a manageable-but-consistent rat problem
memory and self-documentation and crying
it’s late at night and i am currently reheating a slice (is it called a slice?) of frozen vegetable lasagna in the oven because we have no microwave. kale and zucchini and ricotta and garlic. i made it weeks ago (the first lasagna i’ve ever made in my life, i realized) because a character in that week’s episode of The L Word: Generation Q made one and it looked delicious. it was january and it was cold and i was craving comfort food and i realized it had been weeks (months?) since i had cooked myself a meal and not just food. i’d been having Food Problems for the past 6 months or so (that accidental starvation that happens when everything that normally sounds delicious starts only sounding nauseating and your body’s eating schedule is fucked beyond repair and the cold beast of anxiety is holding your stomach hostage). luckily and miraculously this issue has been almost entirely (?) solved since moving - i think some combination of new beginnings and my aunt feeding me delicious thoughtful meals at regular intervals while i crashed on her couch the week before I moved into my new place.
it also doesn’t help that for the past two years i’ve lived in a co-op with over 100 people and shared an industrial-sized kitchen with a manageable-but-consistent rat problem so my meals have mostly been out of my hands entirely, and my go-to recipe for those rare times i cooked for myself had become a (delicious) doctored box of kraft mac n cheese with pan-fried kale, broccoli, and nutritional yeast.
three weeks ago was my first time grocery shopping for myself, just myself, since before covid. it’s a surprisingly relaxing, self-esteem-building activity that i’ve come to love. before i moved into co-ops in austin, i lived in a quiet duplex in the hyde park neighborhood and did my grocery shopping in the middle of the night at the 24-hr heb (god i miss heb) along with dozens of other college students who had similarly irregular sleeping habits, while an audiobook or podcast played through my earbuds. here i roll a squeaky granny cart down the street to one of the 5 or so little supermarkets near me (probably also listening to an audiobook: right now it’s alone with you in the ether) carefully calculating and picking out which fresh fruits and vegetables i’m going to buy this week (never berries) because everything is expensive here.
i’m living now in the attic of a beautiful old house with no smoke alarms in brooklyn. absolutely none of the city skyline is even close to visible from my (extremely residential) street. when i walk around outside it feels like i’m in buffalo. all of the houses have big porches and little gates and small driveways. there’s only a few obnoxious high-rises nearby, as opposed to the dozens of them everywhere else in the city. it’s the last stop on our train line and it’s a safe bet that it’ll take an hour of commuting time to get anywhere in mid-upper manhattan. or anywhere in brooklyn not directly on my train line. my rampantly-inaccurate time management skills are being tested. i found my two roommates and our sun-drenched, spacious, two-story, affordable (actually) apartment in a facebook group called “Young Females - New York City, NY - Apartments, Sublets, Roommates” two days before i was planning to move across the country from austin via a car stuffed with all of my belongings carefully arranged around my bicycle in the backseat of my toyota-corolla with my sibling. we spent 3 days driving and stopped along the way in nashville and d.c. we only got into 3 arguments. in a fortunate stroke of luck, waiting to secure my housing until a week before i moved worked out because i love my roommates and i love the house and i love my screen-less windows and slanted walls and the rays of orange light i get in the morning and i love kiwi (my roommate’s adorable cat) and i even love the buffer time an hour of personal-yet-communal time on the train allows for before every big social interaction.
other miraculous things that have happened since i moved to new york (that sentence still feels fake): i lost my wallet. on my first lunch break of my first day of work while walking through the union square market a street photographer asked to take a photo of me. i found a free ergonomic kneeling chair (clean! leather!) on a stoop while walking my aunt’s dog in red hook by the ikea - i’d been scouring facebook marketplace for one for weeks to no avail. a ridiculously beautiful man with face tattoos stopped me on the street at 6pm while i was running an hour late for a date and claimed he could introduce me to ice spice. i later find out he’s a legitimately famous model who probably actually had the means to (i only learned who ice spice was a couple weeks ago when my 18 year old sibling clowned on me for not recognizing a billboard of her in times square). sadly i don’t think the offer’s still on the table. yesterday i went to my first ever book signing, because an artist i’ve been a fan of for years (liana finck, the incredible graphic novelist and cartoonist) happened to be doing a pop-up across the street from my work, at the exact time that i got off.
i walked into the store alone at 6pm, no idea what to expect, but quickly saw myself reflected in the dozens of other mostly young-women milling about aimlessly (there were surprisingly few of us there on time). liana was late. a slim man in his late 40’s wearing a mustard sweater with glasses and a single gold hoop earring told us. it was her birthday. when she arrived (i had to google what she looked like - i realized i had never seen a photo of her) we all sang her a mellow happy birthday. a mom with a nose piercing and a semi-young baby in a sling attached to her overalls stood next to me. she was alone, too (except for the baby i guess, but do they count?). the baby kept asking for bananas, as the woman palmed through the folder of prints. it kept saying that word, banana. she talked to it like an adult i don’t think any of the prints have bananas on them. the baby was pacified - it had been listened to and taken seriously. i thought - now that’s a decently appealing example of motherhood. not something i think very often.
i decided to buy a book (they were only $20) instead of an original print ($40, a bit out of my price-range), and waited in line for my turn to look into the author’s eyes and have her full attention for the 2 minutes it took for me to tell her my name and her to write it. when the time came, nervous, i asked her if she had any big plans for her birthday. she responded kindly but i didn’t hear her - i was too busy watching starstruck as she sketched my name and a doodle of a small dog in her trademark scribble style across the first page of my book. her book. what must she be feeling. anything? i thanked her (hoping she could tell how much i really meant it) and walked back through the store. i’d tried to stick-n-poke one of her cartoons onto myself once, and still planned to one day (once i had more practice and could actually do it justice). there was a table with complimentary plastic glasses of wine and hot-dog gummy candies by the front, that hadn’t been there when i’d shown up. i took one and slipped out the door into the evening, ripping into the high fructose corn syrup hot dog with my teeth as i crossed union square. i wrapped my scarf around my neck (another lucky stoop find - no i did not unfortunately wash it) and looked at the pigeons, the people, the cars, the buildings. not even any music playing in my earbuds yet, the contentment i felt in that moment. enchanted by the city, by the subway system, by life.
flash forward, and an hour later i emerge from the underground train station near my house with my heart welled up in my throat and barely-there tears pooling in my eyes. the feeling where you want so desperately to be able to cry to feel that release but nothing is coming out. crying has been unusually difficult lately (read: since i started taking antidepressants again). tears used to flow so freely for me. it’s the first symptom i noticed - it’s like my insides are dehydrated, though i’ve been drinking more water than ever before. men have told me in the past something similar to this feeling, that they feel sad sometimes but that they haven’t actually cried in years. i’m always in disbelief - how could anyone be so disconnected from the physicality of their emotions (really, years?) when i feel like i am feeling mine all of the time. the body demands to be listened to. but it’s more complicated than that, i’ve learned. one friend told me they stand in a dark shower to let out that not-crying-but-needing-to-cry feeling. i find the only thing that sometimes works is being completely alone and journaling. maybe also listening to angel olsen’s endgame. anyways - for reasons REDACTED i found myself in this situation.
but then an hour later again, i was sitting on my living room floor belly-laughing with my roommates and my roommate’s gf, eating cauliflower tacos and watching the new peacock original poker face while an elderly beagle slept on my lap. sadie, my roommate’s gf’s dog who visits frequently. her small paws moved slightly, eyes tightly closed. she was dreaming about something.
“maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying. maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact.”
-heather christle, the crying book*
*one of my 3 favorite books.
i’ve been having extremely vivid dreams recently. none of them bad, just, vivid. waking up in a haze unsure what exactly is real and what’s imaginary. stories constructed after the fact. though i’m a person who regularly snoozes my alarm every 7 minutes while in a sleepy haze for multiple hours, so take that as you will.
earlier today i retraced the steps of one of my previous selves, walking along the highline in chelsea. specifically i stood on a platform where a year ago i dropped my lens cap onto the train tracks below, and (at the dissuasion of the person i was with at the time) i climbed precariously down to grab it. something to prove. there used to be a big mural on the wall there of a woman wearing a shirt that said “i am not interested in competing with anyone, i hope we all make it”. it had meant a lot to me when i first saw it, last january, on that platform. today when i stood on that platform i saw it had been replaced with a generic pink millennial-style-design mural of random iconography i can’t remember. it was negative five degrees today with the windchill. as i kept walking i passed a window with a childrens’ fencing class going on inside, recorded a voice memo to a friend, and quickly replaced my hands in my pockets before they froze off. by the time i ducked inside chelsea market i couldn’t feel the skin on my face.
this chilly little walk made me think about how places and locations hold meaning for me, hold memory. for so long (read: 5 years) i lived in a city haunted by the neutral and non-neutral ghosts of a million different past versions of me. you split into so many different versions of yourself between the ages of 18 and 23. it is refreshing to be in a place where there’s only one past version of myself walking around. only new mistakes to make here.
i said a while ago to someone that journaling wasn’t something i felt proud of doing anymore, just something that i felt like i needed to do. i’ve been journaling every few days, sometimes daily, in an app called day one (available in phone format or desktop format) since november 2019. i’m a die-hard fan of the company, and even pay $2.92 a month to sync my phone and desktop entries (since an unfortunate incident last halloween when my phone randomly died and i lost half my entries forever). i know typing isn’t as in-vogue as old-fashioned handwriting, but it makes it easier to maintain consistency and more accessible imo. go ahead and give it a try - if only so that my ex isn’t the only other person i know who uses it and i can stop thinking that that means we’re supposed to be together.
before day one, i’d journaled every few weeks/months in a variety of physical diaries since elementary school. i’ve always been obsessed with preserving my memories, but more than that, preserving the version that i am at any given point in time. all of the different versions of me are looking at the same moon. i place so much value on that preservation, that documentation, possibly the most value out of everything. more value than being happy, for sure. but simultaneously in this pursuit of accurate self-portrayal i know it’s impossible to view oneself completely accurately: bias-less, ego-less. the ego never really dies (as everyone learns the first time they do psychedelics). everything, our perception of everything, is just a story we tell ourselves, in which we are the center of attention. no one can ever really be in someone else’s head. thoughts i obsess over when i’m REDACTED and there’s a candle burning and a cold cup of milk tea i forgot to drink next to me and radiator hospital is playing and there’s a dirty plate that used to have a slice of re-heated lasagna on it beside me, etc.
so - all that to say i don’t think that i have a goal of any kind with this, except to feel proud of myself for writing something again, something that’s not quite a journal, but almost is. the dirty faucet analogy. trying to stop being so paralyzed by the illusive contradictory pursuit of perfection. vague aspirations for future me to work towards, etc.
anyway here’s a scribble of some hands:
