I’ve got buck teeth. They’re not particularly severe, not too noticeable, subtle enough that when I bring them up my sweet, sweet friends can coo back flabbergasted reassurances (“Shut up, what are you talking about?” “No waaay, I’ve never thought so!”) with pretty convincing authenticity. But I’ve got them. And I’ve got a crooked smile, always cocked up slightly to the left, and a single, lonely dimple when my grin gets wide enough. I used to think it made me so cute. I’m over it now.
I’ve got one hand in my pocket and one knee bent, one hip slightly turned out, weight shifted perpetually towards one side; careless posture, mild unresolved scoliosis, a strong physical dispensation against pulling my shoulders back and puffing out my chest and making any gesture towards dignified, even presentation. I’ve got red cheeks, dead giveaway cheeks, and a neurotic little eye twitch when I haven’t slept enough, and I’ve got pen all over my fingers and vast swaths of nothing on my mind. I‘ve been looking too hard at everything and everyone and thinking too much, and I’ve been playing the fool like I always do.
Maybe I’m bad news. It’s so much of the same. I’m beginning to think I’m bad news.
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I’ve got a thing where I can’t say no when the calendar hits almost-summer and the temperature breaches eighty and the air is hot and heady with all of the imminent everything. It’s bad news. But it gets me out and it gets me going, and some nights that’s what seems most synonymous with enough. It’s usually not; it’s usually wishful thinking, usually very good, believable pretending, usually a proud, slightly pathetic commitment to the bit. It’s usually bad news.
But it gets me to a party, one that’s supposed to really kick off the season (it does not), one for which everyone is instructed to wear neon clothing (they do not). It gets me into stupid, stupid conversation, anxiously cracking glowsticks and attempting sloppy drunken niceties with the earnest energy and miserable tact of an estranged grandfather. I’m nowhere near faded enough for the fake affection, but I do it anyway and I look, to myself, like a blinking little non-neon robot practicing the human concept of revelry and I hate it, because I hate when things look transparent and small, because so much depends on my barring myself from seeing through any of it.
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I’ve got a tote bag full of paper scraps. It bangs against my hip when I walk; it rests against the same side, the slightly-turned-out side, when I’m standing still. I’ve got a sack of treasure — note cards and Post-it’s covered in doodles by my friends and I, big bubble-letter names and stupid drawings and tic-tac-toes and pretty nonsense. I’ve got a friend who sometimes writes down little snippets of conversation she hears, and fragmented bits of dialogue or prose — an interview clip from a lecture, the lyrics to a song that’s stuck in her head, a joke someone made, something unintentionally funny, something unintentionally beautiful. She strings them all together with no punctuation and no attribution, letting it all coagulate into a pleasingly nonsensical jumble. I think things are more profound when she writes them down, even the stupidest things. I think she can just do that.
Going to California I see myself in her Mismatched fish Bang bang kiss kiss My family lives in a different state This is my monster this is my Frankenstein When do we leave? It’s starting
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I’ve got far too much in me these days. I’m a fountain of everything in the shape of a slightly off-kilter girl. I told you; I tried to tell you. I think I’m bad news.
I am so drunk with my friends on a Thursday night in the city. I am so drunk with my friends on a Friday night in the mountains. I hang off the back of a golf cart; the boys take turns doing donuts by the beach, and I can’t breathe. When I jump in the water I think I’ve never felt anything quite so wonderful, and then I’m gasping and scraping the soles of my feet on pebbles all the way to the front door because “Did anyone bring towels?” and two more shots doesn’t seem like too tall a task and it’s a long night, it goes on until foggy sunrise by the water and it ages like wine much better than ours, until beer breath and muddy knees trek back to bumper-to-bumper cars in the driveway and the Pennsylvania turnpike marches us silently home.
It’s peculiar to do something just for the memories, but we buy into it anyway, silently and unanimously. I think that’s powerful and a little bit swaggering, but I don’t say it. I think it’s awfully melancholy, too, but I can’t put my finger on why.
I’d do anything to live it all again. I want to keep doing it until I do it right, and then once more. I want infinity between midnight and sunrise. I’d do so much differently. I wouldn’t change a thing.
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I’ve got a thing against flying, but I do it anyway. It’s not a fear thing, nor some kind of high-strung proclivity for airport anxiety. It’s just prissy; I don’t like the discomfort. But I won’t pay for better, so I lug around strategically-overstuffed carry-ons from shuttle to gate to security and sit by the bathroom and find something to do.
I do have a thing for the idea of airports, for what they look like in my mind’s eye before I start thinking too hard — like hazy, sexy ‘50s ad spreads, very Don Draper, like America the Beautiful, like long, slim cigarettes and big sunsets and art deco. I do think there’s something inspiring about the process, at least how much faith we all put in it; I like when we accept the completely unreasonable as commonplace, when society makes the unspoken, collective decision to just adopt something alien as real and natural, to give up attempting to understand and trade wide-eyed, awed confusion for a kind of pragmatic, bureaucratic matter-of-factness. It’s peculiar to climb inside a big box hovering in the sky, but we buy into it anyway, silently and unanimously. I’m not sure I’d call it beautiful. But I think it’s kind of nice, that we can just do that.
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I am so drunk with my friends on a Tuesday night in Berlin. I am so drunk with my friends on a Saturday night in Paris. It’s so different but it’s so much the same, except I think I might prefer it when we’re fighting for something a little more valiant than the feeling of being older. We get it, that feeling, in Prague and in Amsterdam, in German and in French, in hostel bunk beds and backpacker bars. It doesn’t hold a candle to the amount of time we spend feeling so, so young. But it teaches us and it hurts us and it loves us, and it distracts us from the boys back home and the donuts and the mountains, because we need to move on. We can’t in Europe and we can’t by way of airplane, but we need to move on.
This I’m terrible at. This is bad news.
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I’m back in the city now. It’s July in the city now. Isn’t that cruel?
I am so drunk with my friends on a Tuesday afternoon at the beach. I am so drunk with my friends on a Tuesday night at the beach. In the liquor store a man lets me know I’ve made his night because I’m singing along to Van Morrison and John Prine; when the boys pull up, whistling, to the corner and we ask them where they’re headed, they say, “wherever, anywhere with you.” Going sixty in a forty-five, past the fireworks and the casinos and the still, smoky air lit up by sparklers and streetlights, I crane my head outside the window and scream that I love the home of the free and the brave and God bless New Jersey and God bless America; thirty drunks beam and whoop back at me. When we’re walking across the bridge over the still, inky water and he peers down once, twice at the silent army of docked pontoons and skiffs and starts talking about how much he wants to jump in I know, that second I know, that I’ll be going in, too; when I’m falling through the air a few minutes later, clothes scattered on the bike path, I’m not even surprised. My fate was sealed, because I can’t say no. My fate was sealed, because I’m bad news.
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In July in the city the air is thick, thick like molasses so cloying you’re rendered unable to come up with a better metaphor, thick like it’s standing too close. Thick like the sun almost can’t get through. It’s smoky, too, bright and acrid and grey, but I can’t say I feel a glaring calling to talk about it. I think that’s been taken care of. And some of us have had enough of bad news.
It’s July and I’m terrified, because nostalgia hangs hot in the summer air and chirps with the crickets at night. It lurks between the bridge and the water, beneath the fireworks, under the boardwalk where we sit all night, soaked and shivering, because we can’t move on. It lurks in the passenger seat when the windows are down. It lurks in the park on a weekday afternoon, between the pages of a book I’ve read before, in the dregs of my favorite drink. It lurks in the White Claws and in the sweat and in the bad music. It lurks on the tennis court, at night after the pool closes and the sun goes down and everybody’s looking for somewhere to go because they don’t want to move on. It lurks in my wet hair and in my broken sunglasses, in my tote bag and in my folded-up paper scraps, in my buck teeth, in my crooked smile.
I’ve got a thing against nostalgia and a thing against change, and it is a fear thing. And it’s bad news. I tell my friends on a cool night in Vienna that regret is my biggest fear. The feeling of regret, or the actual thing you might regret doing? The feeling. The feeling, forever the feeling.
this was so beautiful