notes #20
youth & warm weather, zero is an even number, World Book Encyclopediae (2007)
When the salt rim melts into the margarita and becomes a kind of alcoholic Gatorade
My high school boyfriend who was not my boyfriend played Drake while he let me touch him, Family Guy muted on the flat screen in his bedroom. Love used to smell like mildewed laundry and month-old bong water to me. He liked to mix tobacco with his shake and rip bong like a suicide so I could stroke his hair while the world lurched behind his eyelids. He forgot to pay me back for the Plan B. I loved him so much it made me sick, low-grade fevers every time he didn’t text me back.
nostalgia-borne romance of known capacities & past containments. we want to leave the cage of modernity but do so by finding old cages—we can't conceive of a life fully free
I forget zero is an even number, I forget zero is even a number the way white is a color (or the potential of all of them), maybe zero is the same way
in for the summer:
temporary tattoos (NOT minimalist. NOT lisa says gah core)
falling out of coconut tree
the ferry (evergreen) (especially staten island at 2:00 AM, of course)
tiki bars
uncommon marsupials (numbats, kowaris, bandicoots
World Book Encyclopedias (2007)
kitchenaid stand mixer pasta attachment
cafe correttos
Central Park pedal boats
2010s rave eye rhinestones
Silly Bandz tan lines
out for the summer:
SAUCED style natural wine bars (natural wine itself is an essential however)
overuse of antibiotics
espresso martinis
alcoholic seltzers (especially/mostly white claw, high noon, etc)
being “real” and “no bullshit”
threads on twitter
all white sneakers, if you can believe it
I ordered a sandwich and sat at the bar to wait, crossing and uncrossing my legs, unable to get into a comfortable position. I felt ugly and small in a nonliteral sense, small in the sense that I was unimportant and pathetic and not made of much anything spectacular. My hair was greasy at the top and held back by two bows that now felt ridiculous pinned to my head. I read my book and worried someone might approach me, then felt foolish for thinking anyone would ever even want to do such a thing. I was hungry but didn’t look forward to eating anything, knowing that I might cry in my apartment while eating which would make me feel base and animalistic—and not animalistic in a good way, a pleasurable way, but animalistic like a cat eating its own fresh sick.
No feeling more vulnerable, tender than that of a breast exposed beside the fallen shoulder of a bathrobe
I’ve always had the sensation that I’m lagging a year or two behind my sense of self—im always left panting trying to keep up with an invisible idea that I’m just not quite grasping until suddenly, there it is, but it’s moved on now, im licking fumes and getting hungry for whatever it is I know I’ll never reach
Dawn was the Secretary of the Tennis Club, no more though, no more
on the train in the first week of warm weather, back sticking to the seats like tack. the man at the bodega didn’t want to sell me cigarettes, said i looked 19 and i said What a relief to hear you say so, although maybe it’s the skirt, or the cherry red cowboy boots, or the fact I can never quite enunciate “marlboro” without my tongue feeling thick and gummy in my mouth. Been hating my body as well as anything I clothe it in—im usually quite adaptable to the idea of aging and how it works on the face and the body but my skin feels looser on me and my fat feels less supple than tired, Anna said that it’s clear now at bars which women are 21, 22, from the way their bodies look and their flesh sits on them [she didn’t say it so clinically, actually] and now i see it and feel foolish. although I often see women of that age and can tell by how glad they seem to be anywhere, how fun it all seems to them. makes me feel foolish about age the way I was at 15, when the difference of a year felt chasmic and the other side so unknowable. I am young, looking at younger, and thinking “how youthful!” which I suspect I’ll do forever the same way I’ll fear my body forever, the way I’ll
Watching tangerine street disappear into itself with further darkness under the imprecise light of street lamps and construction sites—
Everything very alive, too much, so must ignore through other methods
