observing

'I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.'
- F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby.

nobody knows

'If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.'
- Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited.

grave humping.

The Best Time I Had Sex in a Cemetery in Broad Daylight
By Kelly McClure

Have you ever played that drinking game where a person says something like, “I’ve never eaten cat food, hee hee,” and if you have in fact eaten cat food, you drink? Well if I were playing that game and someone were like, “I’ve never had naked sex for a million hours on top of a grave, in a cemetery, in broad daylight,” I’d have to chug-a-lug.

A few years ago I met a girl online and we had our second date at a cemetery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Our first date had started off at a BBQ place in Williamsburg and ended with us slamming each other against someone’s garage door until 6 a.m., so we decided to keep it nice and mellow this time around and have a picnic on top of some dead people.

This girl had stopped at Whole Foods on the way over to pick up a selection of pasta salad, bread, something I don't remember and birch beer, so we sat against a tree eating these things, not having shit-all to say to each other. Then we walked around the cemetery making lame jokes and references to things we would never have said out loud or considered funny in non-uncomfortable situations, and after an hour or so a little buzzer must have gone off in our heads because we started (without saying as much) to look for someplace to make out. We made a beeline for a huge headstone towards the back of the graveyard, and as we were approaching it I dumped my half-full birch beer in a trash can because I was tired of carrying it around. As I did this, my date looked at me with what I can best describe as a “Kathy Bates in Misery” face, and pulled the drink out of the garbage, saying something about how it was expensive. Looking back, this is when I should have run at top speed for the subway, perhaps stopping at 7-11 for a celebatory Snickers to eat on the way home, but no, even in the face of true bat-shittery, the promise of seeing boobies always wins out.

We sat against the huge headstone and made awkward convo about how weird it was that we were able to talk about all sorts of freaky/nasty shit via email and texts, and yet didn’t have a thing to say to each other in person. (Operating at full-capacity, this makes perfect sense and can be explained with the understanding that it’s easy to “open up” and get all turned on talking to someone online because your brain is making them into whoever you want them to be, but when they’re plopped down in front of you, they/you see you/them for the bloated turd that you/they really are.) So yeah, we talked about this for a while, and I stared at my shoe for a few minutes until I said “close your eyes” and started kissing her. Once we were kissing I felt a little more comfortable, and perhaps I became so comfortable that I fell asleep a little bit and didn’t realize that I was allowing someone to remove all my clothing right there in the grass on a sunny afternoon, but there we were: me, my butt cheeks, and the blue, cloudless sky of Brooklyn, like it was truly NBD.

It would be enough to say that I had “a little bit” of sex in a cemetery in broad daylight, and find a way to stretch that into seeming like a normal thing to do, but this went on for hours. Literally a full day. We would take breaks to smoke cigarettes, or to pick at the leftover picnic food, and then go right back into the grave humping. My date broke away at one point to go pee behind a tree, and when she returned she handed me a small white flower that I assumed she had peed on to be kinky. I don’t know why I thought this, and it mayyybe wasn’t true, but given the sort of day we were having, I just figured as much.

The early afternoon turned into late evening, and we got cold from all the being-naked stuff and started gathering up our crap to leave. I couldn’t remember the way to the exit, and the cemetery was humongous, so I came up with the master plan to just walk straight in one direction until we hit a road or a fence or something that signaled “out.” We hit a fence after walking for about 20 minutes, and the opening was locked. All the openings were locked. Having not had a concrete reason to climb a fence in many many years, I was oddly pleased with the opportunity to do so, and proud of myself for being able to clear it without any major injuries. My date required the help of a makeshift ladder of boxes and a clear patch of ground to land upon, but she made it, too.

The minute we left the confines of the cemetery I immediately started feeling like the crustiest ho-bag ever. All I wanted to do was get home ASAP and watch something clean and good like Gossip Girl to make myself feel like myself again. On our path to the subway we DID come across a 7-11, and so I suggested we stop in to buy snacks and use the restroom to assess how insane we looked. There was a line for the restroom and I stood there avoiding eye contact with everyone, straightening my hoodie and casually brushing little twigs and clumps of dirt from my clothing. Once I got into the bathroom and looked in the mirror I realized why everyone in line had been giving me fish eye and whispering to one another: My face was smeared with dirt from ear to ear, my hair looked like every picture you’re ever seen of Nick Nolte, and my neck was one big hickey. Like, the entirety of my neck was a hickey. I zipped up my sweatshirt as high as I could to conceal whatever could be concealed and mentally sunk down low into my safe place until I got home.

Because I am an actual moron, I went on a few more dates with the cemetery girl. I had to eventually cut things off, though, after she house-sat for me while I was out of state and sent me a serious of hysterical text messages threatening to open my mail. When I came home from my trip I crawled around my apartment sniffing all the fabrics, assuming that she had once again (or maybe just for the first time) peed on something.

I lol'ed. Also, I've been reading The Hairpin a lot lately like there isn't enough ladynews in my life already.

capture.

'Longing is, at bottom, a creative impulse. "There's no doubt in my mind that you're destined to end up a writer," a college teacher once told me. "You have all the right problems." The constant wistful sense of loss, the need to slow it all down for the capture before it drifts away—this is why writers put things into words.' ─ Nathan Heller.

modern wo/man.

Let's Not Get to Know Each Other Better
By Joel Walkowski

A FEW months ago I liked a girl — a fairly common occurrence. But being slightly ambitious and drunk, I decided to ask her out on a date.

This was a weird choice, as I’m not sure I know anyone who has ever had a real date. Most elect to hang out, hook up, or Skype long-distance relations. The idea of a date (asking in advance, spending rent money on dinner and dealing with the initial awkwardness) is far too concrete and unnecessary. As the adage goes: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Why pay for dinner if you can sit around watching TV? If you stay at home, you hardly even need to stand up, let alone put on a nice shirt.

Despite misgivings, this particular foray felt legitimate, a coming-of-age moment straight out of a John Hughes movie. I had always wanted to go on a real date: flowers, dinner and all that. I thought that maybe in doing so I would feel more like an adult and less like a dumb little boy.

So I called this girl, feeling a little sleazy as I searched for the right words: “Hey, um, this is Joel. Do you want to, like, go out? On a date?”

“O.K.,” she said uncertainly, no doubt suspicious the whole thing was a joke.

Her positive response did nothing to calm my jitters. Give me a party, a front porch gathering, or a random encounter, and I’m comfortable talking to anyone. But this kind of formal planning unnerved me. Riding my bike home, I realized I didn’t even know what a real date was, beyond some vague Hollywood notion.

In my 21 years, I have had my share of trysts and one-night stands. I’ve been in love. I know it was love because I shamelessly clung to her. I have had my share of ups and downs but have no idea if I’m doing the whole love thing right or wrong. We don’t tend to define it that way.

In this age of cyberselves, with hookups just a Craigslist ad away, the game has evolved to the point of no rules. It’s not the ’50s where I can ask some lucky girl to wear my pin and take a ride in daddy’s car. This change probably benefits me in the end, as I’m sure an offer of a ride in my dad’s Sable would be swiftly rejected.

For my generation, friendship often morphs into a sexual encounter and then reverts to friendship the next day. And it’s easy as long as you don’t put yourself on the line or try too hard. Don’t have a prospect? Check Facebook. Afraid to call? Text.

With so many avenues for communication, one might expect an onslaught of romantic soliloquies, but that isn’t the case. Casual is sexy. Caring is creepy. You don’t want to show your hand, and you certainly don’t want to fall in love. At least until you do, and by then it’s too late.

Planned romance is viewed as nothing more than ambition, so it’s important that things be allowed to happen naturally. Sex is great, and so are some relationships, but not to the point that they should be actively pursued.

It’s hard to even flirt with a girl without feeling obvious and embarrassed, since the greatest displays of cheesiness come from the pursuit, making it disgusting: “Oh, you drive a Volvo? What’s that like?” Realizing I’m flirting, I cringe and do my best to restrain myself. An encounter is best when unsullied by intentions, leaving lust or boredom to take over.

The typical sequence goes like this: Friends meet up at some sort of bonfire or impromptu game of night volleyball. Maybe that girl from your history class is there, and you start to talk. Neither of you has expectations. But just hanging out and swapping stories, laughing a little, creates a spark and the attraction builds, eventually leading to the big wet kiss that changes everything and nothing.

This is the perfect hookup, a pressure-free surprise. With a stranger, everything is new and acceptable. Her quirks are automatically endearing. This first encounter is the perfect place, but where does it lead?

In the best case, nowhere at all. The next time you see her in class, you act the same as you did before, and so does she, except for the knowledge you share that what happened last week might happen again.

If it continues, you have an understanding, physical chemistry and great conversations. You meet two or three times a week for no-strings sex and long-winded philosophical talks.

Most importantly, you aren’t lonely. Maybe deep in the recesses of your mind you think about possibly loving this person. What’s the standard response? Nothing. If she asks, “How do you feel about me?” you answer from the heart: “I see you as an unexpected treat from the heavens. I don’t know how I deserve this.”

Your relationship is good. Your relationship is strong. But it isn’t a relationship, and that’s the key. You aren’t hoping she will become your girlfriend, and ideally she is not looking for anything more, either.

A friend of mine, a normal girl who is neither especially social nor aloof, engages in hookups unabashedly — she’s just doing what she wants and doesn’t regret or overthink it. Except for one time when she woke up in some guy’s embrace, got out of bed and noticed his bookshelf.

I’m not sure what it was about the contents that impressed or moved her; maybe the books suggested a gentle soul. All I know is what she told me: “I only felt bad after seeing his books.” The books had made him a real person, I guess, one she liked. Or pitied. Because then it was on to the next.

I might not be a typical youth, and maybe my friends aren’t typical, either, but hardly anyone I know aspires to be “that guy” or “that girl,” those once-dynamic individuals who “found someone” and suddenly weren’t so cool. On some level, we envy the scope of their feelings, but we certainly don’t want to become them.

But staying out of relationships can be just as much work as maintaining one. After hooking up with the same person several times I’m sometimes haunted by the “Relationship Status” question on Facebook, and I’ll linger over the button, wondering whether to make the leap from fun to obligation. I envision holding hands, meeting her parents and getting matching ankle tattoos.

Then I come to my senses and close the window.

Sometimes, though, it’s not up to me. I work at one of the campus libraries, and for some obscure reason my bosses, who are mostly middle-aged and female, decided to hold a Library Prom. I had to take someone, so I asked a girl, one of the truly rare fish worth catching (or being caught by).

That didn’t stop me from introducing her as “my friend.”

Which didn’t stop one of my bosses from asking, “Are you two dating?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Um, we are?”

“Well, this is a date, isn’t it?”

She had me trapped. I nodded blankly. With one word, she had changed everything. Now I’m asked about her at work, even though she is currently hooking up with a friend of mine.

I wish I could explain this to the librarians. They’re sympathetic to my other complaints: about studying, about having my license suspended, about taking care of my pet chicken, and so on. “I was there once,” they tell me. “You’ll be fine.”

But when it comes to love, all they can say is, “How’s that girlfriend of yours?”

Maybe this disconnect has always existed. As one of my classmates, a genteel 60-year-old, said to me, “Every generation thinks they discovered sex.” Which might be true, but I’m not sure any previous generation has our plethora of options and utter lack of protocol. This may reflect how our media obsession has desensitized and hypersexualized us.

But I think it goes beyond that. Our short attention spans tend to be measured in nanoseconds. We float from room to room watching TV, surfing the Internet, playing Frisbee and finding satisfaction around every corner, if only for a moment.

Out of fear, we shrink ourselves. There have been many times I should have cried but stifled the tears. Instances where I should have said, “I love you” but made a joke instead. Once, a girl dumped me and it nearly ruined me. How bad was it? I ate nothing but Wendy’s for an entire week.

I’m fairly certain I could have saved the entire endeavor with a soul-baring soliloquy of what was true and what mattered to me, but I couldn’t muster the courage. I don’t know many who can.

We’ve grown up in an age of rampant divorce and the accompanying tumult. The idea that two people can be happy together, maturing alongside each other, seems as false as a fairy tale. So when a relationship ends, it isn’t seen as bad. It’s held as evidence that the relationship was never any good to begin with.

MAYBE it’s just that we have learned nothing can compare to the perfect moment of the unexpected hookup — wet lips on the beach, lying in the sand — and so we aim to accumulate as many as possible. Or maybe we’re simply too immature to commit. That has been the rap against guys forever, but now women think the same way. With the world (and the world of sex) at our fingertips, it’s difficult to choose, to settle, to compromise.

But I do occasionally wonder: If we can’t get past ourselves and learn to sacrifice to be with another, then what is in store? A generation of selfish go-getters fueled by nothing more than our own egos, forever seeking that rare dose of self-esteem? An era of loneliness filled with commercial wants and mate selection based on the shallowest of criteria?

As a staunch proponent of my generation, I believe that, despite what it may seem, we appreciate the ways of love and affection but are simply waiting for them to take over. We might dally in the land of easy sex and stilted text-message flirtation, but deep down we crave the warm embrace of all-consuming love.

I do, anyway. What else could have been behind my crazy idea to ask a girl out on a date? Alas, she and I ended up going to Chili’s and never went out again. Welcome to adulthood.

greatness

'"IN honor of Persephone!” she announced, cracking open a pinkish orb. She handed me half and I stared, shocked, at the gleaming maroon seeds. She was plucking them with abandon, letting the juice stain her fingers, not caring. I tried to breathe.

It was winter in Pittsburgh, I was 18 years old, and I had never seen a pomegranate. I’d met her weeks after arriving in Pittsburgh for college. Somewhat randomly her boyfriend had asked me: “Would you like to come to our party? We’re going to have this Balkan band from Albuquerque and a Norwegian folk singer play, an Indonesian shadow puppet performance, and everyone has to bring a pie.”

At a time when other freshman girls were comparing Wal-Mart dorm room décor and giggling over tipsy messages scribbled on hallway wipe boards, an invitation to an off-campus party with artsy 20-somethings was surreal. I went, terrified, hoping at best to merely glimpse the Bohemian lifestyle my run-of-the-mill suburban upbringing had undoubtedly denied me. Instead, I fell in love.

She was a poet living in a castle-like apartment flooded with plants and books I’d never heard of. The details of her exotic childhood, I learned, included an organic farm in rural Texas and a private girls’ school. She did origami and left it hidden for strangers to find, knew the secrets of library basements and overgrown alleyways, and wore vintage hats covered in rusty brooches. She was into queer theory. She got her clothes from the Goodwill Dumpster. She was everything I’d dreamed of but never knew existed.

For some reason she anointed me with her doting approval and took to showing me around the city. She was on a mission to soak up the magic humming just beyond the ordinary and needed a partner in crime.

Enamored, I dropped everything to distance myself from the banality of university life and tag along. I was still very much 18: In my free time I accidentally dated the wrong people (sweet yet mortal music-theory undergrads), went to the wrong parties (where punks pounded Pabst Blue Ribbon) and actually went to class.

She disapproved, but she was patient and mentored me lovingly with carefully crafted book lists and midnight adventures. A year after we’d met, just as I was getting a handle on Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne Carson, she called me: Would I like her bicycle? She’d bought a one-way ticket to Japan.

The only person more devastated than me was her suddenly ex-boyfriend. Our common heartbreak inexplicable to the outside world, he and I mourned together. Only we knew the depths of her enchantment and, thus, the tragedy of our loss. While I sent her letter after letter, he actively plotted to get her back. In one hopeless ploy, he reasoned that if the two of us could lure her into a three-way relationship, our combined appeal might jointly win her over.

At 19 this seemed plausible to me and I went for it, pawing at him in the dark, remembering her. After he’d fall asleep I’d sit in their living room and trace my finger over the books she’d left behind. I ached in the presence of her ghost. Eventually he also took a one-way flight to Japan in an attempt to reunite; soon he was wandering through India without her. And I was left in Pittsburgh, newly alone.

With everyone I deemed important now abroad, I mustered up my newly developed confidence and hatched my own plan: I too would study in Japan and properly declare my love once and for all. When I marched to my university’s study-abroad office to seal the deal, however, I was confronted with reality: Living in Japan was expensive. Prohibitively expensive.

But there was a six-week summer program in Beijing, for which generous scholarships existed. Would I be interested in that? I glanced at the map. China seemed close enough. I applied.

By June I was at Peking University studying Mandarin on an open-jaw airline ticket; six weeks later the program ended and I was standing in Tiananmen Square. And to my disbelief she was there, too, standing next to me, flying a makeshift kite. By then she had quit her Japanese job and come to Beijing with her teenage brother. Her plan was for the three of us to take the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow and sort of wing it from there.

Still getting my bearings abroad, I was not yet the type of person who “wings it” — especially in Russia — but this wasn’t about logic; this was about her.

She slept a lot on the train; she also read for hours and barely ate. I bonded with her brother over spoonfuls of Nutella and ruthless make-believe gossip about our fellow passengers. We got to the topic of her ex-boyfriend.

“She only liked him because they read at the exact same pace and turned pages at the same time,” her brother said, rolling his eyes. “Not exactly my idea of romance.”

I swooned at the thought of her reading something undoubtedly wonderful in the adjoining compartment but forced myself to nod. We looked out the window: a herd of camels, for a flash of a second. We were in the Gobi Desert.

Nights were hard. She was inevitably inches away, sleeping peacefully as my desire for her boiled. In Ulan Bator, under a sky thick and white with stars, we decided to sleep in a yurt on the steppe. As her brother slept, she whispered to me: “Have you heard about that hand-built, nine-grotto Virgin Mary shrine some priest spent 42 years piecing together in Iowa?”

I told her I’d build her a bigger one if she wanted.

She laughed and played with my hair, knowing it was true but not wanting to show it. The shrine I had already built for her was painfully exposed; in two years my mainstream existence had been razed to the ground to make room for a garden in which her every eccentricity was welcomed to bloom. What was I doing in Mongolia? It seemed I would follow her anywhere.

The landscape changed as we rode to Russia: an endless expanse of pine trees, one after another, through the train windows. We stopped in Irkutsk to skinny-dip with seals in Lake Baikal, eat spiced pine nuts from the cone, and hike through fields to hunt for mushrooms and shamanistic cave drawings, but I barely noticed. While staying with a family, our kindly Russian host mother instructed us to strip and smack each other with birch branches in a backyard sauna. This is where we finally did kiss, under an orange moon, but her heart was elusive while mine was unsophisticated and greedy.

In the four days it took to ride from Irkutsk to Moscow she somehow found us a place to stay: an office-building basement secretly converted at night into a cheap hostel by a cleaning lady. The catch was that we had to be out each morning by 8.

We whiled our days away in bookstores and second-rate amusement parks, eating hot dogs and forgetting to go to the Kremlin. When she and her brother decided to ditch the train and hitchhike their way through Finland and the Baltic states — all the way to relatives in France — I suddenly felt like an impostor about to be discovered. I wanted to keep going but couldn’t keep up.

I was too afraid not to return to Pittsburgh, not to finish college, not to tell my parents exactly where I was. I didn’t have much money and was too afraid to hitch. She seemed genuinely sad but did not stop me from leaving. As I turned my back on her at the first major fork in the road, I was grudgingly conscious of a painful realization: My life was not one of one-way tickets. Not yet.

OVER the next few years she passed through Pittsburgh many times and we’d always go swimming in a fountain, or stencil poetry onto sidewalks, or cook pizza or kiss, only for a day or two, and then she’d be gone. I’d beg for her ever-changing address and she’d write, inconsistently, sending short stories and watercolors too good to be from someone I knew. One day she showed up with a new boyfriend. The only thing worse than losing her was the realization that I’d never had her.

Recently I came across her biography online. She is now an accomplished writer, the recipient of many fellowships and awards. My first thought: Thank God professional judges of the potential for magic in artists have justified my fanatic obsession. And then I saw it. Among her various honors and residencies, chosen out of the hundreds of cities she has visited and thousands of experiences accumulated, she had written that she once flew kites in Tiananmen Square.

I tried to breathe. There are so many fruits in the world; we can’t remember exactly who introduced us to what. But we never forget who showed us that there were, indeed, more fruits to discover than we’d ever realized.'

This story has everything I like: adventure, three-way relationships, unrequited girl crushes.
Haven't we all had a crush on this girl? I want to be this girl and be with her.
Via.

darling

"TEN years ago, my high school sweetheart and I liked to pretend we were disaffected expatriates living in some crumbly postwar foreign capital. In reality, we lived in an affluent New York City suburb.

Fortunately there was English class, where our teacher assigned “The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway’s 1926 novel about American and British expats who booze their way through Parisian cafes and Spanish bullfights.

Devouring the book, we thought the protagonist, Jake Barnes, a twentysomething American reporter, and his hot-and-cold lover, Lady Brett Ashley, were pretty cool. They were always visiting interesting places and discussing the meaning of life, or lack thereof. And even though their lives were a little messy, they always spoke so insightfully!

Sure, we concluded, Barnes, Lady Brett and other Lost Generation all-stars had dependency, identity, and substance-abuse issues. But in other ways, they seemed like the sort of people we’d be happy to be like when we grew up. They were adults, but they were much cooler than most of the adults we knew.

The summer after my freshman year of college, my girlfriend and I traveled to France and Spain together, Hemingway style, picnicking on the Seine and sipping wine with Basques in San Sebastián. After the trip, we corresponded via telegram-style letters and e-mail messages that went something like this:

Dearest Jake: Can’t bear staying apart. Stop. Please visit after exams. Brett.

Brett Darling: Will come on Greyhound Saturday. Stop. Arriving 6:40 p.m. All my love. Jake.

I was pretty sure I would marry her, just not anytime soon. I also assumed — taking my cues from Hemingway, Maugham and Fitzgerald — that I had years of globetrotting to do before I’d consider settling down with anyone.

The next summer she and I worked in California. On weekends we’d cruise to the Henry Miller Library, an oceanside hangout named after the footloose novelist. It was fun to gaze at the Pacific and quote him to each other.

My own travels would begin to feel Milleresque: That fall I went to Buenos Aires; the following spring, I volunteered on a coffee farm in Mexico; that summer my girlfriend and I traveled to Montana, where I had landed a job baking pies at a roadside cafe.

Thinking of Hemingway’s Ketchum, Idaho, I had looked for a beautiful place where I could write and fish. The cafe owners said they also had work for my girlfriend — they needed line cooks.

In Montana, we were happy living under big skies, among friendly strangers and away from the East Coast. But our cabin was cramped and mouse-infested, and my girlfriend — a vegetarian — quickly tired of grilling burgers.

We quit after six weeks and headed east in her car. The ride felt like a defeat. I broke off the relationship because I was restless. Stop.

More than a year passed before we met for pizza on a dreary November afternoon in Boston. I had come down for the weekend from Vermont, where I was starting to write for a newspaper, to attend a journalism conference.

She was thinking of applying to law school; I wanted to go abroad again. There was no spark between us, but I attributed that to bad timing, figuring we would eventually rekindle our romance in a different place and context. The fact that I didn’t know where or how seemed kind of exciting.

Three springs later, I quit my newspaper job and spent the summer wandering around China and Southeast Asia. I settled in Hanoi, Vietnam, partly because its sidewalk cafes, French-designed boulevards and bustling expat social scene reminded me of books I had read about postwar Europe.

I spent the fall and winter drinking coffee, writing travel stories, scratching away at a novel and dating women from other countries. Soon I would be learning the ropes at a European news agency, playing tennis with diplomats and feeling expatriated in a good, adventurous, Hemingway sort of way.

But I still thought fondly of my first love. From what she’d told me over the phone before I left the United States, I knew she had started law school. I resisted that plotline: I sensed that someday she would decide to come find me.

I hadn’t seen her in three years. Two months after my 26th birthday, I mailed her a letter: Living abroad was fun, I wrote, but I missed her, and I wanted to see her the next time I came home to visit.

She replied via e-mail that she couldn’t see me: she had a boyfriend, and she was happy.

Ouch. I hadn’t been pining for her per se, but I was upset that she didn’t seem to need to see me in the same way I felt I needed to see her. Also: what boyfriend? I had assumed that, like me, she had been drifting through lovers as one floats among so many ocean swells.

Then she e-mailed to say that she was in Washington, D.C. — Did I want to meet up?

I did. A few weeks later, I hoisted my backpack, hailed a motorbike taxi outside my apartment and began a five-week odyssey of work and travel that would take me from Hanoi to Moscow to Paris to Reykjavik to New York. Along the way I strolled the Luxembourg Gardens, ate crepes by the Seine, reported a story from Rouen, slept in departure lounges and on friends’ couches, rode Amtrak to Vermont, paddled a canoe across an Adirondack lake and caught a train back to the city, where in Chinatown I boarded a southbound bus.

The next day, a sweltering Wednesday, I finally arrived at my destination: the entrance of a Washington Metro station, where my high school sweetheart, in a black skirt and silver blouse, looked more beautiful than I remembered. We ducked into a Mexican restaurant and ordered beers to steady our trembling hands.

She said she had been dating the same guy for three years. I had met him once at a party but I wouldn’t remember. Anyway, now they were living together. She liked law school and had never felt so settled — in a good way.

“What about you?” she asked.

My throat crackled. I had been kidding myself assuming that I would marry this woman: We had each followed roads that the other had no interest in taking, and now she was in love with someone else.

Still: She was looking at me so prettily over the guacamole that I felt like whisking her away. Dearest Brett: Let’s start over together in Mexico City. Jake.

“Let’s have another drink,” I said.

We split the bill — it was almost half a month’s rent in Hanoi — and found a table at a high-ceilinged German brewpub on the next block. The lighting was dimmer there. Loosening up under the alcohol, I said the kind of playful, witty things I knew would make her smile.

Laughing, she said she wanted to hear more about my expat life. “A wire service in Southeast Asia?” I recall her saying. “I imagine you wearing one of those silly reporter hats with the wrap-around brim.”

We left the bar and walked toward the Metro. She pointed out that the station was closing in five minutes. She wasn’t inviting me to come home with her. She joked that she would be sure to send me one of those silly — —

When she noticed that I was crying, she hugged me as one holds a child who has scraped a knee. I held her hands and realized that the next time I saw her — if I ever were to see her again — she would probably be wearing a ring. She might even be a mother.

I dried my eyes on my T-shirt. A janitor was cleaning up. Otherwise we were alone. I scratched my sandals against the pavement. Perhaps I wanted to keep standing there because I had been traveling too much. Or maybe I sensed that I wouldn’t be back. Two or three minutes passed.

FOR the first half of my 20s, the Rest of My Life had appeared to wait patiently. And time, like a gift certificate, seemed like something I could hold on to and cash in later. But that night I felt as if the rest of my life was already upon me. Time was short, and I couldn’t think of anything to look forward to.

I grasped for something winning to say. Nothing came. I was drunk. She walked into the station and didn’t look back.

For a dizzy moment I considered chasing her down that escalator. Dearest Brett: Am lonely without you. Stop. Come to Hanoi. Mike.

The escalator stopped and the trains left. I walked on. I suppose I had my own connections to make."

Rather romantic, wouldn't you say? From Modern Love. Via YMFY.

Cobain

"Chef Boyardee is meaner, stronger, less susceptible to disease and more dominant than a male gorilla. He comes to me at night. Willfully opening the locks and bending the bars on my window. Costing me horrendous amounts of money in home burglary devices. He comes to me in my bedroom. Naked, shaved and oiled. Goose-bumped thick black arm hairs risen off his skin. Standing in a pool of pizza grease. Barfing up flour. It enters my lungs. I cough. He laughs. He mounts me. I'd like to kick his hot-stinking, macho fuckin' ass."

- Kurt Cobain

Big ups to Mark Peckmezian for showing me this. This quote is amazing, it's like Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. And then, it's more homoerotic and sort of racist, written in this desperate drug addict way. The imagery is insane, not to state the obvious like the douche that I am, but the man is talented with words.
The quote is from his biography, Heavier Than Heaven.

Daumier

'"All the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, ‘What can you write that hasn’t been written already?’

He’s absolutely right. I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with at that moment is that Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, and seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavoured muffin from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L?"

— David Rakoff writes, in his few-years-old and brilliant essay book Don’t Get Too Comfortable, about the one time he was sent by some magazine (Vogue, most likely; no big deal) to cover the couture shows. I presume he was not invited back.'

Via SNP.
Gargantua. Honoré Daumier, lithograph, 1832.

rituals

“I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.”

- Nicole Krauss, Great House.

This is one of the most beautiful, tragic and true things I've read in a long time.
Reblogged from SNP.