allegedly spent the night laying on my back and says never, not even for a second, were you turned towards me. He says he had ten dreams and I was in all of them and looked very pretty in each. I ask him for more details but he can’t remember any. Curious. Ten dreams. Sex and a joint regardless.

Intelligentisa at noon. “This Charming Man” is playing over the speaker system and I am reasonably provoked. Busy inside. I am wearing a white tank top with no bra and everybody loves me. The two short kings running the counter today are working slowly. Stoned maybe. It takes twenty minutes for the cuter of the two short kings to call out two dirty chais. Tom and I walk back uphill to the apartment. I take my sweatpants off and sit in my white tank top and baby rib thong in bed. Look at myself in the grey reflection of my laptop. Open up the curtains a little, let in some light. Look at expensive apartments available for rent on the internet for fun. For pretend. I am just playing pretend. Or at least I hope I am.

I spend the afternoon looking at the internet in my bedroom. I save the listings of about fifty different gorgeous vintage apartments. Just for fun. I smoke one joint in bed with my boyfriend at two, then another one at four. At five, Tom asks me if I would like to go take a look at a tiny two bedroom house for rent at the top of Topanga. I would. So I change out of my Brandy Melville pajama pants and into a tiny black skirt and big boots with metallic hardware. I put concealer on my cheeks and perfume oil on my neck and use the Mason Pearson brush on my blown out hair. Which is acquiring grease at an alarming speed. Stuff a handful of joints into my Corto Moltedo bag then follow Tom out through the courtyard and up the hill to where we parked his car. Blue skies over Hollywood.

We stop at the Gower Gulch for four shot hot americanos and a pumpkin loaf, to split. There are no parking spots so Tom idles. I run inside, feeling like an easy target in my tiny skirt. On my way out, holding both hot americanos and the pumpkin loaf in a bag, an old man with liver spots and a big bandage on his face looks at me in a way that feels like rape. And the look makes me so nervous that I grip one of the americanos too hard and the lid buckles and the liquid spills all over my white sweater, all over my tiny skirt and down my thighs. To the old pervert’s delight.

Tom speeds up the 101 North to the 27 up, up, up to Topanga. We smoke a joint in the car and drink our coffees and listen to Curren$y. The conditions are so nice and Tom’s mood is so good, but there’s this terrible little psychosomatic feeling in my stomach that I can’t quite describe. Probably something to do with all of the pretending I’ve been doing lately. Probably something to do with all of the pretending I am doing right now.

Luckily for me, the house at the top of Topanga is cursed. Strange landlord. One of the bedrooms is laughably small. Strange junkyard featuring three unkempt looking Great Danes barking in a fenced in pen out front. Well priced for the location but otherwise completely fucked up. I shake the strange landlord’s hand on our way back to the car and his hand is a little bit wet and I feel like I might throw up.

Tom and I do a long walk around the west side at sunset with the dog. The sky changes from blue to yellow to orange to pink. The cool tones blend into something warm. An impressionistic sunset and a full moon tonight. And in the car on the way back to Hollywood, “Skeletons” by Travis Scott plays and we stop at the In-N-Out by Hollywood High for cheeseburgers and fries. We sit parked outside of my apartment with our food for an hour, eating and talking and kissing and smoking and procrastinating going inside until we finally do, sometime around eleven. We collapse into bed and fall asleep quickly.

Tuesday

I wake up at seven to Tom’s alarm and immediately roll on top of him to avoid yesterday morning’s drama. Adapting my behaviors to bypass trouble. I am learning. Or like, better said: being trained. He gets out of bed and starts working in my living room. I stay in bed. Push open the curtains. Light a joint.

I spend the hours between eight and noon adding things to cart on various websites without ever pressing purchase. My mother calls and says that she found two huge boxes of photos from my childhood in my brother’s closet and wants to know if she should bring them with her when she drives in tomorrow. Should I pack them? Do you care? I tell her to pack them, that I care.

At noon, Tom rushes me out of the house for coffee and a cinnamon roll at Solar before a penthouse apartment viewing on Hollywood Boulevard. I am in a mood because I am in a terrible outfit. Big ugly creamy sweater over a short skirt with big boots. Greasy hair. Didn’t get the chance to really consider my face in the mirror, which is maybe a good thing. Mentally. Feel like I want to crawl out my skin anyway.

On the way to the apartment viewing, nothing goes right. I spill coffee all over my ugly sweater, just like I did yesterday before the Topanga house. (God?) We witness an Asian woman trip and fall over a homeless man lying supine on the boulevard. The cinnamon roll makes a mess and doesn’t taste very good. The only close parking spot requires a one-hundred point turn. And when we finally do make it inside, the building is historic and gorgeous and the views are so expensive but the unit is a total bust. The leasing agent, a thirty-year old Slavic woman wearing an ill fitting suit with filthy white tennis shoes, is a little bit of a bitch. She tells us that there is no air conditioning, no laundry, no parking, and no utilities included in the rent. We tell her thank you but no thank you and take the old elevator back down to ground level and sip the last of our cappuccinos in disappointment. Although I, the liar, the pretender, am a bit glad to be disappointed of course. Because if the apartment had been perfect...

Tom leaves for the west side and I drive to the Trader Joe’s on Hollywood and Vine. I buy: dates, rosemary crackers, five kiwis, four nectarines, two honeycrisp apples, a wedge of brie, two bags of trail mix of two different ilks and a bag of sea salt chips. The cashier winks at me and tells me that my total is fifty dollars. I try to feel something about fifty dollars and can’t.

I get home from the grocery store and immediately undress and return to bed. I get stoned, talk to the cat, pick and eat all of the dried pineapple out of my new trail mix and agree to meet Tom on the west side in an hour or two.

Five p.m in Venice. Sex, then a joint, then a nectarine shared over the kitchen sink.

“Summer Madness” by Kool and The Gang plays in the car, loud, while Tom speeds up the Santa Monica Freeway toward Hollywood. The sunset is bright orange in the rearview mirror and when Tom asks me how I am feeling about my mother’s impending couple of weeks in LA, which begin tomorrow, I feel dread. Couple of weeks. Feel the urge to clutch at my neck. Feel suffocated. And nothing has even happened yet. I tell him that, and then I tell him that feeling that way makes me hate myself, feel worse, like a bad daughter and generally a wretched bitch. He says no, no, I feel that way too, and then I drop her off at the airport and feel depressed.

We eat leftover Zankou pita and hummus and tzatziki and falafel for dinner in my bed and fall asleep early, before eleven.

Wednesday

Awake at six. In and out of sleep till seven. Sex and then a joint. I look at my phone and monitor my mother’s location and find her little dot in the middle of the desert, Newberry Springs, CA, wherever the hell that is. She is two and a half hours from LA and my mood is a mess.

At ten, Tom leaves for the west side. My mother calls and tells me that she’s passing Pasadena and should make it to my aunt’s house within the hour. She says just come over whenever you can and I say okay and then hangup and smoke two bowls and start running the bath to cleanse myself and stew in my dread.

I don’t leave Hollywood for Burbank until noon, and I don’t feel good about it when I do. My hair is greasy because I was too lethargic to shampoo it in the shower. Exfoliated everywhere and shaved and put concealer on and dressed myself in a bad (short shorts, long sleeve top, moto boots) outfit and left instead. Got into my car and drove it over the hill. Felt nice to drive my car a distance farther than down the street for the first time in weeks.

I kiss my mother and her dogs and my aunt hello and then sit in the living room by the big window for an hour, looking out through the glass at the shimmer pool and palm trees and orange awnings. We talk and drink coffee. Topics of discussion include: my uncle, quitting my job, my mother’s miraculous promotion, my cousin’s wife’s gestational diabetes, Fourth of July, and my crazy new boyfriend. I have a lovely time and feel terrible about all of that dread I felt before.

At three, my mother and I leave Burbank for Miracle Mile because she tells me that she’s been dreaming about the Swedish candy store on a consistent basis since the last time she was in LA. We go into Sockerbit and fill two paper bags with one hundred dollars worth of organic candy. My mother taps her card and I kiss her on the cheek and then follow her across the street to Sidecar, where she buys a dozen old fashioned donuts, and Trader Joe’s, where she buys watermelon and peaches for my aunt and a bottle of sparkling water for me.

On the drive back over the hill to my aunt’s, my mother and I eat Swedish marshmallows and I listen numbly while she turns down the Electric Light Orchestra song that is playing to tell me that she thinks she heard God whisper to her I sent him. Him being Tom. But it might have just been an intrusive thought, she sighs. I’m excited to see what you think, I say. And do not mean.

But dinner goes swimmingly. My mother and I make it to Superba right on time and Tom is already there, sitting in a big booth in the back of the mostly empty dining room. He stands up and he’s wearing this navy blue button down and his hair is combed back and my mother presses her elbow into my side and says I love him before we’ve even finished crossing the room. Jesus Christ. The two of them do ninety nine percent of the conversational heavy lifting and leave me sitting in the middle to watch and nervously pick at the bread.

After dinner, instead of letting me drive my mother back to Burbank, Tom insists. So he lets her into the passenger seat of his car and I get in the back and it’s so surreal, this moment, sitting behind two of my worlds, watching them collide. When we hug goodbye for the night, my mother whispers he is obsessed with you.

Thursday

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Sunday

Wide awake, three a.m. Still editing last week’s diaries. Determined to finish editing before I sleep so that I will not have to deal with any of these romantic, pathetic sentences about Tom in the morning. Want to wake up with nothing left of him to edit. Nothing left of him at all. Just the fading hickey on the left side of my neck and the bouquet of roses in the kitchen, to be tossed out at sunrise. The apartment feels quiet, empty. Keep thinking: what happens next? I am working on the diaries slowly because I am a little bit terrified of coming to the end, of having everything all tidy and formatted and ready for publishing, because what will there be left to focus on then? To keep me from unravelling?

It’s been ten hours since Tom left and I am desperate to fill the void. I go into the kitchen in my underwear and flood the dim room with lamp light. I open up the cabinets and then the fridge and consume practically everything in sight. Which is not much. Handful of dry cereal, handful of semi-sweet chocolate chips, stale bit of refrigerated French bread spread with the last bit of eggplant caviar, a couple of cornichons and a quarter jar of basil sauerkraut. I eat standing over the sink in a fugue state. And when I come to, I still feel famished. The hunger is bottomless because the hunger is psychological. I get back into bed and go on my phone and look at Postmates. Feel depressed by the five a.m. options. Decide that Starbucks is as good as it’s going to get. Put a venti iced caramel macchiato and a butter croissant in the cart and look at the price and find the fees ridiculous and wonder if I should just force myself out of bed and up the street to where my car is parked and drive to the Gower Gulch instead. But then I remember my heartbreak and decide that if there is ever going to be a morning to pay thirty dollars for someone to bring me a fucked up frozen croissant and three-hundred calorie cup of coffee, it is this morning.

I specifically request for my Postmate, a guy on a motorcycle named Davide, to bring my fucked up frozen croissant and three-hundred calorie cup of coffee directly to my front door. I give Davide the courtyard gate code and tip him well and everything, but the bitch does not comply. So I tie a kimono on over my bra and go all the way out through the courtyard to meet him. He is very handsome which disarms me and puts an end to my annoyance almost instantly. The air smells like fire and the sky is thick and yellow and confronting the morning light feels good, invigorating.

At seven, I finish editing. I paste the diaries into the blog and pick a title and a picture and publish and feel light inside. Seven a.m. The earliest I’ve published diaries to the blog on a Sunday morning in weeks. Months, maybe. I take a bite of my butter croissant. Tastes like nothing. Don’t know what to do with myself, really. I am free bleeding into my white bed sheets and feeling like sleeping soon is a pipe dream. Might give up, skip sleep entirely, get into my car, drive to St. Vincent de Paul and spend a small amount of money on a large amount of clothing to make myself feel better about everything.

I check the blog for comments. The first reads: you will be just fine. I reply: it’s been twelve hours since he left. I haven’t slept yet and can’t imagine sleeping soon. The sun is up. I haven’t cried since 3AM but I have been on the verge once or twice. Should I get high and wait in bed until sleep happens to me or should I get dressed and find coffee and drive to the charity shop I like ten miles away and spend a small amount of money on a large amount of clothing? I receive the answer I want to receive. Which is perfect because I am just beginning to feel bad for myself again, to cry and miss him, remember the way he’d kiss my shoulders in the morning. But this is nothing that cannot be forgotten (at least for a little while) in the densely packed aisles of a Lincoln Heights charity shop.

I sit in bed and roll a joint and smoke it. I put the first episode of the new season of Love Island USA on the TV and think about Tom and cry all throughout the introduction until I look up at the screen and happen to see a beautiful girl with a robotic leg lip syncing to a stupid song. Which immediately puts an end to my tears and dissociates me from my sad reality and immerses me into The Villa. God, I love this fucking show.

At nine, the urge to call Cal and ask him to come over and spend the day watching Survivor in my bed with me arrives. I push the urge away and get out of bed instead somehow. I go into the bathroom and look at my pink, puffy face in the mirror and brush my teeth. I put on a tank top and sweatpants and mini Uggs and collect my wallet and my vape and my keys and force myself out of the front door and up the block to where I parked my car. For morale.

Walking up the hill, I pass these two kids getting out of the backseat of a beater, evidently being dropped off to spend time with their father who is standing in front of a dilapidated apartment complex. He bends low to hug and kiss them. They look so happy to see him. The kids are so young and tiny and when I hear him say how have you guys been, which implies missed time, I feel like I might cry. Today is Father’s Day. On top of everything.

On Riverside Drive, the sky is white and the palm trees are enshrouded in a low fog and the vines hang long over the overpass. Everything is blanketed in clouds but there will not be rain. No. The blanket is thin and there is bright light on the other side. I look out through the windshield and think: the city mirrors me, like an externalized nervous system. Any minute now, the sun will start to burn through the clouds.

Still, would kill for a klonopin.

I spend an hour inside St. Vincent de Paul. I fill a blue cart with clothes I don’t particularly like, get a little depressed and bored, put everything back on a rack and decide to leave with nothing. But then, on my way out, I pass the home section and end up purchasing a sapphire beaded rosary with a gold crucifix, a small white diner mug with a single dark green stripe, a pair of candle holders, a tiny crystalline stash box and a little brass tray shaped like a seashell. Treasures. When the cashier finishes scanning my things and tells me that my total is twenty one dollars I feel lucky.

On the drive back to Hollywood, I take the streets instead of the freeway because it sounds like a nice way to waste time. I think about Tom. I turn do not disturb off for the first time since he left last night and find that he called three times. I consider the power I hold in this moment and do not feel prepared to give it up. At least not now. Not yet. Who knows, might give it up tonight.

I pull off on Western into the Lazy Acres parking lot. Charity shop treasures in a paper bag on the passenger seat, heart aching I go inside and purchase two bags of air fried kettle chips, cherries, trail mix, dark chocolate, Annie’s cheddar bunnies, two enormous bottles of Essentia and a refrigerated box of tiramisu. Coping food, obviously. I park two blocks away from the bungalow in a spot where I know I won’t get a ticket and carry my bags uphill. Thinking of nothing but Love Island and my fluffy bed and the joint I am about to smoke.

At five, Tom calls.

I need to see you, he says.

Not now.

Over the course of the evening I smoke four joints, watch six and a half episodes of Love Island and eat about one thousand calories worth of coping food. I get bloated and hate myself. I go into the bathroom. I put my hair up and run my bamboo toothbrush under hot water and then snake it down my throat until a satisfying amount of coping food is out of my body and into the sink.

And at ten, Tom calls again.

I am going crazy, he says.

I am going to sleep.

Monday

Open my eyes. Nine a.m. Alone in bed. I am sweating a little and there are five missed calls on my phone. One from my mother and four from Tom. And a text from each. Tom says good morning. My mother says call me please.

So I call my mother from bed and spend half an hour listening while she psychoanalyzes the behaviors and habits of my half brother’s twelve year old son, Eli, who is currently nine days into a ten day summer stay at her house in Las Vegas. She complains about my brother’s lax parenting and confides in me about her anxiety that Eli might be looking at things God wouldn’t want him to be looking at on his unmonitored iPhone. She tells me that she is cancelling her trip to DC for the Fourth of July to drive up to LA and see me instead. She says she will come with her car this time and both of her dogs and two weeks worth of clothes so that she can stay with my aunt in Burbank for as long as she wants, until she feels like going home. She says I can’t wait to meet Tom and I say ummmmm mmhmm.

I keep looking at Tom’s good morning. I think about him and then I think about my power and then I think about him some more. I send good morning back and before a minute passes, he’s calling. I pick up. He begs to see me. I say fine, not now, later, but fine.

We hang up. I vacuum all over and change the litter and clean the sinks in the kitchen and bathroom with bleach and make the bed and shove stray things into cabinets and closets until I look around and feel pretty good, feel better. Then I run the bath hot and get in and exfoliate and shave everywhere. Reach for my toothbrush and can’t find it because I threw it out last night after using it as a tool to aid digestion (engage in self harm). I sigh and dry off. Put on a tiny black cotton halter neck dress and sit in my bed and get stoned in preparation of reuniting with my control freak boyfriend.

And before two, my control freak boyfriend is standing on my doorstep in jeans and a white tee shirt with clean hair and weed and a carton of apricots in his hand.

After an hour of French kissing and reconciliation, Tom tells me that his car needs to be looked at and asks me if I’ll come with him to the service center on Wilshire. Fine. So we get into his car and drive over and when we pull in, it’s nostalgic. He says remember the first time you came here with me? and I say yes and try to remember something specific about that day and can’t think of anything other than the denim Stussy shirt I bought that morning on La Brea to wear over my dress before I met him there.

The guys at the service center tell Tom that they’ll need the car for the afternoon. So we walk down 4th Street and sneak into Park La Brea behind an old woman with a ratty little dog. The physical and energetic atmospheres are each equal parts numb and placid. The mundane, manicured landscaping of Park La Brea. The tepid weather. The banal conversation. The blunted feeling. We wander the grounds with a lit joint, exit through a set of gates on 3rd Street, cross, walk through Pan Pacific Park and into the Erewhon on Beverly.

I shop alone while Tom and the dog, who is not allowed inside, wait at a little wooden table on the sidewalk. It’s crowded and I feel hot and agitated. I go to the tonic bar and order a cowboy brew and a cococcino and then walk around while I wait and purchase spicy tofu, dried mango and a very perfect looking container of cut kiwi. And just as I am on my way out, passing through the doors, cradling my things and walking quickly, I pass a beautiful girl with a familiar face walking in. She has her arm looped through a man’s and she is leaning into him and saying I think I want a smoothie. We lock eyes and it registers who she is. Kai’s sister. And she’s giving me this look like my familiar face has registered for her too, but neither of us say anything. Keep walking.

Tom and I walk down Beverly to Fairfax and then down Fairfax into The Grove. We do a lap around the farmer’s market and then the main square and I can’t stop thinking about Brandy Melville and say I want to buy underwear. Tom says amazing. So we go through the little alley past See’s and Drake’s stupid store and the pizza cafe and a line of like, one hundred people waiting for La La Land and enter Brandy Melville. The security guard looks at the dog and then at Tom and shrugs and waves us in. We roam around both floors of the store. I stuff my arms with cotton bralettes and underwear. And when we go to check out, the disdainful teenage sales girl (who interrupts our interaction to roll her eyes and scream NEXT at a vacant girl waiting in line on behalf of her shy coworker at the till next door) announces the total and Tom taps his card. I feel self conscious in front of the disdainful teenage sales girl but kiss his cheek anyway. And to my surprise, when I turn back to her, she smiles earnestly and says have a great day you guys and really kind of sounds like she means it.

On the walk back up Wilshire to the service center, Tom and I stop at Walgreens so that I can buy a bottle of organic coconut water and a new toothbrush. We make it back to Hollywood around seven. There’s a perfect parking spot on my block and when we collapse into my bed with the air conditioning on, he says feels so good to be home. I ignore the word home and integrate the sentiment. We sit in the low light with our laptops and a bag of dried mango with the bedroom windows open until ten p.m.

And at ten p.m., we leave the bungalow for the Target on Sunset and Western because I need cat food and Tom needs some adapter. We listen to Larry June in the car. Warm summer night. The moon is small and bright white and sliced in half in the sky. And it’s so beautiful but I feel a little bit sick, looking at it through Tom’s windshield. Half moons always remind me of that slit open eye in Un Chien Andalou.

For dinner: Superba delivery. The usual perfect feast. Bread with salted butter and fresh cheese and brussel sprouts and Caesar salad and rigatoni bolognese. We get stoned and eat every last bit in bed and everything feels nice. Fall asleep watching Succession and holding each other codependently tight.

Tuesday

I wake up in the middle of the night, itching all over, thighs and stomach and neck and chest covered in tiny flesh colored welts. I untangle myself from Tom and go into the bathroom and get close to the mirror and pull up my shirt. Blood underneath my fingernails. Skin covered in scratch marks. I open up the medicine cabinet, swallow a benadryl and get back into bed.

Seven a.m. White sheet-staining period sex. Then Tom gets into the shower and takes a work call from my living room. I continue to lay. Touch my stomach. Survey my rash. Wonder if it’s diet or stress. Hope it’s diet. Something more scientific. A matter of elimination. Feel excited by the idea that my rash is a matter of diet because now I get to conduct a new set of experiments on myself. I get up. Shower. Reach into the black paper bag, take the tags off of a new bra and then a new pair of underwear, put them on and get back into bed. I push open the curtain a little, let in the green light, open up the window and then my laptop.

At ten, Tom finds me in the bedroom and tells me he has an hour free. So we walk down Franklin in the warm gloom to Solar de Cahuenga even though I hate Solar de Cahuenga. We sit beneath a plastic tree on a leather couch with stuffing busting from the seams while a stressed out gay guy with bleached hair works the bar alone. We wait thirty minutes for two cappuccinos and then walk uphill back to the bungalow.

At one, Tom leaves Hollywood for a meeting in Beverly Hills. While he is gone I shampoo my hair in the shower, dry off, go into the closet, take the tags off of another new bralette and pair of underwear and put them on. I light a joint and lift the blood-stained top sheet off of the bed and find that nothing seeped through and feel relieved. I go into the kitchen and eat cherries and Annie’s cheddar bunnies. I take pictures of my body in the mirror. I feel unsatisfied with the way that I look. I do one hundred hip dips on the hardwood floor. I try on a pair of white cotton bloomers I bought at that thrift store in Ojai a couple of months ago. I like the way they feel. I don’t take them off. I do another hundred hip dips on the hardwood floor.

Later, after sunset, sitting at the kitchen nook across from the giant vase of rotting roses, enveloped in their beautiful smell, I watch Tom make spaghetti bolognese and listen while he tells me that despite understanding my hesitant position, he believes that I should at least consider accompanying him to tour a couple of apartments. Let’s really embody the reality, he says. Sounds like me. He tells me that he will pay the rent and the bills and everything else, pay for whatever I want, add me as an authorized user to his card. He says that his budget for rent has no limit and that I can pick out the place, somewhere beautiful and expensive in the hills or the canyon. Just for a couple of years, of course. Then a mortgage. He spoons the bolognese into two jade bowls and sits across from me and tells me that he wants to give me everything. He smiles. And all you have to do is give me everything in return.

Wednesday

Wake up at noon feeling docile, anesthetized. Briefly wonder what’s the cost of being taken care of? Then think: now is not the time. Sex instead. Smoke a joint. Shower languidly. And at three, a walk down Sunset to Superba for lunch. We sit in the garden and order two black sesame matcha lattes and two chopped chicken salads and bread with salted butter and fresh cheese. He fantasizes aloud about the potential features of our imaginary future apartment. I dissociate a little and stare for too long at the woman sitting two tables away. Thirty something and beautiful and dining alone with her baby, a tiny thing in a striped onesie sleeping in a stroller. She is drinking a glass of wine and eating something I can’t identify out of a low bowl, the sugar snap peas maybe. I feel jealous. I want to have a baby and then put my baby in a striped onesie and bring my baby to Superba.

Tom and I make it back to my apartment around five and lie in my bed and begin to argue and don’t make up until nine. And even though we make up, there is no resolution. The closest thing we have to a resolution is the mutual recognition that we are at an impasse and that it’s getting late and that there is leftover Superba bread and chopped chicken salad in the fridge and that we just want to get high and eat. I say let’s pray about everything for a few days and feel like my mother. He agrees, retrieves the leftovers from the kitchen and gives it a rest. The mood is fragile. Emotionally exhausted. We smoke, pick at the food, watch an episode and a half of Succession in silence and then fall asleep early, something like nine-thirty.

Thursday

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Sunday

It’s one o’clock in the morning and I am sitting in the passenger seat of Tom’s car in the drive-thru line at the 24/7 Starbucks on Western and Fountain. The line is surprisingly long for one o’clock in the morning. Tom and I are smoking a joint with the top dropped and listening to a Curren$y song. He turns the volume up, loud, and I feel self conscious. We order two tall cappuccinos and drink them on the 101 while Tom speeds eighteen miles in eighteen minutes to the strip mall off of the Canoga exit. A guy in a fucked up car is waiting for us in the parking lot with five grams of dried mushrooms. Tom gets out, pays cash, gets back in and pulls back onto the freeway. We pull off at the quaintest In-N-Out I’ve ever seen and I’m not sure where we are, maybe Sherman Oaks. The employees act braindead. Sprouting from a patch of grass out front are two crossed palm trees. We order cokes and burgers and fries and drive the food back to Hollywood.

Parked in the dark on my street in the early hours of the morning, we halve the bag of mushrooms and then halve that half, say cheers and consume. I chew and swallow without breathing through my nose and chase with my cheeseburger. We sit in his car until all of the food is gone and I start to feel the mushrooms glittering in my solar plexus. I look at Tom, already a little bit high and worried, and say let’s go… like right now… before we can’t…

The mushrooms wear off around ten a.m. I stare out the window into the hot pink bougainvillea blossoms and feel clean. It’s bright outside and we are wired and can’t imagine sleeping so we don’t. We lay around my bedroom bullshitting until two o’clock in the afternoon instead, when Tom looks at me and asks if I feel capable of reentering society to procure coffee. And I do, kind of, so we walk to the Starbucks on Hollywood and McCadden and order two hot cappuccinos. On the Walk of Fame, I feel full of goodwill towards humanity. I am smiling and making eye contact with everyone we pass, looking at people and thinking things like you were just a baby once, and when a guy selling CDs (what is this, 2008?) on Highland looks at me and says good morning beautiful I say good morning beautiful back. Tom laughs.

Later, I sit in bed with my mushroom induced insomnia and my coffee and my breakfast sandwich and edit last week’s diaries until seven p.m. I press publish, sigh, shut my laptop, rub my eyes, undress, pick Tom’s sleeping hand up off of his chest and fasten it to the back of my neck.

Monday

I come to consciousness in a panic and look at my phone and see 7:53 and try to understand whether it is 7:53 a.m. or p.m. Both feel plausible. I stretch my arm out and peek through the blackout curtains and assess the light and decide: a.m. Feel relieved at the light, the clear morning light.

Tom and I get out of bed to move our cars for street cleaning only to look at the posted signs and realize we are parked perfectly. We leave our cars as they are, parked a few spots away from each other on the same block, and walk to Intelligentsia. I am wearing jean cutoffs with black ballet flats and a tank top and the mood is nice. It’s early and the space is empty. We order two hot dirty chais and drink them on the little patio outside and then walk to Playboy Liquor for water and Juul pods. Halfway up the hill back to my apartment, Tom looks at me and says is now a good time for groceries? And I say yes so he puts the dog in the backseat and drives us up Franklin to Lazy Acres. We purchase: cinnamon Puffins, barbecue kettle chips, jalapeño kettle chips, lime and salt tortilla chips, guacamole, salsa, five kiwis, four white peaches, four apples, two mangos, basil, ground beef (for bolognese), two bowls of sesame noodles and a fat wedge of brie.

We drive back to Hollywood and set the groceries inside. There is something off about Tom’s mood that I feel resolved to ignore because the sun is shining and it is a beautiful day. I light a joint and pass it to him and suggest we spend the afternoon in the living room for once. I open up all of the windows and blinds and we sit across from each other at the big wooden table and eat white peaches for breakfast and I try hard to make it nice.

Between the hours of two and sunset, I read The Garden of Allah by Shiela Graham in its entirety and reorganize the bedroom closet. I make piles of clothes for trash, for Goodwill, for folding, for hanging and for laundry. Sometime late, around eight, Tom finds me in the closet and undresses me. We have sex, redress, take the dog for a walk around the block in the dark, come back inside, eat tortilla chips and kiwis for dinner in my bed and fall asleep on top of each other with all of the lights on before ten p.m.

Tuesday

Wake up at five a.m. Have sex. Fall asleep again. Wake up at nine a.m. Have sex. Then light a joint in bed and listen while he tells me a story about a Serbian girl in Germany that he crossed borders for when he was thirteen. They met online and had been emailing back and forth for a year before he met her. He was nervous. She was Muslim and it took a lot of convincing to get her parents to go along with it, but they agreed to host him for two days so long as he payed his own way and swore not to try to sleep with their daughter. So he went to Berlin and stayed for two nights and didn’t touch her. He slept in her bedroom. She slept between her parents in their’s. And when the agreed upon two days were over, he wanted more. So he went to a hotel nearby and gave the guy at the front desk cash and rented a room for two more nights and emailed the girl to come meet him. But her parents intercepted the message and got very upset. He spent two days alone in that hotel, emailing her and not getting any replies. And then, when it was time to check out and take the long train back home, she was there at the station, waiting with her mother. She walked up to him and delivered him a scripted break up while her mother looked on. He said you’ll be back and she was, two years later via email, and they kept in touch until he was seventeen when somehow, he can’t remember, they lost each other again.

At noon, we leave the bedroom for the kitchen. I sit at the nook table in my baby rib thong and tank top while he stands at the stove, shirtless and barefoot in jeans, frying eggs in butter and slicing bread and apples and celery and brie cheese. We eat across from each other at the table and I look at him and remember the story he told me in bed and find it all so romantic and think: I have never known anyone in my life like this person.

And at one, we leave my apartment for his. I wear a black bodysuit and black kitten heels and blue jeans and gather my things and a trash bag full of old clothes for Goodwill and get into Tom’s passenger seat. We stop at Neighborhood and order two hot dirty chais and an almond croissant that I cannot imagine taking a bite of until sundown at least. In the car, I look out at La Brea, at the street lamps and for lease signs over empty storefronts and posters for Yoko Ono at The Broad and resent the fact that LA is currently littered with pictures of Yoko Ono and that therefore I am constantly made to think of Yoko Ono. Must this go on all summer? I miss that one winter when all of the posters around LA were for Joan Didion at the Hammer, and I was constantly made to think of Joan Didion instead.

Tom and I spend the hours between one and three in his apartment. He showers. Finds out the dryer downstairs is fixed and does a load of laundry. Sits at his desk and mixes a song. I sip my chai on the black leather couch and look at my laptop and write and feel a little bit bored and go into his bathroom and stare into the mirror and fix my hair into a slight side part to feel something. It works. I feel changed and beautiful.

I follow him back outside mid afternoon, get into his passenger seat and go with him to the Santa Monica Equinox to pick up his lost AirPods. It takes the girl at the front desk a while to track them down. The lobby is small and full of gay guys typing on laptops. Tom is a little bit impatient and I am a little bit stoned, fingering the gorgeous semi-precious natural stone mosaic counter. Eventually a man appears with the AirPods and Tom and I get back into his car and drive up Wilshire to Erewhon. We go inside and order a cococcino and a cowboy brew and purchase a large bottle of still water and a bag of dried mango and a bag of chocolate toffee pistachios. The sun is shining and Tom is wearing a navy blue linen button up and I look at him and feel happy and think I really do love him so much.

We drive further north up Wilshire into Beverly Hills for his meeting. He parks the car on a residential street off of Beverly Drive and we part ways and I wander around aimlessly and feel stoned and a little bit pathetic about the situation, what I am doing. Killing an hour alone, wandering around like a lost puppy, waiting for my owner to call out for me. I pass a newsstand and look for a copy of the new Paris Review and can’t find it. I pass a Starbucks and go inside and buy a protein bar I do not plan on eating in order to gain access to the bathroom. I look up bookstores nearby on my phone and walk to two different locations and find that both locations are permanently closed. I feel a little bit depressed. I stare at the walking directions to a third location and try to decide whether or not I should go, but before I can decide, Tom calls.

We drop my bag of old clothes off at the Goodwill on Sunset in Little Armenia and then drive over the hill to a Russian grocery store in North Hollywood. It’s tiny and cute inside and full of Eastern European women wearing big sunglasses and Coach bags on their arms. Tom picks out a warm loaf of bread and a case of herring and a jar of eggplant caviar and a jar of pickled tomatoes and a sack of white cherries. On the way home, we stop at a dispensary in Toluca Lake and buy fourteen one-gram prerolls.

And later, in Hollywood, Tom stands over me in the kitchen and feeds me dinner with his fingers. Pickled cherry tomatoes and fresh bread spread with eggplant caviar. We undress and get into bed and turn on the air conditioning. We eat dried mango and chocolate toffee pistachios for dessert and he helps me solve the crossword. We put Succession on and fall asleep right before the season one finale.

Wednesday

I wake up at seven to Tom’s left hand pressed inside of my underwear. Sex. Fully come to consciousness halfway through. Sit up and part the curtains a little and smoke a joint. And then, at his insistence, watch the Succession season one finale right away, without getting out of bed. I think I dreamt about Logan last night, he says. The credits roll and we shower one after another without turning the water off. I dress myself in a long black cotton skirt and the striped tank top I slept in. I roll perfume oil across my neck and wash two kiwis at the kitchen sink, one for me and one for him, and we eat them standing on the back steps, skin and everything. We go back into the bedroom and drink sparkling water and lie down and fall asleep and don’t wake up again until eleven.

At noon, he gets up to take a work call at the kitchen table and I go into the bedroom closet and sit on the floor and continue my overhaul. Feel sick of my overhaul. So completely over my overhaul. I fill another bag for Goodwill. Then fill another two bags for laundry. And when I can’t take another second in the closet, I go into the bathroom and plug the drain and start filling the bath with water. But Tom hangs up his call and pulls me into the bedroom and undresses me and spends thirty minutes with his fingers inside of me and I forget about the bath until it’s too late. I spring out of bed and find the tub overflowing. Find the bathroom, hall, and entrance to the bedroom all a puddle, soaking wet. We lay towels out all over like a big white rug and smoke a joint and forget about it and get back into bed.

Later in the afternoon, I try the bath again and finally lower myself in and shave all over with honeysuckle soap and a cheap single use Larchmont Beauty Center pastel yellow razor. I drain the water and sit in the empty tub wrapped up in my towel with my vape. And when I open up the door to let the steam out, feeling faint, the dog comes in and so does Tom. He sits on the edge of the porcelain and lights a joint and we smoke and sit like that until I am sick of not being in bed. So we get in bed and eat Erewhon chocolate toffee pistachios for breakfast. It is four o’clock in the afternoon and when Tom asks if I want to eat the rest of the mushrooms and go for a walk in the hills, I say yes, let’s.

I go into the kitchen and pour the leftover mushrooms out onto the cutting board and chop the fat ones into smaller, more appetizing bites with a big knife. I split the pile into two doses, chew and swallow my half without breathing through my nose, eat a bite of bread dipped in eggplant caviar and then follow Tom outside, through the front door and the courtyard and across Franklin Boulevard.

At the top of Hillcrest, we are peaking and Tom calls me free spirited and I say yes, in some ways that is true, and I give off this bohemian impression maybe and I am kind of bohemian, sure, but also if you think about it I am not free spirited at all, in fact I am incredibly fastidious and obsessive, super neurotic, I archive my life obsessively and have been archiving my life obsessively for a long time and there is nothing relaxed or free spirited about it, it’s like, completely agonizing at times and it feels out of my hands, pathological, compulsive, and it’s really crazy because I am never fully present… or actually maybe I am ultra present… triple present… it’s like… I don’t just live… I live three times, each time a further distorted version of the real thing, and this infects everything, this… the writing… it infects everything… like even when I am living I am looking for things, noticing things, trying to focus on remembering things, the way they look and feel, thinking about how I am going to represent what I see, already shaping sentences in my head, you know… like when we saw that snake at The Top of The World? Do you remember? I was looking at the snake and at the man and his dog and trying to remember everything, the feeling, the temperature, the sky, the air, the dirt, what you were wearing… or even right now… even what I’m saying right now, I’m trying really hard to remember what I’m saying right now because I think in a few minutes I might want to write it down…

We get a little bit lost in the hills and find ourselves somewhere up high in Outpost Estates and don’t mind because it’s lovely out and we are fried. The streets are steep and narrow and empty and the air is a little bit thick and wet and there are these low, dark, apocalyptic clouds closing in on us from what feels like all around. We make it back to the bungalow just as the light starts to change, sometime around eight, and we go inside and sit in my bed and turn on the air conditioning and open up the curtains and stare into each other’s eyes until the effects abate.

I go into the kitchen alone and slice a melon in half and scoop out the seeds and feel a little bit nauseated by the experience, by the sounds and the intrusive thought that the seeds are like guts and that what I am doing is like surgery. I bring both halves of the gutted melon and two big spoons into the bedroom and Tom and I try to eat it but it’s not so ripe. So I stack the halves on top of each other and place the melon back into the refrigerator and slice an apple and a wedge of brie instead and bring that and a bag of barbecue kettle chips into bed, where we watch an episode of Succession and fall asleep early and warm, a little after ten.

Thursday

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Sunday

Wake up at seven swimming in a pool of my own sweat. The illness-ravaged body fights back. Or tries its best. Still feel awful. Had chills all night, barely slept. Traversed the world of a bad dream I can’t remember. Reenter the real world all wet. Think: out of one nightmare and into another… my life! Tom feels me stir and wakes up too and we spend two hours lounging around the sweat soaked bed. Vile. But the mood is so good.

At noon, we walk the dog down Franklin to the car and take Sunset to the Silverlake Erewhon. It’s so warm and beautiful out that I feel emotional. Thank God for June. Tom gives the keys to the valet and we kiss in the elevator and order two cowboy brews and a turmeric crush smoothie to share. We walk around the produce section and purchase a carton of figs and a carton of apricots and pick up our drinks and drive back down Franklin to Hollywood. He pulls off at the 76 on the corner of Beachwood to fill his tires with air and I think about Cal and stare out the window at the intersection and feel paranoid every time a black car drives past.

Tom drops the dog and I off at the bungalow and leaves for a session on the west side. I sit alone in my bedroom with my cowboy brew and the curtains closed, smoking bowls and eating dry cereal like a dog and editing my diaries until seven, when he calls and says he’s on his way to pick me up and take me to dinner. Which is terrible news considering the amount of dry cereal I spent the afternoon consuming. But he parks out front and calls again so I put ballet flats on and zip a hoodie up over my slip skirt and bra and run out feeling happy to see him. He plays me the song he made and I tell him I am done with my diary for the week and feel so free and he says yes baby. The sky is still blue. But that will change soon.

For dinner, at Mel’s: cobb salad, fried chicken, onion rings, potato salad and mac and cheese.

And after dinner, Hollywood is clogged. There’s nowhere within a half-mile radius of my apartment to park. We circle around the hills and go way far up and find a precarious spot in front of a big house at the top of Whitley Heights and decide to leave the car there for the night. The winding walk down through the hills to Franklin is magic, sublime. I unlock my apartment and pull Tom into bed and flip the air conditioner on and say my ears have been clogged since this morning, it’s like I’ve spent the day on an international flight. We eat figs and apricots and sit next to each other and look at our laptops. I write and feel nauseous while he tweaks a song and we don’t fall sleep until midnight.

Monday

Mood upon waking is lethargic. My eyes are open before noon but not by much and then it’s another hour (of laying about and fucking and reading emails and blog comments on my phone and responding yes to the producer when she asks if I am okay with meeting for lunch on the lot) before Tom and I make it out of the house for coffee. While waiting to cross Hollywood Boulevard, I squint and sweat and feel overwhelmed by the sunshine. I watch a middle aged father wipe the sweat off of the back of his fat neck and turn to his frail daughter and say it’s really beating down, are you all right? But she doesn’t reply. I feel nauseous from the heat and maybe also from the familial scene I just witnessed. I consider the violence imbued within the phrase it’s really beating down and think yes, yes, that’s exactly how it feels. I am wearing very short shorts and a tank top with a big crewneck sweatshirt over top and ballet flats. Tom is in a black sweatsuit. I pull at his hood and say only you know how you are doing what you are doing right now.

Right before we make it inside Intelligentsia, Tom picks up a phone call and starts yelling into the receiver in a language I don’t understand. The dark grimy patio is full and so are most of the seats inside and there’s a line and Tom is talking too loud and he’s distracted and the dog is taking advantage. When it’s our turn to order, the dog puts both front paws up on the register and Tom doesn’t notice. The barista is upset. I order two hot dirty chais and a butter croissant and tap my card and then wait by the bar feeling oppressed by the environment and circumstances. My chest is still rattling and I haven’t taken a good clean deep breath in what feels like forever and I want to take my sweatshirt off and be free but I am wearing so little clothing underneath.

We survive the grueling walk uphill back to the apartment and revive the mood with air conditioning and a retreat to bed.

Later, I bite into a perfect looking apricot, find mold inside and feel like ending my life. Then I sit in bed with Tom till late, eight or nine, drinking espresso and eating dry cereal in the crypt. We talk about God. We talk about marriage and children and our families. We describe the personalities of the people we grew up with to each other and discuss destiny. He asks me if I want to go to his country’s embassy in Sacramento this week so that he can finalize his divorce and I say sure, why not. So he looks up the embassy online and makes an appointment for Friday and says let’s leave on Thursday night.

We leave the bungalow and walk to Playboy Liquor to buy Juul pods. Perfect out. Warm breeze, white sky, clouds flooded with moonlight. We walk back up the hill and go inside and I drink orange juice and ask him what he feels like having for dinner while he fixes my living room blinds. Superba? He asks. And in that moment I love him so much.

The food arrives a little before ten. Bread with butter and cheese and brussel sprouts and kale salad with grilled chicken and rigatoni bolognese. We feast in bed.

Tuesday

Seven-thirty a.m. Wake up naturally. Sex and then laze around in the blackout-curtain induced synthetic dark talking till ten. Shower together. Which is romantic and takes forever. I draw on an invisible amount of eyeliner for the first time in weeks and put on a white babydoll dress that makes me feel like a child. I turn to Tom. Does this babydoll dress make me look like a baby? He assesses. No. Actually, maybe. But like it’s hot.

At noon, we leave the bungalow for the west side. We talk about fate in the car and then I get a text from Amy, asking me to please clarify my state of employment. A long and overly formal message that could have just been: are you quitting or what. I show Tom and ask him what he thinks I should do and he says quitting my job is not a decision that he can make for me. He tells me I should really think so I try to really think but there’s nothing in my head but static.

At his apartment, I sit on the black leather couch in my babydoll dress and make MacBook Photo Booth movies of myself smoking weed and eating overnight oats while he showers for his meeting and gets dressed. As per, by the time he’s ready to go we are running late. He sprints downstairs in his navy blue suit and I rush behind him and we get into his car and I quietly do the sign of the cross as he accelerates. We make it to Glendale five minutes late, which is miraculous considering the time the GPS told us we would arrive. We kiss and he hands me the car keys and I watch him enter the high rise and think: seems right. I get into the driver’s seat and wonder what to do and then drive five minutes up the boulevard to Erewhon. I go inside and vape in the dark bathroom and then wander around. I buy two seeded bars, a little mesh sack of perfect kumquats, a shot of Liquid Gold (ginger, lemon, turmeric, cayenne) and a pint bottle of sparkling Mountain Valley.

I take my haul to one of the little metal tables out front and sit and look around and consider taking my laptop out of my bag but ultimately don’t. Ultimately just sit on my phone. Sip my Mountain Valley and drink my Liquid Gold and nearly choke. I smile at a really chic older woman wearing a perfect outfit and she does not smile back. I think: bitch. And then, after a briefly wounded second or two: good for her.

Twenty or thirty minutes pass like that until then I get restless and decide to drive back to Brand Boulevard and wait there. There’s a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf across the street and coffee sounds nice so I go in and stare at the unfamiliar menu without processing the words and can’t decide what to get and feel pressured by the bored teenage boy at the register’s bad attitude and order a Vietnamese cold brew without knowing what Vietnamese cold brew consists of exactly. I tap my card and wait by the trash can and feel vaguely uncomfortable and look up at the menu and find that the stupid Vietnamese cold brew is going to cost me like three hundred calories. Feel disgusted by this information and decide that I will permit myself no more than like, five sips and then feed the rest to Tom. I take the stupid drink with me back into the car and park in front of a big church and wonder if the doors are open and think about going inside. But then my phone rings and it’s Tom and he’s finished so I speed up the block and pick him up and he tells me that they offered him the job on the spot and I think thank God.

We make it back to Hollywood a little after four p.m. Ben calls Tom to see what’s going on. He asks if we want to smoke a joint and go for a walk and we do so we tell him we will meet him around Sunset and Doheny in an hour. But we pack and smoke a couple of bowls and then lie around stoned, talking, fantasizing, and don’t end up leaving the bungalow till half past five.

In the car on Sunset Boulevard, the sun shines so brightly through the windshield that it makes me sick to my stomach. I put my sunglasses on and look at my phone and remember that my mother’s sixty-ninth birthday is tomorrow and begin to feel guilty about having left finding her a gift to the last minute. I spend the whole drive trying to come up with something perfect and by the time we’re at Doheny, I am charging my credit card two-hundred dollars for a gift card to the massage place in Vegas she likes.

We find Ben waiting for us on Sunset in dark sunglasses with half a joint in his mouth. We smoke the rest of what he has and then walk to a dispensary pas the plaza for more. But I forgot my wallet and can’t get in and Tom doesn’t want to leave me outside so Ben goes in alone and comes out with some fucked up preroll that’s THC level reads 60%. We light it up and it tastes and feels like a dab, a bit nostalgic, and my eyes get heavy in way that they haven’t in a long time. I pick up a fallen magnolia and carry it down Fox Street.

On the way back to Hollywood, Tom and I eat kumquats in the car. The roof is open and “Let’s Kick His Ass” by Zack Fox is playing on a loop and at the long light on Outpost Drive, facing the big church on Highland, the trees are shimmering and the sky is lilac.

For dinner, foraged from my empty kitchen and eaten post-coital in bed: plain tortilla chips and more kumquats.

Wednesday

Wake up at eight a.m. to the alarm I set last night in an effort to not forget and/or sleep through the majority of my mother’s birthday. I forward her the stupid massage gift certificate I purchased yesterday. Felt good about the certificate yesterday, feel stupid about it today. Not good enough. But what would be? I leave Tom in bed and wander out into the courtyard and call my mother twice and twice she doesn’t pick up. I do not leave a voicemail.

I call my mother for a third time around nine and she picks up. I say happy birthday and ask her if she got the certificate I sent. She says no and then hold on and then mumbles into the phone for two or three long minutes before screaming and thanking me and telling me that she’s going to see if the spa has any openings this afternoon. I ask her how it feels to be sixty-nine and she tells me that she simply can’t believe it, that she still feels nineteen inside. I believe her. She says that she spent all week thinking I might show up to surprise her this morning. I tell her I wish and then hang up and go into the bedroom and tell Tom what she said, that she’d been hoping for me to surprise her in Vegas, and he says let’s go. And I say no. And he says no? And I say no. And he says should we go this weekend, after Sacramento and San Francisco? And I say I don’t think so and he asks why not and I spend the next hour explaining to him about my brother, the love letters, the sexually charged poems, pictures of me he printed out off of the internet taped up by his bed, my mother’s inability to acknowledge the situation, my inability to sleep soundly under the same roof as him until my mother acknowledges the situation, etc.

Tom and I walk the dog to Intelligentsia and purchase two hot dirty chais, a vegan brownie cookie, a ham and cheese croissant and two turmeric shots. We knock back the turmeric shots at a little golden table by the big window facing Cahuenga while a trans barista wearing a leather daddy cap and camo short steams the whole milk for our chais. We walk uphill back to the bungalow and reenter my bedroom and talk about money and the trip to Sacramento. He calls his lawyer again and the lawyer tells him that there is actually no need to go to Sacramento. He hangs up the phone and relays this information to me. Are you disappointed? He asks. I contemplate. No, not really, I don’t think so. And he seems wounded by that answer. But why should he be wounded by that answer? I take a bite of the ham and cheese croissant and open my laptop.

I get a text from Amy saying that she would very much like for me to come back to work, but if I don’t respond to her by tomorrow at noon, she will process my final check and consider me gone. I type Hi Amy and then delete Hi Amy and turn my notifications off.

Tom leaves the bungalow for a music session on the west side around two and I am left alone with the dog and the cats and my diaries and filthy apartment. I eat dry cereal and crackers with sauerkraut and look at myself in the mirror and sit on the floor of the bedroom closet with my pipe and vape and laptop and stay there for the entirety of the afternoon. I try on clothes and edit my diaries and make MacBook Photo Booth movies of myself smoking weed and listening to music. I lie down with my back against the hardwood to masturbate twice, both times with my eyes closed under the red lights, both times imagining Tom fucking other girls, girls I know he’s fucked before. Both times I orgasm and both times, after the orgasm is over, I feel sad inside.

And when he arrives back to the bungalow with pizza from Joe’s, I feel too fat and full of self-loathing to eat it. We sit in my bed and I listen with a tight chest while he says he thinks we should probably move in together soon. I provide a touch of resistance to which he does not respond well and then the whole thing blows up into something heated and we fall asleep with our backs turned to each other a few minutes before midnight.

Thursday

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Sunday

For dinner, eaten naked in my bed at one a.m.: miso soup, seaweed cucumber salad, jasmine rice, yellowtail, spicy tuna and bao buns with sesame tofu.

The alarm rings out at seven and the feeling is ferocious. I skip the shower I desperately need in order to steal seven or eight more minutes of sleep and then I crawl out of bed and get dressed in the dark and wake up Tom and show him the time and say I am like, so fucked.

Work is normal until it isn’t. I finish my americano from my desk. My nail breaks. I procrastinate completing each and every one of my tasks. One of the girls goes to the coffee shop on the corner and brings me back a dirty chai in a very cute eight-ounce cup and I say wow, the cup is so cute. I edit my writing on the clock. I look at myself in the mirror and hate the cut of the cheap tank top I am wearing. I drive to Target on my lunch break and purchase another cheap tank top with a slightly less hate-able cut. I use my car like a dressing room. And when I return to the office, I find that all hell has broken loose. There’s trouble and some of the trouble involves Tom and me and I decide that rather than facing the trouble, I’d like to leave. So I call Tom and sneak out of the back door and leave.

He picks me up and speeds me to the apartment on Venice Boulevard. We smoke a joint on the black leather couch and move past the day’s trouble quickly (which is perhaps troublesome on its own) and decide to take the dog and leave the west side for Hollywood indefinitely. There’s all of this traffic on the 405 and we are listening to Curren$y and smoking a joint and I pull my laptop out and edit my writing all of the way home. I publish last week’s diaries to the blog from my dark bedroom and feel so relieved until I shut my laptop and part the curtains and look around at the state of things, the grime on the windowsill, the clothes on the floor, the stained sheets. I change out of my stupid work clothes into jeans and this light grey racerback top with a low neckline and then ask Tom if he feels like going to IKEA with me and he does, so we go. He speeds up Barham Boulevard and we park in the giant lot and walk down towards the train tracks and smoke a joint before wandering inside. A Toro y Moi song I hate is playing and we sit together in the display rooms and try and decide what kind of person would live in each room. He buys me brand new fluffy white bedding and we emerge from the giant warehouse just in time for the last of the sunset. It’s still so warm out and there’s just the tiniest bit of orange left in the blackening sky and it’s the last day of May and I have fresh linens in my arms and a perfect apartment and two cats and a crazy boyfriend and no day job and a blog that gives me enough to pay my bills and not much more. I am in the IKEA parking lot taking stock of my sumptuous, nonsensical life and feeling overwhelmed by the sensation that I am somehow living outside ordinary adulthood. That there is something adolescent lingering beneath it all despite the adult settings. Not immaturity exactly (though maybe that too), but prolonged liminality. I live like someone delaying final entry into adulthood. No domestic permanence. Unstable romantic ethics. Fragmented identity. Avoidance of future planning. Fantasies of eventual “normal” life.

And on the way back to the bungalow, we stop at the In-N-Out on Cahuenga. He orders an animal style double-double with animal style fries and I order a Diet Coke and a cheeseburger with raw onions. We eat in the car and take the 101 back to Hollywood. The moon is still full in the sky, hanging right above that big white illuminated cross in the hills over the bridge. I point my finger at the windshield and say look and Tom looks.

Nothing much happens in the hour or so we spend awake before accidentally falling asleep in my bed with all of our clothes on. I pluck my eyebrows in the bathroom mirror while he sits on top of my duvet and looks for new jobs on his laptop. I pray for him. I wonder whether or not I should show up at work tomorrow afternoon and think probably not.

Monday

Monday. Perfect waste of a day. We wake up at noon and have sex and afterwards, laying there, I ask him if I should call out and he says for sure so I text Amy that I am not feeling well. Which is like, pretty much true. I am dehydrated and hungry and dry all over and my hair is greasy and I have a headache and my eyes are red and itchy and I am so nauseous all of the time and exhausted, physically and spiritually exhausted, and I just can’t picture showing up to that place full of trouble where everybody is mad at me. Especially in this state. I watch my message to Amy deliver and then put my phone on do not disturb and pull Tom back flat into the sheets and lie on top of him and fall asleep and don’t wake up again until sunset, seven p.m. We sit in my bed rubbing our eyes, parting the curtains for air and bits of fading daylight, talking about love and money and smoking weed and cuddling with the animals until it’s dark. And then I put “Stay With Us” on a loop and get into the shower and shampoo my hair while Tom sits on the edge of the porcelain to watch and sometimes touch. He places a pickup order for caprese pizza and caesar salad and meatballs from Joe’s while I dry off and then we walk the dog down Hollywood Boulevard towards the pizza shop in the dark. It’s empty in there and too hot and both of the guys behind the counter are in bad moods. Tom asks one of the guys if he’s almost off for the night and the guy throws his head back in a dramatically sarcastic way and lets out one loud HA! We carry the food back up the hill past night blooming jasmine and two or three guys with no shoes and syringes. We take all of our clothes off again and get into bed and smoke a joint and eat our Joe’s dinner while Marty Supreme plays on the TV. My eyes start getting heavy in the middle of Marty’s trouble and I fall asleep sometime around that scene where the gas station blows up. And when I open my eyes again, Tom is snoring and the room smells like marinara and I look up at the TV expecting to find Marty but instead it’s prosthetic-laden Dwayne Johnson fucking a guy up in The Smashing Machine.

Tuesday

I wake up naturally before eight o’clock (miraculous) feeling completely rejuvenated after inadvertently dedicating the entirety of yesterday to rest and relaxation. The mood is languid, domestic. I crawl on top of Tom and wake him up and we lie around for an hour under the ceiling fan, hitting the vape and drinking warm and flat sparkling water and kissing and talking about our parents, his dead father, my deadbeat father, corporal punishment, children. He tells me that he wants four children and that he wants to start having them pretty soon, and when he asks me what I’d do if I found out I was pregnant right now, whether I’d get an abortion or not, and I explain about my complex philosophies and ultimately answer not, he smiles and I start to imagine myself pregnant and feel like I can’t breathe and decide to stop imagining that.

We leave the bungalow with the dog a little before eleven. The sky is all grey and it’s not the least bit cold out. June Gloom. I don’t mind. It’s perfect, really. Seventy-degrees and all white. The jacaranda trees are losing more and more of their color and I look at the purple petals littering the cement and think: it feels like I am always falling in love in spring. And then I do some calculations and discover that it’s true, I really am always falling in love in spring. I’ve fallen in love six times and all six times happened in spring.

We take Venice Boulevard all the way to his apartment and go upstairs and get stoned and listen to “Incredible” by ProdWithFlavor on a loop and take turns taking bites out of an Erewhon seeded bar. He collects a bunch of laundry into a pile and tells me that the machine in the basement is still broken and so we drive to that strip mall laundromat off of Grand View. I take pictures of my kitten heels against the aquamarine linoleum floor and then go into the little market next door alone and buy a mint terra yerba mate and a single-pill packet of Claritin and a double-pill packet of Tylenol and a stick of Dove deodorant. I stand in the parking lot beneath a fat date palm a few feet away from a guy leaned up against the hood of a fucked up Toyota. He’s smoking a cigarette and the smell is wafting my way and I yearn for the sensation of a Marlboro 27 100 in my mouth and consider going back into the little market to buy a pack but then remember Tom and think better not.

And later, he goes into the office for a meeting and I am left all alone on Wilshire Boulevard with an hour free and no clue what to do. It is two o’clock in the afternoon and the sun is burning all of the way through this morning’s gloom and it’s bright out and I think I am getting a migraine. I’m wearing jeans and black kitten heels and a white cotton Brandy Melville tank top with a tiny pink bow sewed in the center of the chest. Crewneck sweater sitting in a pile on top of my head. To block the sun. Corto Moltedo bag on my arm. Big silver ring from The Getty slowly tarnishing on my left pointer finger. My roots need to be dyed and my nails need to be done and I want botox and a cup of coffee. I can make these things happen for myself. All of them. But I can only make one of these things happen for myself right now. So I drive up Wilshire to Starbucks and order four shots of espresso over ice. I sit in the car in the sun flooded parking lot and look at pictures of shoes on my phone and wonder how I can get three thousand dollars fast to buy UGG x Chrome Hearts Suede Boots in black. For summer.

Traffic is hellish on the way back to Hollywood. We slouch up La Brea and wish we had a joint to smoke. The dog sighs. Tom messages job recruiters from the driver’s seat and I shop for shoes on therealreal.com from mine. We pull off at the Whole Foods on the corner of Santa Monica and Fairfax because I am desperate for sparkling water and a bathroom, and then we continue northeast to Lazy Acres and go inside and have a euphoric time filling a shopping cart to the brim with groceries. At the register, Tom taps his card for $398.09. We take Franklin back to my apartment and listen to “Everything She Wants” by Wham! really loud with all of the windows down. We go inside and put all of the food away and then sit crouched together by the full refrigerator, eating leftover caprese pizza from last night. And then we go into my bedroom and Tom looks at me and says I forgot, I got you a present and then runs out through the front door and comes back a few minutes later holding a cardboard box. He rips it open and it’s a wall mount, for my TV. Oh, wow. I watch him drill a bunch of holes and struggle with the weight of things and halfheartedly offer my assistance a few times, each of which he denies. I sit in bed and file my nails and brush my hair and check my email and find a message from a movie producer who wants to talk to me about my writing.

At eleven, we drink lime La Croix and eat Lazy Acres sesame noodles for dinner and cantaloupe sliced in half right out of the rind with big spoons for dessert. There’s this awful hint of congestion in Tom’s voice and he’s coughing a little and I know whatever’s coming for him is coming for me too and feel despondent. Feels like it was just two or three weeks ago that I recovered from my last sinus infection. Feels like that because it was like that. My fucked immune system.

Wednesday

At eight, the alarm Tom set to avoid getting a parking ticket goes off. It’s hot in my bedroom and I am in a white cotton bralette and little grey Brandy Melville shorts with USA printed on the side and Tom says it’s like God sent you to me straight out of my teenage pornographic fantasies. When I think about him watching porn I feel a little bit jealous and a little bit aroused. I felt similarly when he told me about that time his friend took him to a restaurant full of prostitutes in Thai Town.

We get into his car with the dog and start driving east down Hollywood with no aim other than finding coffee. We end up in the hills of Silverlake and then Atwater Village and then Glendale. We go to the new Erewhon and it’s so spacious. The lights inside are dim and the aisles are wide and the ceilings are high and the parking lot is generously designed. We take a cowboy brew and a cococcino and a warm slice of zucchini bread from the tonic bar and then walk towards the purple mountains with our breakfast and the dog. I pick up a hot pink hibiscus flower and carry it through a beautiful little neighborhood full of Spanish style houses and avocado trees. We make our way back toward the car after an hour or two of wandering and Tom picks up a call about a new job and I go inside the store again and purchase a gorgeous looking carton of figs and four perfect apricots and a bottle of heavenly greens.

We drive from Glendale to the Petco on Hollywood and Western and go inside and buy litter for the cats and food for the dog. We look at a bearded dragon trapped in a little cage in the back. Tom touches his finger to the glass and the dragon presses his tiny head into the same spot. Tom says do you like him and I say yes.

Back at my apartment, we sit at the kitchen nook and discuss the precarious state of our professional lives. He asks me if I am quitting my job and I say I think so and I ask him if he is quitting his and he says I think so and we both smile. I try to think about the practical reality of quitting my job but feel blank inside. Feel TV static buzzing around my mind. I look at my laptop and apply for three or four stupid part-time jobs I don’t want while Tom does an interview over the phone. I think about the blog. I think about my writing. I think about what it would mean to have no job, just the blog and my writing, and decide that if I am going to have no job, just the blog and my writing, even for a temporary amount of time, I will need to do more, expand, create a new element, really push, make the output feel like a sacrifice. I think about my archives. Think about the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of words sitting collected in an organized set of TextEdit documents on my desktop. Wonder if I should do something with them. Daily diaries kept since the fall of 2018. It was that October, I think, that I started writing every day. Every day, whatever, something. I was still raw from the breakup with Riley and underweight for the first time in my life and a little bit lost and friendless and skipping classes and working at the coffee shop on campus and just starting to smoke cigarettes and fuck around with hallucinogens on a regular basis and living in that haunted house by the train tracks in Pomona with Drew and Jamie and his bitch girlfriend. And God, I was so lonely.

I shower and then we make breakfast for dinner (which is also just technically breakfast). I set a tray of bacon to cook in the oven and put French butter in a little jade dish and serrate a baguette and slice a wedge of humboldt fog cheese and wash the rest of the figs I bought this morning and take apricot preserves out of the fridge and arrange everything nicely on the kitchen nook table while Tom fries four eggs with chopped basil in an amount of butter that concerns me greatly (calorically). We sit across from each other and eat and it’s nice. And then I feel psychosomatically bloated from all of that butter I witnessed in the egg pan and want to smoke a joint about it but can’t because there are no joints left. So I place an order for an ounce of weed on my phone while Tom washes the dishes. And eventually the guy arrives and gives me my ounce and Tom and I get into bed and smoke and eat kettle chips and look at his laptop in the dark and give each other tours of the neighborhoods we grew up in via google maps street view. Five minutes before midnight, I remember for the first time all day that I am scheduled to work at eight a.m. tomorrow morning. And the morning after that. And after that. And after that. And after that. I try to picture myself going in and simply can’t. And without thinking about it too much, I text Amy that I am still unwell, so unwell that I can’t imagine healing in time to work this weekend. Before I press send I think: I have been acting highly fireable lately. I press send. Amy does not reply.

Thursday

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Sunday

How much chaos do I need in order to feel alive? It’s three in the morning and Tom and I are sitting in his parked car on my street beneath a rotten palm tree and the silver moonlight. We are eating ginger and looking at Postmates and feeling dissatisfied with each and every available option despite just having spent the past five hours arguing on two empty stomachs. The emotional climate is delicate. A sad song is playing and I’ve got my knees tucked up under my chin and my eyes are getting heavy and eventually we look at each other and give up on finding food. Tom puts the car in drive and speeds us to the west side. I fall asleep on the 101 and wake up on the 405. We take the stairs up to his apartment in silence. I unzip my hoodie and slip my ballet flats off and tuck them into my bag and wonder where my kitten heels are until this ugly vision of them sitting on the floor mat of my passenger seat caked in vomit arrives.

Sunday morning. Ten a.m. Tom’s bed. He’s late for work and rushing and I’m lying flat on my back beneath the duvet, smoking a roach and taking hot plastic puffs from the Juul and lamenting the fact that the final pod is nearly empty. I want to cross the street and go into the liquor store and purchase some more, but Tom thinks we’re quitting so I have to wait till he leaves.

And when he leaves, I do it first thing. I put my ballet flats on and leash the dog and enter the liquor store and purchase a bottle of coconut water and a four pack of five percent Virginia tobacco Juul pods and feel nothing but pure levity. I click a fresh pod into the battery and inhale and feel healed, perfect, reborn, brand new. And then I cross the street and go back upstairs and pack a bowl and smoke it and then pack another bowl and smoke that one too and open up my laptop and write.

At one o’clock, I cut the hem off of my midi dress to make it a mini and leave Tom’s apartment for work. I’ve got half of my hair piled up on top of my head in a French pin and I feel beautiful despite being all out of perfume. I arrive late and nobody minds. The manager is out and the afternoon is smooth. I drink my liquor store coconut water and publish my diaries to the blog from my desk and feel light. The photographer asks me if I’m high and I say not really, why and he says there’s something about your eyes. Tom brings me a Sweetfin spicy tuna bowl for lunch and I put it in the fridge and forget about it. I take my break at five and drive up Wilshire to Erewhon and purchase: truffle plantain chips, dried mango, two seeded bars, two cans of Canyon Coffee cold brew, a bottle of heavenly greens and two sachets of liposomal vitamin c. I sit on the second floor courtyard bench and stare out at the palm trees. I rip my vape. The night runs late, drags on and on, but the temperature of my mood is so nice that I don’t mind. I sit alone at my desk with my laptop, reading Joan Didion and shopping for shoes on therealreal.com to replace my puke encrusted Manolos. At a quarter to ten, I go into the empty break room and eat seven bites of my spicy tuna bowl and bury the remains deep in the trash. The guilt is complex.

Work wraps at a quarter to eleven. And by eleven, Tom and I are going at it over nothing again. We argue with theatrical indignation all the way back to his apartment and by the time we arrive, I am so full of rage that I slam the car door and storm upstairs ahead of him. He stays put for two or three minutes and then follows me. And when he finally makes it upstairs, he unlocks the door and keeps right at it. I sit on his black leather couch with my face pinched, taking it until I can’t anymore.

I’m fucking leaving.

Go!

So I go. Or try to. I run out into the night with my phone and bad attitude, resigned to my dramatic exit until a little clarity breaks through the indignation and I suddenly remember that my bag and laptop and keys are sitting trapped inside of his car. So I sigh and start walking a square around the dark block and make it about halfway around before I hear the hard little clicks of his dress shoes approaching from behind.

Monday

It’s a few minutes after midnight on the Harbor Freeway and I am in the passenger seat of Tom’s car, crying quietly and watching Downtown glitter and disappear in the rearview mirror. Tom is driving fast and somehow his speed creates the illusion of progression while our emotional reality remains circular. He parks in the red on my Hollywood block and pulls a warm bottle of champagne from the backseat and we sit together with the engine off, passing the bottle back and forth and taking big swigs in silence.

I dream something about eating soft-serve ice cream with my friend Jack in a Japanese hotel room and don’t fully arrive back to consciousness or Los Angeles until noon. I leave Tom snoring in my bed and close myself into the bathroom. I stare into the mirror and feel physically and psychologically debased by my sensual, lonely, intoxicating, unsustainable, aesthetically rich, emotionally evasive and deeply contemporary life. I am dehydrated and congested and anxious and a little bit hungover and a little bit stoned and my hair is so dry and the pores around my nose disgust me and I decide that I’ve got no choice but to bathe. So I run the water very hot and sink myself in deep and it feels like purification. I exfoliate. I shave my legs. I shampoo my hair. I sit in the drained basin wrapped up in my fluffy white towel for a very long time. I apply perfume oil. I moisturize. I feel better. These moments feel ceremonial almost. When I emerge from the bathroom, I have soft skin and a restored sense of selfhood. Vanity functions medicinally. The body is a manageable surface. Sexualized, stylized, monitored, neglected, exhausted and aestheticized.

The afternoon passes languidly. Nothing much happens. We lie in bed. We light joints. We talk about money. At six, I put on a tiny white dress and a baby pink mohair sweater and a pair of Miu-Miu dupe boots. We take the dog for a walk down Sunset to Superba and sit alone together at a big table in the corner of the low-lit garden. Six o’clock is early for dinner in LA and the place is empty. This is our backyard, I say to Tom. We sit for three hours, drinking cappuccinos and eating bread with butter and cheese and brussel sprouts and kale salad and chicken schnitzel, watching the restaurant fill up and then empty out again. The dog lies at our feet and sniffs the waitress’s ass and scares the bus boy and eats every scrap.

We get back to my apartment late. The bedroom windows are open and the lights inside are all set to red and Tom and I are in our underwear, looking at our laptops in bed. I am singing along to a Phoenix song and Tom looks up at me and says I will remember this moment forever. And when I turn towards him, my eyes glance past the open window and panic arises immediately because there’s Bunny, sitting in the planter on the wrong side of the screen. For a second it’s difficult to reconcile the image with reality. Then I realize he’s done the impossible, squeezed his little body through the tiny hole in the screen. Green eyes gleaming. I freeze. I slowly crouch by the window and try coaxing him back inside, but the planter starts wobbling and all of the sudden it’s tilting forward completely and I’m screaming and Bunny drops out of the window and falls down into the night. I run downstairs into the backyard wearing Tom’s shoes in a fugue state and when I find Bunny alive and well amongst the tangle of palm fronds, I say thank you God about one hundred times. But the second I move towards him, he bolts. Then Tom appears and all three of us are running. Through bushes and flowerbeds and three or four neighboring yards. We hop fence after fence and the scenario begins to feel nightmarish, unreal. The night is warm. The neighbors are asleep. We search and search and search and eventually there is nothing left to do but go back upstairs, give up for the night, cry, decide to try again in the morning. I keep picturing Bunny somewhere alone in the darkness. I keep crying. Tom says maybe he’s been desperate to run away and I say, through streaming tears, maybe, but he didn’t mean to fall.

Tuesday

Wake at noon. Morning sex. Lie around. Feel awful about Bunny. Cry. Tell Tom that I think I dreamt of Bunny, that there’s this lingering image of him lying in a patch of grass somewhere in my mind, and Tom says I think I had the same dream.

The afternoon drifts by. We lie around smoking weed and talking and looking at our phones and listening to “Superstar” by Curren$y on repeat. At three, we run out of Juul pods. And before we leave the bungalow to forage for more, I put on my cloth Sorrel rain boots and Tom considers them carefully and says these are like the boots my grandma puts on to feed the chickens in the village of my country. We run into James on the way to the smoke shop and I tell him about Bunny and he says poor thing. And then at the smoke shop it’s that old man I like behind the counter, and when he asks me how I am I say not so good, my cat fell out of a window. And then my mother calls and I pick up and immediately say Bunny ran away and she says who is Bunny and I say my fucking cat, he fell out of the window and she screams HE’S DEAD? Which makes me laugh.

At four, we take Highland to 6th to Fairfax for Tom’s haircut. A Freddie Gibbs song is playing in the car and I am wearing jeans with kitten heels and a Brandy Melville tank top and my hair looks lush and my skin looks smooth and the sun is shining and my God, in this singularly perfect and fleeting moment, I feel like the luckiest girl alive. Two minutes from now, who knows.

I am sitting in a giant cheetah print plush lounge chair at a hair salon on Fairfax, feeling fantastic. The windows are barred and there are these very Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree style chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and every surface inside of the space is mirrored or steel or white. I look around and think: kind of pornographic. The salon is nearly empty. It’s just Tom and me and the hairdresser, a middle aged Swedish woman with strong arms and blunt cut bangs, and one other client. This elderly blonde in a faux Chanel tweed dress. She’s trying to get cash out of the ATM but there’s a malfunction and her hair is done up in this big poofy coif. Tom asks her if she’s going to an event and she says yes, a wedding on a weekday because the bride is CHEAP! And none of us laugh, especially not her. The hairdresser is talking to someone on speakerphone about the malfunctioning ATM and neither of them can hear each other because the connection is so bad. Say that again? Say that again? She’s a little bit disheveled and very sweet. When we first walked in, she kissed Tom on the cheek and then looked at me and then back at him and said and who is this pretty girl? A Stevie Wonder song plays and then a Blondie song plays and I sink deep into the cheetah print cushion and sigh. The hairdresser takes her scissors to Tom’s locks and complains about her children. My son, he turned eighteen last week and all he ever does is watch Netflix and invite stupid girls over to my house. And my daughter, she says, twenty years old and doing nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. She shrugs. Screw my them both.

We drive up La Cienega to Melrose Place and go into Alfred Coffee and order vanilla lattes and talk about how we both used to work shitty jobs on this street. We discuss the strangeness of the synchronicity and try to think up somewhere nice to have dinner, somewhere with a view, and just as we decide on The Sun Rose, James calls and I pick up and he says I think I’ve got eyes on Bunny. So we speed back to the bungalow and when we arrive, there he is: Bunny, sitting happily on my doorstep as though he hadn’t just fallen out of a window and taken off for the hills last night.

And later, we sit for dinner at Lemon Grove on Vine. We drink sparkling water with lemon and gin with dill and share pasta and Caesar salad and fried potatoes and hummus with cucumber and pita bread. The restaurant is set on the rooftop of The Aster and the view is so nice that it almost makes up for the bizarre service. The hostess asks too many questions and then apologizes too many times for asking too many questions. The waitress makes us uncomfortable for reasons neither of us can specifically identify. A nervous busboy comes over to our little two-top with a slice of apple cake and says did you guys order apple cake and we say no and he says are you sure and we look at each other and then back at him and say no, again, and he sighs and rolls his eyes.

Tom pays the bill and then drifts the car up Mulholland in the dark. We smoke a joint and listen to old Kanye and pull off at a viewpoint way up high and look out over the Valley and kiss and say wow and then take Laurel Canyon all the way back to Hollywood. We take all of our clothes off and turn all of the lights out and draw the blackout curtains closed and I flip the TV to HBO and put on No Reservations. The Venice episode. Tom has never seen or heard of Anthony Bourdain before. He watches him eat fried sardines with a fisherman and says I like this guy, I really like this guy.

Wednesday

“This Charming Man” rings out at six-thirty a.m. and the sound of Morrissey’s baritone voice brutalizes me. I shoot out of bed immediately and Tom says only you know how you’re doing what you’re doing right now and I agree and then lock myself into the bathroom and wash my face and brush my teeth and pat Saie concealer into my sleepy cheeks and massage Kerastase oil into the ends of my hair. I dress myself in ballet flats and an oversized sweater and a long black LA Apparel skirt that should have been washed two or three wears ago and feel pretty good, considering. We leave the bungalow and the early morning light is biblical. It’s raining a little and the sky can’t decide its mood. There are these great big patches of bright light cutting through the blanket of grey and I think to myself: looks like a Joseph Turner painting. Or something. Tom speeds me down Melrose and even though I am running late, when he asks if we should stop for coffee I say definitely.

At one, I sneak out of the office and run out through the front gates in my flats to meet Tom. We drive up Wilshire to Erewhon and order one cococcino and one cowboy brew from the tonic bar and then select a sandwich from the refrigerator to split for lunch. We look at the map and find out that it’ll take an hour and a half to get back to Hollywood and feel depressed and decide to bide time at his place instead. I follow him upstairs and watch him draw the blackout curtains closed. I sit on the couch and write a story and he sits at the desk and writes a song. Four or five hours pass like that until I start to get all nauseous from the blue light and looping music. I tell him that I need some air and go downstairs alone and do a lap around the block in the evening sunlight and my work clothes. And then I come back up and sit down again and decide that I don’t feel any better than I did before. So I go back out and walk to the liquor store and buy four single-pill packets of Claritin, two double-pill packets of Tylenol and a liter bottle of sparkling Mountain Valley. And just as I am settling back in on the black leather couch, determined to push through my nausea and stay put, Simon calls and it feels like a gift from God. Haven’t heard from him in something like two months. I pick up and wander back outside into the last of the sunlight and listen while he tells me that he misses me and that he’s four days sober from ketamine and currently filing for bankruptcy. He says he’s lost thirty pounds in the past two months, an unintentional side effect of his addiction and poverty, and that everybody keeps complimenting his hot new suffering body. We spend an hour and fifteen minutes talking and before we hang up, I tell him that I’ll come over some time next week. Wonder if I mean it.

We don’t leave the west side for Hollywood until late, sometime around ten. We’re halfway down Ventura Boulevard when Tom asks out of the blue if we should take mushrooms tonight. I say yes without thinking and he spins a u-turn and merges back onto the 101-North and before long, we are back at that strange little strip mall off of the Canoga Park exit, purchasing five grams. And I feel vaguely excited, but there’s this nervous pit in my stomach that I don’t know what to do with. All I’ve had to eat today is half of an Erewhon sandwich and I am worried the shrooms might hit me like a truck. But so what?

Thursday

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Sunday

The crescent moon hangs high in the sky over Hollywood. At two, Tom parks the car in front of a fire hydrant on my street. We go inside and I feed the cats and then we take all of our clothes off and get into my big white bed and eat Erewhon tortilla chips with organic guacamole and pico de gallo for dinner off of a wooden tray while a playlist I made four summers ago loops on the TV. “What More Can I Say” by The Notations, “Me Myself and Dollar Hell” by Mild High Club, “Seahorse” by King Krule, “Young Lady” by Kid Cudi, etc. We eat in silence for the most part. Sometimes talking. I tell him I want to write for two hours while he sleeps but he convinces me not to. And then we start to have sex but it’s so hot in my bedroom and we’re sweating a lot and after a while of pushing our bodies together he says I need to take a break. And so we lie there in the dark under the ceiling fan, heavy breathing, and the mood is a little bit fragile and my writing is weighing on me and so I get out of bed and zip his hoodie up over my naked body and take my laptop and headphones and say I just need like, two hours and he doesn’t say anything. I sit in the dark kitchen nook and plug my headphones in and put “Gardena’s Finest” on a loop and open my laptop and look at the words I collected all week and start to cry without really knowing why.

Quiet morning, strange mood. Tom’s alarm rings out at nine and we get ready to leave the house in silence. On the 405, he puts “Lifestyle” on for me and I kiss his cheek and he smiles really big and says you know, I’m actually in a great mood, it’s just that you are being quiet and when you are being quiet it makes me want to be quiet too. He drops himself off in the alley and kisses me goodbye and I switch over to the driver’s seat and take his car back to his apartment and walk the dog and then sit at his desk with the intention to write, write, write. But there are all of these leftover, sealed Juul pods lying around and unsmoked joints too and it’s hard to concentrate. I am all alone with my new sobriety for the first time and it doesn’t feel so good. It’s my desire versus my willpower. I keep picking up the Juul and bringing it to my lips and then putting it down without inhaling. Then picking up a joint and bringing it to my lips and then putting it down without lighting. I play this game for an hour until I start to feel insane and call Tom and say should we not just like, finish our supply and then go sober from there? And he says don’t be weak and I say you don’t get it, this is like, way easier for you than it is for me and he says fine, you finish the supply and in the meantime I will be winning. We hang up and I pout in his desk chair and think don’t be weak, don’t be weak and then lift the Juul to my lips again and inhale. The destruction feels quick and light. Like nothing.

I leave Tom’s apartment for work ten minutes later than I should. I clock in on time from my phone on the 405 to avoid any further trouble with Amy and show up late in a little black dress and kitten heels. The day is slow, a little bit painful. Nothing much happens. I spill champagne on a dog. I look at my phone in the courtyard. I sigh. I fix my eyeliner in the kitchen, staring into my distorted reflection through the microwave. I take my lunch break at five. I drive up Wilshire to Erewhon in the early evening sunshine and buy two bottles of heavenly greens, one for Tom and one for me, and a plastic clamshell box of Asian spicy tofu to share. Which we do, later, alone in the break room. The evening wraps precisely seven minutes earlier than standard and I feel disproportionately grateful. Tom and I steal a bottle of cheap champagne from the break room fridge and take it home with us. His idea, obviously.

In the car, we argue about each other’s bad moods. I blame his bad mood on his sobriety. He blames my bad mood on his sobriety too. All of the words we say feel sharp and pointless, arguing just to argue. We sit in his apartment not looking at each other until he says I’m going to walk the dog, do you want to come and when I don’t say anything he looks at me coldly and repeats do you? And I say do you think it might be nice to have like, five minutes outside by yourself? And he says doesn’t make a difference and I narrow my eyes and say well, if it doesn’t make a difference, go alone. And he goes. I open up my laptop and stare at the screen in a fugue state until he comes back.

And later that night, he pours two glasses of champagne. We clink and I take a little sip and then watch him toss back the entirety of his glass, pour another, toss back the entirety of that glass too and then pour a third. I start to worry. We work for something like an hour. He mixes a song and I edit my diary. And then he spins the chair around to look at me and he’s got his beautiful face contorted into something drunk and confrontational and I say what and he comes over and rips my dress off of me and fucks me like he hates me, twice. Right before he is about to come for the second time I say you’re so mad at me and he pulls out and comes on my face. I sit naked on the black leather couch and take the champagne bottle and drink what’s left and feel debased.

Monday

I don’t publish last week’s diaries to the blog till two a.m., and when I do, I feel less relief than I would have had I pressed publish before midnight. I shut my laptop and look at Tom and say done and he says done? And I say done and he puts a joint in his mouth and I widen my eyes and watch him break his twenty-four hours of sobriety and think the destruction feels quick and light.

We wake at nine. Tom’s bedroom is humid and the blackout curtains are drawn. We have sex while one million alarms go off and then Tom gets up to open up the windows and run the shower while I take the dog downstairs for a walk. I’m wearing silver flip flops and Tom’s hoodie over my little Brandy Melville dress, which is coated in dog hair and stained with cum.

I drop Tom off in the alley and then drive up Wilshire to Chevron and fill my tank for sixty-nine dollars and feel terrible about it. So terrible that I drive up Wilshire to 11th and spend like, seven more dollars on six shots of espresso over ice.

I spend exactly an hour alone in the bungalow and during that hour I vacuum everywhere, change the litter, kiss the cats, smoke two joints back to back, take out the trash, bathe, exfoliate, shave, moisturize, swallow my vitamins for the first time since who knows when and get dressed.

I fix my appearance while driving across Los Angeles. Gua sha on Cahuenga. Concealer on the 101. Hair oil on the 405. Eyeliner on the 10 by the Cloverfield exit, where the traffic stalls. Rosewater spray on Lincoln. I park in the dark underground lot and look at myself in the rearview mirror and think fine. I am wearing a cheap dress and expensive shoes and my hair looks fine and my skin looks fine and I am still bleeding, but only a little. I take the elevator up and the day passes fine. Everybody is nice to me. One of the photographers, this middle aged guy, looks me up and down in my little dress and asks me if I’d like to model for him sometime. I reply I can’t, you know I’m shy. The new girl tells me about her cosplay habit. Ted and Leon argue. Leon wins. The new girl learns that it is important to be on Leon’s good side.
I sit with my knees up in the break room, biding time. I download spreadsheets. I look at spreadsheets. I type things into spreadsheets. At five, for lunch, I drive up Wilshire to the Starbucks I like and drink a four shot hot americano with a quarter inch of cream.

Work wraps up painlessly. Tom peels us out of the parking garage in my car so fast that the tires squeal. We smoke a joint on the way to his apartment and then smoke another inside. So much for asceticism. We talk about money and world domination and drink shots of fermented sour cherry liquor and then, just as we are getting ready to pack up and drive to Hollywood, his friend calls and he picks up and starts speaking loudly in a language I don’t understand. So I leash the dog and take him and my big bag downstairs out into the cold and find Tom’s neighbor sitting on the curb with some guy I’ve never seen before. They are smoking spliffs in the moonlight and I get stuck doing small talk with them while waiting for Tom to appear and end up basically performing a stand up routine for the two of them, this pair of sixty-something year old Rastafarians, about my day. They cackle at everything I say and hit each other on the shoulder and it feels nice and then finally Tom appears, still on the phone, and I say thank you and goodnight to my audience. We listen to Empire Of The Sun songs on the 405 and I get a nostalgic stomachache.

It’s eleven o’clock and I am sitting across from Tom at The Melt. I am still in the clothes I wore to work and we are sitting at the same table we sat at when we came here together that one time, forever ago. Forever ago, also known as like, February. I was wearing slacks that night, I think, and a v-neck sweater with no bra and it was cold and I was feeling uncomfortable. Tonight I am not feeling uncomfortable. Or maybe I am, but in newer and more unusual ways. We eat the same things we ate in February, too. I have a cheeseburger with no modifications and he has this very fat and strange burger with a fried egg and a portobello mushroom stuffed inside. We share garlic parmesan fries and sweet potato fries and he drinks Coke just like he did in February and I drink lime la croix. I eat a third of my burger and think about how last time I had a Diet Coke and wonder why I chose lime la croix instead tonight, why I chose to split the reenactment and then think who cares, nobody cares. We don’t leave till midnight.

Tuesday

We drive up Sunset past an enormous and very gorgeous billboard of Rihanna for Dior to this plaza with a great view of La Cienega by the 1 Hotel. Tom leads me out onto the edge of the concrete in the cold. I wear his sweater over my short dress and it’s almost romantic but not romantic exactly because we are not alone. There’s this homeless guy wearing a hospital mask and a hat too big for his tiny head standing like, three hundred feet away from us, and he has this big speaker and he’s playing music really loud. He appears to be pretending or maybe hallucinating that he is performing a DJ set for all of La Cienega. The guy is clearly high and screaming along with feeling to a random assortment of songs and Tom and I smoke a joint and cry laughing. The guy is dancing all crazy and every time the dancing gets too fervent the dog gets upset and starts barking and the guy gets a little nervous and slows the dancing down. But then within a few minutes of dancing more cautiously, he inevitably loses himself in his own music and starts dancing really crazy again and the dog doesn’t like it and the cycle repeats, repeats, repeats. Tom talks at me for a long while about money and success and I am so cold that I can’t concentrate. My legs are covered in goosebumps and the conversation is making me a little bored, he’s saying stuff I’ve heard him say one hundred times before, and eventually I get so miserable that I can’t help myself. I just stand up and start walking toward the car while he’s in the middle of a sentence. He says do you want to leave and I say yes, I’m so cold and he says and you just stood up? And I say I’m sorry, that was like, so rude of me and he doesn’t say anything and maybe he is mad at me.

He drives Hollywood Boulevard back to the bungalow really fast and we don’t talk at all and he’s playing rap music at a really high volume and I feel nervous but then he parks the car on my street and puts his hands on me and starts talking about nice things.

One o’clock in the afternoon. Wake up. Morning sex. Call my mother from bed. Ask her about her trip to DC and about my uncle and about how she’s feeling, generally. She tells me she just freshly collapsed into her bed post-airport. She has the sliding glass doors open in her bedroom and I can hear the exhaustion in her voice. She said that her trip went well and that she met several senators and that my uncle’s new house is gorgeous, green with brick and big white columns. She says that at night, the lights are all warm and incandescent. She keeps yawning into the phone and when she asks me if I’m alone I say no and she tells me to call her back when I am so that she can find out what the hell is going on. She says that she wants to come to LA for her birthday in June but can’t promise me anything because her life is always changing. We say love you and miss you and bye and then hang up and Tom lights a joint and we lie around looking at our phones in my dark bedroom.

We fall asleep like that sometime around two and don’t wake up again until eight. Slovenly, romantic. The dog growls at Bunny and Bunny growls back. We have sex and get into the shower together and he sits on the edge of the porcelain while I shave my legs. I go into the closet and look at all of the clothing piled up on the floor and sigh and ask Tom what I should wear and he comes in and sighs too and then says pants or skirt and flips a coin. Pants. Jeans or otherwise? Jeans. And then I put on a Brandy Melville sweater and kitten heels and put my wallet and keys and phone and weed and vape and lighter into my bag. His car has two parking tickets tucked under the windshield when we get outside.

I sit across from Tom at a big table in a dark empty corner on the patio of Aroma Cafe. There’s a chill in the air and “Die For You” by The Weeknd is playing too loud and there’s hookah smoke blowing all over and I don’t feel so well. We order chicken tenders off of the kid’s menu and greek salad and bread and roast chicken and mashed potatoes and I drink two cappuccinos even though it’s nine p.m. The greek salad comes with this unappetizing mountain of shredded cheese and none of the plated food looks right in the low blue light.

Just before midnight the moon is a thin crescent, hung up above my street between a palm tree and The Roosevelt sign. There’s this warm wind blowing in through the open window while Tom and I sit at the kitchen nook talking about summer. Summer. Things we want to do this summer. Drive to San Francisco. Drive to Palm Springs. Drive to Vegas and then Zion. Fly somewhere far away for my birthday. Sell my car and buy something cheap and gorgeous and vintage and unreliable, maybe. Make money. Make music. Swim in the ocean. Get tans that last through winter. Drink heavenly greens and go to El Matador once a week. Stay codependent. Do everything together. Eat well. Drink well. Live fast. Write stories.

Wednesday

It’s two in the morning again and we are in our underwear in my dark bedroom again and Tom is working on his laptop again and I am reading something about Garden of Allah on Internet Archive and getting sleepy. I need to be awake in four hours. On the freeway in five. At my desk in six. Four, five, six. Feel nothing when I think about these numbers. These numbers mean nothing to me. Something to count and pass. Want to smoke a joint and fall asleep on Tom’s chest and let them pass.

I sleep dreamlessly for two or three hours and wake up at six a.m. to “This Charming Man” in my LA Apparel running shorts and white bra feeling psychedelic from sleep deprivation. We have sex and then he tells me that he didn’t sleep all night, that I turned my back to him and started breathing heavy and he put his headphones on and kept going, all night, until my alarm rang out and I turned back to him. He says I miss you so much when you sleep, you always turn to the window, away from me completely, and it’s like you disappear but then in the morning you open your eyes and come right back to me.

The abandoned car wash on Beverly Glen next to that big church looks so beautiful in the morning light.

I work from eight to four. The new girl calls out and Amy says I don’t like this, I don’t like this. Joe comes to my desk with two pieces of news. First he tells me that Tom cornered him last weekend and told him to give me space. Then he tells me that he quits. I drink three black coffees and feel euphoric in my exhaustion. I complete every task. I work fast. On lunch, I walk to Target in my kitten heels and buy a tin of honey roasted almonds and a black tank top. I eat eleven almonds and then throw away the tin.

Tom picks me up in the alley at four. He tells me that he had a meeting at nine and then slept all day. I tell him about Joe quitting after that little chat they had and at first his mood is all serious but then we laugh and drive up Wilshire to Erewhon and order cowboy brew and cococcino at the tonic bar and then gather an assortment of foods for lunch. Mulligatawny soup, French bread, dried mango, an organic chocolate chip cookie the size of Tom’s big palm and spicy tofu. We want to make it back to Hollywood eventually but traffic is clogged up and it’ll take an hour if we go now, so we drive to his apartment instead and spend about fifteen minutes sitting still at that fucked up light on Barrington.

We make it back upstairs to his apartment and he draws the blackout curtains and sets our food on the bed. I want to nap and feel sick of being trapped in my pinstriped slacks but when I ask Tom if I can borrow a pair of briefs to sleep in, he hesitates and thinks for a minute and then says wouldn’t that be strange, you wearing my underwear, men’s underwear? And I ask him what could possibly be strange about that and he can’t answer and I don’t push it, just lie down in my pinstriped slacks and consider the fragility of his masculinity. I take a bite of tofu and then push everything away and close my eyes and experience, for the first time in a long time, an extreme and undeniable yearning to be all alone. I do not know what to do with this yearning and I am sure this yearning will go away soon, dissipate, get replaced by a different yearning, one of the yearnings that comes as a side effect of my codependent tendencies. But in this moment, my yearning to be all alone feels like the truth, like a ray of sunlight piercing through a blanket of clouds.

Thursday

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Sunday

The body revolts against the lifestyle. I wake up at nine with a swollen eye, a hickey and a splitting headache. The body is a problem I can solve. Just need eye drops, arnica, aspirin, a liter of sparkling Mountain Valley all to myself and two or three favors from God.

Alone in Tom’s car, slouching north up La Brea Avenue, I shuffle the music and “Mardy Bum” by Arctic Monkeys comes on. I turn the volume way up and scream along and feel surprised to hear all of the correct lyrics coming out of my own mouth. Despite the decade that’s passed since I last screamed along to this song, Alex Turner and I are in sync. Screaming along to “Mardy Bum” is like riding a bike. I guess. Oh I’m in trouble again, aren’t I? I thought as much! I drive up Sunset Boulevard to the Gower Gulch and pull in to a parking spot in front of the nail salon and place an order for a four shot hot americano with a quarter inch of cream from my phone and then turn the ignition off and sit in my car and stare at nothing and wait and think about how lucky/bleak it is that I can get what I want (four shots of espresso made in a kitchen that is not mine) without having to interact whatsoever at all with another human being.

Three o’clock comes around and I am supposed to be at my desk by four but I am thinking of showing up closer to five. I mean. What do they want from me? I take my time. I languish in the shower, let the hot water turn my skin all pink. I sit in the empty bath wrapped up in my towel and look at my phone and wait for the will to rush to arrive, but it never does. So I dry off slowly and pull a long dress with no sleeves on over my head and feel okay in the mirror and then get into my car and drive twelve miles down Santa Monica Boulevard back to the west side.

I’m sitting at the desk in kitten heels and a dreadful disposition. Work is terrible. I argue with Tom. My left eye starts to burn and then waters for hours uncontrollably. The pace is slow and all of the crucial tasks were completed before I arrived and I feel so upset with Tom and so annoyed with my left eye that I click my heels all of the way down the hall and into the little office where Max sits and tell him that I have to go, like right now. And he doesn’t ask any questions, not really, so I leave.

I call my mother from the 405-North to wish her a happy Mother’s Day but she’s in a mood because it’s seven o’clock and I had all day to call and didn’t till now. I thought you forgot, she sighs into the phone.

At nine, Tom shows up at my doorstep with half an ounce of weed and a halfway decent apology. We sit in my dark bedroom for something like three hours, arguing a little and then making up and then arguing a little more and then making up again and ultimately deciding that we should just be happy. He falls asleep and I finish writing and press publish at like, eleven-thirty and then collapse on top of him and feel nice. He pulls my head into his chest and says watch me take care of you and give you everything.

Monday

I dream something about shopping for stuffed animals in Italy and don’t wake up until ten. It’s probably another bright warm day in Southern California but I wouldn’t know because the blackout curtains are drawn. Tom is asleep in his work clothes. His shirt is still tucked into his slacks and his belt is still buckled and he slept the whole night with his jacket on. I wake him up and ask him if I should go to work and he says no which is exactly what I want to hear. And so I call Amy up and tell her that I can’t make it in. I click the phone off and Tom pulls me into his lap and we stay like that for an hour or two, bullshitting. Kissing and listening to music and talking about things I could do to make my apartment perfect and I like him so much and feel a little bit scared.

On the way back to Tom’s apartment, sometime around three, we stop by a coffee shop on La Brea to put an end to our hunger and migraines and general energetic suffering. Tom is wearing a white tee shirt and jeans and I am in my baby blue and white pinstriped pajama pants and a black cardigan with beat up black ballet flats and big sunglasses. We order a chocolate chip cookie the size of his palm and two iced dirty chais because it’s so warm outside. And then we get back into the car and he puts on “Gardena’s Finest.”

It’s five o’clock and I’m drinking mint terra yerba mate and listening to Jay-Z in the passenger seat of Tom’s car. We are sitting parked in front of the Cinema Cleaners on Jefferson Boulevard, smoking joints and looking at our phones and, for some reason, putting off going inside to drop off his dry cleaning. Two hours pass like honey before we make any moves to exit, and then we finally exit. I ask the Mexican lady at the front about her day while a guy who tailored a suit for Tom once asks him how the suit’s been doing lately and then we get back into the car and he says let’s go home baby.

Tom and I are sitting in his bedroom and he’s making a beat and still has his sunglasses on and the mood between us is nice. I am on the black leather couch with my laptop, writing. My cardigan is unbuttoned and my bra is showing and I have something like four hormonal zits on my face because my period is coming. We work for three hours. He writes a song and I, for the first time in something like six months, write a story. I am staring at the words on my screen and beginning to feel a little bit faint from all of the blue light and concentration and weed and so when Tom tells me that he wants to do laundry but has to do it at the laundromat because the dryer in the basement is broken, I see an opportunity for escape and join. We smoke a joint and then drive to this little laundromat off of Grand View.

The laundromat’s ATM won’t break Tom’s hundred dollar bill, so we drive to In-N-Out. The west side is enshrouded in fog and everything feels quiet, uncanny. The drive-thru line is so short and a Thouxanbanfauni song starts playing and Tom says there are a few songs that make me feel close to God, and this is one of them. We both get animal fries and Tom gets a double-double and I get a cheeseburger with raw onions and the dog gets two plain patties and he pays the guy at the window with the hundred dollar bill that the laundromat refused to break. I am so stoned and so lightheaded and on the way back to the laundromat, Tom drives so fast that the inertia flips my stomach. He leaves me in the car to go start the washer and then he returns and we eat our food in the parking lot with the roof dropped and I feel so happy to be eating that I almost get emotional. We smoke another joint and feel so heavy and sleepy from the food that he puts his things in the dryer and takes my face in his hands and says let’s just fucking go home and nap. So we drive a minute or two back to his apartment and take our clothes off and lie down.

Tuesday

Tom’s alarms start going off at eight and we are not out of bed till ten. We slept and slept and slept and never got up to get his laundry from the laundromat and I smoke half a joint and he doesn’t because he has a meeting soon. My phone is malfunctioning and has been since late last night. I say I think I am going to buy a new phone today and Tom says okay. We wear our pajamas out and take the dog with us to the laundromat off of Grand View and I walk him in a square around the block while Tom collects his clothes. The sky is all white and thick and it seems like it might rain. We get back into the car and he zooms us back to his apartment and showers while I reread the story I wrote last night on my laptop and find it quite trite after sleeping on it and sigh. He asks me if I’d rather stay at his apartment while he goes to his meeting or drop him off and take his car and be free for five hours and then pick him up and I can’t choose so he chooses the latter for me. So I drop him off and we kiss goodbye in the alley and then I get on the 10 in his fast car and take the La Brea exit to Edgewood to Wilshire to Vine and drive straight to the Verizon store across from the big Chase bank on Sunset Boulevard (whose fountain I threw up in once, on Halloween of 2021 when I was roofied at a Don Toliver show at the Palladium, but that’s another story). I park at a meter out front and plan to go in and talk to someone and buy a new phone but then I think better of all of that intrepid human interaction and decide to place the order for my new phone on my broken phone instead. I select the iPhone 17 Pro in silver because the other two color way options are monstrous, fucking hideous, and then I sit and wait and sigh and wonder how long it’ll take for the order to be ready for pickup and decide to wait and sigh at home instead. Home, where I can like, make myself a cup of Blue Lotus masala chai and take my vitamins or something.

I spend a couple of hours alone at home waiting for Verizon to tell me that I can come pick up my phone, and during those couple of hours I:

1. Vacuum everywhere

2. Feed the cats

3. Listen to “Gardena’s Finest” one thousand times in a row

4. Exfoliate and shave in the bath and don’t wash my hair although I most definitely should

5. Think about Tom

6. Think about Cal

7. Smoke the other half of the joint I smoked this morning on the back steps in the cold air in my baby pink towel and silver flip flops

8. Chug water

9. Eat two handfuls of dry cereal standing in the kitchen over the sink. Like a dog

10. Moisturize

11. Gua-sha for like twenty minutes straight, sitting on the hardwood floor of my bedroom closet

12. Do a very bare minimum amount of makeup

13. Cut the hem off of my midi Cou Cou slip dress for some reason and put brown Dansko clogs on and get in my car to meet Tom

I pick Tom up in the alley and drive us in his car to Erewhon. He looks at me behind the wheel and smiles and says this is the view I have been waiting for. We order one cowboy brew and one cococcino and buy spicy tofu and sushi and eat together at two of the little wooden stools at the tonic bar, looking out through the big windows at Wilshire Boulevard. We talk about the state of our relationship and he tells me that he is falling in love and I want to say something back, something specific, but everything I say comes out nonchalant and vague and I can tell that he wants more and I want to give it to him but can’t and don’t know why. In the car on the way back to his apartment, we smoke a joint and I tell him that the new phone I ordered still isn’t ready for pick up and he says phone, phone, phone, you keep talking about the phone, what the fuck do you need a phone for?

It’s seven o’clock and beautiful on the 101-North. Tom is speeding past all of those car dealerships and palm trees by the Universal Studios exit and we are talking about ideas, talking about The Muse and debating the utility of perfectionism. The dog is in the backseat and we are on the way to La Tuna Canyon Park, a dubious destination that neither Tom nor I have been to before. But then we get there and discover that the park is on the side of the freeway, and luckily we both feel quite romantically about freeways. The mountains are so big and the sky is even bigger and the trail we walk is big and wide but there are wildflowers lining both sides. The blue sky turns orange and then pink. We are finished with our walk by eight which aligns perfectly with the sunset and everything is perfect. We get back into the car and Tom asks me if I’m hungry and I am, so he drives us ten minutes or so east to the Glendale Americana where we sit for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. “Bittersweet Symphony” by Verve is playing and I order the chopped salad and a Diet Coke and Tom has a Diet Coke too and a big bowl of spicy rigatoni.

It’s so quiet and dark and cool in my bedroom and the red lighting against the white walls looks so nice and I’m so stoned and we are in our underwear, Tom and I, and he is mixing a song and I am writing and he looks up at me after an hour or two of not speaking and says flow state.

Wednesday

It’s three in the morning and so humid in my bedroom and there’s a migraine sprouting from my third eye. Tom is still going and I keep sighing, trying to signal that I want to sleep, but he’s refusing to pick up what I’m putting down and I feel a little bit petulant about it. So I take my dress off and roll over and pray that we accidentally sleep through our breakfast plans and then feel a little bit guilty about praying for that.

We wake up at 10:59 a.m., a precise and unforgiving sixty seconds before we are meant to be sitting at a four top in the Superba garden with Tom’s artist and her wife. I think about my nearly but crucially unanswered prayer while I brush my teeth and button my jeans and think why, God, why? But then we leash the dog and drive down Wilcox to Superba and meet the lesbians at a big table in the corner of the little grove and the air is lush and perfect and there are angel’s trumpet trees all over. I order a cappuccino and a chopped salad and Tom says, make that two please. The lesbians order grain bowls and the four of us share bread with salted butter and fresh cheese. Tom asks the waitress to put in an order of unseasoned scrambled eggs for the dog and the mood is nice. I talk to the artist’s wife about cats and children and Tudor style homes and London and New Jersey and one hundred other things while Tom and the artist talk about music, music, music. The artist’s wife asks me if Tom and I ever have difficulty communicating due to our cultural differences and I look up at the sky through the treetops and say ummmmmmmmmmmm for a gauche amount of time.

We leave the lesbians waiting for their car outside of Superba and drive straight down Sunset to the Verizon store and interrupt two really stoned young black male Verizon employees in the middle of a retarded conversation about video games to ask if one of them could please go rummage around the back stock and retrieve my new phone for me. Eventually they do, and it’s gorgeous (in a way that I do not personally find interesting at all), so we get back into the car and drive home. It’s three o’clock and I have to be at my desk in Santa Monica by four. I leave Tom in my bed with his laptop and lock myself into the bathroom and shower without washing my hair. We rush out and the GPS says that I am going to be six minutes late which is not so bad but not so good, at least not today, because I never showed up on Monday and Amy is getting really sick of my shit, I think. Tom exits on Lincoln Boulevard and I develop a psychosomatic stomachache.

Work debases me. I meet the second new girl and immediately identify her as a lesbian and then feel thrown when she mentions her decade long romantic relationship with a man. Amy pulls me into her little office and says you’ve gotta cut the bullshit and then tells me that her life has been so fucked up lately and begins to cry. I apologize. I drink two cups of black coffee and eat an Erewhon seeded bar for lunch and still feel hungry, which in turn makes me feel fat. I miss Tom. I look at my greasy hair in the mirror and comb through the tangled ends with my fingers. I think about Cal and feel guilty. I think about my mother and feel guilty. I think about my father and feel guilty. I fiend for a joint. I hit my vape in the bathroom. I hit my vape in the courtyard. I hit my vape by the dumpster in the last of the sunlight. I check the mailbox. I look at the internet on my laptop. I edit my diary. I pray that the night wraps early. I bide time, bide time, bide time.

The night wraps early just like I prayed it would. I think to myself: God works in mysterious ways. Tom picks me up and speeds me to Hollywood and tells me that he wants a drink. So we drive up Franklin Avenue to La Poubelle instead of my apartment and sit inside and drink gin with lime and share a dozen oysters that don’t taste so good. The service is bizarre. We have two waiters for some reason and both of them seem concussed. The first waiter is this thirty-something year old guy with a cast on his arm who keeps coming over and asking if everything is alright and the second waiter is this young girl with a French bob wearing a long baby blue dress and every time she comes over, she stands too close and doesn’t say anything, just kind of smiles. But the light is so dim and there’s this old movie playing on the projector and I feel so drunk and when Tom asks so, are you my girlfriend or what I say of course I am and he reaches under the table for my ankle and pulls my kitten heel into his lap.

Thursday

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Sunday

Lying supine on Tom’s couch. The apartment is warm and smells like dog and my thighs are sticking to the leather cushions and the wheeze in my chest is wearing on me and I’m so hungry, haven’t eaten since whenever, and all I want to do is get into my car and split open the brown bag of plantain chips sitting in the backseat, waiting for me, and smoke a joint and drive to Hollywood. But Tom is dragging. We dropped Ben off at his apartment late, a little before midnight maybe, and now it’s one in the morning and we’ve been sitting around Tom’s apartment for what feels like forever and he keeps saying that we’re going to leave soon but it’s been an hour and soon still hasn’t come.

It is twilight in Hollywood and strangely quiet and neither of us can sleep. We eat pasta for dinner (breakfast?) in my big white bed and watch Mulholland Drive. Tom has never seen Mulholland Drive before and he’s not doing a very good job at paying attention. Camilla is in Betty’s aunt’s bedroom, crying, nervous about her trouble, and Tom rolls his eyes at the screen. This girl, she’s always upset. I try explaining to him about the car accident and her memory loss but he just sighs.

We come to consciousness and find that it’s later in the morning than we’d like. We are lying in the crypt together and it’s hard to move but we do. He gets into the shower and then irons his shirt in my bedroom and I feed the cats and brush my teeth and stare into the mirror and decide that I feel okay about my reflection for a girl who hasn’t prioritized her hygiene in something like three weeks.

Tom goes to work and I take the dog for a walk. I am wearing silver flip flops and a black cardigan with brown cropped leggings and my leggings have no pockets and so I’ve got a red Bic lighter tucked into my waistband and the dog leash tied around my wrist and a joint in my mouth and my keys in one hand and my phone and vape in the other. My mother calls and I don’t have the dexterity to pick up.

I spend the hours between eleven and four o’clock alone in Tom’s apartment, cleaning up my diaries and smoking joints. I sit at the desk stoned and try to remember the last time a day passed where I didn’t get stoned and can’t remember and feel pathetic for a few minutes and then forget about it all. I play with the dog and walk to the liquor store and buy sparkling water and canned espresso and drink both at Tom’s desk and write, write, write until I notice the time and realize I will be late for work. My cough is so wet and I don’t feel like getting dressed but I put my ballet flats on and a little black dress with a big sweater and get into my car.

Tom is driving 101 miles per hour up the 101-North and talking loudly over a Freddie Gibbs song about money. I stare out the window and can’t find the moon. The night is dark and the wind is blowing and I feel suddenly empty inside and, for a few minutes, try to figure out why but can’t and stop trying.

Monday

Tom is in his work clothes, driving my car down Melrose towards La Cienega towards the 10-West. He is supposed to be at his desk in three minutes but it’s going to be more like thirty. We are stuck in a turn lane at the clogged intersection behind a semi truck with a big orange NORMS logo on the side and there’s this gorgeous advertisement on the back. A big beautiful picture of pancakes with syrup and a perfect pat of butter on a white plate, and white text below that reads caught you looking at our tasty hotcakes. Stupid text. So stupid that it puts me in a bad mood. Plus Tom is telling me a story he’s told me twice or thrice before and a song I like is playing and I want to turn the volume up but can’t because it’d be rude.

My mother calls and I pick up and she says you haven’t been calling, you must be in love. Which I deny.

The girl I’m sitting next to at the Erewhon tonic bar on Wilshire Boulevard is so young and tan and there are six Cartier bracelets stacked like Egyptian burial jewelery up her left wrist. I am waiting for a crushed cococcino (organic espresso, organic coconut cream, scratch vanilla syrup, organic coconut whip) and she is waiting for six Hailey Bieber smoothies. I know that she is waiting for six Hailey Bieber smoothies because she’s already gotten up from the little wooden stool twice to check in with the weary baristas about her wait time. What are you waiting on? They ask. Ummmm, like six Hailey Bieber smoothies. I get bored and stand up and pace the aisles and collect dried mango, propolis lozenges and two coconut granola macro bars and purchase them and by the time I’m finished at the register, my drink is ready and the girl is gone.

I get into the car with my cococcino and drive down Bundy to Tom’s apartment. I light a joint and roll down all four windows and listen to “Beverly Laurel” by Tame Impala and when I turn up his street there is a perfect parking spot. I walk upstairs with my vape and my wallet and my keys and use the key he put on my ring last night to unlock the front door and leash the dog. I am wearing beat up black ballet flats and little navy and white striped shorts and the Gold’s Gym tee shirt I bought at Squaresville a couple of months ago. My hair is French pinned in a pile on top of my head and I have big sunglasses on and I am stoned and it’s mostly warm outside but sometimes there is a breeze that spreads goosebumps across my exposed thighs. Lilac jacaranda petals litter the sidewalks and the jasmine is blooming and mostly I feel good but I have this feeling like the other shoe is going to drop soon.

I am doing laps around the Brandy Melville at The Grove and I’m stoned and still have my big sunglasses on because before I left the car, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror and didn’t feel so good about what I saw. I pile clothing up into my arms without much thought or discretion and then tap my card at the checkout for three-hundred and sixty-four dollars. I feel nothing. The girl at the register shoves all of my new things into a big black bag. The Brandy Melville at The Grove does not have any dressing rooms and so I do not know what any of my new things will look like on. I will find out in an hour or two, I guess, after I shower. Want to straighten my hair. Want to pluck my eyebrows. I think: VANITY NOT SANITY WILL SAVE ME. I drive up Fairfax to Hollywood and pull on to McCadden and idle my car in front of Starbucks and place an order on my phone for a four shot hot americano. I make it back to the bungalow a little before two o’clock. I get stoned on the back steps and pet the cats and get into the bath and stay there for too long and then dry off and try on all of my new things and decide to wear one of the stupid new black cotton dresses I just bought to work with slingback kitten heels.

Work is slow. I drink cold coffee with cream. Max leaves without saying goodbye to me. Dan points out the short hem of my new dress and says that what I am wearing is probably against dress code but good for morale. I slice the skin of my ring finger open with the box cutter and don’t bleed somehow. I call my mother in the break room and she doesn’t pick up and I think she must be in love.

It’s eleven o’clock and there is an accident on the 10, I think. Tom is driving and we are listening to a Cocteau Twins song and trying to get up the on-ramp but we aren’t moving at all and neither is anybody else. A sea of red brake lights extends as far as the eye can see. Every thirty seconds we inch up a foot or two and the GPS tells us that it’s going to take forty-minutes to get back to Hollywood, double the usual at this time of night, and we aren’t sure what’s going on exactly because we can’t see far enough ahead, but we are sure it’s something. We never find out because we sober up and remember that we can simply exit and take the streets. So we pull off on Bundy and there’s this Asian guy with his hazards on in the middle of the street and the front of his car is freshly smashed and he looks so distressed and like maybe he’s been crying. A hit and run, Tom says. I did that to someone once.

Tuesday

We make it back to my apartment sometime after midnight. It’s raining a little and we find the Chinese food he ordered in the car waiting at my door step in a damp paper bag. We go inside and undress and turn the lights off and get into bed and eat cream cheese wontons and spicy eggplant and spring rolls and beef with broccoli and watch that movie with SZA and Keke Palmer where they are desperate for rent money and decide that we hate it and fall asleep.

Tom’s alarm goes off at eleven. He gets up and goes into my kitchen with his laptop and sits at the nook and works while I sit in the bath and cleanse myself and look at my phone. Cal sends a picture of the cat lying in a patch of sunlight in his bedroom and a message that says miss you and it makes me sad for a few minutes and then nauseous for an hour. But then I dry off and moisturize and roll perfume oil all over and feel better. I emerge from the bathroom in my towel and Tom’s still working so I put on the pink cotton spaghetti strap top I bought yesterday and ballet flats and walk down the little hill to the smoke shop. It’s Jim behind the counter instead of the autistic white guy for what feels like the first time in a long time, months maybe, and I ask him where he’s been and he smiles at me and says here, where have you been? He tells me that he works mornings, five days a week, sometimes six. And when I tell him that I guess lately I’ve been sleeping in he smiles and rolls his eyes and says okay princess. He hands me three packs of virginia tobacco Juul pods and only charges me for one and then I walk to Intelligentisa and order two hot dirty chais with whole milk, a brownie cookie and a croissant from the trans girl behind the register. She’s wearing a mini skirt with a hem so short that it’s stressing me out and “A Horse with No Name” by America is playing over the speaker system and I walk uphill back to the apartment singing the la la las of the chorus in my head. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.

It’s almost four o’clock and we are heading back to the west side in Tom’s car. It’s cloudy out and grey and a little bit cold and I am wearing a white dress with black polka dots and kitten heels which is really stupid of me considering the weather and the plan we made to take the dog out for a walk. We stop at Herbarium on La Brea to buy one single joint because traffic is bad and we are all out of weed and want to be high. We drive past his old neighborhood and he slows down in front of a beautiful apartment building with trees and a green yard and points at one of the balconies and says a guy was shot in the head there and then keeps driving. It takes an hour to get to Venice and we pull straight into the lot of the dispensary he likes. The security guard looks great. White button up and dark wayfarers. He gives me a hug and tells me that his mother is sick and that he’s been having a terrible day. Tom tells him that he’s sorry to hear that and then asks him if he can use his employee discount on us and the security guard says no, that the girl on shift at the register is strict. And then later, when we don’t have a lighter and the security guard runs to get one, Tom looks at me and says when someone denies you a favor once, they are much more likely to come through the second time.

Tom asks me if I’d like to sleep in my bed or his and I say mine. So we leash the dog and put him into the backseat of the car and drive all the way back to Hollywood. I am so hungry and there is so much traffic, we spend something like an hour on La Brea, and Tom is restless. We pass Jeffrey Deitch and I think of Gabriel and feel a little bit sick but only for a second. Tom parks the car in the red outside of my apartment and we run inside. I feed the cats and take off my dress and put on track pants and my Gimaguas hoodie instead, more appropriate for a walk, and then we go back outside into the last of the sunlight. I lead Tom and the dog down Franklin and then up Holly through the tunnel and deep into the Hollywood Dell, all the way up Weidlake to the Mulholland Reservoir. The houses in the Dell are so nice and the view of the city up high between the properties is like magic. Pink sky, sparkling lights. We make it to the top just as the sun is setting and there’s this fat guy in a water department truck idling by the entrance who stops us from going through. Tom says can we just look at the water and the fat guy turns his engine on and shakes his head no. So we walk back down the winding hill and through the tunnel in the dark to my apartment.

I ask Tom if he’s hungry and he is and then I ask him if he wants to go to my favorite restaurant and he says he does so we drop the dog off and walk to Superba. We sit inside and when Tom asks me to order for us since It’s my favorite, I oblige. The waiter comes over and I ask for two olive oil washed martinis and bread with butter and salt and fresh cheese and brussel sprouts and rigatoni bolognese. The waiter says those are all of my favorite things and I feel pleased. Tom loves the food and hates his martini so I drink both and by the time the glasses are empty I’m drunk. We eat our plates clean and then order two cappuccinos and a piece of chocolate cake for dessert and eat those plates clean too.

Wednesday

The alarm goes off at eight and again at eight thirty and again at eighty fifty-five. At nine, Tom gets up and goes into the living room and takes a meeting from his laptop. I wash my face and put on track pants and a tank top and ballet flats and leash the dog and go out through the kitchen door with a joint and a lighter and a roll of the dog’s shit bags and my headphones and my wallet and my phone and my keys and walk west down Franklin Boulevard. I listen to “Gardena’s Finest” by D. Savage on a loop and pass Highland and the Magic Castle and that beautiful church with the angel’s trumpet flower tree out front where I used to pick up my ex girlfriend from AA meetings and Joan Didion’s old house and go up into Wattles Garden Park. I sit in the grass and light my joint and call Cal. He tells me that the cat has fleas and that work is going well and that he misses me. He asks me if I want to come over and I lie and tell him that I have to be at work in an hour. He says poor baby and then we hang up and I feel sick to my stomach and stare out into the smog for a long time until I forget and start to wonder if I got a tan.

We spend the hours between noon and three smoking and laying. He showers and then I shower and then we sit in my bed, smoke two or three joints, listen to music, talk about music, argue about music. Tom doesn’t have to work today but I do and so eventually we get into his car and he drives me to Santa Monica. I take sips from a flat bottle of sparkling Mountain Valley and look at the time and know that I am late and spend most of the drive trying to come up with something nice to say to Amy when I walk in late but can’t come up with anything.

Work bores me. Someone leaves a passive aggressive pastel sticky note on my desk. I eat pretzel goldfish and drink break room coffee. Ken falls ill and has to go home early. Tom stops by with cowboy brew for me. The new girl earnestly asks me if I am a model and so I decide that I like her immediately. I teach her how to scan invoices and show her the places where she can hit her vape without anybody knowing. I get bored and go to the bathroom and draw on eyeliner. It is an easy night and I am free before nine. Tom picks me up in the alley and hands me a lit joint and I haven’t smoked anything since this morning so I get a little too high and anxious and start to feel suffocated by my greasy hair and, generally, my life.

Tom and I sit for dinner at a steak house chain in Marina Del Rey. Our waitress is a hey mamas lesbian who keeps calling Tom boss. What can I get for you, boss? The lights are low and the space is all industrial, gears and wood panels and exposed pipes, and there’s rock music playing a little too loud overhead. We drink beer and eat ahi nachos and caesar salad with grilled chicken and fish and chips and talk about money and sex for an hour and then Tom pays the check and we get into the car and drive to Hollywood. For dessert: refrigerated dates in my dark bedroom.

Thursday

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Sunday

I wake up early, eight a.m., in my bed with the new curtains closed. The bedroom is a crypt, perfect, completely lightless and cold. Tom has to go soon and he’s getting dressed. I just smoke a joint and lay. All that is real in this moment is my self imposed Sunday deadline, all the work I left myself to do. Tom leaves. Doom looms. I swallow two aspirin for my head and pace the room, smoking, listening to new Isaiah Rashad and not liking it and picking pieces of clothing up off of the floor and dropping them in the closet until I feel suddenly spent and get underneath the duvet again.

My alarm goes off at two later that afternoon and I wake up all alone and immediately want to roll back over but there’s no time, I’ve got to finish writing, so I crawl out of bed, light a joint without delay and open up the windows and tie the curtains back. Let the heat out, let the light in. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, pink and tan and warm all over from my oversleeping, and feel the urge to pick up my phone and call Amy and tell her that I can’t make it in. But I run the bath really hot instead and then sit on top of the duvet in my towel for two hours, making the sentences I typed into my diary all of last week look nice. At four, I put on a black mini skirt and a black cable knit sweater and black kitten heels and get into my car and use three freeways to get to my desk.

At seven o’clock, the sun sets and I drink hot green tea with honey and eat pretzel goldfish alone in the break room for breakfast. My hair feels greasy and the interior texture of the sweater I’m in is irritating my skin and I’m not wearing anything underneath. Claustrophobic and nauseous again, dehydrated maybe. Someone reheated pizza and now the windowless room is so warm and everything smells like burnt crust and there’s this awful lump of tomato sauce coagulating on the counter like a blood clot by the kitchen sink.

We’re standing in a dispensary on Venice Boulevard ten minutes before closing and the brunette behind the counter looks bored. She’s like, thirty-three maybe and anorexic and she’s wearing these little shorts and a stupid bowler hat like a girl at a bar in Brooklyn in 2011 or whatever year it was that girls in bars in Brooklyn were wearing stupid bowler hats. Tom wants something specific and the hipster tells us that she doesn’t have it and so we get something else and when we leave, Tom tells the hipster goodbye and the hipster says nothing. Tom seems tired and I go quiet, following him back to his apartment in the dark.

On the way to Perch, Tom smokes a joint on the 110 and says that the last time he was in Downtown it was past midnight on Easter Sunday. We give the valet guy the keys on Hill Street and then we take the ancient elevator up to the top floor, where the bar is. The elevator is slow and there’s this black guy in there with us and he has long dreads and a bottle of champagne in his hands and when Tom asks me whether or not I think the rooftop will be busy, the black guy inserts himself. Nah, it’s been chill. And when the elevator doors open he’s right, it is chill. The lights are dim and the view is profound and as we mill around the bar, waiting for the bartender’s attention, a cover of “Lost” by Frank Ocean plays and I wish it was just “Lost” by Frank Ocean instead. Tom orders two espresso martinis and we drink them on a little bench next to a group of eight: seven men and a woman in a cheap looking strapless wedding dress. The bride is middle aged and bleach blonde and drunk and talking loudly in her smoker’s voice and drinking something pink out of a frilly looking glass. He hasn’t let me have any fucking sugar in six weeks she slurs, pointing at one of the seven men accusatorially. I am still in my kitten heels and the little skirt I wore to work and my hair is so greasy and I’m hungry but the martini is strong and I’m drinking it quickly and my body gets warm with synthetic dopamine. Tom’s phone rings and it’s his mother calling and he picks up and starts talking to her in a language I don’t speak. He says a word that sounds a little bit like my name and I wonder if he is talking about me.

Monday

Perch is closing and I’m loaded, which is good, and a Justin Bieber song is playing and everybody is crowding around the ancient elevator, trying to go down. It’s Tom and I and the sloshed bride and her seven grooms and a group of six or seven other guys, vultures in Chrome Hearts, lingering till closing time in the hopes to find a girl drunk enough to fuck. How depressing. We listen to Gunna on the 101-South back to Hollywood and Tom drives fast. He parks his car in the red on my street and then we crawl into his backseat and stay there for two, two and a half hours, drunk, smoking joints, rolling the windows down and then up and then back down again.

I dream something about shoplifting a steak knife and a pack of cards and an ostrich feather from a grocery store that looks like a hospital. I am nervous because I know I am being watched but I come to consciousness before they can catch me. I look at Tom, asleep with his jaw unhinged in corpse pose, and then look at my phone. It’s ten o’clock and Cal called twice a little after nine and I try to picture myself sneaking out of bed and through the kitchen door onto the back steps to call him back, but the room is so dark and so cool and I have a feeling that when I shift myself up, all the blood will rush and a migraine will come. So I lie back down and sleep for three and a half more hours and when I wake back up again it’s one and Tom is still in corpse pose. I sit up very slowly and crane a little bit to look at my reflection in the mirror that hangs on the closet door and decide that a shower would be good.

I’m sitting in the drained bath wrapped up in my pink towel, looking at the internet on my phone and waiting for the will to leave the bathroom to arrive but it never does so I drag myself out. I open the door slowly and peek into the bedroom and find that Tom hasn’t moved an inch and wonder for about a second and a half if he could be dead. He’s buried beneath the white duvet and the ceiling fan is going. I comb my hair and moisturize all over and go into the kitchen and swallow norethindrone and liposomal vitamin c and vitamin b complex and vitamin d3 and ashwagandha and then pour two ounces of raw kefir into a shot glass and swallow that too. I feed the cats and then take my wallet and keys and walk two blocks alone in the sunshine in a little dress and clogs to the drugstore on the corner and buy cat litter and a liter bottle of Essentia and a packet of allergy medicine and then walk back. It’s almost four and I have to be in Santa Monica for work by five and Tom is my ride. So I go into the bedroom and wake him and put on a $ilkMoney song and sit in the living room, waiting for him to get dressed. I look around at the decrepit state of my apartment and feel weary. The ashtray is full and spilling and there’s dust and cat hair everywhere, on every surface and balled up in every corner, and there’s empty and half empty glasses sitting all over, on the wooden table and on the book shelf and on the hardwood floor, and there’s empty juul pods and clothes and shoes and brown paper bags strewn about too.

On the 405, I light a joint and text Max that I am going to be an hour late and he doesn’t reply. I look over at Tom and say everybody is mad at me and Tom looks over at me and doesn’t say anything. It’s rush hour on a Monday and Tom is fried. I am wearing a black dress with long sleeves and the fabric around the neckline is pilling and I keep pulling long strands of thread out and wrapping them around my fingers until the soft skin turns white. I spend most of the drive feeling psychologically ill prepared for the public sphere, looking at the ETA on his map and feeling sick inside. He drops me off in the alleyway and tells me that he will come save me at nine. I drink a cold cup of coffee with cream and eat an apple at my desk for breakfast and turn the heat on and swallow two aspirin for my head and avoid prolonged eye contact with everyone.

I’m sitting in Élephante with Tom and I tell him that I am stressed and anxious and nauseous and not all that hungry and in a bad mood and a little bit histrionic. I tell him about the bad conversation I had with Amy over the phone and drink an Aperol Spritz and wish it was something stronger. We share grilled octopus salad and shrimp with garlic butter and mushroom polenta and a chocolate torta with salted caramel and mascarpone. Tom keeps trying to direct the conversation somewhere else but I am being difficult, monomaniacal, complaining a lot, and I think probably my catastrophizing is making him uncomfortable but for some reason I can’t stop. He pays the check and I light a joint in the passenger seat on the way back to his apartment and wish I was smoking it in my bedroom instead. He parks and we go upstairs and I undress and sit on the black leather couch with the dog and my laptop and write while he mixes a song.

Tuesday

It’s three o’clock in the morning and I’m stoned in Tom’s car, bombing down three big empty freeways back to Hollywood. The moon is huge and baby yellow in the sky as we speed down the 101 towards my apartment. The Hollywood Hills start to sparkle near the exit for Western and I feel nice. Tom finds an open spot a block away from the bungalow and we go inside and undress and get into my bed and eat cape cod chips and drink sparkling water and talk about nothing till we fall asleep.

We wake up at noon and spend a languid post-coital hour in my bed looking at our phones in the dark under the ceiling fan. I read Worst Boyfriend Ever’s recap of the Rainbow reading and feel vaguely agitated at the inaccuracy of his portrayal of me. I highlight a sentence I don’t like and send it to Worst Boyfriend Ever and say you’re so annoying for this and then ask him if he wants to hang out on Friday. He says yes. My cheetah print ballet flats are still in the back of his van. I look over at Tom who is watching a video in a language I do not understand with the vape clenched between his teeth and feel nothing.

I’m sitting with Tom on the little patio outside of Lazy Acres on Western Avenue. We are facing the parking lot and eating beet salad and lobster bisque with bread for breakfast. It is four o’clock in the afternoon and so beautiful outside and the parking lot palm trees are glittering in the warm breeze. I am wearing a flesh colored spaghetti strap bodysuit with jeans because I am all out of clean underwear. Haven’t done laundry since who knows when. My ballet flats are black and so beat up and my nails are grown out and need to be fixed and my throat hurts and I am worried that I might be getting sick so I bought turmeric drops and a bag of propolis lozenges from the supplement aisle. There are girls in plaid skirts and white polos and Mary Jane’s with white socks streaming out from the Catholic school on Franklin across the street. About an hour ago I looked at Tom in my bedroom and said do you want to go to like, my favorite place ever and he did and so here we are. I bought us green smoothies and americanos at the tonic bar while he walked around, putting things in the shopping cart for dinner, and then we put his brown paper bags in the trunk of the car and came back inside to eat. The security guard I like said hi, long time when we walked back in. Tom finishes our soup and most of the salad too. We decide that we hate the bread and toss it and then get into his car and head west down La Brea towards his apartment. There’s a lot of traffic and “BED FREESTYLE” by Babyxsosa is playing and at the long red light on Olympic, I lean my head against the window and see that the little ice cream shop I used to go to with Cal when we lived together in Miracle Mile has been shut down and replaced with something else.

We make it back to the west side an hour before sunset. It’s like we have two properties, two cars, west side, Hollywood, dog, cats, options, options… Tom says on the 10-West. We go upstairs and leash the dog and then go back downstairs and spend the last of the daylight pacing through the residential streets. We are on Inglewood Boulevard walking uphill and at the top, the whole city reveals itself. I can see Downtown and Culver City and the Hollywood sign, which looks so far away and so obscured by smog that it almost makes me emotional. I don’t know why. Tom is talking about money again when two fat ravens flutter past my body so closely that I can feel the wind from their wings. They land on a low power line and I stare and they don’t seem to notice me. And later, we are walking past this big house with a weak fence when all of the sudden a doberman snarls and lurches up at me and misses my right cheek with his teeth by an inch and somehow I don’t flinch.

To Do Tomorrow:

• Fix my nails

• Call out of work probably

• Grocery shop

• Fill gas, clean out the car

• Pray

• Bathe

• Do like, one thousand loads of laundry. And pour bleach over everything in my life

Wednesday

It’s two o’clock in the morning and Tom has been in the kitchen cooking pasta for something like an hour and I am having a difficult time understanding what could possibly be taking so long. I’ve been writing for four hours on the black leather couch and I’d like to sleep soon seeing as I need to be at the desk by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Six hours from now. Six hours from now. Six hours from now. What does six hours from now mean to me? Nothing. Wish I was in Hollywood in my underwear eating sesame noodles. Or something. Feel faint. Haven’t eaten anything since that lobster bisque and I’m drunk on red wine and wearing his hoodie and just as I am about to lose all hope, he hands me a bowlful of wagyu beef rigatoni bolognese that changes everything.

At eight o’clock, the garbage men drag the big metallic dumpsters that live behind Tom’s apartment out to the street and it wakes me. I swallow hard and my throat feels coated in glass shards and I know that I am in trouble. I reach over Tom’s unconscious body for my bag, wanting liposomal vitamin c, but I knock the curtains open a little and a hot ray of light floods in. Tom opens his eyes and smiles and says good morning and asks me for the time and when I tell him how early it is, he says this is amazing. So we dress and leash the dog and talk about coffee and I ask Tom if he’s ever been to the La Colombe in Frogtown and Tom says no, let’s go. There’s a lot of traffic on the 110 and Tom is explaining Pokemon to me while I look out at the sea of cars through the window and try to count how many times I’ve been trapped in a situation where a man is explaining Pokemon to me. I count: four. At La Colombe, we order two hot dirty chais and share a chocolate croissant.

Nothing much happens during the evening hours spent together at my apartment. We introduce the cats to the dog. I shower while he works in the kitchen nook on his laptop. He showers while I work in the kitchen nook on my laptop. The cats fight with the dog and then make up. We lie around my bedroom drinking sparkling water and smoking joints and not eating anything. I go into the kitchen and pull a sack of cara cara oranges out of the cabinet and discover that they’ve gone completely bad, turned all blue-green, and when I move the sack a few of them turn to powdered-mush. I gasp at the horror and Tom looks over and sees and I tell him to close his eyes but he doesn’t, he just stares, not saying anything. I wrap the sack in plastic and take it out to the dumpster and then run back inside and wipe everything with bleach and feel queasy. My apartment is filthy to the point of perverse and it’s making my skin crawl. I go into the living room and look around, stare at my couch and hate the way it looks and think about all of the debris that’s probably caked underneath the cushions. I stand there and look, look, look and get myself so worked up, so disgusted about it all that I ask Tom to drag the couch out onto the street for me. And now the living room is so barren and the echo is so intense and there is all of this space to fill and I feel a little bit better but not completely.

I am sitting in a leather booth at Celadon Thai on Washington Boulevard across from Tom and he is telling me that my accent is hot. I ask him what my accent sounds like and he says that it’s so Los Angeles. He says it’s like the accents girls have in movies, or maybe not movies… the accents girls have in the porn I watch. You’re always dragging out your wordsssssss. We eat fried wonton shrimp and summer rolls and thai spring rolls and green curry with rice and tofu and mango sticky rice. We are having a nice time but then I make a joke that he doesn’t like and he goes quiet. We pay the check and walk the block between the strip mall and where he parked his car in silence. I light a joint to lighten the mood and when Tom sees that we’re almost out of weed, he drives us to the dispensary on Venice Boulevard. The security guard he likes is standing out front and the guy is feeling really chatty tonight. It’s cold out and I’m tired and not in the mood and Tom is tense and the security guy is clueless. He’s talking about a car accident he saw this morning and going into a lot of ugly detail and when a girl peeks her head out from the dispensary door to tell the security guy that he needs to quit talking and help her lock up and close for the night, I feel relieved.

Watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in Tom’s dark bedroom and sweeping our tension under the rug and setting my alarm for seven o’clock and wishing my chest would quit rattling every time I take a breath.

Thursday

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Sunday

It’s nine in the morning and so warm in my bedroom and Tom is buttoning his shirt and looking at the time on his phone and telling me that he is going to be late. I don’t say anything, sit up and lean over and stretch my body toward the window and knot the curtain and push the frame up and feel relieved by the breeze. I dreamt something about going to Norm’s with my mother that I can’t fully remember and now my hair is wet and matted against my neck with sweat.

I get dressed and get into my car and tune the radio to KJazz 88.1 FM and drive down Franklin to Gower and pull into the Gower Gulch. I place an order for a four shot hot americano with a quarter inch of cream on my phone and watch a homeless man bash his head against the thick dark glass window of the pizza shop next door. He is barefoot and there’s dirt or maybe dried blood caked into the creases of his tan skin. He’s wearing a pair of silver basketball shorts that don’t fit and every time he winds himself up to bash his head against the window again, they slip a little lower.

I am on the couch in a white cotton bra and white cotton underwear and white cotton socks with a king-sized joint in my mouth when I realize the afternoon slipped away from me. It’s a quarter to four and I’ve got to be in Santa Monica by five and I need to wash my hair but there’s no time. So I snuff the joint and go into the bathroom and start running the hot water and lower myself in and shave my legs and slice the tight skin around my left knee open with the sharp razor twice. I dry off and massage my face at high speed with the stainless steel gua sha and dress myself in all black and pour two fat scoops of cat food into the little bowls in the kitchen just in case I don’t make it back to my apartment tonight. I apply concealer and eyeliner and mascara at the long red light at Highland and Hollywood in the rearview mirror of my car and put “The Perfect Kiss” by New Order on and turn the volume way up and go ninety all the way down the 10-West to Lincoln Boulevard.

And later at my desk in Santa Monica, sometime around seven, I’m sitting in my ergonomically fucked chair reading blog comments on my phone because I’ve got nothing better/left/else to do and the lights in the room are dim and I feel so calm. I am wearing a short black dress with long sleeves and Miista boots and the fifteen milligram edible I swallowed for breakfast an hour ago in the break room is swimming through my blood stream. Amy comes out of her little office with her ludicrously capacious red pleather bag on her shoulder, ready to go home, and asks me if everything is alright.

You look half dead, she says.

I do?

Yes.

Tom is on the phone in the car, trying to buy mushrooms from a dealer in the Valley. We are sitting parked on Venice Boulevard in the moonlight and “Empty Pages” by Larry June is playing and there’s a lit joint pluming smoke out of an empty coffee cup sitting in the center console. The dog is snoring in the back seat and I feel good, or at least I think I feel good. After talking to the guy in the Valley for like five minutes he clicks the phone off and looks over at me. Let’s push it, he says, shifting the car into drive and stretching right his arm across my body to protect me from the force of his acceleration. Soon we are flying up the 405-North in the dark and “Never Been, Pt. II” by Wiz Khalifa and Rick Ross is playing really loud and the car is vibrating and every time Rick Ross growls, Tom growls too and I’m laughing. He takes the Canoga exit and hands me his phone and asks me to text the dealer that we will be there in five and then pulls into a strip mall parking lot. There’s a nail salon and a European Wax Center and a pilates studio and a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. The lot is big and empty and we wait in the car beneath the fluorescent lights for a minute or two until a skinny black guy shuts the door of a Dodge Charger and makes his way over to us. The guy’s got a goatee and one AirPod in and he’s wearing a white hoodie with a crossbody bag. Tom tells me to wait in the car and so I pull my knees up to my chin and rest my forehead against the window and watch him dap up the skinny black guy through the front windshield. The guy rifles through a white plastic bag and hands a ziplock full of dried albino mushrooms to Tom. I pull the half-smoked joint out of the empty coffee cup and relight it and when he gets back in the car, Tom is smiling and shaking the little bag. Do you eat lamb? He asks. I don’t know, do I?

Monday

I’m lying in Tom’s bed and the mushrooms are making everything nice. I am warm all over and slow and when I move my body it feels like I am swimming. The light in the room is red and the dog is staring up at me from the floor and when I roll over onto my stomach, I feel something hot on my skin and reach underneath myself and it’s a lit joint. I pick it up and drop it into the ashtray and stare into the little hole it burned into Tom’s white bedsheet. I stick my pointer finger through the hole and say look to Tom but Tom doesn’t look.

I wake up at noon. Someone’s car alarm is going off outside and it sounds more like an ambulance than a car alarm and there’s a helicopter whirring somewhere close by in the sky and the hot afternoon light is streaming in through the black curtains and I feel a little bit nauseous. I am in a white bralette and Tom’s sweatpants and for a second or two I have a solid grasp on my dream but Tom feels me stirring and says good morning and my grasp slips. I sit up in his bed and look at myself in the mirrored closet door and use my fingers to detangle my hair. Tom says let’s drive to Laguna Beach and have mushrooms for breakfast but then Rose calls and wants us to join her and her daughter at the Getty Villa at three. We flip a coin, heads for Laguna Beach, tails for the Getty, and it’s tails so we call her and tell her that we will see her and Callie at three.

We stop at the Brentwood Country Mart on the way to the Getty Villa because I have no clothes and there is no time to stop by my apartment in Hollywood. I am wearing his sweatpants with my Gimaguas hoodie and Manolos. Tom parks his car in the little lot and we split up. He goes into Caffe Luxxe and orders us two hot americanos and I go into the Brandy Melville and look for clothes. I am naked behind a fucked up curtain, trying on a white cotton dress when he texts: take your time, I see you in the fitting room. I buy the white dress and a black cotton cardigan and a pair of grey underwear with a tiny white bow on the waistband from a stressed out teenage girl with Carrie Bradshaw hair. When I ask her if I can use the fitting room again to wear the clothes out, she shrugs and says yeah, whatever, cool and then yells out GIRLS, SHE’S GOING TO PUT THE CLOTHES SHE JUST BOUGHT ON IN THE DRESSING ROOM and the girls nod. And then we pull out of the Country Mart lot and back onto the PCH. It’s warm out, sixty-eight degrees, and I put my big sunglasses on and look out at the ocean through the window and wonder if the water has always looked so dark, so green.

I’m sitting at Gladstone’s in Malibu with Tom and Rose and Callie. We spent about an hour at the Getty Villa, wandering around the big gardens and little galleries, feeling marginally stoned and bored. Callie wasn’t having any fun and so none of us were having any fun, really. She kept tugging on the hem of Rose’s little floral dress, asking when we could leave. She was running around a lot and Rose kept yelling at her and then looking back over at Tom and me and saying sorry, what were you saying? We are sitting at a big round table on the corner of the deck overlooking the ocean. I drink two mojitos and pick at calamari and onion rings and caesar salad with shrimp. Callie orders a cup of clam chowder, takes one bite and begins to whine. I ask the waitress for a third mojito but she never brings me one. Which is good because when I go to the bathroom and look at my face in the mirror, the walls behind me are spinning.

The 405-North between Venice and Hollywood is empty and Tom is driving fast. I put a Curren$y song on and Tom turns the volume up. He pulls off at the Chevron on Cahuenga and fills my tank and when there are no open parking spots on my street, I guide him into a spot in the red I like to use and tell him trust me.

I eat another stem, sink my neck into the soft arm of the couch. I am wearing my new white cotton dress and the ridges of my teeth are caked in psilocybin and all of the lights in the bungalow are pink and I keep putting my fingers into my mouth to pick and re-eat. Tom puts Scarface on the TV and says I love this fucking movie.

Tuesday

I wake up at one, sweating in my dress. Tom’s phone rings and it’s Ben calling, wanting to know where Tom is. Tom tells Ben that he is with me in Hollywood and that if he’d give us an hour or two, time for coffee and a shower, we could meet him at the apartment around three.

The girl behind the counter at Intelligentsia looks about nineteen. She’s pale and a little bit fat and when it is my turn to order, instead of asking me what I’d like or, God forbid, saying hi, she just looks at me and raises her eyebrows and does a tiny sigh. I order two hot dirty chais and a chickpea curry pastry for Tom and I and when I tell the girl thank you she says mmhmm and rolls her eyes. She pours the hot whole milk in slowly and then pushes the cups across the steel countertop and yells TWO DIRTY CHAIS without looking at me even though I am the only customer inside.

It’s really beautiful out and warm and in an hour or two the sun will set and I am sitting in Tom’s passenger seat, drifting down the 10-West towards his apartment where Ben is waiting for us. We are late. We listen to Wiz Khalifa in the car and when we pull up there’s Ben, standing on the curb, squinting at us through his glasses and smiling. The three of us go upstairs together and drink bottled margaritas for breakfast on the couch and then leash the dog and go back downstairs and get into Tom’s car and drive up the PCH to the Mulholland Highway, way up into the Santa Monica Mountains. I am wearing jeans and hiking boots and my hair is clean. When we hugged hello, Ben inhaled really deep and then pulled away and said my God, what an incredible smell. Tom parks the car at a trailhead I can’t read the name of and tells us that we probably won’t make it up to the top and back down again before the sun sets.

We leave the Santa Monica Mountains at ten and the streets are all empty between The Palisades and Westwood. My lungs feel weak from all that uphill and my knees and palms are bleeding a little from slipping in the dirt on the way down the mountain in the dark. We spend the car ride getting high and discussing whether we prefer humans or animals and why. Ben says that he prefers humans because animals aren’t individualistic enough and I tell them that his reasons lacks scientific accuracy and then ultimately agree that I too prefer people, though I tend to feel more empathy for animals. Tom idles his car outside of Ben’s apartment and we say goodbye.

I’m sitting in a booth at Bossa Nova on Pico Boulevard with Tom and it’s late, almost eleven. We are drinking red wine and eating Brazilian steak with black beans and plantains and discussing our recent inseparability. I am not so hungry and the conversation is making me nauseous and I keep looking down at my steak, sawing off little bites with a big knife and bringing the fork to my open mouth and chewing slowly. There are four drunk black guys sitting in the corner by the window and they are laughing a lot and one of them keeps looking over at me and smiling and when Tom isn’t looking, I smile back and don’t know why.

On the way back to Hollywood, I sit with my knees up in the car and stare out at the lit skyscrapers as Tom flies up the 110 through Downtown, towards the 101. I think about Cal all alone in his apartment with the cat and feel a little bit sad but mostly just numb and decide not to think about that. A Tame Impala song is playing and we are about to come up on my apartment’s exit when Tom looks over at me and says you know, shrooms twice in two nights is nice, but three times in three nights…? And my eyes widen and I tell him that he’s crazy and he speeds past my exit, speeds up towards the Valley and the Canoga park exit where the mushrooms are.

Wednesday

It’s six o’clock in the morning and I’m in bed with Tom and we haven’t slept yet. The sun is rising and the birds are chirping and about an hour ago I decided that I just couldn’t picture myself going to work today and so Tom is drafting a message to Amy for me on my phone that says: I won’t be able to make it in today, I’m not feeling well this morning and need to take the day off, so sorry about this. We are laughing at so sorry about this.

We get up late in the afternoon, sometime around four, to the excruciating whir of a leaf blower floating in through the open bedroom window. The room is warm and I am wearing a striped tank top and the underwear I bought at Brandy Melville yesterday. I get up and put Kerastase oil in my tangled hair and spray rosewater all over and brew bustelo espresso on the stove while Tom showers. He comes into the kitchen wet and I split the espresso into two mugs. Cal is texting, wondering where I am right now and where I have been all week, and I feel guilty.

I am sitting at the kitchen nook across from Tom, naked under my kimono, eating a bowl of Nature’s Path cereal with coconut milk for breakfast. It is nine o’clock at night and dark out and the first few hours of consciousness are passing languidly.

In the car, Tom lights a joint and tells me it’s our last and then calls this Afghan who works security at the dispensary by his apartment and asks him if he’d be willing to pull a twenty-eight pack of prerolls off of the shelves and wait in the parking lot for us to arrive since our ETA is a minute or two past closing time. The guy agrees. Tom pulls into the little strip mall lot and we get out and the guy hugs me hello and lights up a joint and the three of us stand around in the dark underneath the street lamp for ten, fifteen minutes talking about nothing. The guy tells us that the best part of his new life in America is that everybody he meets is so nice. I say really? And he says yes, really, like you guys and smiles really big at Tom and I.

It’s a little after eleven and we are at the Redondo Beach pier and the waxing crescent moon is small and bright white in the sky as Tom leads me past the fishermen to the little marina and back around again. The mood is quiet. It’s cold and I’m drunk and nauseous because we just split a bottle of champagne in the car and three joints and the dog keeps yanking the leash and I keep looking out at the dark water and feeling like I’m going to throw up.

Thursday

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Sunday

It’s two o’clock in the morning and I am idling my car on Franklin Boulevard in the dark, anxiously waiting for the line of cars behind me to clear so that I can back into this fucking parking spot. I am a little bit drunk and holding everybody up and feeling bad about it. I am looking in the rearview mirror with a pinched face, watching driver after driver get frustrated with me and work up the courage to swerve around. I watch three or four cars swerve successfully and then I watch one swerve unsuccessfully, watch one swerve right into the headlights of a car coming the other way. There’s a loud crash followed by a loud screech followed by a chorus of softer metallic clanging and the collided cars are spinning and my eyes are widening and then the realization that it is all my fault floods over me.

I wake up at eleven and feed the cats and swallow my pills and bathe and massage my face with the stainless steel gua sha for a long time in the drained basin. I press concealer into my cheeks and dress myself in a black long sleeve top and a long black skirt and Miista boots and get into my car and drive down Highland to Sunset to La Brea to the 10-West. I make it to Santa Monica in record time. I pick up a four shot hot americano from the Starbucks on Wilshire and because I have the time, I go to the dispensary I like, the one with that big picture of Marilyn Monroe up on the wall, and purchase half an ounce of marijuana from a girl with turquoise hair and about fifteen facial piercings. She tells me that she likes my outfit, that I look elegant, and I say thank God, I felt like shit in the mirror this morning.

I am sitting at my desk in Santa Monica and I feel paranoid and so I get up and start looking for Max and when I finally find him and ask him what’s going on he tells me that he can’t do this right now. I think I might be in trouble.

So like, I’m in trouble.

It’s five o’clock and hot out and I am spending my lunch break sitting atop a little wooden stool at the Santa Monica Erewhon tonic bar in my Manolos and paranoid mood.

I’m with Tom at a little table on the patio of the Tocaya on Wilshire Boulevard. I tell Tom that I’m not hungry and he orders me a Baja taco anyway. He wants to know what’s wrong with me and I am having a hard time articulating. He is looking at his phone and drinking cucumber water as I pick my cuticles and stare at my obscured reflection in the window. The Strokes are singing “The Adults Are Talking” over the speaker system. I feel nauseous and stare at myself some more and listen to the lyrics. Same shit, a different life. I’ll get it right sometime. Oh, maybe not tonight. Oh, maybe not tonight. Oh, maybe not tonight. Oh, maybe not tonight. Oh, maybe not tonight.

He puts his arms around me because he can tell that I am losing it, and when he pulls away he says you are very fragile. Emotionally? I ask. And he says no, like, your body. And I say emotionally too, though, no? And he says no.

I am sitting at the kitchen nook in the dark across from Max and it’s late, almost midnight. The little lamp is on and I am eating the Baja taco Tom bought for me at Tocaya and Max and I are discussing the trouble I am in and pulling tarot cards and smoking weed. He follows me into my bedroom while I look for an ashtray and considers the space for a moment and then says, it’s like you sleep in an asylum or something. We bring the ashtray into the kitchen and he pulls The Wheel card and I pull The Lovers and we keep unravelling the little white foldable instruction guide to find out what the cards mean. I ask him if he thinks I should quit my job and he doesn’t say anything for a long time and then he tells me that those are the kinds of decisions I need to make on my own. He says I don’t want to convince you of anything and I ask why not and he shrugs. I am sighing a lot and keep saying things like, my life is a fucking nightmare. I say I feel like Dan Humphrey or like, Jenny Schecter in season four of The L Word. But Max doesn’t know about Dan Humphrey or Jenny Schecter and therefore doesn’t understand what I mean.

Monday

Joe and I are sitting in my parked car, passing a joint and talking and for some reason I am telling him everything. Telling him all about how much trouble I am in. He listens and then he diagnoses me with depression and prescribes me physical exercise for healing. I used to be just like you, he says. And then I started hitting cardio four times a week. Joe does not understand me. I knew this already. He wants to take me for a run on the beach sometime. I tell him that I have a bad knee, that I got my patella shattered by a seventeen-hand horse named Badger when I was a high school sophomore and never got the surgery I was supposed to get and therefore still occasionally feel pain, especially while running, and all he says is damn, so maybe we could just walk then. My mother calls and I don’t pick up because Joe is still talking. She texts you don’t have to call back I’m just thinking about you, ready to go to bed, love you and the banal tenderness of those words strung together makes me want to cry.

Sitting in my car on some dark residential street off of Pico, typing into my laptop with my knees pulled up in the driver’s seat. Shitty west side apartment complexes to my left and right. My shoes are lying discarded by the pedals and there is an empty can of limoncello la croix filled with bile sitting in the cup holder. An hour ago I said goodbye to Joe and started driving down Lincoln towards the entrance to the 10-East when something flipped in my stomach. I started shaking all over and saliva collected in my mouth and everything in my abdomen went sour and cold and I knew I was going to be sick. So instead of changing lanes and speeding down the onramp I kept driving. There is this strip mall on the corner of Pico and Lincoln and when I saw it I felt so desperate. I pulled in and parked in an open spot in front of Donut King and took the empty can out of the cupholder and spit bile into the little aperture until I felt better. The car was running and “Swollen” by Bent was playing over the sounds of my retching. When it was over I wiped my face with a pair of black tights lying in the backseat and felt grateful that I’d made it through the day without eating and therefore avoided having to regurgitate anything thicker than bile. I stared into the empty Donut King and watched an old Asian man in a filthy looking apron move a filthy looking mop around the filthy looking tile floor underneath the fluorescent lights for a very long time until suddenly and all-encompassing-ly the urge to leave the strip mall parking lot arrived. So I pulled out and drove south down Pico until I found somewhere dark and semi legal to park where I could be all alone. I cracked the windows and lit a joint and pulled my laptop out of my bag and began waiting to feel good enough (psychologically, physically) to drive to Hollywood. I am still waiting to feel good enough, I guess. Still shaking all over. Still cold. Still in trouble. A little stoned.

I never answered Tom’s text but I called him up a few hours ago, a little after nine, still feeling nauseous in my car on that ugly street off of Pico, and he told me to come over. He needed to drop something off to some guy in Encino and wanted me to come with him. So I went with him. I sat in his passenger seat while he sped fast up the 405 and back down again. We smoked a joint in the car and while we were passing that part of the freeway where all of the sudden you can see the whole valley and all of the lights start sparkling, I asked him to play “Cherry Blossom Girl” by Air and he turned the volume dial up and let it loop twice. Now I am in his room, drinking bottled margarita out of a whiskey glass and watching him move things around on his desk. Feel sick. Bottled margarita out of a whiskey glass on an empty, sensitive stomach. It doesn’t get much stupider than that. I spent about three minutes alone in his bathroom, sitting on the cold tile by the toilet in the red light trying not to vomit, and now I am still feeling faint on the couch. Over myself, so completely over myself.

Tuesday

It’s four o’clock in the morning and I’m lying in Tom’s bed. The dog is asleep on the floor and the blackout curtains are drawn closed and I am still a little bit dizzy and I am going to be so cold, sleeping in the little dress I wore to work in a bed that is not my own. I would like to be in my big white fluffy bed but my big white fluffy bed is twenty two miles and three freeways away and it’s the witching hour and I just can’t picture getting there tonight. And even if I could, I don’t want to be alone. Alone with my trouble. Would rather be here with Tom who, a few hours ago, grew a little bit agitated and very bored as I began to explain my trouble.

Tom’s alarm goes off at eight. He gets out of bed and closes himself into the bathroom and turns the shower on and starts playing a trap song. I wait until I hear the water stop before I open my eyes and get up. Hot little rays of sunshine flood the dark room through the cracked blinds and I look at myself in his mirrored closet doors. I get up close to my reflection and stare at my face and feel nothing. I look at my body, turn to the side, assess the flatness of my figure’s profile and the visibility of my sternum and feel nothing. I am still in yesterday’s dress and my tights are lying in a knot by the dog’s bed. Tom emerges from the bathroom all wet and I pull my boots on and put a joint in my mouth and tell him goodbye. I walk outside and find my car and light my joint and smoke it all the way back to Hollywood. The 405-North is so clogged and I am looping a Playboi Carti song with the volume turned up real loud to numb my lonely troubled feelings.

I drive down Melrose to Larchmont and park my car at a meter in front of Clark Street Bakery. It’s beautiful outside and I am all out of the perfume oil I like. The sidewalks are full of chic middle aged women holding small dogs and big shopping bags. I cross the pavement and walk into Malin+Goetz, which is empty but for the solo sales associate, a really young and blonde and tan girl wearing Havaianas and white jeans. When I walk in she looks up from her iPhone and smiles and says hey, can I help you find anything but my fingers are already reaching for three little roller bottles of Cannabis. I set them on the counter in front of her and she says perfect: one for your bathroom, one for your purse, one for your car and I say exactly and we both laugh despite nothing being funny. I tap my card on the till and when she asks me if I’d like a bag, I decline. My phone starts ringing and it’s Tom. I pick up and he tells me that his meeting is over and asks me where I am. I tell him that I am buying perfume in Larchmont and he says Larchmont? And I say yes, Larchmont and he says what is Larchmont. It’s eleven something o’clock and he wants to know if I’d like to meet him at a car service center on Wilshire Boulevard at noon to keep him company while the mechanics look at his car. I am standing in the sunshine with the phone pressed up to my ear, watching an old woman tug a hungry white standard poodle past the sidewalk tables of Le Pain Quotidien and thinking why not.

I’m sitting in a pizza shop on Gayley Avenue with Tom and he is talking numbers again. He says I know I talk numbers a lot, I hope it doesn’t bore you and I shake my head sideways to indicate that it doesn’t bore me. And it really doesn’t bore me. Or at least it doesn’t bore me any more than everything else does. I felt bored this morning in the bath, reading something in the LA Times about that man who got shot in the leg yesterday while walking around West Hollywood with his wife and baby. An Empire of The Sun song is playing over the pizza shop sound system. Our little two top is sticky and the place is warm and empty. I am sipping Diet Coke and Tom is sipping Sprite and we are waiting for the fat Mexican guy behind the counter to bring over two calzones.

I’m with Ben and Tom in Tom’s apartment. Ben has his pink guitar hooked up to a tiny maroon amp and he’s strumming and Tom is sitting at the piano with his hands on the keys and I am curled up on the couch in a little white dress and ballet flats, staring sometimes at my phone and sometimes at the dog and sometimes at Ben’s pink guitar and sometimes out the window and into the window of the apartment next door. Ben is wearing a grey cashmere sweater over a white tee shirt and he keeps taking his fingers off of the guitar strings to turn towards me and inquire after my personal history. He wants to know where I grew up and when I tell him Las Vegas he tells me he didn’t know that people grew up in Las Vegas. He wants to know if I went to college and when I tell him that I did, he wants to know what I studied. I say art history and he makes the joke that everybody makes when I say art history, the joke about how I must not care about money. He wants to get into a philosophical discussion about the definition of art, but there is a bit of a language barrier and Tom seems irritated by Ben’s lack of focus on the guitar.

Wednesday

It is a quarter to four in the morning and I am in the backseat of a black Tesla and a black woman named Osirisius is driving me home to Hollywood. She is wearing a pink wig and a gospel song is spilling out of her speakers. The choir is chanting we shall prosper, we shall prosper and it feels like they are chanting just for me. The streets are empty and Osirisius is driving slow. My eyes are all red and I feel like I might cry. Debased. Later I will seek forgiveness for what happened tonight. But for now I cross my knees and look out at La Brea in the dark through the tinted windows and let we shall prosper wash over me.

I wake up naked on the couch by the open window feeling quite disturbed and begin to cry within a few seconds of consciousness. I am in too much trouble to go to work, I just can’t go to work, and so I call Amy and tell her lies. I tell her that I can’t make it in today because I am suffering from a UTI. I say apologies if this is TMI and tell her that I am going to see a doctor for antibiotics later in the afternoon. She is so understanding on the phone, so blind to my guile, it makes the guilty little pit in my stomach spin. Whatever. I want this.

To Do:

- Move my illegally parked car

- Coffee

- Retreat

- Shampoo my hair

- Get stoned

- File an extension for my taxes because I am useless

- Sit on the couch in my underwear and stare at my stupid fucking blog that is ruining my stupid fucking life

- Think about what I’ve done

- Think up a good way out of trouble

I drive up Barham Boulevard to Lake Hollywood and park my car on that steep incline across from the grass. I am wearing green and white dolphin shorts and mini Uggs and feeling dried the fuck out. Feeling fragile. My solar plexus is abuzz with trouble and espresso and nicotine. Earlier I was sitting in the living room with my bad mood, staring up at the ceiling fan when it occurred to me that it might be nice to get out of the house and lie in the grass for an hour or two. So I took a limoncello la croix from the fridge and picked Deception by Philip Roth up off of the table and got into the car. But now that I am here and the grass I pictured lying in is within reach, there’s nothing I’d rather do less than get out and reach it.

It’s five p.m. and I’m in bed and bored and sober and in trouble and lonely so I pick up the phone and call Cal but there’s no answer. Want valium.

I open The Pattern app for the first time in months because it’s getting late and I am getting desperate, seeking divine meaning and possibly intervention, and The Pattern app tells me: you may have made the honest mistake of assuming you should always be the center of attention.

Cal calls me at ten and tells me that his shoot just wrapped and that last night, when I didn’t pick up the phone, he felt angry with me and anxious and so he drove past my apartment in the dark to see if my car was parked out front. He tells me that he drove up and down my block and all of the other blocks within a reasonable radius, and when he couldn’t find my car he sped through every red light back to Beachwood. But he’s feeling calmer now and he wants to know if I want him to come over with dinner and I do, kind of, so he does.

Thursday

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