i just don't know where i can be found

i'm looking at job openings and i can already feel my chest tighten prematurely at the thought of meeting new people

i looked at xxx's and xxxxxx's tumblrs from when they were 21/22 and they were exactly the way i am at this very moment, idealistic and excited and eager to overshare, but it's still so them, the essence of them i mean, and it got me thinking about how someday i'll be 27 and the virtual world i live in, this safe space i've always had, will be vastly different and i'll be different too

i don't know how i feel about that

i'm scared i'll stop being this vocal about the things i love and i'm scared i'll stop caring about them altogether

a couple weeks ago i found out about an artist called bunny rogers and she wrote this

and like same

maybe i should get a job at phoenix publishing house because it's so close by and maybe i'll get a meghan daum/joanna rakoff-esque essay out of it

i keep reminding myself that christina kelly, definitive sassy magazine writer and ellegirl editor-in-chief, started out at footwear news

i'm about to watch and cry to titanic for the second night in a row

every so often i become obsessed with the histories of shipwrecks

2008 was the year i started becoming who i am now and i think i've always used it to measure the passage of time and this year it hit me just how short, and just how long, a decade actually is

in fact we're three years away from a whole new decade think about that

an afterword on emotional nakedness

After my last post I realized it marks the first time I’ve written about me and this boy in our twenties. “It’s so weird,” I said to Ella, when I was asking for her opinion on the piece. “We met when we were fourteen.”

In my words and hazy recollections we’d been frozen in time, rudderless teenagers doomed to make the same mistakes and have the same stilted conversations, never reaching a resolution of any sort. We were young adult fiction. He was always going to be the way I knew him: messy and insightful and naive and sweet and distant. His stepmother picked him up after school and he never took notes on homework so I had to remind him over Yahoo! Messenger. He owned a Zune and he wanted to borrow my Juno and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist DVDs. He started dating a girl over text messages and broke up with her (also over text messages) after a month. He was always taking a break from love, and he was always in love with somebody else. One day, we were going to open an all-ages music club.

I was eighteen when I’d last seen him. He wasn’t around for when I sank into depression, or when I got my first job and got published, or when I moved away from the only town I’d ever known as home. I don’t know anything about him or his life now, either. So to have found us there, four years later—eight years later, even—I was struck by the starkness. We’ve been coming of age completely independently from one another. We’ve reached the aftermath. We’re old enough to have had sex, to pay taxes, to live on our own. (Technically, of course.)

It reminded me of a conversation we had the summer before we became juniors in high school, a summer of review classes and college applications. I was so sure I’d had my life mapped out, but he was still having trouble seeing where he was going from there. His attitude about the whole thing was decidedly noncommittal and blasé. At one point he said he wanted to be a pilot. Or maybe a musician, who knew. “You don’t give a flying fuck about it,” I said to him, not a question. I wanted him to give a fuck. He told me, “Someday I will.”

I’m pretty sure that someday has come and gone. I’m pretty sure I missed it.

Because I’m a sucker, I romanticized the whole idea of it, I think. I imagined that I could understand what the characters in those self-indulgent movies about fumbling your way through adulthood and relationships from your past and present (About Alex, Celeste and Jesse Forever, etc.) are going through. I read essays from Chloe Caldwell and Melissa Broder and re-read All This Has Nothing to Do with Me and Mickey with an entirely new comprehension level. I even made a god damn playlist.

Which, again, is really new and really weird. I used to be able to appreciate these things as an outsider. I guess I just didn’t realize I’d be able to relate to them so soon, even in the most basic, fleeting sense. I’m in a brand new demographic and my life’s starting to reflect that.

A lot of my friends told me how much my moment of anti-clarity resonated with them and their own experiences, even if they differ in the specifics. I poke fun (and cringe) at the idea of “#relatable reads” and hugot culture, but there’s still really something about the universality of certain situations and emotions: “I get that.” I think that’s what I was trying to do, too, looking for solace and new perspectives in the creative work of other people.

From the Olena Kalytiak Davis poem “Kafka and Milena About to Meet in Vienna”:

when i last saw you
i handed you a poem in which you were already dead

when i last saw you
you misunderstood what i hadn’t yet just said 

when i last saw you
there was a blanket over my head
you said you knew where i lived 

the threshold and the backward glance
i am glad you aren’t here now

but (in the margins) i am also sad

not your face

only the way you walked away
through the tables in the café

From “Business, Yeah” by The Preatures:

I saw you on the street today, you were
looking worse off than I remember
When I held you in my hands, but man,
my hands didn’t understand what they were holding
And now I, I know you live it
I see it you live it
For me it’s just business
...
Do you walk around talking to me? Do you
still get that pain in your chest?
Does it make you nervous?

You might be thinking: “If you’re so over him, how are you still writing about him this way?” I don’t think it’s something so simply put. I’m still kicking myself over the way everything unfolded, but I don’t really want to go back in time and do it over. There are so many things I’ll never know for sure, but I’m holding on to the things I have found to be true. (Like the fact that he’s kept the wrong people around.) My need to get it all out is more about the circumstances than it is about a particular person.

 And I might have used him just to get some creative exploitation out of it.

Okay, okay, I definitely did.

These songs and books are showing me that I’m not alone in my momentary lapses of judgment and emotion and that I’m not being defensive. You don’t have to want something to miss it.

When I finished that essay I found that I still don’t write about anyone the way I write about him. That doesn’t mean anything, though, because everyone I’ve had a crush on Post-Him has been an acquaintance at best. Sometimes I wonder if I write about him differently, or if he would recognize himself at all in my paragraphs and verses. Thing is, I don’t quite think I even do anymore, myself.

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