JAC'S REVIEW
  • HOME
  • WRITING

God is a (struggling) woman

8/17/2018

5 Comments

 
Click here to watch/listen to "God is a woman" by Ariana Grande. 
Flash back to last summer, when I still felt full: I am sleeping on an air mattress in my friends’ apartment to buy me a few extra weeks in New York after the end of my lease in June. I am living out of a suitcase or two, which I’m terrible at, and when I finally move out of the city I leave behind a few things not worth bringing with me: a curling iron, a bottle of olive oil, a mirror with a sharp edge where its frame is cracked. On a Monday night, I make an anchovy sauce and talk to my temporary roommate about our post-college plans, which will soon be irrelevant. Between the two twin size beds that fill the living room—a sacred space where, when I was twenty, I got very drunk for the first time—we gush over HAIM’s music video for their new single, “Want You Back.” We dance along to it, trying to imitate the band’s synchronized steps down Ventura Boulevard. Glancing back and forth between the Apple TV and each other, we toss our heads back laughing at our attempts to keep up with the women in the video.
 
“Want You Back” makes its way onto a playlist I label “july pop,” a short collection of upbeat songs I listen to between spins of the Gone Now and Melodrama albums, which I swallow whole all season. I am not interested in working out during these weeks, but on the mornings I have off, I listen to “july pop” and put on sneakers and a sports bra and walk around Battery Park and South Street Seaport and never break a sweat. Knowing my days in the city are numbered, I walk to embrace the narrow FiDi streets, the backdrop of my college memories, before everything changes. In the afternoons, I walk straight up and down Broadway, six, seven, eight miles per day, to and from SoHo brunches and East Village ramen and Brooklyn lemonade. (The days are heady this season. I can still feel their potency now when I am brave enough to reminisce.) Walking through the city all summer feels like an accomplishment rather than an obligation, as if opportunities will sprawl from my front door forever.

 
***


Flash forward now, to the following October: I am running around a track in Providence wearing the same sports bra but a new pair of sneakers, which I bought begrudgingly—the sixty dollar charge feels like a critical loss.  I am missing my college friends and their feminine embrace, my classes and my identity, my former job and my sense of purpose, my walks in the Financial District. I have very few responsibilities and the kind of free time that adults fantasize about. I am running most days of the week after work. I am extremely unhappy.

I sit down on the track, my forehead dripping sweat, the fall heat suffocating like summer sun after just a few laps. I take a Snapchat of my bitter face and caption it: If I’m going to be miserable anyway I might as well be skinny.
 
I look at my list of friends but hesitate before I send it because I don’t believe what I’ve written, at least not completely, and I don’t want my friends to believe it, either. I especially don’t want them to hear it from me. I am supposed to be the capital-F Feminist friend. I am supposed to be the one who challenges these standards, not the one who adheres to and perpetuates them. I am supposed to be better than this. I delete the picture but run another lap. 


***


In December I start spending more money on clothes, on new pairs of glasses, on gel manicures. I notice that people are noticing. They compliment my wide-leg black dress pants, my boots with a too-high heel, the highlights in my hair. They ask me how I manage to always dress so well, always look so nice, and I feed off of it. My body begins to feel like an accessory, something that exists for the aesthetic pleasure of others, for the first time since high school. Then and now, I start to believe that I can use my appearance to get me what I want: satisfaction, attention, validation, purpose.


***


It’s February now and I am not eating after 4 pm and I am running on the track in a sweatshirt on a rainy Sunday morning because I sent a text message I regret on Saturday night. I realize I’ve lost a bit of weight slowly then all at once and I am the thinnest I’ve been in my adult life. I have gotten sick more times since graduating in May than I did in all four years of college combined so no one is surprised when I get the flu this year. It leaves me feeling weak for longer than it should but I have plans on Friday, important plans, so I go to the mall after work and buy a crop top to wear out. As I shop, I convince myself that now I will be able to attract the guy I’ve been trying to win over. I believe the delicate combination of my thinner figure and my more revealing clothing will allow me to control situations, render myself irresistible, all-powerful, God-like.
 
If my approach is successful, if my body and its reveal get me what I want, then I am a model of female sexual empowerment. But what am I if they don't?

(They don't.) 

I am exhausted. Standing next to him, I lean back against a brick wall and subtly glance to my left whenever I can. He buys me a Bud Light that I didn’t want but don’t regret.

 
***


It’s March and I am on the phone with a friend and she is insisting that when she comes to visit me in Providence she’ll wingwoman for me at my favorite bar. I tell her that I don’t think she would be very good at that. She asks, surprised, Are you kidding me? Don’t you remember that bar in Florence and the lacrosse player? I nod, laughing along as I remember the pivotal moment to which she is referring. I know you have the personality for it, I explain to her, but we look too much alike. Any guy would see you, realize you’re the hotter version of me, and choose you instead.

Next I decide that since I’ve lost weight I should really build muscle, but in a healthy way, of course. A body positive, even feminist way. I need to do yoga, I decide. Yes, I know how to handle all of this. Yoga will fix everything. Although I haven’t noticed anything wrong with my skin, everyone I know keeps telling me I should be using a toner when I wash my face. No matter how many times I ask, no one can explain to me exactly what “toning” means or what part of my face needs to be fixed by it. It’s a toner, it’s super natural and good for you, it’ll tone your skin, everyone tells me. I am perplexed and indignant but I buy a bottle anyway, use it every morning and night.


***


It’s April and I am at a party standing in a stairwell with a boy I’ve been flirting with exclusively through friends for a few weeks now. I spend a half hour listening to him tell me about a girl he’s been eating, drinking, traveling, and sleeping with for months. But we’re not together, he assures me as he takes a step closer. Really, she’s not, like, my girlfriend or anything. I roll my eyes. Classic, I tell him, as I clench a plastic cup filled with half a bottle of red wine. You wanna have your cake and eat it, too. When I turn to leave he touches my arm and spews out a list of impulsive compliments, trying to grab my attention before I move on. Your hair always looks so perfect, Jaclyn, and you dress so well and your nails are always painted so nice and I love that, that’s so nice, really, I’ve noticed. His voice is both hushed and rushed as we hear the sound of a woman coming through the front door of the apartment building one floor below us. Before I walk away, I lean in and whisper to him, Your girlfriend’s downstairs.


***


Later in the month: the weather is getting warmer and I have fixated on wanting to get rid of the red bumps on my upper arms that have been there for as long as I can remember. As I Google how to banish them once and for all—it’s called keratosis pilaris, you know, and it’s caused by a buildup of keratin, which actually protects your skin from infection, and there are 3 million cases of it per year in the US alone and there are products you can buy that promise they will fix it forever—I picture how I would look if I didn’t have them, how I would glow all summer long. I picture a perfect self living an ameliorated version of my life. If I fix the few things I don’t like about my body, then I will surely end up posing on a picturesque dock in a dress as the sun sets in orange; at bougie barbecues wearing an oversized white hat; strolling out of the ocean waves Baywatch-style with my hair blowing perfectly in the wind. I buy the generic brand of an expensive cream and incorporate it into my morning and night routines, right after the toner. I buy a bottle of a vitamin that I read can help, too, and plan to put it directly on my arms before I shower each day. I sit with a scissor at the desk where I wrote my college thesis and cut open each of the two hundred tiny capsules one by one, spilling the liquid from each pill into a sandwich bag to create a supply and then throw away the outer shells. The months are long this year.


***


It’s Memorial Day weekend and I am in the bathroom of a bar in Newport tucking my shirt into my jeans to define my waistline. Since high school I have been wearing dresses and skirts almost exclusively, ones that flow out and rarely accentuate my shape, which I never thought twice about, but recently something shifted in me and I have been wearing skinny jeans and black V-neck shirts as often as I can. I like this outfit because it makes me feel small in the middle. I care about this more than I wish I did and more than I will admit. My favorite pair of jeans, perfectly hugging my ass and legs, have begun to rip and I am preemptively devastated at the damage I know is coming. I will either have to order another $75 pair, which I can barely afford, or call the store and beg for a refund because I’ve only had them since December, after all, and shouldn’t I be able to at least get two years out of them? I don’t know what the protocol is because I’ve never loved a pair of jeans like this before.

My friends and I dance past midnight at the bar as a live band plays. I set my sights on the guitar player, who is not my type at all, and I become determined to get his attention. I am intoxicated by the possibility of this ending in my favor. I stare at him, a short guy with black hair who wears Converse high tops and Adidas track pants and barely looks my way.

It’s hot as hell in the bar and I am sweating now but I keep my cardigan on because it allows me to leave my shirt tucked in without being self-conscious about my midsection. If I take off my cardigan I will want to untuck my shirt and if I untuck my shirt I will lose my waistline and if I lose my waistline then I might as well just go home.


***


A Less-Than-Comprehensive List of Places I’ve Caught Myself Sucking In My Stomach in the Last Three Months: in a fourth-floor social studies classroom, sharing lunch and laughs with my best friends at work; in the dressing room of a TJ Maxx, always; walking through Providence as the wind blows my sundress against the round of my stomach, worried someone I know will drive past me; tailgating a concert at Gillette Stadium, singing my lungs out in search of catharsis; having dinner with old friends, bragging about my graduate school acceptance; teaching at a summer camp that aims to empower young girls through music; under a seatbelt in the passenger seat of a car I probably shouldn’t be in anymore; wearing a new bathing suit at RISD beach on the Fourth of July, immediately after getting a stomach virus and vomiting twice in the parking lot.


***


June is winding down and I go to the mall with friends to find new clothes for our respective summer breaks. After finishing lunch in the food court, my friend says she’ll regret eating such a big meal in a little while when she’s trying on clothes and feeling bloated. For a moment I agree, but then, feeling defeated, I flippantly tell her, Honestly even if we hadn’t eaten this we’d probably still hate ourselves because this whole process is always miserable. We let out a pensive laugh colored by anxiety.

An hour later, we are in adjacent dressing rooms at The Gap, trying on maxi dresses and rompers and showing each other our options. When she finds something she loves, she says things like, I just have this amazing vision of me wearing this yellow dress with these sunglasses on and my hair being really big and curly! I can imagine the scene she describes perfectly and I want it to come true for her. Oh my God YES that is PERFECT, I say. You look SO good. You’re going to LIVE in that dress this summer.

As we continuously boost each other up, it becomes easier to drown out our own criticism, and we can sense some solidarity in this struggle. Before we leave, a woman from a few dressing rooms down walks over and tells us, You two have a great relationship.

We go to Zara and I buy a new shirt I was happy to find and I wear it out that night. When we get back from the bar after 2 am, the guy who’s been trying to kiss me with some regularity comes up behind me in my kitchen and puts his hands on my hips and tells me I’m beautiful. He’s not the one I want so I laugh lightly and tell him to fuck off. I skirt away but hold onto his compliment for days. Maybe weeks.


***


Early July, at the beach, lying on a towel on my stomach until I can feel the sun start to turn my skin pink: I remember being seventeen and getting a sunburn on my back that was embarrassingly noticeable in my senior prom dress. I remember feeling the sun beating down on me that day and knowing I’d regret not turning over or sitting up but being too self-conscious in front of the friends I was with to show my stomach in front of them. These girls were extremely thin, knew their weight to the nearest decimal point at all times, and constantly talked about dieting and wanting to be skinnier. If they saw themselves as imperfect, I reasoned, they must be disgusted by me.

I realize, when I think back to that day, that sunburn, and the mindsets those girls held, that I am luckier than most women I know: both my personality and the ways I naturally adhere to normative beauty standards (which I am neither blind to nor unappreciative of) give me advantages. Perhaps more importantly, I have spent many hours reading about how culture and capitalism can construct and distort our perceptions of beauty and sexuality. My feminism and my education cannot be understated here, and I am privileged to have these on my side, giving me the ability to list the comforting facts that I know deep down to be true: that beauty is socially constructed, and every single thing we believe to be either “flattering” or “unflattering” was made up by someone who makes money off of us when we internalize these ideologies; that despite the way we talk about bodies in this culture, no one has a responsibility to be thin or exercise or eat healthy food; that health is cultivated inwardly—it’s something you feel and not something you look, and therefore it cannot be spotted and charted by any onlooker or tabloid or cosmetics company; that no person is obligated to look, act, or use her body in any way that isn’t decided upon entirely by her because her body belongs to her and her alone; that any time in my life that I have been truly happy I have not been worried about keeping a gym schedule; that despite how many photos of perfectly svelte women are posted online every day, documenting how sexy you are is not a requirement of modern womanhood; and on and on and on.

And yet here I am, still able to pull all of this baggage out and put it on paper. Although these thoughts and actions may read like a list of paralyzing insecurities, in reality they are so ingrained in my everyday life that they are as regular as brushing my teeth. I rarely give them a second thought—but I am trying to. I am trying to actively cast away the negative thoughts I have been taught to have about my body and my sexuality with the goal of undoing a lifetime of conditioning. But this is a constant production. Its complexity remains as the year progresses.


***


It’s finally summer again, mid-July of this year: Ariana Grande releases “God is a woman” and I have mixed feelings and a date with a new guy tonight. After dinner and drinks, we go to his house and listen to this song while we hookup on his rooftop. After a minute or so, I pull back, let his lips linger for a little. My eyes still closed, I say, It’s such great pop songwriting but I really hate it, too, revealing to him the abridged story of how my two great loves, pop music and feminist media studies, are star-crossed.

A few weeks later this boy with the rooftop loses interest in having a casual relationship with me and I am racked with questions about what I should have done differently: should I have slept with him sooner? Or waited longer? Played harder to get? Should I have taken more initiative? Did my nerves prevent me from giving him all that he wanted? Were my text messages too forward, too flirtatious? Did I not make it clear that I was interested in him? Didn’t I explicitly say that I don’t need something serious right now? Is there more I could have done to impress him, to make him lose his senses over me? Isn’t he supposed to be fawning over my body? Was there something wrong with what he saw? How come he doesn’t believe that God is a woman, and that that woman is me?

This isn’t about my inability to handle rejection or to accept when “he’s just not that into you.” I am well aware of the ways that people can be misaligned and intentions can be misinterpreted. This is about an entire culture telling me one thing about how my sexuality and my appearance empower me, build me up, make me stronger and better, and make me able to get what I want from men, while my lived experiences directly contradict this. This is about my struggle to recognize the truth of my own stories in my real life when my real life exists completely entrenched in a culture that says the opposite is true. This is about a year when I did all that I thought I was supposed to do to feel sexually empowered but still ended up feeling hallowed out and powerless over and over and over again.

If I am supposed to be as powerful as God because of my sexuality, what does it mean when I’m not? When I can’t win over the guy I really want; when the one from the party only wants me to fill some superficial void because he already has a woman in his life who is, for all intents and purposes, his significant other; when I go completely unnoticed by the one(s) in the bar(s) despite my trying so hard to preserve my waistline; when I offer my body up to a man the way I think he is supposed to want me to but still end up feeling out of control—how many more pieces of myself can I try to change in order to reach the ideal, to reach the sexual power that Ariana Grande and many, many others are singing about? How many crop tops can I buy, how much can I lighten my hair, how many laps do I have to run, how long will I be asking unhelpful employees at Lush what the fuck a toner actually does?

If you asked Ariana Grande, I assume she would say that every woman should feel powerful, that it isn’t about looking a certain way but rather feeling a certain way. But the concept of “God is a woman” (and other songs like it) requires women to use their sexual power to please men, making empowerment about being outwardly sexy—which is determined by what a woman looks like, how she performs sexually, and how much men enjoy it—rather than her personal sexuality—the way she feels about her own relationships and her own sexual desires (not to mention that same-sex couples are still nearly invisible in these messages). We are fed this vision of sexual empowerment all across pop music—this idea that we can make boys weep if we buy the right products and present ourselves in the right way and always look our best, as if men are victims of women’s beauty and sex appeal. This is the particular form of success we tell young women they should aspire to. And at what cost?

According to this ideology, I should rest assured that feminism is mainstream enough for a major pop star to release a song called “God is a woman”—which is a huge statement—and bask in my female empowerment, confident that all of the boys from the last year are drooling over my Instagram and regretting not choosing me. But when real-life women don’t feel empowered in the way that Ariana Grande says we can, it makes us look at ourselves, our own actions, our own bodies and understood flaws, our own sexual choices, and place blame inwardly. If so many of our media messages tell us that it is possible to be empowered through our sexuality, and then we find that ideology to be false in real life, we blame ourselves. We should have worked harder, dressed better, eaten less, posted more pictures, bought more products, spent more time, pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps in this incredible modern world of girl power and female sexual empowerment. Don’t you realize how lucky we are to be women today? Why do we even need feminism anymore if girl power is everywhere? Can’t you see how empowered women are? Haven’t you heard that god is a woman?

...and if you like me enough

click here to subscribe & have my feelings delivered directly to your inbox.
5 Comments

Young Woman's Trash

6/2/2018

1 Comment

 
I spend most of the last weekend in May searching online for the perfect electric tea kettle. I started drinking black tea with lemon only recently, and I like how it feels to hold a mug of it while watching a full season of Insecure in one night. It feels healthy, mature, like the next right thing for me to like, like the perfect adult thing to order in the café where I sit and write on sad Sunday afternoons. After many years of hating it, I acquired a taste for tea instantaneously one day, the same way I did with a particular glass of house red wine when I was twenty years old and studying in Italy and feeling like I was bad at everything someone like me was supposed to be good at.   

I scroll through endless electric tea kettles from Target, JCPenney, Kohl’s, and Macy’s, racking my brain to recall each and every department store I followed my mom and grandmother around when I was a little kid. Suddenly it’s after 1 a.m. on Monday and my phone has shifted to night mode and I’ve completely blocked out the Gilmore Girls episode playing to my left. As the time escapes me, the electric tea kettle decision begins to feel crucial. I know I want one that’s cute, but not too flowery or overtly feminine, and the stainless steel ones are ugly and boring. I’m afraid I’ll leave fingerprints on the clear ones, but all of the ceramic ones are too white, with too much blank space. Some have spouts so thin and intricately long that I think the water would take forever to actually pour out and I am not a particularly patient person. As I scroll, I start to picture myself having friends over for tea and walking gracefully in a long, A-line skirt and velvet, heeled Mary Janes from my counter to my table to warm up my friends’ mugs.

Most of my searching occurs in between the hours I spend packing to move into my second place in Providence, one year almost to the day after I graduated from college in Manhattan. I will remember my first house here for its ragged wooden floorboards, a living room I barely stepped foot in, an upstairs bathroom the size of Texas, and the way my displacement within it mirrored my social experience outside of it. My writing often glamorizes my life, which is probably a coping mechanism for me, but I want to be honest here and state simply that it has been a hard year. I am sure one day I’ll look back and be able to come up with a list of important lessons I learned this year, and I'll even discuss them in this space, but at the moment I am still so far in the thick of the shittiness that I can’t yet recognize its value. For now, I try to convince myself that age twenty-three has to be better than twenty-two as I cross each day off my calendar and watch my Gemini birthday slowly approach.

Back in March, I nearly committed to a graduate program in the Midwest that accepted me with a generous offer. I spent three days visiting a campus in Milwaukee, practicing for what I was almost positive would become my life in the fall. I rode the bus and kept the card to refill it later, tried to find a restaurant with a good Greek salad, made small talk with people hoping something would stick and develop into relationships resembling what I have with my college womyn friends. As I went through the motions of learning a new city, I remembered how recently I had done all of this in Providence, and how much time I’ve spent since then trying to convince myself that uprooting my life last year was the best choice I could have made.

The Milwaukee airport was small, as was Providence’s, and the cross-country trip was easier than traveling from Penn Station to Monmouth County during rush hour. I went into the handicapped stall in the bathroom, opened my suitcase on the ground, and changed from my midi skirt and heels to my favorite black jeans and Adidas sneakers. Walking to my gate, I looked down at my white shoes, still pristine. I bought them just before my trip because I wanted something comfortable to wear when I saw Lorde in concert with my best friends the following week, in Boston and Jersey (and I thought Brooklyn and Connecticut, too, until I remembered to pay rent), but mostly because Lorde wears Adidas in the music video for “Green Light.” Sometimes when you are an aspiring media scholar constantly critiquing the music you love, giving into a capitalist trend feels like a necessary form of rebellion against your own personal restraints.

There were cheese hats for sale in the airport, the ones everyone mentioned to me prior to the trip when I told them I was probably moving to Milwaukee, and I chuckled as I walked past them. I considered stopping to take a picture but decided not to. Instead, sitting at the gate, I took a picture of the bag of chocolate covered pretzels I was eating and sent it to my friends in our group message because I know Joe keeps them in his desk drawer at work at all times, and because Megan and I got in the habit of buying them on campus in between classes last year. I knew they would understand the reference and know I was thinking of them when they opened my text, and this was important to me. They asked me, of course, how the trip was going, and I told them that I had decided not to accept the offer. All of the friends I texted while sitting in the Milwaukee airport had a unanimous reaction: can we be happy? They checked in on me, made sure I was not too disappointed, and then told me how relieved they were that I was not moving even farther away from all of them. Joe said that Milwaukee had become his trigger word. My mom sent me a text gushing about how she will support any decision I make as long as I am happy. My sister Melanie, who lives around the corner from me in Providence, said that she feared influencing my decision earlier but could finally admit that she would be ecstatic if I stuck around Providence for at least a little bit longer.

I watched the sun setting in purple over the runway and listened to “Delicate” through my headphones and felt content. I caught myself beaming, basking in a feeling of satisfaction, which has become my greatest scarcity this year. I had no plan B at this point, not even another graduate school I had been accepted to, and yet, compared to how I felt a day earlier, walking around a picturesque campus on Lake Michigan that I felt obligated to join but knew I wasn’t meant to be a part of, I felt fucking liberated.

There is an expectation, I believe, for young women feminists in particular to be willing to drop everything for an opportunity to advance their careers. But I don’t believe that making a choice strictly to improve your resumé, if that choice comes at the cost of your personal life and happiness, is a truly feminist act. The unconditional support I received from my friends and family when I turned down this offer — and, it is important to note, their willingness to honestly express their feelings to me — made me confident in my decision not to move farther away from the people I love in New York or my incipient relationships in Providence. I am grateful to have people in my life who know my neuroses and still keep me around, who remind me that I am capable of giving and receiving unconditional love. The relationships that provide me with this sense of security and contentment feel worth investing in as much as — if not more than — any part of my career or education ever has.

I am not saying that I left Providence for three days and had an epiphany that made me love it here — this miniature city is still way too small for me, especially on its East Side, where I’ve been living and have spent countless hours driving around in circles, killing time, memorizing street names and shortcuts, listening to SZA’s album and feeling suffocated. (The combination of track six and Blackstone Boulevard in the late afternoon feels personal.) But it took leaving the state and returning, being tempted by a new (and promising) city, to realize that although I haven’t quite made a home for myself in Providence yet, at least I have laid a foundation. I have just begun referring to New York City as “New York” when I spent the first twenty-one years of my life referring to it exclusively as “the city,” which sort of makes me cringe, but also feels indicative of my adjustment and the work I've put into building a life here. I applied to a master’s program in Rhode Island the night my plane landed and managed to get accepted and officially commit to the program within a week.

The Sunday after my trip, I went to my sister’s house on the West Side of Providence, which she and her husband Karl had just moved into. They made an offer after I went to the open house and told them they’d be crazy not to. Whenever something goes wrong in the house, my sister blames me for convincing them to buy it, and I take the blame because I still love the place and because I am trying to get her to laugh through the stress I can see in her clenched teeth. I sat on their new couch next to my oldest sister, with their dog Zuzu cuddled between us. A few feet away from us, Karl painted their dining room walls the perfect shade of teal to match the couch, carefully avoiding the ceiling and moldings with a level of patience and precision I wish would rub off on me. The new lamp in their dining room was too short and too modern for the feel of the old house, so they needed to return it. Half the kitchen tiles were pulled up for renovation, the top of the center island not yet installed, some of their old furniture and decorations redistributed temporarily in similar but different places in their new, more spacious home, like an erroneous facsimile of their old home. Melanie made dinner — salmon and a traditional Greek salad, my favorites, because she was trying to comfort me, and she knows how to do it well — and we sat in the dining room with the smell of paint surrounding us, the window open to dry the paint letting an early April chill creep in. Despite the boxes still packed, the salmon was cooked perfectly and there was bread in the house and we used placemats and we got to choose between two different bottles of white wine to have with dinner.

I told Melanie and Karl that I feel older now, like the last few months had aged me exponentially and influenced my priorities. I told them that I was anxious to stay in one place for a while, after living with different people in different places almost every semester of college. I want to live in a home I care about, where I make my bed every day and hang pictures up in real frames. I want to make an anchovy sauce and let it simmer on my stove for hours on a Sunday afternoon, wiping bright red splatter as I try in vain to keep the white gas stove clean, and serve it to friends who will inevitably rave about my family recipe. I am sick of eating meals at my desk in my bedroom instead of at a real table, and I want to stream TV shows on an actual television, not just my laptop. I need to open a bank account I can access anywhere, unlike my (very) local Long Island credit union, and stop relying on cash back at CVS as an ATM like I have been the last five years. I want to come home to someone at night, someone who is worth coming home to, and I wish there were a quick fix for the loneliness I’ve fallen into this year.

It is still true that if I had my pick, I would be putting down roots in Manhattan, but that isn't realistic right now. Instead, I start taking a daily vitamin and clean out my car and buy a proper face wash. In an alternate dimension somewhere, a 19-year-old version of me scoffs pretentiously at my domesticity.

After dinner we sat on the teal couch and watched a favorite episode of Girls called “One Man’s Trash.” In it, 24-year-old Hannah spends two nights with a 42-year-old man she just met. She asks the man to beg her to stay with him overnight, he tells her how beautiful she is and she is surprised to hear it, they read the newspaper in the backyard and drink glasses of lemonade. He keeps a bowl of fresh fruit on the center island and steaks in the fridge and wine on the counter just for himself. As they call in sick and play house together in his Brooklyn brownstone, their encounter reveals to Hannah what her adult life could look like. At the end of the episode, Hannah says, “I came here, and I see you, and you’ve got the fruit in the bowl and the fridge with the stuff, the robe, and you’re touching me the way that — I realize I’m not different, you know? I want what everyone wants, I want what they all want, I want all the things. I just want to be happy.”  

In the last week of May I spend four days packing up everything I own and make short drives from the East Side to the West Side to load and unload as many cardboard boxes as I can fit in my tiny car at once. The boxes are left over from my sister’s move so I scribble out her handwriting and put my own labels on each one. While packing I find things from my last apartment, from my senior year, that I never used or even unpacked here. Like my quirky magnets — there’s one of Alexander Hamilton, given to me by my friend Angela on my twenty-first birthday, and a collection of small square tiles I got in Pompeii with Ancient Roman sex scenes painted on them, and a little Greek salad magnet I bought in Athens. My record player is covered in dust because I haven’t used it a single time since I lugged it here last summer from my parents’ house, insisting that since I wasn’t living in a tiny New York City apartment anymore, I could and should be able to find the space for it. I peel 4x6 photo prints off my wall, scotch tape ripping sage green paint leaving the same trail of subtle damage I have left behind in every dorm and apartment I’ve ever lived in. As I take them down, I look at each picture I deemed worthy of hanging up when I moved in and think about whether or not the same pictures will carry meaning for me in my next place, or if I need to replace them with new photos, new people, like I did each year of college. There are several pictures from graduation, like the one with Julie and Megan where I can recognize an enduring contentment in my eyes that I would give anything to have back now (and where my hair looks perfect); one from a night last February at a Lower East Side bar, in which I clutch Amelia’s head with my long arms so zealously that her face is completely covered; one taken in my old kitchen at this time last year, as we embraced Harry Styles’ album, drank a box of rosé, and talked at length about Mark Ruffalo; at a rooftop bar in Midtown celebrating my last day of my last job, as we dragged ourselves through a July humidity so thick and sloppy we felt underwater and my emotions were so heightened and so keen that I don't think they will ever again feel as intense as they did that summer; one with my family at a wedding in autumn, where I am noticeably the only one without a significant other but I put my contacts in and danced with my sisters and my nose ring looked as cool as it ever has and I felt remarkably whole and sure of myself; and a perfect elevator picture from the fall of my senior year that lives in my memory as proof that the everyday can be worth falling in love with. Next year I want to blow up these pictures, put them in frames and hang them with a hammer and nails instead of Command Strips for the first time. I want to add new pictures, too, from the life I’ve been working on here, and hopefully of what my life looks like in the next two years in graduate school.  

I’m staying at my sister's for the rest of the month until the studio apartment I want opens up. My things are only half unpacked, spread across the second floor of her house — the big, open space that made me convince her to buy it (which I’ve been referring to as “the smush room,” à la Jersey Shore) is filled with my books and clothes and bric-a-brac heedlessly wrapped in pages of The Providence Journal. I’ve got a mini fridge up here, and my own bathroom, which is perfect for me because the only health advice I happen to follow is drinking excessive amounts of cold water (my friends, especially Andrew, can attest to this, as well as my constant need to pee). Next to it is a shelf, half of which is cleared for my future tea kettle. Next to that is a bowl of fruit.
Picture
from long to manhattan to staten back to manhattan to rhode (and I still don't have a tan)

...and if you like me enough

click here to subscribe & have my feelings delivered directly to your inbox.
1 Comment
<<Previous

    Jac's Review

    Music, ​feelings, and a little bit of feminism.

    About & Contact

    words by the month

    September 2020
    July 2020
    May 2020
    January 2020
    June 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    October 2014
    August 2014
    April 2014

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • HOME
  • WRITING