SUMMER EVENTUALLY
a story about new york, debuted live in new york
Any good summer is part-desire, part-desperation. Today you’re beautiful and ugly, sticky and mistaken, the condensation residue under your plastic cup makes an entirely vulgar story. Desire has to be proportional to desperation: too much of the former, you go quiet. Too much of the latter, you contemplate cutting all your hair off. Luckily, being too grown to act on your impulses lets you keep both your split ends and secrets to yourself. All I remember from my former summers is whatever happened between the train rides to and from apartments where conversations would go sideways and not at all how they’d been rehearsed. Poor facial recognition is key to not dwelling in silence, at least not until September comes around. Eileen Myles said summer is endurable, and I don’t disagree with poets. “You’re not alone,” I type under the grocery list in my notes app, “And nothing’s an original experience.” Like that’s supposed to make me feel better. It’s not a crime to want to be the first person to discover hardship.
Summer is made of happiness or sadness and paper glue to hold the edges tightly. When the air is stale and humid, look out into the crowd and proudly say “See, I wasn’t easy to get rid of.” Now I’ve got proof that I exist outside of my head. Without the right intention, chasing I-told-you-so’s, but that still counts for something. It’s always bigger than a guy thing and so much better than a selfish thing. In the summer, your problems are the problems of humanity by proxy of relation and gin-drenched olives.
Existing in your human flesh form in the summer is a kind of rebellion, very particular, and it breeds resentment. None of the clothes fit right. The back sweat, the catcalling, sore throat from the AC blasting. Where do you go when everything is set up as an Instagram story backdrop, cardboard and flatlined? When the rooftop bars are brimming with warm smiles and delicately creepy waist touching while getting through the crowd? Who do you speak to if everyone’s too hot to understand? I have no problem being honest with you the same way I was honest when I walked out of the Upper East Side flat to get away from everything I thought I ever wanted right there in my hands and in my power. I didn’t cry, but that’s just global warming for you. Preserving water and latching onto scaffolding. Let it thaw.
I’ll tell you just a little more about it. I said I walked out of the strangely lit, alluring East Side studio like it was some protest in the name of everyone who’s ever been a girl. The doorman must’ve thought I was a hooker gone astray, not a romantic. But who’s to say that there isn't a Venn diagram overlap? And since I clawed my way up there, right now was the least relevant time to be embarrassed. He wanted me polite and better and half-digital and I dared to disobey, so now I’m picking inner battles in a Lyft and voice memoing my mom because I’m too exhausted to spare the details. She says she never worries about me because if there’s one thing I can do is handle heavyweights and get away unscathed.
I could’ve sworn his life was something from a Hopper painting. He’s got everything I never had the guts to wish for, so why was it so dark in there? Why could I feel the loneliness of an aimless afternoon clinging to the undecorated walls? It was a Holiday Inn, impersonal, flat soda tasting, he must’ve been inquiring for a late checkout for a decade straight. No man under the age of 35 should have a favorite bar, no bartender should know his order. That’s something you acquire over a lifetime, seasoned and awkwardly returning to the routes and habits you learn to prefer after you’ve tasted life in every form like a prodigal son. He hasn’t even begun trying or grown out of being a picky eater, and he routinely runs into the people he used to know on Accutane. What a life. Money is freedom, I’m sure, but too much of it from the wrong places can atrophy the brain, and out of the blue I turned flushed and grateful for my lacking. I wanted no part in that sterile comfort. And if you ever need a poetic reason to storm out of an apartment, just ask your darling about the most spontaneous thing they’ve ever done. You won’t enjoy the answer.
So when, again, at dusk, wearing our differences out in the open, we have to prove that we deserve love and attention, each through our own methods (his is more ideological, mine is more hysterical) and so do you and everyone all the way at the back of the room, what is it that we’re fighting for? Or against? Knowledge collides and now I’m having trouble seeing where I made a problem out of an unfinished sentence. I used to think respect comes with a great ordeal of effort, a sort of hegemony, that gratitude is earned, but that has been debunked by many before me. The difference between going crazy and going outside is a matter of intention. Look to the ones that love you most today and not the ones that promised you forever.
“I don’t know what to do, mom, I’ve been so sad and nothing’s going my way here.” “But is it ever?” she goes. “You’re still allowed to relish in the off-script parts.” My mother always says profound and simple things that coat the pain of being a rigid soul trapped in a 5’3 body with absinthe, and her abrasive, slavic phrases cut to the bone just to remind me why I am alive. She makes me feel easy to love thousands of miles away and hours ahead. The same, I’m afraid, can’t be said about anyone on this block. That’s why the driver is steering out impatiently.
Summer, I’d like to break my patterns once and for all, so be my playground for testing out new strategies and seeing how far I’ll go to speak my mind, fragmented in time and space and relevance. I got recognized in Williamsburg today. It should’ve cheered me up, but I felt like a walking trigger warning. “I wonder what it takes to not feel a certain type of way” I said, “Will I just have this guilt forever? Am I doomed to keep washing down the sorrow at different airports until the day I die?” I’m sure I’m overcomplicating pity. It could be just a woman thing or a shame thing. It could be hormonal. It could be being Russian and a Jew thing.
What makes it worth it, you’re asking? Some questions require an answer from your memoir the least convenient way. The Domino Park on the way home and becoming someone you never thought you could be. But looking out the window now, over the edge of knowing better, the comfort that I’m not the only one with this heaviness in my solar plexus and mispronunciation of words I should know binds us together in a dance. Paying for my own cab, my own dress, fighting my own gluttony, bending my self-enforced rules, feeling tethered to the people I’m unlikely to see again unless I stay the night and call a truce for party favors.
I’ll look back on this summer, however tragic and comical, with sweetness. It will have been a chapter of my sparkly life before I had a favorite bar. I love becoming something and not quite knowing what. Top 10 experiences, if you will. It keeps desire and desperation intact, it keeps me tired, it spins the wheel of fortune, it promises another summer, and looks at me like I deserve a second shot.
Wrote this for the most magical night I created and shared with
, , , , & . I’ll cherish that evening forever & I’m nowhere near done writing about it. Endlessly grateful to the writers, everyone who showed up, and especially to those who got up on stage impromptu — the talent in the room was off the charts. Special moment of gratitude to angels Hassia and Rachel. More of these to come soon in different cities in Europe & North America, that I promise <3
i wish i had been there SO bad… this must’ve been so earth shattering and life changing live
incredibly perfect and somehow even better the second time around