The musician asks me why I don’t have an accent and I tell him it’s because the TV raised me. He thinks I’m being funny and asks me if I’d take pictures of him playing guitar. I tell him to ask the bartender and he makes one of those cartoonishly surprised faces in response. “Well, there’s no one else here to take a photo, and this show,” he gestures at the stage, “is kind of important.”

The bar is empty except for me and a few other journalists. We’re all wearing our press badges and using the vouchers the festival coordinators gave us at the office for free drinks, but they only cover (1) glass of wine or (1) well drink or (1) IPA, so I have to pay for my Guinness myself, which I don’t mind because everything in Canada is cheap anyway. I look at him and shrug, and he sulks to the stage where he plays Sublime and Johnny Cash covers for the next 20-ish minutes while I finish my beer and look over my notes.

Weeks after being scouted and only a week after my sixteenth birthday, my mom bought me an expensive slouchy cardigan and new jeans and my dad called a private car for us to go to a meeting with another modeling agency in Portland. This was before Uber and around the time my mom developed a fear of going anywhere herself. My dad had given me some advice, which was that you must treat every job as if it’s the most important job of your life. An ex-boyfriend told me that’s why he loved Japan so much—everyone took pride in their work. “This is why you have to keep posting, no matter what,” he said. “If people don’t see you doing anything, they’re going to think you’re doing nothing.”

The rain starts up again as I walk back to the hotel. I didn’t have an umbrella or a jacket. I didn’t think to bring either. When I went to Miami in the spring to cover a red carpet for three days I checked a bag and brought every single beauty and skincare product I had with me, a few extra pairs of underwear and a hoodie for the plane, but now I’m in Montreal for a week for a film festival and all I brought was whatever I could fit between my carry on and leather tote. I’ve learned I can live on and with very little, and sometimes I think I’m a better person because of it. Years ago, in Costa Rica–this was before anyone called me a writer, when I was still working at Aritzia–I had to stay one night in a hotel in San Jose where there was a used bar of soap in the shower and a sticky layer of dust on the bathroom mirror. The walls were the color of an overripe peach and the closet didn’t close all the way. I showered in my flip flops. I thought about bed bugs but not as much as I think I should have. I mostly thought about my mom. I used my personal hotspot to watch a documentary about NXIVM on my laptop before falling asleep on top of the yellow-white sheets in the clothes I’d wear to the airport four hours later.

This hotel is much better than that one, but not nearly as nice as the one in Miami, where I became friends with the bartenders and an elderly German couple who had recently moved to Spain. The shower is clean and there’s a nice, big TV. I turn it on and mimic the French-speaking news anchors as I undress. I have a review to write and interview footage to edit but I want to take nudes instead. There’s no one I can send them to though, except for maybe my friends, but nobody’s heard from me in 48 hours and I don’t want anyone to think this is a cry for help. I’m exactly where I need to be, which is nowhere at all, but sometimes I catch myself thinking of hosting a dinner party in a house upstate.

I thought I left Central Park early enough to make it back to the apartment before the storm, but when the doors open at the 36th Avenue stop, people are running across the platform with their tote bags and beach towels over their heads. I watch them through the space in between the torsos of the short couple standing in front of me. The woman is wearing a black windbreaker with the hood pulled over her head. The man is in board shorts, sandals, and a blue t-shirt. He’s trying to stand without holding onto anything but it’s impossible with how many people are in this car.

The train lurches to 30th Avenue and I shove my phone into the bottom of my nylon tote. The walk from here to the apartment is roughly 20 minutes. People take shelter inside the fast casual doner kebab restaurant with a knockoff Pornhub logo or underneath the produce market’s trembling green and yellow awning. I walk past the Greek restaurant that used to be a barbecue spot before turning into a ghost kitchen during lockdown. Two girls huddle under an umbrella outside the Key Foods. The wind picks up again and flips their umbrella inside out, and they scream in unison and rush to cross the street. Outside the liquor store, a man smiles as a customer walks inside, and I hear him say something about the rain being nice before letting out a laugh. I really haven’t eaten anything today, even at the picnic, but I really haven’t eaten anything in a week, and I don’t feel particularly hungry, but there’s a dull, throbbing halo of pain radiating inside of my skull, right above my brain, and I figure I should do something about it. I walk to the pizzeria.

Dom is the owner and he’s seen me enough to recognize me, but sometimes I’m not sure. Once I stopped by for a chicken roll and he asked me where I was from, and I said I’m “from here,” and he asked where exactly, and I told him I was born here, and that was the end of that conversation. I order two regular slices and tell him I’ll just eat them standing up, and when I pull out my wallet, he shakes his head and tells me to go sit in the dining room, which isn’t a dining room, but a hall with a few tables and chairs and a bar that had turned into a storage area of sorts. I ask him if he’s sure and he nods, then asks me where I’m from, and I tell him I’m from here, but I moved to Bethpage when I was in elementary school, and he asks me if I saw the terrible thing that happened last year in Bethpage, and I say no, I don’t really keep up with the news coming out from over there, and he tells me to wait. He comes back from the kitchen with his phone and hands it over to me: MAN INDICTED FOR MURDER OF PARENTS INSIDE FAMILY-OWNED DELI IN BETHPAGE, LONG ISLAND.

“Anyway,” Dom says as I hand the phone back to him. “There’s a lot of Italians in Bethpage. Nice area.”

I finish my pizza in between half listening to the only other customers, a large Italian family urging each other to finish the last bit of tartufo (the bald man with tiny glasses says he can’t eat it because his teeth are sensitive and the only woman at the table tells him to stop making such a big deal—“You’re not biting it, come on.”—and he goes, “Okayokayokayokay, I’ll take a bite, I’m taking a bite, see?”). I walk back to the counter to pay and Dom apologizes and asks me if I’d like a t-shirt. I realize my white tank has been soaked through, and even though I’m wearing a bikini underneath it and I’m completely flat chested, he seems embarrassed. He disappears into the kitchen again and reappears with a t-shirt with the pizzeria’s logo on the front and the phrase KEEPING IT REAL SINCE 1958 printed on the back. I thank him and head back into the rain.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with the opening of “The Princess and the Pea” in my book of fairy tales. The family has given up on their search for a real princess. One stormy night, they find a girl at the castle door, rain streaming down her hair, soaking through her dress, running off the back of her shoes. She insists she’s a real princess, and the king, taking pity on her, asks her to come in. Between that and the image of Rose wading through the rising water inside the Titanic’s corridors, I always fantasized about being a beautiful woman soaked in water.

I take off my clothes in the bathroom and get into the shower. I didn’t grow up to be a beautiful woman. I didn’t grow up to be anything special at all. Neither of these things bother me as much as they used to, but when I tell people this, they get visibly upset, and I realize maybe I should tell people less or not say anything at all and continue going on through life without a real shape or name or backstory.

I take NyQuil and fall into a dreamless sleep, but that’s not true. The only people who don’t dream are dead. I read that when I was a kid, too.

A lot of people think that if you eat enough sardines, you’ll stay young forever, and your skin will glow and your nails will grow and your hair will reach your waist, but that’s not true. If it was, then the guy sitting next to me and my friend and the bar wouldn’t have been so surprised when we revealed we’re in our thirties. I haven’t had sardines until recently, and I’m sure my friend hasn’t had them ever. If she did, it was probably when she was little, the same way I used to eat cherry tomatoes from the carton. You like things and then you don’t. Sometimes there’s a reason. Usually there isn’t. You can apply this to most things. I argue in therapy that sometimes people are just who they are, and there’s no one thing or person you can point to and say, yes, this is the source of my pain, this is the source of my desire. My therapist is a good at her job, so she disagrees with me. I let her.

If you ask me what my earliest memory was, I would tell you I’m not sure. I see a flash of images: a cluttered room somewhere in the back of the church, a box with mirrors and trinkets on my lap, peach flavored yogurt and cheese sandwiches. Strawberries growing by the swings, my friend’s mom wrapping her hair in a faded pink towel, a man with a Snow White tattoo on his arm, Fun Dip by the public pool. A collection of books called Help Me Be Good, Silly Putty stained with newspaper ink, the sensation of splinters on the back of my legs. Did my friend really pick up a dead bird, or was that something else with eyes? Our classroom bunny, little red envelopes for Chinese New Year and latkes during Hanukkah, standing on my toes to try to look over the counter at the deli. One day, I thought, I’ll be tall and my hands will be bigger than mine are now, and it won’t feel like anything happened.

I noticed my hands at the bar. I started taking multivitamins again after my doctor asked me if I was taking vitamin D. This is the second year in a row she has asked, and the second year in a row I told her, no. Again, there is no reason for this. She reminded me that osteoporosis is a thing and my future self will thank me for it. I bought a small tub of gummy vitamins a week and a half later and imagined what I’d look like when I’m forty, fifty, sixty years old. Eventually I’ll have to stop using my student ID to buy discounted museum tickets.

Looking at my hands, I realized that day might be coming sooner than I thought. I rifled through my bag for my hand cream. It smells like plastic and baby wipes and something else. I can’t tell if I like it or if I’m repulsed by it. What I do know is that we need to leave the bar because the guy seated next to us is talking, talking, talking and I’m not sure if he knows how much he’s been talking–not to us, but at us–about his past relationship and all the places he has to go to tonight, and maybe, after we get the check, we can come with him to some party, but first he’s got to pick up his friend, who may or may not have a car. He also has a mountain of cocaine in his pocket. “Fergalicious” blared through the speakers. The bartender told me he took my glass of wine off the check, and I’m certain it had less to do with the fact that I was wearing a sheer black nightie as a top and more to do with the fact that the guy at the bar is his friend. In fact, everyone in the restaurant is his friend. See the painting in the back? he asked. I did that. I didn’t see the painting.

We walked to the next bar. I stayed out too late, spent too much. I got a cab and the driver asked me what I was doing out at 3AM on Valentine’s Day. He told me a story about how he picked up one girl outside The Box and how she cried the entire ride back to her apartment because the boy she liked wasn’t texting her back. He told me about his kids. He told me he can read palms. I told him I never cry unless I’m angry and my palms are impossible to read. He told me that was untrue, unless I somehow managed to burn or file off my palms.

Outside my apartment, I reached my hand through the partition for him to read, but he couldn’t turn comfortably to give me a reading. He asked if I’d be okay sitting in the front. Every terrible story starts like this, but I got out of the cab and slid into the front seat anyway.

Under the iPhone flashlight, my hand looked like a map to a place I’d never been to before. He inspected it for a moment. You have a brother and he loves you. You have a sister. You fight with her. Lots of money is coming. You are easy to love, so you hurt many people. You’re the luckiest girl in the world, he said.

For the first time in weeks, I slept through the night. In the morning I scrambled two eggs with toast and listened to the birds outside my window. I haven’t heard them in ages, or maybe they’ve never been this loud.

The Crumbl location in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, is located in a shopping center just beyond the Collectors Bazaar antique store, sandwiched between a brand new Dollar Tree and a Habitat for Humanity ReStore. There’s a few other stores in this shopping center, too—a Grocery Outlet, a Ross, an Aspen Dental. Inside, the air was heavy with sugar and the artificial caramelly nuttiness of the orange Sol De Janerio body spray, and a crowd of girls and overstimulated parents—mostly fathers—had clustered into something that looked less like a line and more like an amoeba. My sisters and I stood behind a cluster of girls on their tiptoes, trying to look at the glowing digital menu over the shoulders of taller patrons. One man—his baseball cap just barely concealing the sweat on his brow—broke tragic news to someone over the phone: this location was sold out of the Khloé’s Cookies & Cream Skillet Cookie. After a beat, he sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and said he could try the other location, roughly 27 miles away.

This was the last day the Kardashian Jenner Family menu would be available at Crumbl, the popular vaguely Mormon dessert chain that’s less of a bakery and more a hyper-optimized dessert experience aimed at Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Each week, about 6 or so new cookie flavors and/or desserts are revealed on social media, each frosted, filled, and topped within an inch of its life. The cookies are comically large and neatly packaged in the brand’s signature pastel pink boxes, designed to be photographed, tagged, and posted before anything inside is eaten (for this collaboration, Crumbl replaced their pink boxes with signed beige boxes, but our location seemed to be out). It’s the kind of place that feels designed specifically for the algorithm, from its open-concept kitchen designed to “[provide] customers a first-hand experience watching as their cookies are mixed, balled, and baked” to the self-checkout kiosks set to maximum brightness—a brand that markets indulgence, shares its flavor drops like sneaker releases, and thrives on the illusion of scarcity.

It’s not that I think I’m better than everyone inside Crumbl that day because I’m not a fan of the Kardashian-Jenner family, or that if you’re a fan, you’re some kind of vapid person or bad feminist. Even Courtney Love said she was “ensorcelled” by them, calling them a “Venusian fertility cult in the Valley.” And I get it, it’s hard not to be enchanted by the family—they’re all beautiful, each one smoother and more symmetrical than the last. They’re fabulously wealthy and perennially trending, one of them is dating Timothée Chalamet, another may or may not still be with Bad Bunny, and all of them are in a near constant state of reinvention and/or rebrand. But what’s more fascinating than any of their relationships or Met Gala appearances is how, exactly, we got here.

The Kardashian-Jenner family weren’t the first wealthy family on TV, but they were the first to perfect the art of turning fame itself into a multi-generational business model. They didn’t just capitalize on our attention—they industrialized it. Over time, they have become more than just a reality TV spectacle, but tastemakers, style arbiters, and, at least in Kim’s case, political figures. What began as curiosity has morphed into a kind of emotional investment, a parasocial intimacy that makes us feel as though we know the family as well as we know our own, and we’re willing to support whatever they choose to sell or endorse, from liquid lipsticks to mobile games. Which is how we end up in Quakertown, watching a grown man decide whether it’s smarter to stay in line or to get back into his car to continue the hunt for Khloé’s Cookies & Cream Skillet Cookie.

Let me be clear: it’s not that I hate the Kardashians. That kind of reaction feels as tired, and frankly, as unproductive as saying the family has no talent. Plenty of people are untalented and famous, and plenty of talented people are not famous, and nobody really cares. But I digress. I’m critical of them and of the culture that props them up uncritically, which is a symptom of something much bigger–the widespread absence of media literacy.

I admit that I was a fan of the family in college, specifically Kim. We were in the middle of the rise of fourth-wave feminism, and we were collectively rethinking the way we’d maligned women like Britney, Anna Nicole, and Lindsay. I’ve always been obsessed with and fascinated by beautiful women and Kim was an example of what beauty (and money, but mostly beauty) could give you access to, and how far you could go if you knew how to use it. I even considered purchasing a copy of her 2015 book, Selfish, which I argued was a genius reclamation of self by a woman whose face and body has been picked apart and idolized in equal measure. I admired how she took her friend Paris Hilton’s blueprint and blew it up, harnessing the power of social media and relentless self-promotion (nothing was below them in the 2010’s, including promoting Charmin toilet paper at a public restroom ribbon cutting event) to build something that would eventually be bigger than reality television and far more permanent, turning herself and her family into an instantly recognizable brand.

All of that is still true, but as I got older and my worldview got more complicated, so did my feelings towards Kim and her family. I realized that supporting women simply because they’re women was an overly simplistic feminist stance, one that ignored the nuances of power, privilege, and influence. Now, I feel aggressively neutral about them. It’s just that nothing they do surprises me anymore, not the Tesla robot, the Catholic cosplay, or North West’s cameo in an FKA Twigs song, not the nipple bra, the unretouched bikini photo “leaks”, or the private Wicked screening with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. Even Poosh, arguably one of the sisters’ crunchier and more harmless ventures, is ultimately kind of boring. Of course Kourntey, the Kardashian with the least amount of personality and the most resistance to work, would be the one to launch a lifestyle and wellness blog à la Goop. But why should I go there when I could get all my unhinged lifestyle advice and buy snake oil from the equally dead-eyed but far more endearing Gwenyth Paltrow, whose presence I find comforting in a sort of alien kind of way?

@pooshNo pictures, please 💅 #poosh #pooshtok #mondays #9to5 #corporate #boss #kardashians #worktok

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By the time we got to the self-checkout kiosk, it was confirmed that yes, Khloé’s Cookies & Cream Skillet Cookie was sold out for the day, however the mini version was still available. We decided getting a 6-pack of minis (two Double Chocolate Chip Cookies, two of Kim’s Snickerdoodle Crumb Cake Cookies, one of Khloé’s Cookies and Cream Skillet Cookies, and one of Kendall’s Cookie Dough Cupcake Cookies) would be the best way to experience as many flavors as we could without risking a root canal, along with two full size options (Kris’s Classic Yellow Layer Cake and Kylie’s Pink Confetti Sugar Cookie). Kourtney’s Flourless Chocolate Cake is noticeably absent from our selection, and this is for two reasons: 1.) we were well aware of all the TikToks claiming the flourless and sugarless cake tasted like dirt and 2.) we already had one cake, and that was enough.

At this point, the line to the kiosks was completely indistinguishable from the line of customers waiting for their orders. A small group of college-aged girls stood with their arms close to their sides as several younger girls in running shorts and sneakers pushed their way through the door, letting in a refreshing blast of cold air. Just behind the gleaming white counter, employees in matching black t-shirts and baseball caps kept their heads down as they packaged each order with a stunning lack of urgency. This was going to take a while. My youngest sister and I decided to wait in the car.

Eventually my other sister returned with three neatly stacked pink boxes. Before we could even open them, she let us know that after the employee handed her part of our order, she asked if my sister “had any questions” (“I was just standing there,” said my sister. “I was like, ‘Nah, I’m just waiting for my cookies.’”)

I was only really interested in the Double Chocolate Chip Cookie–the safest, most boring option–but I believe that the only way to accurately assess whether or not something is actually good is to see if they can do the simplest item right. The Double Chocolate Chip Cookie, in its two-bite maximum mini format, was decent but ultimately forgettable. Even now, trying to recall the flavor of the cookie, all that comes to mind is the texture–soft and gooey but not quite underbaked, wilting in the box despite it being 40 degrees outside.

My sisters did the real taste test, splitting the cake into sections and offering each other bites of the other cookies. I wondered why Kris’s dessert wasn’t a cookie, but a layer cake. Then it hit me: of course it was a layer cake. Its purpose is to let the more extravagant desserts shine—and none were more eye-catching than Kylie’s Pink Confetti Sugar Cookie, a fist-sized vanilla sugar cookie rolled in rainbow sprinkles and topped with a thick, near impenetrable layer of pale pink cake batter flavored buttercream. My youngest sister offered me a bite. The texture could only be described as something like refrigerated Play-Doh, the flavor sweet to the point of numbing. It was sad, because beneath that layer of buttercream was a pretty okay sugar cookie.

“I don’t think I like this,” I said, and took a bite of the second Double Chocolate Chip Cookie to cleanse my palate.

@crumblStas and Kylie are the Crumbl IT girls, you heard it here first. 🍪 #Crumbl @Kylie Jenner

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A car pulled into the parking space next to us. Two young girls–probably around my youngest sister’s age–climbed out. The driver, a girl with long, platinum blonde hair and gray sweatpants, swung her silver glitter lanyard in one hand as she and her friend ran to the Crumbl entrance. Outside, three girls posed for a photo, holding their cookies close to their open mouths. I watched them and wondered what they thought of the Kardashian-Jenners—if they thought of them at all. Were they here because they loved the sisters, or were they here because Crumbl is just where you go after practice? To this younger crowd–most of them had to have been born between 2005-2010–are the Kardashian-Jenners just a bunch of hot rich moms and a supermodel? Or has their influence become so baked into our culture that they don’t even think of them at all; they’ve just always sort of been there (I remember, as a kid, waiting in the food court of the Roosevelt Field Mall and seeing a neon light in the shape of Marilyn Monroe, animated in such a way that the outline meant to be her skirt would blow up over her knees and fall back down again, and I somehow knew that it was her despite never seeing any of her movies)?

It doesn’t seem to matter that the cookies are just average, just like it doesn’t matter if the Kardashian-Jenners are likable, or authentic, or even particularly interesting anymore. What matters is that they–both the family and Crumbl cookies–remain legible to the algorithm that keeps them relevant, even if the end product is just okay. And now that everyone has indulged in their cookies, the Kardashians have introduced a new product that will help you feel less guilty in snacking going forward. Would anyone care for seed oil-free protein popcorn?

Thinking is all I can do when I’m forced to stay in bed, in the dark, pressing a washcloth full of steadily melting ice against my forehead and left eye. Today, I worked from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, which would have been fine and actually kind of pleasant if my store manager didn’t make a surprise appearance while I was preparing shipments of cashmere and sustainable denim. Here is what you need to know: he is a man of indeterminate age from Chicago who sometimes mentions the magic of New York moments, which seem to consist of expensive rooftop experiences and Broadway musicals. He organized a potluck after Black Friday but was the only one to bring in anything (two pale trays of mac and cheese). This morning I caught him having a full conversation with ChatGPT. Just back and forth. And I thought, well. This explains a lot.

It sounds like I’m unfairly dunking on him, and perhaps on some level I am. But if a man who comes to work two hours before he is scheduled with a vague excuse concerning admin just to putter around the boutique with no real strategy or purpose other than to stress me into a small migraine, then perhaps he deserves it.

Actually, let me clarify. I’ve been getting migraines at least once a month since I was 19. Stress and/or lack of sleep can bring one on, but not always. Usually I get a Big One the week before my period, which, coincidentally, is the same week I feel like I should jump off a cliff. But those feelings are less intense now, partially because since I’ve been gone, I’ve been on a low dose SSRI, partially because I feel like things are actually moving forward since returning from Paris.

I wrote two other posts before this one, one about Miss Hawk Tuah (not Haliey Welch herself, who I personally find to be quite charismatic and funny, but to the low comprehension, limited information social media users who turned her and her catchphrase [?] into a symbol) and the other revisiting “I’m Just a Girl” and trad wife content after the election, but neither of them felt right. They felt like reactions, but like most reactions, they really weren’t saying anything. And I’m sure someone reading this will say, you’re not saying anything now, and yeah, I don’t think I am, but when it comes to hot takes and think pieces and essays, I feel like we are seeing less arguments in support of a thesis and more people who just enjoy talking about controversy or pointing out the obvious for what feels like forever. And a part of me felt that the other two posts I had been working on were contributing to the problem.

I think a lot about how we have been conditioned to post continuously, as if everything needs some kind of response. I feel the pressure to figure out an angle or hot take, especially now that I am also freelancing, and everything has the potential to be a pitch, but does everything have to be? But I also need money, so everything kind of has to be examined and turned over and over until I can figure out a story. Part of it feels good, because I like interacting with things and figuring out how and why A is connected to B, but at the same time, I feel that some things are better left alone. Like, should I actually have something to say about Machine Gun Kelly's response to Megan Fox's pregnancy? If Taylor Swift skips a Chiefs game, is that any of my business? No. And yet, I will read an entire psychological analysis of every single woman on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives based solely on their outfits, so you see the problem.

Although most of the stories I pitch have something to do with the Internet or pop culture in some capacity, I have been making an effort to limit my screen time as much as possible so I don’t succumb to some of the thinking I’ve been seeing online. When someone tried to say everyone has been super skinny except Addison Rae but she looks amazing I knew I had to log off before I accidentally revert to Tumblr 2011 levels of thinking. Plus, there are benefits to not being constantly connected, or rather, to being really fucking bored. And nothing is more boring than being stuck in bed, unable to scroll or watch videos or listen to music because the pain in your head is so great, it feels like your eyeball can pop out of its socket at any moment.

Without sounding like a masochist, this is one of two benefits of having migraines. The other is that, much like food poisoning, when it’s over, you feel cleansed (I won’t explain why or how, I just personally feel like my demons have left me once my head no longer feels like it’s stuck in a vice). I like forcing myself to be bored, to be firmly confined to my bed, to be in a state that forces me to do nothing but think.

There’s a strange intimacy in being alone with your thoughts. It’s as if my brain, finally free from the endless task of filtering through the chatter, starts to process everything that’s been sitting in the background, the half-formed ideas I have typed in my notes app that I promised myself I’d return to after work, the lingering questions, memories I didn’t realize were still living in the back of my eyes. And this is typically when the urge to write strikes. Maybe it’s because I enjoy defying the conditions of my body and the rules of productivity. Maybe it’s because being bored actually gives me space to discover, whereas being constantly entertained (or preoccupied, because most of the time I’m not getting any real pleasure from scrolling) doesn’t allow for me to think of new possibilities or come to conclusions or just have any kind of realization, period.

I’m not suggesting that social media is ruining my life or keeping me from writing. What I’m saying is that boredom is a generative tool, allowing us to wander freely through information and new possibilities. Kierkegaard called boredom “the root of all evil” but also the impetus for creation and engagement with the world. Agatha Christie claimed she plotted her novels while washing dishes and wrote while she was in the bathtub. I am in bed drafting a Substack post.

So perhaps I should thank my manager who has conversations with AI chatbots and organizes 3 hour meetings on effective communication and claims he doesn’t know how to do basic tasks for this moment of pain and productivity. If he hadn’t come in unannounced, you would have been waiting until the end of the month to hear from me. And in a rare deviation from my usual conclusions, I’m inviting you guys to send me topics you’d like to see me cover or hot takes you want me to elaborate on (or disagree with!). You can use the comments below or send me a message.

I’ll be here. In bed.

I am watching season one of Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. Whenever I’m unemployed it becomes clear that the worst thing in the world for me is to be left alone with my thoughts. The silence amplifies everything that’s been on mind–rejections piling in my inbox. Editors encouraging me to send more ideas. A job interview to add to my calendar. I try to distract myself. Bought a new book. Painted my toenails candy apple red. The usual. But it’s been too long since I’ve gotten a pedicure. I stopped writing. That’s unusual.

So maybe I’m in a slump. But I don't want to talk about that or my emails or unemployment. I only bring these things up to explain why I have been watching Rock of Love for the past three hours, because despite insisting I don’t believe any pleasure is guilty, I feel I have to offer some kind of justification. I know someone will bring up the show’s obviously problematic handling of race and gender or the state of entertainment post-9/11 or our general fascination with violence, especially the low-culture variety (Wrestlemania, torture porn, influencer boxing matches). It’s easy to make judgments about the intelligence of people who watch this kind of content–I remember people using the phrase lowest common denominator to describe audiences who enjoyed trash TV and movies with gratuitous sex and violence–but I don’t think most people are stupid. I don’t even think the women on the show are stupid. 

Rock of Love has been off the air and out of the public consciousness for so long that I feel required to explain the show’s premise–25 women are invited to a mansion in Southern California to compete for the affection of 44 year old Bret Michaels, former frontman of the band Poison and father of two who is never seen without his bandana, a cowboy hat, or both. In between mingling with Michaels, the women participate in various challenges in order to win dates, which can be anything from shopping for custom bikinis to subjecting the girls to a private screening of a documentary about his life. A contestant is eliminated each week until Michaels must choose one of two remaining women to be his Rock Star Girlfriend. The show aired for three seasons. 

This is a show you can smell from the screen–patent leather and bottom-shelf-liquor, cigarettes and hairspray, chemically sweet body mist and Listerine. It’s knowingly loud and ugly and mean-spirited. The bodyguard, Big John, stocks a bathroom with toilet paper as Michaels talks about how the most beautiful women will be coming to the mansion in a voiceover. There’s a pole and a penile plethysmograph. They call each other sluts, skanks, and whorebags, sometimes all at once. A colorless blonde looks into the camera with unseeing eyes and calls herself a Jessica Simpson knockoff. She is eliminated immediately. One contestant insults the other’s meth-scratched face. Another tattoos Bret’s name to the back of her neck. Michaels acknowledges a contestant fascinated by parallel universes with polite disinterest before commenting on her nice ass. Everybody has fried hair and nobody is having fun.

A lot of people think I’m an intense person and I understand. I never recline my seat in the movie theater. Or on an airplane. I prefer to sleep without pillows. Reader, I have worn leather jackets in 80 degree weather. But I refuse to become insufferable. This is where my interest in low-culture comes in. It’s important to be open to every possibility, to experience everything, to learn how to be an active and engaged viewer no matter what. It can’t be Janus Films and Tove Ditlevsen all the time. I’ve learned just as much about human nature from an episode of a reality house hunting show as I have from reading Proust.

So of course I’m watching a (mostly) forgotten mid-aughts dating show on Hulu. I could be watching something relevant and arguably good like Love Island USA or something romantic like The Bachelor. I watched a few episodes of Love Is Blind but lost interest quickly. The contestants are real estate brokers and account executives and financial advisors with perfectly groomed brows and tasteful filler and white teeth. They are hyper-vigilant and cautious–they know how to position themselves, how to say the right things, how to justify their behavior with the kind of terminology and verbiage you’d see on a pastel infographic. They are definitely, totally, 100% here for the right reasons, and certainly not interested in shilling Fashion Nova and Shein on Instagram or launching a podcast. They are safe and approachable. I am skeptical and easily annoyed.

So what are the girls on Rock of Love trying to win? What would motivate someone to simulate phone sex for a moist has-been rockstar on national television? Not many people are willing to shake the fundamental fear of being ugly and unlikeable or make quick decisions in order to create good entertainment. These girls knew they weren’t going to become serious actresses or models after their time on the show. Social media didn’t exist in the way it does now in 2007, so becoming an influencer was obviously not an option. Sure, there was opportunities to star in potential spinoffs and make some money off of paid club appearances, but those are never guaranteed. These women just wanted to be on TV–but so what? At least they’re being honest about their desires. I don’t think many people can say that about themselves.

When I watch Rock of Love, I can’t help but to think about how much I fear being seen but desire attention nonetheless. I’ve never felt a need to become an influencer or some kind of It girl, I can disappear from social media for weeks or even months and not miss a single thing. I want to *want* to be wanted. I want to put myself out there just because. And yet.

There’s always something—my name, my face, my body, my thoughts. Are they good enough? Engaging enough? Interesting enough? I’m not sure how much of myself I am willing to share, how far I am actually willing to go to have my desires met. Watching these women use their fearlessness and creativity to invent storylines and personas on these kinds of shows is fascinating to me—what would be possible if I just committed to my desires, even the most shallow and fleeting ones?

Maybe I’m thinking about myself too much. Time to watch another episode.

I say this with love and respect for women–I’m going to confiscate your books, just for a second. Not because you shouldn’t be reading (which you absolutely should be doing, by the way) but because I think we need to have a talk about the Internet’s sudden interest in all things literary. For every self-proclaimed BookToker sharing their steamy book recommendations with non-threatening pastel cartoon couples there’s an anonymous philosophy student memeing Joan Didion into Bella Swan levels of bland relatability their followers can project onto. For every Colleen Hoover defender there’s a Sarah Lawrence graduate who insists owning a copy of Infinite Jest is a red flag. For every cozy Kindle girly who needs a stand, remote, Stanley cup, and body pillow to read is a woman who is carrying a used book falling to pieces in her bag. Let women enjoy things! you’re probably thinking. But you know me–I can’t let anyone enjoy anything. It’s time to get critical. 

For those who are unaware, BookTok refers to a niche community of creators on TikTok who create content about their favorite books and authors. The content can range from straightforward recommendations and reviews to bookcase setups and reaction videos. There are book clubs and book hauls, discussions about specific tropes, and far, far too many people filming their reactions to A Little Life Blair Witch style, their cameras capturing every falling tear and slow drip of snot.  

@jessicaisweirdbitch IM TIRED. #alittlelife #book #whywouldyouwritethis

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When I tell people I like to read, I am afraid I will be lumped in with the thought daughters who share mood boards featuring halved figs, Kafka’s diary entries out-of-context, and a selection of books that don’t have much in common beyond coexisting on a shelf in an apartment somewhere in Bushwick. Let me be clear–I want people to read more. I love sharing what I am reading online, even though I know my personal taste might not be for everyone. I have given away precious copies of books to exes and friends, never expecting them to return. Reading helps me write. It also helps me figure out what the fuck am I doing in real life. Everything that confuses me has already been experienced by someone else. There’s comfort in that. 

I first discovered BookTok in 2021. There was something legitimately exciting about the existence of a digital community of (mostly) women sharing and discussing their favorite books and authors, especially with anti-intellectualism on the rise. But BookTok, much like other niche communities on TikTok, rewards creators who can perform their love for reading in a way that satisfies the algorithm. Sweetbitter author Stephanie Danler wrote about her inability to connect with BookTok for Bustle, noting that it is impossible to discover different fiction and that in order to find more literary content, she would have to search Lit Girl Aesthetic, where she would find a surprising amount of Dostoyevsky in the hands of startlingly beautiful women with cutting captions about angst and reading-in-the-corner.

Danler realized her inability to connect with BookTok had nothing to do with her or the writing advice she was sharing online, but everything to do with how TikTok works. On it, you can’t just show a book by Clarice Lispector. The successful accounts performed being a ‘woman who reads Clarice Lispector.’ Usually, the performance takes the form of consumption–massive book hauls and unboxings, product recommendations like coloring books, custom book embossers, and clip-on lights, and showing off thought daughter essentials, like a bottle of Glossier You, Phoebe Bridgers and Harry Styles albums, and expensive headphones. Others might film themselves writing poetry in the park, share POV-style videos of them reacting to certain scenes, or post memes to prove they are the most esoteric chica in the room, like this:

Listen–some of you sharing this meme have never read Clarice Lispector’s work, and that’s okay! But I think it’s worth discussing why reading is experiencing a renewed interest, even if it’s just about the aesthetic. 

Stuck at a bus stop in Baltimore this past weekend, I told my boyfriend about the existence of book stylists, the people who curate libraries and social clubs and are responsible for putting certain books in the hands of influencers and celebrities. According to The New York Times, in the past few years, books have become such coveted signifiers of taste and self-expression that the objects themselves are now status symbols. Having a specific book in hand or on a table adds an unexpected aspect to one’s persona, and celebrities and influencers, eager to cultivate a certain ~vIbE~, know this. This is also why the Sarah J. Maas and Ali Hazelwood fans will, on occasion, post themselves reading Sally Rooney, not because they are embarrassed that they enjoy romance or fantasy, but because being seen reading specific kinds of books sends a message. It all comes back to the online panopticon–wanting to be perceived as creative, in-the-know, cool.  

Being a lit girl is in. But what is a lit girl, actually? It’s easy to identify them–Allie Rowbottom, Rachel Rabbit White, Orion Carloto, and Marlowe Granados immediately come to mind, as well as images of Danler’s friend, Emily Ratajkowski, promoting her essay collection on C-Span. The literary it girl *seems* to effortlessly connect with their audiences and appeal to potential new readers in ways that are often clever, self-aware, and exciting. She’s online enough to market herself and be aware of certain trends and discourse, but offline enough to be spotted in the park or at the same party as you. The literary it-girl’s appeal seems to be more attainable than, say, your stereotypical influencer’s–just read the right books, socialize with the right people, and make the right references. The literary it-girl, while (oftentimes) conventionally attractive, is not considered attractive solely because of her looks. It’s about her taste, her intellect, her business-savvy.

This of course, leads me back to Colleen Hoover, who also understands the art of self-promotion,  successfully cultivating a devoted fanbase who call themselves CoHorts. Technically, if we are going by the definition above, Hoover is a literary it-girl herself, a self-published social worker turned bestselling author writing everything from thrillers to erotica. In fact, of all the literary it-girls, she is the most successful–as of October 2022, Hoover has sold more than 20 million books. Objectively, she is not a good writer, and I believe her fans know this–according to one, her books are writing for people who don’t like reading (I should mention–I’ve never read Hoover’s work myself, I’m not against erotic content or content that explores themes like domestic violence, child death, and self-harm. In fact, I want people to read challenging work and to embrace media that might be designed to repel, provoke, or arouse). But you don’t have to be a good writer to be popular on social media, you just have to resonate with readers. Her fans are overwhelmingly young and female, actively seeking surface-level content as a way to turn off their brains and escape from the very real stresses of their day-to-day lives. While escapism is not the point of art, there is value in genre literature and the glossy paperbacks stocked in Target and grocery stores that most people would consider trashy or low brow.

It’s interesting how the rise of the lit-girl and the renewed interest in reading is happening while students are using ChatGPT to write essays, New York City public libraries are closing on Sundays due to budget cuts, unschooling is becoming increasingly popular, and as of 2023, the number of books targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92% over the previous year. It reminds me of how food content and chefluencers are becoming more popular as food prices continue to rise–the more inaccessible reading becomes, the more reading becomes a luxury, the less we encourage independent thought, especially in women. 

I admit, it’s very cool that celebrities like Kaia Gerber have book clubs featuring new voices, writers to watch, overlooked, or underrepresented stories. Dakota Johnson launched a book club this spring, telling Bustle, People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things rather than talking about what fucking face serum they’re using and thinking that that’s the most important thing in the world. I admire the other people reading on the train. If a meme can get a teen girl interested in Susan Sontag or inspire her to write poetry, then fuck it, share the memes. But I wonder if this is the right approach, and if we can get more out of reading besides surface-level experiences or temporarily making them our personalities.

We have to acknowledge that things are that deep, even if they are considered low culture. Being critical and contemplative keeps you from consuming media like a child by the pool with a bag of chips, dissociating as they dunk their wrinkled fingers over and over in search of the most satisfying bite. This isn’t about thinking one genre or author is better than another–to be honest, I don’t care if a woman prefers Icebreaker over The Stranger–it’s about being thoughtful and present. It’s okay to reflect on themes, to think about dialogue, to read something for reasons beyond spice levels. It’s okay to think about how a book made you feel, to ask yourself why you connected with certain characters or ideas. It’s okay for reading to serve as a gateway for insightful and, sometimes, difficult conversations and realizations. 

It’s okay to be critical. You have pleasure and wisdom in your hands. Treat that with care.

I will be thirty tomorrow. For a while, I thought as I got older, something would click, like all of the secrets that everyone else seemed to know would be revealed to me and I would no longer feel like the last person in a long game of Telephone. I didn’t feel like a woman when I arrived in Paris–I felt like a girl, swallowed up in a blazer three sizes too big for her frame, alone in a city she had never been to before with a bag full of impulse purchases from the pharmacy and a key to an apartment she’d share with three strangers. Girl felt right.

It’s not that I am clinging onto the title as a result of fearing aging. I’m not actively avoiding the traditional material trappings of adulthood. I think the current obsession with girlhood is never more interesting than bonding over being shitty at parallel parking and Caesar salads and photos of baby deer with pink text hovering above their spotted heads. I am not necessarily interested in conversations about whether or not the girlification of adult women online is dehumanizing or empowering, I’m not here to tell you to not wear bows as accessories or if girl dinner is freeing, I’m not offended if someone refers to me as a girl in conversation. I’m wondering about womanhood. I’m wondering when I will no longer feel like a girl.

Girl no longer literally refers to a young (or not quite young) woman–it can refer to anyone that desires, that wants. As Susan Sontag writes in The Double Standard of Aging, Youth is a metaphor for energy, restless mobility, appetite: for the state of ‘wanting.’ In order to want, you must lack. Or at least, feel as though you are lacking. And no one knows that feeling better than the girl.

I think about how our understanding of girl has shifted from a literal definition to a symbolic one. This is precisely why men like Succession’s multi-millionaire media heir-apparent Kendall Roy is just so baby girl–confident and commanding yet painfully insecure, addicted to drugs and starved of affection, privileged and in a position of immense power, yet he is perceived as a failure. All of the characters suffer in various ways–Shiv, Kendall’s sister, is fated to become her mother, married to a CEO and pregnant with a child she likely will never love–but it is Kendall, crying on his fortieth birthday, who is featured in edits set to Olivia Rodrigo’s music. And they'd all be so disappointed / 'Cause who am I, if not exploited?

@emmlaurensononly a month until i get my most pathetic 40 year old man who’s also a teenage girl back #succession #hbo #kendallroy #successionedit #kendallroyedit #oliviarodrigo #fyp

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The girl is desirable and youthful, free of the daily devotion that comes with motherhood and marriage. She lives in a state of contradictions–attractive and repulsive, immature and wise beyond her years, private and vulnerable, passive and impulsive. A girl can create and transmit knowledge by passing a note in class or by curating (or intentionally not curating) photos on social media, but she cannot change the cultural or social constraints that bind her to the conditions she must navigate. Despite all of the books she’s read and all of the films she’s seen, all the places she’s been and all the identities she has tried on, she’s powerless. She cannot build anything the world will try to knock down. So what does the girl do? Worst case–she sees the mess, she cries, she writes poetry she may or may not post, she texts the boy she said she’d never speak to again, she smokes too much weed, she goes to the party. Best case–she will find pleasure and enjoyment in the mess she’s been given. She goes to the party.

It’s no wonder that online, everyone is a twenty-seven-year-old-teenage-girl. If youthfulness is defined by want, and want comes from lack, then it’s no surprise that many adults—whose lives have been defined by the climate crisis, gun violence, and pandemic isolation, now suffocating with student debt, the rising cost of rent, and feeling pressure to apply to grad school in order to get a real job—are embracing a state of perceived powerlessness. We stand in line at the coffee shop where cold brew is six dollars, scrolling through our phones, witnessing horrors beyond our comprehension in between a limitless stream of advertisements disguised as content. You guys have been begging for cool toned brown lippies so today’s the day. Let’s get dressed for Coachella day two. POV: you’re a 2024 bride getting married in September doing 12-3-30 with a wrist weight arm workout every day up until the wedding. If you’re in your twenties and you’re wondering about getting Botox for the first time this is the video for you. The world is ending, so why does it matter if this top is sixty-five percent polyester and likely made by a person being grossly underpaid in a sweatshop? Why not rot in bed all day watching Disney movies and reading YA novels even though you’re pushing thirty? Why not suck down a strawberry kiwi flavored vape and toss more plastic into a landfill? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. I’m just a girl! 

It is also this very stream of limitless content that makes the girl the perfect consumer–impulsive, suggestible, eager to find solutions to manufactured fears, aging being one of them. As Sontag writes in The Double Standard of Aging, The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls. Eventually, the unending scroll of funny videos and posts become debates on whether or not thirty-three year Jennifer Lawrence’s sudden glow up is the result of a blepharoplasty or forty-three year old Kim Kardashian’s belief that she only has ten years where [she] still looks good. In an interview by Hailey Bieber with vampire facial creator Dr. Barbara Strum for Violet Grey, Strum makes recommendations like her Sun Drops ($160), Super Anti-Aging Face Cream ($360), and her vitamin E infused Lip Balm ($55) for a sheer glow. She also mentions developing a skin care line for her six-year-old daughter. She’ll also always use sunscreen, drinks a lot of water, and eats a healthy, anti-inflammatory diet. She also offers advice for those who would like to start their own business. Do you feel empowered yet?

Of course not. This is all a scam. We know it. We’ve been knowing it. The pursuit for eternal youth is endless and unattainable. And yet I feel a secret sense of satisfaction when I see the genuine shock on strangers’ faces when they find out exactly how old I am, not because it makes me feel beautiful, but it makes me feel like I still have time to figure it out. 

Two weeks into my stay in Paris, over crab tartare, charred mackerel, and several glasses of orange wine, a friend of a friend bounced a baby the size of a doll on her lap. Despite her sitting across from me, dipping her fork into the same plate as me, something about her existence felt nebulous. She was blissful and beautiful–her red stained lips faded into a muted hot pink as the night went on, her skin was luminous, her eyes looked tired but not because of exhaustion, but because of a sense of accomplishment, like those of a runner placing first in a marathon. She’s cracked the code, I thought. She asked me if I wanted to have kids, and I said I’m on the fence.

Are you afraid of getting fat? She asked immediately. I said no, there’s too much to explain. Because the kilos *do* come off fast, she insisted. She doesn’t believe in the institution of marriage, she mentioned–she’s been married before and it doesn’t change anything. But a baby does. It forced me to reevaluate my priorities. It can’t always be about me.

Thank god I have time, I thought. Then I realized she is only two years older than me. 

So then what is it? If girlhood is defined by want, then womanhood must be defined by satisfaction. I think of our friend, at peace with her life. She’s happy in her career. She’s in grad school. She has an affectionate boyfriend and a beautiful baby. Obviously, it’s not about the baby, because the ability to have a baby doesn’t make someone a woman (I think of all my sister’s friends who are married and rushing to have babies before their thirtieth birthday, not because they are ready to support and care for a life, but because they want to have something to give them meaning, because they want to be young moms, because they want the next logical step, whether or not they are emotionally or financially prepared to take that step. How childlike they are in their desires despite actively pursuing the traditional markers of adulthood). It’s about understanding the unknown and working with it instead of ignoring it or reacting to it. It’s about having agency. A sense of control. Confidence.

In the fifth grade, I wrote a journal entry about my teacher’s fortieth birthday. Forty is very young. It’s only one year older than 39! And that’s young! She can travel anywhere she wants! One day, I thought, I’d travel the world too. I’d become a famous writer. I’d have a nice house. I wrote something about this house having marble, because marble seemed like the greatest indicator of success. After school, I would sit on the bus ride home with my head pressed against the cool window, watching the road roll endlessly ahead. There was a whole life ahead of me, one that stretched beyond this road, and I was excited to become the person who would experience it. I imagined myself as an explorer, with my hair in two braids. 

I think about that smart little girl all the time. I thought about her in Paris. I think of how proud she would be to know that I am living in the city, that I get to travel, that I am loved, that I am a writer. Even now, as I write this in white eyelet shorts and a t-shirt, trying my best to be still in the summer heat, she is with me, looking over my shoulder, sounding out the words she doesn’t know but will look up in the dictionary later.

I think she’d consider me a woman. I hope.

There is a mythical version of America where the landscape consists of sun-faded flags, motels, above ground swimming pools, biker bars, and county fairs, silhouettes of oil rigs against bright blue skies. A version where the highways–dotted with pastel diners and billboards advertising Budweiser and Jesus–roll along without any beginning or end. Here, you can hop on the back of a pick-up truck and leave the empty cul-de-sacs and McMansions and go anywhere, be anyone. In this version, America is still a land of opportunity and possibility. Some will go to Hollywood. Others will go to Walmart. They will look for the No Boundaries crochet tube top Lana Del Rey wore in South Carolina last month. Walmart is lana core you can’t tell me different, comments a TikTok user. The top is $11. It is out of stock. 

Del Rey’s fashion choices have never been about sophistication or elegance. She’s technically never worn a good outfit. Her style tends to be excessive, contradictory, and offbeat, working even though it technically shouldn’t, like a randomized Sim, according to a fan on X. She dresses like your millennial older sister who couldn’t post a photo without using picnik—messy and mass produced. Charming even when it’s befuddling. Authentically American. 

This was the Del Rey I was introduced to in 2012–a self-proclaimed gangster Nancy Sinatra with side parted auburn hair, a diamond tooth cap, skinny jeans, and long acrylic nails. She was kittenish and slightly awkward in interviews, pouting while a TV host describes her as an angel coming out of dream or from a David Lynch movie. I remember her smoking a cigarette, her baseball cap turned backwards, stunned when a TMZ reporter asked her on a date. Are you serious? she asks, clearly not interested in a response. There was something about her that made her irresistible and off-putting. Early critics pointed out the troubling sexual politics of her debut album, her alleged outdated, anti-feminist ideas, her campy SNL performance, where she seemed dazed and stiff and extravagantly uncomfortable. I had never seen anyone like her. She was beautiful. She was strange. She was a freak. 

One of the common early criticisms of Del Rey was that she was inauthentic. There was speculation around whether or not she actually self-produced her own music videos, to plastic surgery allegations to, according to The Guardian, questions as to when exactly when Del Rey teamed up with…Interscope and how much influence their savvy marketers might have put into her original emergence. 

My intention was never to transform into a different person, Del Rey said in a cover story for Billboard in 2012. What other people think of me is none of my business. Sometimes, it hurts my feelings. But I have to just keep going. The good stuff is really good. Some of the other stuff is difficult, but I’ll be able to tour now, probably sing for a while. That’s nice for me. 

I wonder about authenticity, about how it is such a uniquely American desire. There are many ways to succeed in American politics, but most of them involve authenticity, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wrote in 2014. The influencers who do best are the ones who speak to us like we are their friends, because consumers will always trust someone who is part of their circle.  As women, we are told that by constantly engaging in activities to self-optimize–engaging in a stratum of expensive juices, boutique exercise classes, skincare routines and vacations, as Jia Tolentino wrote in her essay Always be Optimizing from her book, Trick Mirror–we will become our happiest, prettiest, most authentic selves. In 2022, BeReal promised users authenticity and a break from the curation and competition that comes with Instagram. Even I catch myself manually animating certain parts of my face in order to seem interested in what a stranger has to say, even though I want to ask, are you serious? 

When I think of Del Rey during this time I can’t help but think about Karen Black’s Academy Award nominated performance as Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces (1970). This wasn’t the first time I saw a movie with Black–I was introduced to her through Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses, a movie that, for friends who are reading this, will agree is more in line with my personal taste. But this was the first time I was truly struck by her presence. She is warm, accessible, Tom Burke wrote in The New York Times in 1970. She is also…worldly, changeable, a subtle comic, and something of a freak, a beautiful freak (43 years later, in her obituary, The New York Times will immediately mention her ever so slightly off-kilter eyes).

Five Easy Pieces tells the story of Robert Dupea, a former classical pianist turned oil rig worker who left his privileged life to drift in between odd jobs, trailer parks, and bowling alleys in Kern County, California. Robert’s blue-collar cosplay is convincing but not sustainable. When he finds out his father has suffered a stroke, he must return home, but there’s a problem–his girlfriend, Rayette, a sensitive waitress and aspiring country singer–is pregnant and wants to come with him. 

Perched on a bathroom sink in a pink-peach waitress uniform, singing and applying makeup in the car, pouting her lips as she tries to win the affection of an empty, self-hating man…I couldn’t help but to see Del Rey in Rayette (I am reminded of The Waffle House Incident™. Turns out, that wasn’t a publicity stunt or promo for Did You Know There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard–servers gave Del Rey and her siblings Waffle House shirts after noticing how often they were going to the breakfast food chain). She’s a girl from a small town with big aspirations and a sweet voice, a rangy, imperfect beauty, not nearly as polished as Bobby’s love interest back home, but charming in her own way. To me, she represents the mythical version of America, hopeful and eccentric, full of potential, seductive even if she is a little rough. It wouldn’t surprise me if secretly, Robert wants what she has–whether she’s talking about her love for fluffy white cats or Tammy Wynette, she’s authentically herself, something he can never be. So he runs away, this time in a truck headed north, ready to become someone else. I hate to say it—he’s just like us.

So, the tube top. I genuinely believe Del Rey went shopping at Walmart, saw the top, and bought it because she thought it was cute. Again, this is a woman who wore a dress from Dillard’s to the 2020 Grammy’s, an $18 green marbled mini dress to a Variety event in 2021, and black leggings and Keds in her downtime. Del Rey’s not trying to be anybody else. I don’t know how many of us can say that.

What I can say for certain—Goodwills across America are going to be full of these tube tops in less than a year.

The first snowstorm of the winter has hit New York. My friends who wake up early for work are posting videos of the snow drifting from the sky, dissolving upon contact with the sidewalk below their fire escapes. I imagine every radiator in the city groaning awake, the sound of metallic clanking interrupting the insulated quiet. There, the morning is pale and clear. From here, the cold seems colder. I am happy I have escaped part of the winter on the beach town in Costa Rica, happier I brought my writing with me. For the first time in months, I have decided to make a conscious effort to write and to write seriously.

There was a time where I half-jokingly referred to my writing as Sad Girl shit, and for a while, that seemed appropriate. I began posting my writing in the aftermath of a breakup. I moved back to Queens with a painting rolled up under my arm, a suitcase filled with books, and comp cards I’d no longer distribute. I had just graduated with my MFA and zero job prospects. Besides rejections from fellowships I half-heartedly applied for and emails from brands coaxing me into using my savings on chino shorts and silver slingbacks, there was nothing for me to keep an eye on. So I wandered in and out of the Met unnoticed, a ghost amongst the tourists. I practiced tarot until I entered a state of semi spiritual-psychosis. I ate an edible every night. I fell asleep in a fuzzy state of euphoria. If only I were the easy satisfied type, the kind of person who benefits from cognitive behavioral therapy and bell hooks and attachment theory. My calendar, yellowed and curling under weeks of direct sunlight, was a reminder that I had some sort of semblance of a life, even if it made me feel a different kind of misery. I was no longer modeling, no longer workshopping. There was no one around to define me anymore, yet I couldn’t define myself. I wrote until suddenly I didn’t. My scrolling habit turned into a screen time average of seven hours a day. Consumption took place of creation. 

I studied my sadness in the mirror with surgical curiosity. The image reflected back at me was not a whole face, just parts that existed on the same plane–a red splotch where a nose used to be, swollen lips, puffy eyes. New creases and lines. I washed my face raw.

The Sad Girl is satisfied with the idea of being a passive observer of her own existence, carefully categorizing and expressing herself through quirky collages featuring My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Elliot Smith, and crushed pomegranates. She loves the word “esoteric.” She is uncritical. She is literal. Sylvia Plath is reduced to a tragic blonde despite her talent, vitality, and complex body of work. Mitski’s theatrics and desire–for a lover, for music, perhaps both, perhaps neither–is misunderstood as feminine rage. Fiona Apple is nothing more than an emotionally volatile waif whose music overlays poetry by self-proclaimed femcels on TikTok. Lolita is a guide–no, wait–Lolita is problematic–wait! Lolita looks good sitting just the right way on a night table next to a Diet Coke and a crystal ashtray filled with matchbooks. Recently, she’s considered becoming a nun.

Calling my work Sad Girl shit felt good because initially it was liberating–in this way, I could be messy and unlikeable, self-obsessed and self-loathing. It saved me from having to think of my work–and by extension, myself–as thoughtful, complex, or worthwhile. 

The difference between the Sad Girl and myself is that I don’t live to be sad. My sadness was not interesting or insightful or a form of feminist resistance. It was masturbatory in the most pathetic sense. It was stifling. It was boring. And I am bored–bored of anything that performs the aesthetics of sadness, bored of turning trauma into a public commodity, bored of associating subjugation with womanhood, bored by the notion that the most meaningful art must come from a place of suffering. I think of the women Sad Girls gravitate to–Lana Del Rey, Virginia Woolf, Hope Sandoval, Sofia Coppola, Joan Didion, Phoebe Bridgers, Ethel Cain–and I think of their diverse bodies of work, the evolution of their respective careers, and the fact that they don’t have that much in common. By labeling them as Sad Girls and flattening their work, they are bound not just by the patriarchy, but also by our own narrow sets of expectations and desires. 

I think the most interesting parts of our lives–the richest, most complex parts of our lives–happen when we make a conscious decision to live externally, to find and share pleasure, to be curious and open despite our fears. This is where the best stories come from–nothing worthwhile can be created from a depressive, dissociative state.

One morning I laid on the floor. I watched myself from the third person. There she is, on the floor, next to her books and the painting she never framed. And there’s the sun streaming through the window. I had experienced and survived greater sources of pain in my life up until that point. Why this shutdown, why now? If I were still in my program, someone would have told me how generous I was sharing such an intimate moment of vulnerability but perhaps I could use more interiority. But was there any use living even more internally? I got up. I stuffed my calendar under a folded stack of jeans in my closet. Briefly, I thought of turning it into a piece of confessional art. When I realized I was seriously considering this, I threw it in the garbage. Now it’s rotting somewhere in Staten Island while I take notes on the beach. 

My story does not begin or end with sadness. It begins and begins again. 

I stretch for the sky and look towards the water. From here, it seems limitless. I think I’ll go for a swim. 

I know it is him because he is russet-colored and missing his tail. Perhaps he lost it in a fight, perhaps he was caught in a gate. Perhaps he was struck by a car crossing the street. I’ve seen a fox flattened into the pavement just outside of the neighborhood, all tufts of red and orange and bits of bone. I thought it was him for a moment, but in the coagulated black and purple smear was a beautiful, bushy shivering with every passing car.

This morning, the fox trots over the yellow-green mounds that make up the backyard and disappears between the trees. I am with my sister at the kitchen table for the first time in a little over a year. She doesn’t notice the fox, but she knows he is there. Her focus is consumed by the email she’s been typing and retyping, the Slack messages announcing their arrival with a loud whoosing noise every few minutes. I am sitting in front of a mostly blank Word document. I switch tabs to the local bus station’s website to purchase a ticket back to the city. 

I first noticed the fox ten years ago, shortly after my mom moved to Pennsylvania. The fox and I always seem to be in a constant state of movement as though we are afraid of being caught. There are eyes on us. I feel the eyes especially when I try to write. 

I work at an upscale women’s retailer whose clientele skews mostly millennial, affluent, and white. It’s not the clothes–vegan leather trousers, oversized blazers, figure-smoothing tops–that these clients are after. What they want is the illusion of the everyday luxury we promise as they walk through the door and into an aspirational world of beige and snake plants and Anish Kapoor. Nothing innovative exists here. Nothing glamorous, despite the advertisements featuring Pamela Anderson mowing the lawn in stilettos. No risks. The clients will come in with their milky iced coffees, slicked back buns, and cartoonishly large gold plated earrings. They will spend the money they earned at their finance and marketing jobs on fabrics sourced from Japanese mills and extra-fine merino wool. They will ask if this satin blouse comes in any additional colorways, and we will tell them, yes, of course–black, white, and matte pearl, not to be confused with light birch. I wonder if their closets are organized by color, and if so, how. 

I remind myself as I wrap their expensive bodysuits and denim in printed tissue paper that I am equal to our clients, perhaps not financially, but in more important ways. Sure, I laugh at their recycled jokes from the Internet and nod as they go through the itinerary of their upcoming work trip to Paris–modeling taught me how to perform, even if only for a few seconds–but I know that if we were to sit next to each other at the bar, no one would be able to tell who works in service and who works in an open-concept office. Besides, if they are delusional enough to believe they are buying quality garments (“Ever since I stopped buying fast fashion, my wardrobe has been so much better,” said one client after swiping her card for nearly $1,600 worth of polyester), then I can–no, should–be delusional enough to believe that I can build something bright and worthwhile, that this is just the in-between, that in a few years, this stint will just be another story on the shelf. 

I enter my payment details in the blue-gray rectangles in front of me. The website directs me to a page notifying me that my ticket has been sent to my inbox. I close my laptop and look at my sister. She sticks out her tongue when she’s concentrating, so I know now is not the time to tell her that the fox has returned. He lopes over the rocks ans through the trees, his black lips curled upwards in a satisfied grin with a squirrel between his teeth. Its body lolls like a broken flower.

The average fox has a lifespan of five years in the wild. When I see him next year, things will be different. Tomorrow I will return to the city, return to work, return to the essays I’ve been trying to finish. For now I have this, and that is enough. 

It doesn’t feel like traveling if you don’t know where you’re going. That’s what I thought as the train came to a stop in New Haven. What I did know was from here, Jules would pick me up and we would drive two hours to Vermont. I knew we were going to a cabin. I knew cabins have become chic in the past few years. I packed the essentials—a water bottle, birth control, contact lenses, travel size shampoo and conditioner, facial sunscreen, a book. I packed what could be essential—razors, edibles, mouthwash, extra hair ties, tweezers. I packed what felt essential–a bottle of orange wine, my favorite g-string. J’s text was vague so I filled in the gaps with my imagination. I saw a bed, simply made. A nightstand with a perfectly yellowed doily. En suite bathroom with a peeling clawfoot tub. In some versions there was a rug. In most versions there wasn’t—too hot. In every version there was an outlet. I brought a hair dryer. 

What most people would do in this situation is ask more questions, but I arranged his texts and an Instagram post of his friend’s faces illuminated in bright light like puzzle pieces on the floor. Jules would figure out the rest. They supplied me with a bikini, sweatpants, and an extra jacket. On our drive up to Vermont we picked up a dozen bagels and cream cheese before pulling off on the side of the road to buy strawberries from a vacant farm stand in front of church. Only the bees and fruit flies seemed to know it was there. I paid for the berries anyway, tapping my card on an iPad installed on a counter mounded with tomatoes puckering in the heat.

It was a straight, consistent drive, the kind of drive that feels like swimming in an infinity pool. The landscape rolled along outside the window, a dizzying, unending stretch of green and blue, interrupted briefly by a turkey vulture with its face buried inside the chest of something recently dead. Jules pointed it out to me but I didn’t see it. My eyes had been fixed on the mountains in the distance until I noticed my phone glowing with a text from him, informing me that there was no running water in the cabin.

Now that I knew, it seemed so obvious. I tried to rearrange the imagined cabin’s blueprint in my mind. If there was no running water, then there is no clawfoot tub. Or sink. There could be a sink in the kitchen. But where was the kitchen? I found it just off the living room, as kitchens tend to be. My attention shifted to the duffel bag and its contents in the backseat. I justified packing like a teenage runaway in the only way I knew how—by reminding myself that this would somehow contribute to The Plot.

The Plot—much like love and lack of love—influences most of my decisions. I had been trying to find a story for months. I spent the winter and spring analyzing and writing poetry. I read philosophy. I read erotica. I read criticism. I recorded voice notes of observations I would never revisit. Flew to San Diego hoping I’d find a story but I wasted time watching the palm trees sway in the salt-soaked breeze. Eventually I gave up and toured the most haunted house in California. No ghosts. After less than a week, I took a red eye back to the city. I promised myself I would start writing for real again once I made space for passion.

My boots sunk into the matted grass as I walked around the car and to the cabin. J, dressed in an orange hoodie and orange running shorts, led the way with our bags. Partially concealed in the fog rising from the wet earth, the White and Green Mountains in the distance seemed to have no beginning and no end. It was impossible to imagine them thick with snow in the winter or that winter could ever exist at all. 

The cabin belonged to a woman whose name I can’t remember, but when I heard it, I imagined a blonde in shorts and flip-flops, eyelashes heavy with mascara. We walked around the picnic table with a tableau of a dinner party—a cutting board with a partially eaten loaf of bread, a blue plate of wilted asparagus, a parmesan rind, half a red bell pepper. Bees hovered around the bouquet of wildflowers in between two candles–one purple, one pink—before inspecting the empty cans of hard seltzers and open tins of store-brand tomato sauce. 

I noticed the plastic gallon jug and a freckled banana hanging from the clothesline as we got closer to the porch. They were being used as target practice. The group was outside, aiming their BB guns at the banana, drinking, adjusting the volume of the music blaring from the radio. One girl crouched alongside a dish rack, scrubbing a plate before rinsing it with bottled water. They all seemed older than us, but not by much–ten years maximum. Still, they took pause as Jules and I approached. They looked like children after a day of play, with their flushed cheeks and hair piled in loose buns or covered in caps. Some of them were barefoot despite the rain. All of them seemed to be speaking in code.

Two dogs rushed from the front door and licked at our fingers as we walked inside. The blueprint had finally vanished from my mind. The first floor of the cabin was not much else other than a large living space with two couches, a fireplace, and a kitchen. No fridge. Jules and I put the wine, bagels, and cream cheese in a cooler filled with ice water. The strawberries joined the other fruits and vegetables on the table in the center of the first floor, just below the stairs. The loft was above. There were three beds, each made up in simple white sheets. An empty bassinet sat in between the bed I’d share with J. 

Jules elected to spend the night in their car. 

J told us there was another cabin not too far from the one we were staying in, which we could walk to if we wanted, but it would be easier to drive. The group called it the 5G cabin since it had WiFi, a fully equipped kitchen, and running water. The friends in the group with babies would be staying there, along with a mockup of the merkaba they were planning to burn the following night, as part of their tradition every year. This was what J was referring to in the Instagram post he sent me, the piece of the puzzle I couldn’t place. The group’s merkaba would be filled with fourth of July sparklers and fireworks and burned after sunset. I typed merkavah in my notes app and pushed my swollen duffel bag under the bed.

On the porch, with the BB gun on my shoulder, I aimed for the jug swaying in the rain. I shot once, twice. Missed. Took aim again. I kept my body still. Inhaled. I didn’t see it, but I heard it—a swift, sharp pop as the pellet struck the plastic with the pull of the trigger. It felt easy, involuntary. Just like breathing. Just like a heartbeat.

There were squirrels in the ceiling. I heard them chattering and chasing after each other as the sun pushed itself in between the trees and through the window. The haziness of the early morning light was made only hazier with my nearsightedness. I wanted to lie in the vagueness and color, the impressions of form, but my heart scratched against my chest like a kitten behind a locked door. J was close enough for me to see his tanned skin peeking from the white blanket, the flashes of the color of his tattoos, the sharpness of his jaw. He was still asleep, and probably would stay asleep for a couple hours more. 

I reached for my phone on the night table beside me. I thought about how I keep writing the same story over and over. This time I promised I’d get it right. I typed merkavah in my browser. Scrolled through videos from Burning Man. Blogs explaining Kabbalah. Definitions from online dictionaries. A post from a crunchy New Age site describing the merkaba as a “representation of the ascension process.” I placed my phone on my chest and folded my hands over it, feeling it pulse with the beat of my heart. 

There were new sounds coming from the cabin, sounds that could only come from bodies fueled by days of alcohol, possibly acid, and years of godknowswhatelse. I put on my glasses and let my eyes adjust to the new shapes and sharpness of the cabin, the beams supporting the roof, the half-full cans of beer on the bannister. The squirrels continued to dart to and fro above my head. I wondered if they were fucking or fighting or if there even was a difference. Still in my boxers, I pulled on my riding boots and J’s orange hoodie and pressed my lips to the soft space between his jaw and ear lobe. I wanted to say goodbye to Jules before they drove to another lake for the day.

I went down the stairs step by step, careful not to make any noise. There were couples on the couches interlocked in each other’s arms like otters to keep from falling off. Outside, a few of J’s friends were brewing coffee in a French press and prepping shakshuka for breakfast. As I walked to Jules’s car with one of the smaller dogs trotting by my side, I thought about my own relationship to The Plot, my belief that it’s not what happens, but how it happens. I had a version of this trip in my head once I decided I’d go, which didn’t take long after I received J’s text. This was the reality—endless glasses of wine. Wading through the wet grass to the top of a hill. Jule’s cherry cola hair catching the last moments of daylight. Tick checks. Brushing our teeth outside and rinsing with the last bit of water in our bottles. People sleeping in cars. People sleeping in tents. People who didn’t seem to sleep at all. The ice in the coolers had melted. There was a shortage of cigarettes. The most reliable car was low on gas. Someone would need to get supplies before the cops close the roads for the parade. That someone would be me and J. 

Sometimes desire will take you from New York City to a Wal-Mart in New Hampshire, speeding down the frozen aisle with two hands on the shopping cart, one leg stretched out like a figure skater. We came prepared with a list: ice, eggs, cigarettes, hard seltzers, tiki torches, skewers. I insisted on popsicles. Neither of us thought of buying bottled water. There was no way to the nearest market in Topsham–the roads were closed and so was the general store. We had no choice but to cross state lines. There were wagons of children with strawberry cheeks, families in matching Old Navy t-shirts setting up folding chairs along the curb, John Deere tractors decorated in red, white, and blue, teen girls driving atvs at the slowest possible speed.

I checked my phone on our way to back to the cabin. 3% battery. I shouldn’t have used it to take blurry photos of a WE LOVE YOU WINONA RYDER poster attached to the side of a barn with Jules the day we arrived. I tried connecting my Bluetooth to the speaker we found in the car. No luck. J connected his instead, playing music he was planning to use for his short film. Outside the open widow, little beige islands of Dunkin Donuts and pharmacies turned into suburban neighborhoods, which then turned into long stretches of farm land punctuated by a single house or two. I wished for the impossible—a longer summer, an escape from work and stagnancy, and for the first time in a long time, I wished to write.

Under the tube of retinol and g-string and mascara and everything I had to go without for the rest of my stay, the things I was afraid of J seeing me without but knew he didn’t care how I looked regardless, was the one thing I was smart enough to pack—a fleece-lined long sleeve. My body trembled like the moon on water as I pulled it over my head. Either I developed a fever after our Wal-Mart trip and afternoon at the lake, or the temperature dropped dramatically on the mountain. I reminded myself that I did have shrooms. I stepped out of my cut-off shorts and into my jeans, still damp from the festivities in the 5G cabin the night before. I breathed into my stomach, empty except for the handful of strawberries I ate for breakfast.

I made my way from the fireplace to the porch where J handed me a burger. I chewed mechanically. One of the girls asked if I was an Aries. Then Libra. She stretched the i slightly longer than necessary. Leebra. I told her I was a Cancer and immediately began to wonder if this confirmed any suspicions the group may have had about me, if they had any at all. I knew that they knew I was young, that I didn’t work in advertising or film, that I had never been to a lake, that I claimed I was a writer but I hadn’t written anything substantial in months. Then I reminded myself once again that I was not entirely sober or hydrated and I should drop it and watch the merkaba burn. After we finished our burgers, the group grabbed their things—shrimp bathing in a bowl of marinade, beer, sparklers, babies, cameras—and we headed for the hill near the 5G cabin. 

The merkaba was attached to a rope and hoisted over a fire. It hissed and popped with fireworks shooting from expected and new angles, leaving streaks of red and green in the dark. One of the boys ran around the hissing structure, dousing it with lighter fluid, avoiding the flames steadily stretching for the sky. I observed the fire from a distance with the girl who tried to guess my sign. She hugged me, leaving a sparkler lodged in between the fibers of the sweater I borrowed from one of the other girls. The fire consumed the merkaba, setting off the last of the sparklers and fireworks embedded inside, melting the little white flowers it wore as a crown, filling the air with the scent of cooked meat and burning wood. 

The longer I stood still, the better I felt. I took my gaze above. This is something people say when you are far from the city, but I had never experienced it myself—in complete darkness, away from the illuminated signs and street lights and cars and buses, it’s easier to see the stars. There were stars I knew and stars I had never seen before, stars that seemed to move in the heat from our spot on the hill. They spoke in a language I could understand even in my sleep—you are here. You are here. 

I know I should kill it, but I can’t. I’ve never been able to, even when they started appearing in Pennsylvania years ago. And now they’re in New York. This one seems to have fallen from the sky, next to my shoe. One step, and I’ll crush it, like I’m supposed to.  

The spotted lanternfly is a planthopper, or what entomologists call “true bugs.” It’s known for its insatiable appetite, jumping and sucking the sap out of the most important plants–grapevines, hardwood trees like black walnut and maples, soybeans, apple and stone fruit trees. It consumes and consumes and leaves behind a trail of honeydew, a sticky, sugary substance that attracts bees and mold.

I should be responsible and kill the lanternfly. Instead, my hips hinge forward on their own. I feel a bend in my knees. My hand drifts to the pavement. The lanternfly offers me one of its legs. And then I realize how stupid I must look, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, trying to save something so destructive.

Three summers ago, the lanternflies were contained in Pennsylvania. I didn’t know about their existence until I briefly moved in with my parents in 2019. I noticed their spotted wings, red and shining, crushed like strawberries in the hot pavement. Everyone, even the children, knew they had to kill the lanternflies. They screamed and laughed as they jumped on the insects’ origami bodies. 

One afternoon, while sitting outside of a coffee shop, a lanterfly landed on my notebook. I only realized it was there because the woman sitting at the table next to me gasped upon its arrival. I offered it my wrist and let it crawl up and down my arm before it found shelter in between the creases of my sweater. I had never seen anything like it in the city, so I let it be while I examined its wings. Unfolded, it’s easy to mistake a lanternfly for a butterfly or a moth. It crawled into my palm where I turned it over and over again like a pearl.

I observed my sadness in the mirror before slipping the tank top I wore the day before over my head. For weeks I stuffed my tears in my mouth and swallowed them in the deepest part of my stomach where I thought they’d drown. My nose and lips were stained red, my eyes were bloodshot and swollen with insomnia. I combed my eyebrows in place with a dry spoolie brush, briefly considered mascara, tossed the silver tube on my bed, and headed for the train.

Sometimes I think my body is a home for destruction. Sometimes I think I attract the worst kinds of things. Someone told me this is because I am a healer. People come to me because they know I will change them. I wish I could change lanternflies into moths. 

Rain drops funnel through the branches and leaves above my head as I walk towards the pier. I focus my gaze on the bench I’ve rested on many times before. The rain streams through my hair and down my cheeks, soaks through my jeans, and begins to pool in my sneakers. I sit on the bench, thankful there is something to hold me.

My mom calls. She says it’s raining in Pennsylvania and I tell her it’s raining in New York. She asks me where I am, and I tell her I’m by the water. She suggests I find a cafe to sit inside until the rain lets up, but I tell her I already got a coffee before walking here, and I’m too embarrassed to go inside anywhere with a drink already in hand. 

She continues to speak but all I can hear is the collision of the waves in the Hudson and the sound of someone repeating over and over, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, until I realize there is no one at the pier besides me. 

I’m not crying because of anything in particular. I’m crying around something, the same thing I’ve been writing and rewriting and deleting and writing around for weeks. I want to tell this story without revealing anything.

I graduated this spring. In the beginning, I ignored the shadow that tugged at my shoulder and poured myself into life the same way I poured myself into my thesis. I am here. No one else matters. I applied to every job and every internship. I rose with the sun to work out. I broke my contract with my modeling agency. I archived my existence on social media. I cut my hair. Applied to more jobs. Interviewed for an internship. I bought a plant for the artist I’ve been seeing. I looked at apartments. I played with painting again. I didn’t get the internship. I kept applying. My sheets smelled clean and I had fresh bay leaves in my pillows. I attended a writers institute and reminded myself I was nominated to be there. I kept my birthday roses until they smelled sour. In Soho, a photographer asked for my photograph. Another one asked for my photograph. I was here. I was somewhere else. I went to the parties. I bailed on the parties. I opened my phone and watched the world happening behind the glow of the cold screen. The AC hummed but the room never cooled. I drummed my fingers against my collarbones. Buried my measuring tape under empty packs of birth control pills, hair ties, and receipts used to blot lipstick. I went to Bathhouse alone. When I plunged into the cold pool, I felt briefly aware that I belong to me. My inbox chimed with unread emails and reminders for classes I attended in the fall. The wastebasket overflowed with crumpled poems, used matches, and old socks bleached transparent. I wrote more poems on my laptop. If I could harness my passion and my insatiable nature I could do so much more. The bay leaves dried out but I didn’t shake them from my pillows. I read Baudrillard on the train. I read Shirley Jackson’s biography on the train. Men asked me what I was reading on the train. Men asked me if I was single on the train. I bought a copy of Wuthering Heights, a book on witchcraft, and vintage Playboy magazines in that order. If only I wanted less. I brushed crushed bay leaves off my sheets. I swallowed 30 milligrams of melatonin and looked for images in the static hovering in the dark. I filled the tub halfway with hot water and sat in silence until my nose turned red. I missed my best friend. I stopped looking for apartments for us to share. The strawberries in the fridge grew soft patches of gray fuzz. I considered modeling again. I browsed the shelves of my favorite book store and wondered when would it be my turn to see my name there. I consulted my tarot cards. Who am I to you? The answer jumped from my hands and onto the floor: The Empress. The Priestess. I left a glass of water on the night table. A glass of water on the floor. A glass of water in the sink. I cycled through the same three apps. The lanternflies followed me to the city. I scrolled endlessly. Videos of the best places to eat in the city. Videos of girls subsisting on Diet Coke and Ottessa Moshfegh. Videos of people lip synching to Fiona Apple. Videos on the best methods for killing lanternflies. I could feel myself fading away. I tapped on my notifications. I needed to take a break. I needed to cry. The artist asked if I’m okay. I said everything except for what I’ve been meaning to say–I love you and I am in pain. 

Geese shuffle past the bench with their necks craned to the sky. They stop to shake the rain off their feathers before continuing in the direction of the carousel that’s been locked the entire summer. I wipe my tears with the back of my hand. The rain eases up. The world goes on.

When I stand, my legs feel new. If I fall, I hope I can land in hands as gentle as mine and be excused. 

This week I decided I’d look for a used camcorder. I don’t know when and how the idea got in my head, but at some point while sitting in front of all the work I was supposed to do, all the work that I wanted to do, I found myself sifting through ebay for a camcorder and VHS cassettes.

I realized as I scrolled through the listings that, beyond using nostalgia as a coping mechanism, I have been looking for something real for a while. When everything feels like unending unreality–an inbox piled with emails, job and residency applications in various states of completion, tapping in and out of the same three apps for entertainment–it would be nice to have something tangible, something analog, something that feels real. 

I stopped my search to look up The Velveteen Rabbit. 

I read and reread the exchange between the Rabbit and the Skin Horse. The Rabbit asks if becoming Real hurts, and the Skin Horse replies, "when you are Real you don't mind being hurt,” before going on to explain that the process takes a “long time.” He tells the Rabbit, “it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.…Once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Ugly has always been appealing to me–gooey video nasties and trashy B-movies, insects with too many eyes and too many legs, the intense sexuality of Egon Schiele’s twisted bodies, sticky dive bars with barely functioning toilets, the distinct sweetness of bruised and freckled fruit, decaying houses on the drive up to a dying mall, acne scars and crooked noses on movie star faces, childhood stuffed animals whose noses are missing after being loved for decades, the earthy funk and cloudiness of a glass of natural wine, paparazzi photos before 2009, a single letter transformed into an ink blot because the writer struck the key on the typewriter too hard. I manage to whittle every tube of pomegranate lip balm I own into a severe slant. I keep flowers until they begin to smell sick. When I’m on the train underlining my favorite lines in a book, my pen shakes so hard the lines devolve into childish squiggles. A former friend went to Mexico and came back with a wooden black bunny for me because he knew I’d love it despite its missing front paw. And now I am looking for an old camcorder and VHS cassettes. 

There was a dead bird on the sidewalk on my walk to the train this week. Its blue and gray wings were folded together like a prayer and there was a little hole in its skull where an eyeball used to be. I stopped to take a photo of this sign of rebirth. On my walk back, the bird was flattened into the pavement with one of its wings missing, a distortion of what once was. I was happy I got to it before the ants and flies and the strollers and bikes.

When I posted the bird to my Instagram stories, I received a few disgusted messages from my friends. My sister said the image made her physically sick.

The more we fear ugly, the more we disconnect from reality, the more we give power to beauty, which demands us to invest in treatments and procedures and technologies we don’t need. I am not immune, of course. Though I surround myself with ugly, I’ve spent my life idolizing, yearning, praying for beauty. I’ve spent many dreamless nights scrolling through photos and videos of beautiful, poreless, thin, expressionless people, creating scenarios in my head about what would happen if I could harness their power myself. Beautiful, untouchable, desirable.

But I can feel myself reacting, pushing against this desire, closing out of every video promoting preventative Botox and offering advice on how to be That Girl, whatever version of That Girl is trending at the moment. What would it take for me to risk being ugly? What would it take for me to stop stressing over the proportions of my face, the texture of my skin, the boyishness of my frame? What would it take for me to be open and vulnerable in a way that wouldn’t make me cringe? What would it take for me to be real and to feel confident that I will be loved regardless? To being open to rejection? To maintain any kind of social media presence, to share my writing with the person I have genuine feelings for, to accept my own softness, my own strangeness? I can feel my thoughts building pressure inside me like a bottle of champagne forgotten in the freezer—

So I decided. 

Either I can let the fear of being ugly keep me stagnant or I can embrace the things that bring me joy: the physical, the analog, the tangible, the faulty, the fuzzy, the sticky, the real. Allow myself to be loved the same way I love, disconnect from the endless scroll and make something with my hands instead. I want to paint something. I want to film something. I want to write something. Turn the camera on myself, see me from someone else’s point of view. Someone will understand.

This afternoon I went on ebay again. I found a listing for a camcorder that wasn’t too expensive and came complete with a charger with a single VHS cassette. Condition: Excellent. Description: What you see is what you get, nothing more, nothing less.

Click.