Tell me why the beauty of it was. With each lurching month my stomach’s more oceanic. So I asked you what you thought, is it about discovering our capacity I mean our depth-of-feeling? When I am over the toilet I am finally over myself. I’m over it, I have never meant that not once. Not once have I actually rolled my eyes, I was just looking that way, above me, I was just looking out for the piano that’s about to fall on my head. You cheated on your girlfriend with me who had just turned twenty-two. She had a thing about that. Twenty-twoness, you say, to me, who is now the girlfriend and who is still twenty-two.
My twenty-second birthday was latex, mescal, cocaine, Gatorade, ketamine, eyeliner, bangs, fishnets. It’s infuriating. I wanted to put myself on a shelf, it was so much like that, and I did, if shelf equals Instagram. Yes a shelf like for dolls. She said that it was like you’re playing dolls, that’s apparently what the older jealous writer lady said about me but no-body told me if she said that about my writing or about my life. Or maybe my outfits? You and your girlfriend had both liked my photo that day, on my twenty-second birthday, my latex my bangs my fishnets. Actually you’d both swiped up. My writing in my diary when I got home around five said something like— I LOVE YOUTH I AM SO YOUNG I LOVE TO BE YOUNG. It’s infuriating. I’d been so drunk and happy. On the last day of the semester at a sunny picnic table, I say well I always prefer to meet people in real life and not online, and the older writer lady’s friend, who I love dearly, says that’s because you have actual social skills. Everybody is so surprised when they hear that I’ve never done a threesome.
If I was going to write a love letter to being twenty-two it would be an apology. I would apologize to the older writer lady and the ex-girlfriend. I would apologize to every older writer lady and every ex-girlfriend in the world, understanding how I am condemned to become them and not understanding that at all. Not when the barista boy I’ve had a crush on for years still winks at me. Not when I still laugh and hug you at the club. Being twenty-two is licking the back of the sherbet’s paper lid, it’s sitting on the stoop of a dilapidated apartment and licking the back of the sherbet’s paper lid, it’s sitting next to your own vomit-stain on the light concrete and licking the back of the sherbet’s paper lid and then laughing with your teeth, it’s laughing in the face of terror, in the face of fresh hell, and licking the back of the sherbet’s paper lid because you’ve never tried this flavor before. I know I will atone for my investment in the novel. Probably for-ever after this. Well, this was the life of the mind in present America, writes Chris Kraus in Summer of Hate, ninety-five percent of the students she had met had no information or sense of any historic continuum. The rest were autistic.
My edge of twenty-two into twenty-threeness feels like an airlock, because I’m thinking about it without having any information, or sense of time. My sense of time is either absent or doubled, depending on the drugs. (This semester I seem to have single-handedly turned a Sex Writing seminar into a Drug Writing seminar, don’t ask me how that happened). My twin sister is also twenty-two. She reminds me about my gatorade-puke when we drive up Balboa and pass the spot where I puked Gatorade that time. She works in HR. She transferred to HR from accounting. She needed to borrow my Steve Madden jacket and my Prada pumps and my Dior suit because she works in HR at the Ritz.
On our twenty-second birthday I sent her a video of me jumping up and down while brushing my teeth in the previous night’s makeup and my promotional White Label Yerba Mate T-shirt. Two years ago, on our twenty-first birthday, my sister’s boyfriend called my father to tell him that my sister had been admitted to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Bronwen’s sister recently broke her leg falling off the porch at a frat party. I pinched a nerve in my neck because I took too much Molly. It was after all these events that I sat on my stoop and wrote something like, I LOVE YOUTH I AM SO YOUNG I LOVE TO BE YOUNG. On the beautiful drive up from LA to beautiful Santa Barbara my father gnashed his teeth but also laughed and said things like, I’m sure with the type of headache she’s got she’s sure learned her lesson. In my most hopeful states I imagine my sister marveling at some private, opaque new thought and smiling happily under the covers in the moment just before her boyfriend enters with a breakfast sandwich and more Pedialyte. But in the car my sister asks me, is bartending and going to clubs, like, your whole personality now? And I say, exhausted by her heterosexuality and my own bitchiness, you don’t have passions.
I want to text you, do you think I look good with bangs? But you are K’d way out in Brooklyn and it’s very late. I am not with you, and even if I was in Brooklyn I would not be with you. I’d be at the club, doing my practice of loving everybody so much and proving it— getting on my knees, pouring shots, taking off my shirt, shaking my ass, scraping limes with my teeth, doing drugs, chewing gum, kissing. No matter how much I want to be with you, I’m there. I blast a KYRUH mix while I write because it reminds me of being in my ultimate leather-shorts state. I have this vision of a fantasy during one of the breaks in the mix: you and I lock eyes across the room at Bound, each in various states of dress. Until some dripping thing in my vicinity calls my attention to close my eyes and scream. It’s one of those sorts of fantasies that isn’t pleasant so much as it inhabits a strange nostalgia, bearing signs which point to cataclysm, tragedy, orgasm, hangover, comedown. Delirium, Kraus would say.
Besides, Bound is never at all as sexy as I think it will be. Not even half. Do you think I look good with bangs? The older writer lady is maybe the type of person who cut all the hair off of her Barbies. Of course now they make those Barbies who wear normal clothes and do look like they work in HR at the Ritz. Of course when I say doll I do not mean Barbie but real-life tgirls at the club who pin me up in their clothes and drugs maybe because of love but also because of care or how they see it in me, my own desperation at girlhood. Of course outside of those spaces it’s interpreted as: Bratz.
I am saying: it is it is it is it is it is it is it is. Foggy like a nightmare ahead of me there lies a was. The mania of my tight pussy my life my summers my bang-cutting my outfits: I will live or I will die.
It takes courage you know. It takes courage to be young. To love youth. To love it truly. It tries to make you hate it. It steals your work, your clothes, your ideas, your girlfriend. But I love it. I LOVE YOUTH I AM SO YOUNG I LOVE TO BE YOUNG. This love is a commitment. Time is no master over me.
CODA
MEMOIRS OF AN ANONYMOUS HOT GIRL
OH my god we should drop acid. If you can hold my hand and tell me what to wear on the first day of the semester then why can’t you come with me to have sex with this dude in a warehouse. I am done with the petty and lame thing of an integrated self. I am so over it. My boss said I look pretty today. I knew he would. And I’m not even going to listen to the voicemail the guy I’m chasing left me. I am just going to dance dance dance. Dance dance dance. The djay is only spinning vinyl and it is fun to watch. So retro!!
It wouldn’t take a lot. Anything could do it could permanently fuck me up. But men are so cowardly and phony. No-body with the proper materials really knows how to love. Except for me but what’s the use in that. I wanna put my tiny blue neon nails inside somebody’s tight hot pink asshole.
You know what? Before this I was slinking around the house in my tee shirt eating Indian takeout. The tee shirt said: PrEP awareness week is October 14-21 2021. I was like, okay so what if I’m depressed. The mania will save me. It always does.
How to dress slutty enough that a high school girl puts me on her Pinterest board but not slutty enough for men to actually hit on me?
Praying for the bus at basement with a dead phone during sunrise. Praying for novelty. Praying to novelty. At least I am no longer scamming my classmates out of Ubers. Oh my god thank god you’re here my phone is dying. Forty three dollar Venmo request. A bad poem in workshop:
This is a found language poem just using the comment sections of boiler room sets. So you screenshotted the comment section of a boiler room set. So I’m too hungover to write my prayer to novelty. So I’m too hungover to pray? Fuck. My ode to a twelve dollar peanut butter date smoothie.
I’m looking at photos of pasta on Pinterest. It looks so good but its five in the morning and I am eating a coagulated sugary mass out of a beat up milk duds box
I want to be sexually devastated by a teenage boy twice my size who has not read any of the books I have read but who shares with me unwittingly that pain that belly-hunger of a fetish for the American west, for grunge and flighty mystery, for everything that cries with frivolousness. It is difficult to articulate this desire. I wish to love a boy so dumb that he is a boy. I wanna lick the precum off of an unoccupied subject. Bowled over by stupid beautiful vastness. In youth I deserve this. The blunt thing of vitality, buffering.
Somethingishauntingmeandidontknowwhatitis.com. I want a mommy or a daddy or an otherwise sexual person to hold me when it is dark so I can sleep. To clean my body of its awful goo. To make sounds that are light and small. Again the sun rises. Again. Again Vernon Avenue. Again. I need a home in my body. I need something that is mine. I need.
Just delightful. Just delightful for what the writing is now, and also for the old lady in waiting that will come to exist someday, through the text.
Oh my god I never thought I would actually find the nightmare hallucination that terrifies my buddy Sam Kriss, I thought this was only in his head