I saw you last night and got that old feeling

Though sometimes you cross my mind from time to time, 

I don’t think that the stars are ours to have.

– Very Truly Yours, “Things You Used to Say”

As I left the house I saw that Melissa Broder, as her So Sad Today persona, had tweeted, “got over you but then saw you again.” I put my phone back in my pocket and tried not to view it as a sign.

I was in the middle of asking myself whether I really wanted to break my streak of not seeing you, not being around you, and not talking to you. It had been three years, five months, two weeks, and six days. (Approximately.) It was such a good run—I didn’t want to ruin that.

I didn’t particularly want to return to our high school after five years just to see an amateur production of Cinderella, either. I’d convinced myself that I was going for completely different reasons than having seen your name on the list of people attending. It was a fundraiser. It was an excuse to have a night out with friends; at least, the very, very few I’ve kept in touch with. I didn’t have anything better to do, except I did.

I had put on my favorite denim jacket and worn dark matte lipstick. (Not for you.) I had slicked on some eyeliner. (Not for you.) I had brushed my hair and made sure my neck smelled like peaches and apricots. (Not for you.)

During the play I sneak-studied for my English history exam and felt weird about familiarity and change, or lack thereof. When it was over I stood back, watched the crowd, and made myself invisible. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder for you.

You weren’t there, anyway.

Not until the very last minute, when I spotted the jacket that let people know you were going to medical school. You stood among your classmates from our senior class, fresh off a late lecture, I guessed. I could only see you from the back, but the second my eyes landed on you, I knew. You were already walking away.

“His hair is ridiculous,” I told Alyssa, when the doors closed behind you. (It is. Look at yourself. But whatever.) 

We ended up having dinner in the same restaurant across the street—it had been an entirely different place before we graduated. Separate tables, of course. You were upstairs, because there were probably twenty of you in your group, and downstairs I was relieved, because the room definitely would’ve been too small for the both of us. (Not to mention two of your ex-girlfriends.)

When the plates were cleared and the bill was paid I sat outside with my friends while they smoked. And because I’m being honest, here: I didn’t want to go without seeing you and saying hi.

Obviously, because history is doomed to repeat itself, I never got to. We always were awful at keeping up with each other, even within the same space, even at the right time. Looking back, it’s funny to me that it’s how things turned out. Like, was it ever going to be anything else? 

My back was turned to the restaurant entrance, so when Camille and Alyssa waved to someone leaving, I didn’t see who it was until it was too late. You were in a hurry, fishing your car keys out of your pocket, your glasses threatening to fall off your face. I watched you get into your car—now I’ll flinch every time I pass a black sedan. You wear glasses, I thought. You can drive, I thought. We’re not sixteen anymore, I thought, we’re twenty-two. You walked right past me, I thought.

You drove away. Gone again until who knows when. Oblivious as ever. Makoto Shinkai would be proud.

The girls and I took an Uber, and I didn’t care that the driver could hear me calling you an asshole. They dropped me off along Roosevelt, and my mind was still on you as I bought a cake from a family bakery and rode the jeepney home.

I wanted to leave you a voicemail. Isn’t that ridiculous? I wanted to call you and have your prerecorded message play and probably feel my breath hitch when I hear your voice and tell you everything in one long and nervous tirade after the beep. I wanted to confess. If only for the act itself, nothing more. I wanted to be reckless and loud and unapologetic.

But I couldn’t, because we don’t leave voicemails. And because I don’t have your number. So I settled for the next best thing, which was to send you a message request on Messenger (because we’re not Facebook friends, and fuck me if I sent you a friend request). I thought twice about adding an exclamation point. My finger hovered shakily over the little blue arrow as I told myself what a bad idea this was. My entire life was a bad idea.

I hit send.  

I said: Hey! This is probably gonna sound stupid, but I saw you tonight and we didn’t get to say hi and for some reason that bothered me. So. Hi, belatedly. Hope you’re well.

I immediately muted notifications.

I tweeted about what I’d done.

I went to check Alyssa and Camille’s messages, after which technology decided to betray me and let me know that you’d accepted the request and replied. The preview for your message flashed on the screen: you should’ve tapped me…

Shit. Shitshitshit. I locked my phone and put it away. I didn’t check it again until I was home, practically choking on the chocolate chiffon I’d bought.

You said: FIEL!! where did you see me? in the auditorium?

You said: Hello!! Long time no talk!

You said: hahaha

You said: you should’ve tapped me or something haha

I wanted to say: I’m on my period and I’m lonely and this irrational sentimental bullshit has nothing to do with you.

I wanted to say: You still owe me a mix CD.

I wanted to say: Do you remember when I told you I was starting to doubt the God you and I grew up with? “Don’t waver,” you said. I’m sorry. I don’t believe in any gods now, especially not the ones that take the shape of humans. I believe in a movement that’s bigger than all of us, and I believe that it exists out there in the greater scope of the Universe. Does that make any sense?

I wanted to say: You missed out. I was pretty.

In the end all I said was: It was nice seeing you.

Neither of us said anything after that.

We’re never going to get any closure, are we? Almost-relationships are the weirdest. Maybe there’s really just nothing to close. 

There have now been two nights in my life that involve booze, cheap cake, and a boy, blissfully unwitting. Sadness, also, but. There’s this strangest hyper-awareness that the earth is moving. I’ll live.

I was over you. I saw you again, and I still fucking am.

(All I ask is, this better not be a recurring theme in my life.)  

viewer discretion is (not) advised

I found out about Alejandro Amenábar’s 1996 feature debut Thesis on the same list of 1990s horror movies that led me to Perfect Blue. I have to say, the person who wrote that best-of list just gets me—or, more likely, they just have great taste—because it became one of my favorite movies not even a quarter of the way in. 

The Spanish thriller centers on Ángela, a film student who’s studying violence in cinema for her thesis. Her search for material to analyze brings her to Chema, a scruffy classmate with an almost unhealthy fixation on anything gory and NSFL, and the extensive video collection to prove it. While watching a movie in his apartment (practically decorated like a horror museum), Ángela wonders aloud about the idea of real violence caught on tape. (Un)lucky for her, she gets her answer: The next morning, she finds her thesis adviser’s body in the viewing room of the university’s video archives, and what killed him was a heart attack caused by a snuff film hidden in the collection. The tape depicts the brutal torture and killing of Vanessa, a girl from her class who’d gone missing two years ago. 

To further complicate things, Ángela meets and finds herself helplessly drawn to Bosco, a handsome and aggressive young man who claims to have known Vanessa—and who may or may not have had a hand in her disappearance. Desperate, terrified, and curious, Ángela enlists Chema to help her investigate the recorded murder, and soon uncovers a mystery that’s bigger and more sadistic than she ever imagined. And try as she might, she can’t look away. 

Mmm, jelly doughnuts.

I don’t know how easily perceptible this is about me, but I’m the kind of person who has a favorite serial killer. (It’s Jeffrey Dahmer.) Which is horrible, I know. But my interest is purely from a true-crime, psychological perspective… All right. Maybe I have more in common with Ángela than I thought. Point is, there is nothing out there quite like Thesis, with its balance of academia, snuff films, Nancy Drew-type sleuthing but better, dangerous boys, and Hitchcockian intrigue and paranoia, complete with a tense but highly subdued chase scene that turns the tables on our heroine. Nothing out there that’s as sharp or as subtle and surprisingly sensitive. There’s even a light spatter of humor throughout. 

Basically everything I want to say re: this movie is already in this excellent (spoiler-heavy!) discussion on Girl Meets Freak, a super nifty horror film blog that sadly hasn’t been updated in around two years. So many great points and witty observations about things that I barely even noticed. (My only qualm is: How could they not find Chema, played by a 21-year-old Fele Martínez, easy on the eyes?! I told my cousin this and she vehemently sided with me.) 

Still, there are a few more things I want to rave about.

Aside from incredibly nuanced performances from the leads (Martínez is joined by Ana Torrent and Eduardo Noriega), Thesis finds strength in layered characters with varying degrees of grace, magnetism, and moral ambiguity. There’s Ángela’s true relationship with violence, Chema’s exploitation obsession and whether or not he’s taken it a step too far, and whatever the hell Basco’s deal is. Such characterizations kept me guessing and made the twists and turns of the plot fresh instead of having them come across as stale or tiresome. The mystery itself is tightly written and very clever, with relevant clues and secret hideouts and all these great, horrifying details.The film’s two-hour runtime hardly drags, and it’s destined for multiple rapt rewatch sessions because it’s like there’s always something new to discover about it after every viewing. 

Nylon Private Icon material.

Finally, I adore how it had a very clean look to it that almost appeared to make use of a predominantly pastel (or at least light) palette. It just worked so well. I’m obsessed with the production design—from the My Own Private Idaho poster and little plants in Ángela’s pale pink room to Chema’s creepy/impressive nightmare lair with tons of horror paraphernalia and “REDRUM” spray-painted on the wall. Some literary references and callbacks made it sweet. (Really!) There’s also Ángela’s wardrobe, a fine, ultra-covetable example of the fashion of the decade. Very 1996. (Come to think of it, Chema and Basco, in their own very distinct ways, weren’t slacking in the dress-sense department, either.) 

Which, all in all, adds up to the fact that I’m super glad Thesis exists, and that it was made the way it was, when it was. How I was able to live twenty-one years without it is one case I’ll never solve. 

Unceremoniously

Or, This is why we stopped speaking

I.

I think you got tired of always having to initiate things. (I don’t blame you.) I could never get my nerves to calm down enough to do it myself. You’d pick me out of a crowd and let me know you’ve seen me. Two-finger salutes, references to our late night IMs. And I loved you for that, I did.

It was never that I was pretending not to see you—I was pretending not to exist.

II.

I lied and turned down your invitation to go to your band’s show because I knew I didn’t belong.

III.

There was so much left unsaid between us and it felt cheap to me, trying to cram them all into one word mumbled in passing.

Your name—three letters, four—had never been so heavy.

IV.

You kept telling my friends you missed me and not doing anything about it.

V.

And I don’t know if you know this, but I tried. You were never there. It made me feel strange, asking for you at lunch, afraid people would see through me.

“Have you seen him?” They hadn’t.

I doubt anyone ever really knew we had...this. Sometimes I relished it, that we had some secret togetherness. But every time I sought you out and asked where you were it made me feel small and discombobulated.

VI.

You might have been trying to tell me something once. And I got ready for a confrontation, to try the truth out for a change. But then my overthinking got the better of me, and I froze and walked away.

You didn’t follow.

Maybe I did ruin everything.

VII.

Nobody actually saw through me those days, I’m almost certain. But when we ran into each other in the hall, you acted like you did. I just followed suit. Or maybe it was a mutual decision we didn’t even realize we were making.

God, I’ll never know.

VIII.

I used to think I was sad for us, and for a while, this might have been true. I still get sad thinking about it, if I’m being honest. But I don’t think it’s about you or me anymore. I feel for people, how we drift in and out of each other’s lives, how it just happens. How it hurts, and how it stops hurting.

The truth is, it stopped hurting for me long ago, but what I got stuck with is this emptiness I can’t define that’s lost its shape. Sometimes the emptiness looks like you. But the pining never does.

do-over

let’s do this again
play it again
go dancing again
sing to me again
hold me again
ask me again
have me again
write me again
read me again
tell me again—

      (i promise i’ll 
      say it back this time)

see me again
see me again
see me again

salt and heat and memory

An admission: I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump. It’s been a frustrating few years.

As much as I want to say that I don’t know what brought it about, I’m pretty sure the reasons are clear as day. I got busy with Elision and school. I got sad. Ridiculous as it sounds, I got an iPad—which, let’s be honest, did kind of play a major role in fucking up my attention span. 

The point is, I’ve always been a book person. But for quite a while I was only ever able to devour and love books in theory, and the thought of actually getting through them without skimming and finishing them became a far off improbability. I had a handful of starts and stops, and then I just stopped kidding myself altogether. 

This week I finished Cath Crowley’s Words in Deep Blue.  

And now, after what feels like a lifetime of not being able to write about what I’ve been reading, here’s me gushing about it. 

Three years ago, the world was ending. At least, the students of Gracetown High, inspired by Ray Bradbury, were pretending it was. Rachel was spending her last night in town. She was leaving a love letter in her best friend Henry’s favorite book and waiting for him to call. 

But that’s all in the past. Before Henry broke her heart and she stopped responding to his letters. Before she failed Year 12. Before she lost her brother Cal to the sea and everything she’s ever known stopped making sense.

Almost a year after Cal’s death, Rachel moves back to Gracetown to live with her aunt and work at Howling Books, the secondhand bookshop owned by Henry’s family, even though she’d rather be anywhere else. Henry is there all the time. He works there. He lives there. And these days all he does is mope because his girlfriend dumped him and he just voted to sell the bookstore, even though he loves it, because he knows it’s the practical choice. 

Neither of them is sure about the future. But their days at the bookstore, with the written and unwritten histories that surround them, see them begin to reconnect and find hope—on dog-eared pages and beyond.

I barely remember how I found out about this, but I knew I’d adore it immediately. Not only because I had read the author’s Graffiti Moon a few years ago, but also because the blurb promised me everything I’ve ever loved reading about—unrequited crushes on friends you’ve known forever; estrangement from said friends that only adds to the tension; miscommunication and grand, anguished declarations of affection; grief; and bargain bookstores—thrown together into one love story. And before you mistake me for a sap (which I am), it says “a love story” right there on the cover. It was such a simple but unprecedented premise, I couldn’t help but fall for it.

So, it might’ve taken me more than a couple of days to finish this and I’m still not back to my glory days, but I think it’s finally taken me back on a real literature kick again. I think I just needed to get to a healthier mental state for it. I was patient with the book and I held back the urge to skim far ahead and check the last page (bad habit) because I was super invested and glad to be experiencing it. Also, it’s about people and their relationship/s with books, so I couldn’t have chosen a better comeback pick!

That said, it felt very good to immerse myself in its universe. The novel, told from both Rachel’s and Henry’s perspectives, takes place in a small Australian town in the summer. However, there are also a few scenes on the beach because, among other reasons, Rachel’s home away from Gracetown is located right by the ocean. Personally, I’ve been away from the water for quite some time, and it was fun to live vicariously through and seemingly within the nice little fictional world Cath Crowley has built. You can practically breathe in the briny air and feel the splash of the waves.

Of course, most of the plot unfolds in and around Howling Books. Again, I loved the idea (and execution) of a secondhand bookshop as a setting. In one of Henry’s chapters, he says that the appeal of secondhand books comes from the way they can be full of mysteries, and I completely get what he means. When I buy previously owned books, especially copies that have been around as far back as the 1960s or even the 1940s, I always get to thinking a lot about all the sediments of past lives they carry with them. Who were the owners, to whom my life is now weirdly bound in the smallest yet most amazing way? What became of them, and were they anything like me? How far have these books traveled, and what sorts of events did they get to watch unfold?

Sometimes they’d leave clues. A personal bookmark, notes and highlighted quotes right on the pages, inscriptions on the title page that read To Katie, on your graduation. Love, Dad. (Katie, you heartless bitch, throwing away a present and a perfectly good book! Love, Fiel) Which brings us to the Letter Library, Howling Books’s claim to fame. It’s an entire section of books that aren’t for sale; instead, customers are invited to write on them and leave notes in them. It’s such a romantic notion, people leaving a mark in books that have left a mark in them. Samples from the Letter Library are interspersed between chapters, and they're mostly letters exchanged between the characters that are very telling of character and relationship development. It’s a charming and actually useful touch to the narrative. 

Don’t laugh, but sometimes I’d forget that Rachel and Henry were fictional. They were painfully real, flawed people with distinct voices and ways of looking at life—she from a scientific viewpoint and he with a more literary take. I have nothing but love for Rachel, who hides her sadness in deadpan snark and a lot of introspection, and is just effortlessly cool, insightful, and level-headed. She still wants to dive and swim across the world despite her newly conflicted feelings about large bodies of water. She’s too sensible to believe in ghosts or time travel or transmigration, but she’s still the kind of person who wants to believe, anyway. Henry, on the other hand...man, I don’t know if I want to throw a book at him or write poetry about him. He makes some truly questionable and immature decisions and pines over a girl who clearly doesn’t deserve him, but at the end of the day he’s a kind, intelligent boy who genuinely cares about the people in his life, lives for literature and the shop, and is prone to goofy self-deprecation. 

The minor characters are all very rich and endearing, and they all have their own unique way of loving books, but I particularly grew fond of George, Henry’s sister. She gets shit for being a “freak” at school and has turned to a moody, tough-girl, fuck-off exterior as a defense mechanism, but she’s really a softie who loves reading science fiction with her cat and isn’t afraid of being herself in general. There’s a beautiful side plot involving her and an anonymous pen pal/secret admirer that just took my breath away.  

The novel wears its subtitle “a love story” with a quiet confidence that, holy shit, delivers. Rachel has loved Henry like that for years, and she leaves his life feeling jilted because she thinks he’s ignored her bold, fuck-it attempt at making a move, finally. Henry, on the other hand, has no idea  why Rachel ended their friendship and forgot all about him—all he knows is that it hurt and that she’s come back “rude and gorgeous.” Three years of distance and change is a long time. Rachel returns feeling like she’s gotten over Henry, and Henry’s as clueless as ever, so they both get to experience the deliciously slow process, built up through a series of swoon-inducing moments, of realizing that they’re actually (still) in love (all along). 

There’s a kind of warm and fuzzy unresolved sexual tension going on between them, amplified by interactions that range from funny to stilted to pining to intimate. Part of it’s because they’re actually great at being friends; they know everything about each other. And yet, in some ways, they don’t. And their discoveries are sweet and tender and promising. It’s all in the details. For example, Henry absentmindedly reaches out to touch Rachel’s bathing suit strap when he notices it peeking out from under her dress. It never becomes super explicit, but the writing more than makes up for it. See:

‘You’re very neat,’ Henry says, looking at my handwriting, and it feels like he’s said something sexy.
‘You’re very messy,’ I say.
‘And yet, I’m the one who passed Year 12,’ he says.
‘You’re very annoying,’ I say, smiling at him.
‘You’re very sexy,’ he says, like it just came out and he had no control over it.
‘So are you,’ I say.
‘It’s not the way I’m usually described,’ he says.
‘Tonight feels sort of unusual,’ I say.

I mean...?! See also: “You owe me an apocalypse,” falling asleep together right inside the bookstore reading T.S. Eliot, “You smell of apples.” / “Don’t smell me, Henry,” unbuttoning someone slowly, etc. 

This is also a novel of grief, and it’s handled in a way that poignantly captures what real grief feels like. Sometimes it’s like it’s not there, but it’s ever-present, a current surging even when you don’t sense it. Sometimes you just pretend it isn’t. Rachel’s lament that her brother’s life ended up as a set of boxes collecting his abandoned belongings is soul-crushing, but through her eyes, we get to know Cal, and mourn him, and keep him alive.

The way Cath Crowley ties sentences together is just something else. So wonderful. Sometimes I get too wrapped up to highlight my favorite passages, but with Words in Deep Blue I couldn’t help it—the lines and paragraphs are so pretty or painful or funny or full of wisdom or #relatable or real or all of the above that I needed to remember them and keep them. There’s not a lot of flourish to them, very tell-it-like-it-is, but they sound incredibly nice. I also love that she seamlessly added a lot of references to literature and the theories of time and explored themes of family, gender and sex positivity, and diversity.

I cried. I mean, obviously, I cried. I cried at the letters and the way some of it turned out because all of these characters are facing many different kinds of loss and the effects of growing up or growing older. But, again, there’s a lot of hope and tomorrows to go around, and it brings people together. It’s a brighter kind of realism that reminded me of Sing Street. Life’s shit, but you have to swim against the tide or with it, whatever, something like that. 

I don’t think I’d ever had the pleasure of being able to read the exact book that my sensibilities were calling for at a specific point in my life, until Words in Deep Blue came around. It was so lovely I didn’t want it to end. I almost want to un-read it just so I can experience it all again for the first time. It was completely in sync with me and it’s both unfair and perfect that there will never be anything like it. I’m certain that it will remain with me the way the books in the Letter Library stay with the people who’ve written in them—the way only the best books can and do.