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[bare-vincent]

6/20/25

There’s a very specific nostalgia inspired by summer. That first oppressive heatwave, humidity curling the hairs stuck to my forehead. I remember being 9 years old, give or take, in my room in Connecticut. Air conditioning was a luxury saved for the living room and my windows were only shut if it stormed. I woke up one morning in a confused haze. It was dark out, but the first tendrils of light were creeping across the horizon. It smelled of rainwater, not yet evaporating in the day’s heat. I reached for the book on my nightstand and settled in with half-closed eyes. It was one of those moments in life where a little voice creeps in and whispers: Remember this. This is what it is to be at peace.

I took my time cataloging the morning. The pleasant warmth of my sheets. The soft pink of my walls. The giddy joy of slipping back into one of the dozens of books I would tear through each summer. It never once occurred to me that this was a real day. It felt like one of those dreams you can only have while taking a nap.

I wish the memory ended there. Just a pocket of bliss on a warm morning. One of those anecdotes of childhood that makes your heart ache to be young again.

It was a weekday. My father came in and took the book from my hands, scolding me. I wasn’t supposed to sit in bed. I was supposed to be getting ready for the day. I’ve never been able to name the emotion that washed over me as his voice clipped at me through gritted teeth; a riding crop driving me around the room in a bewildered flurry.

If it had been an isolated incident I think I would be kinder to that memory. I would look for those little humid dewdrops in early July mornings.

Instead, it’s the earliest memory I have of questioning my father’s anger. I couldn’t even tell if we were actually at risk of being late or if he had just been offended by the very sight of me. The sound of his exaggerated gasp as he opened the door struck like lightning. I felt it crystallize my adolescent malcontent into a sharp, metallic rage. I was acutely aware not just of the morning that had been taken from me, but of the idyllic memory fizzling away into just another tableau of my incompetence.

I remember rubbing the sleep from my eyes and wondering how much effort it would have taken to be gentle. To swallow his criticisms about how “we don’t sit in bed and read on days where we have camp” in that cloying tone. To instead find it funny or sweet or even just a bit strange.

This, you see, was my childhood. Moments of quiet enjoyment that I would later be told were evidence of my wrongness. How silly was I to luxuriate in the softness of youth? Didn’t I realize it was leaving a mess? That it was an inconvenience not worth bearing? My aesthetic life was continuously pruned and warped until I felt nothing but a deep, aching hunger.

I suppose it’s no wonder that I snuck into my closet at 14 with a fist full of gas station liquor bottles and mascara dripping off my chin.

And now it’s summer again. And those beautiful, lazy days still come with dread snaked around their neck.

[bare-vincent]

4/17/25

My cat died and I want to grieve but no one ever taught me how. I tried to learn once and got caught between the sadness and the shore. I still feel everything that was ever done to me. It’s all kept safe under a thick callus. I rub the rough skin when I start to think fondly of a warm summer night in Connecticut. I remind myself what’s underneath without having to see it.

That’s what I did when I learned he was gone. I went to brush my fingers over the rough mass and almost passed out from the pain. My fingers hit smooth skin, mottled purple and rubbed raw. Like someone rubbed me new with a pink eraser. My cat died so why am I so angry at my father?

My brother almost died and I tried to write about it. To put all that pain away. But it was November and my phone devoured the words and I don’t think I’ll ever talk about it like that again. I want to blame the modern world but people spill ink on diary pages and drop laptops off tables and laugh when blind drunk. You can’t save it all.

[bare-vincent]

7/22/24

Afternoon

A friend from college came to visit this weekend. I took the day off work on Friday to convince him to stay for good. It wasn’t hard and didn’t take long. Boston in July wraps itself around you and doesn’t like to let go. You’ll find hydrangea petals in your teeth the whole way home. I took him through the common and the garden, told him I had a favorite willow tree, and offered sunscreen from my purse.

We walked around Back Bay pointing at stone facades and wrought iron gates, picking out his home from the sidewalk. A place that makes you feel like somebody.

We ate lobster rolls for lunch. My legs dangled off the stool, three men with his name ate in the same tiny place. We knew because they call out orders by name. The city is beautiful. It has sidewalks covered in trees and a train that runs faster than you can walk. The streets are meticulously clean, the scent of rotting garbage is conspicuously absent coming home from New York or DC.

He wants coffee so we go the Prudential Center. Eataly has a coffee shop at the entrance. We walk through the normal shops full of puffer coats and people with heavy paper bags. The glass bridge takes us to the desolate halls of Gucci and Louis Vuitton. We look in from the outside and I feel an odd sadness remembering when I used to ache to belong in there. Between his money and my mouth we could run circles around them all but now we have nothing but better things to do.

The public library is full of brass lamps and murals and chattering tourists running their hands along the marble steps. There’s a bar and a tea room and a radio cafe and it feels like somewhere you’re allowed to be. We don’t stay very long.

Ducking into Copley we take a last minute detour. That’s the thing, I tell him, it’s a small city. If you keep the green line under your feet you’ll never be far from anything. The Atheneum is next. 10 1/2 Beacon Street because the other numbers were taken by the time they got around to having an address. Red leather doors with brass handles. A place that makes you feel like somebody for only $40 a month. Five floors drenched in sun and bursting with every book ever written.

I find myself almost embarrassed with how beautiful it is. This place where I put my lunch in the fridge and send emails arguing over commas. It is an old beauty in the European sense. We clamber up iron stairs and peer down at the stacks from the narrow glass aisles. Giddy that the galleries aren’t just for show.

Out on the lower terrace I point down at a group of tourists clustered on a shady path.

“That’s where Paul Revere is buried.”

He nods.

We look at the Granary Burial Ground a little longer; we marvel at the permanence of the view. He decides to sell his business down south and buy that brownstone after all.

“I just need a year to get it all figured out.”

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is last on the tour.

“I know what I want.” He says what everyone feels when they first see that courtyard.

“It changes with the seasons,” I tell him, pointing to the windows where the nasturtiums hang each spring.

The cool breeze rolling out of the four story garden comes as much from the marble as the ferns.

I am jealous of the statues. They get to stand on the soft clover. To become a part of the trees and the flowers. To live forever bathed in chlorophyll and sunlight. My knee hits the chain at the bottom of the step. A mosaic Medusa peers up through the ivy.

The rooms would be claustrophobic if they weren’t so beautiful. A hoarder’s den sagging with Titian’s and Botticelli’s and fine French lace decaying slowly behind glass.

“I would be an artist,” I say, shivering lightly in the stone hallway, “but I have a law degree and I’m marrying an accountant.”

I’m easy to misunderstand but he doesn’t. There is no blame burning on my tongue. No taste of regret.

The narrow hall choked with letters and first editions pushes us forward. We speak softly, afraid someone might hear how desperately we want to be someone worth remembering.

“I think I’m written as a Gertrude Stein figure,” I tell him, “I need my friends to do amazing things. Amazing enough that someone will wonder who was hosting dinner every weekend.”

The irony is clumsy and heavy footed. We both feel it. We know too much about Gertrude Stein not to. The violence of my need to create is not so docile.

The next night we sit on the couch after coming home from a bar. My friends from law school have all gone home, full of lasagna and beer and stories about us from college. My fiancé stumbles to bed and I can tell he’ll be asleep before his face hits the pillow.

“I sometimes feel like I’m wasting my brain.” I tell our friend.

It’s not an admission so much, I don’t hide it. My restless ambition runs lightning behind my eyes in a way that’s hard to miss. But no one quite knows what to do with it. Least of all me.

We are 25 and 26 and too smart for our own good. Even worse, people have noticed. We carry around finely tuned scales hanging where our stomachs should be. Self doubt piles up on one end and a god complex on the other. He needs THC to eat and I need Adderall to do the laundry. And above us both there is a long, heavy sword swinging from a rope of braided silk.

[bare-vincent]

7/21/24

Evening

I think loneliness might be kept in the left side of your chest. I can feel it in there now.

[bare-vincent]

5/9/24

Mid Morning

I cried on the floor last night for the first time in a long time because my job forces me to do such insidious things. “Insidious” really is the right word. I don’t design warheads or dump chemicals in fields. But I carve rivers for money to flow to the people who do. I smooth paths for men who use their annual raises on provisions for the IDF and I can’t get a good enough foothold to do a damn thing about it. I watch the capillaries branch and pool and burst and follow them to the end only to find blood on my own feet. I want so desperately to be good in a way that matters. It feels almost tacky now. As if the burning pit in my stomach isn’t fire but plastic rhinestones piled haphazardly on a single half-dead tea light. The flickering reds and oranges nothing more than an accidental party trick, throwing no real heat. And I am ashamed of it. There was a real fire there once, I promise. I can see the ash on my lungs, feel the scars carved behind my ribs, I still cough up kindling when I’m drunk on vodka sodas. I’ve begun doing little things to stave off the heat death looming within me. Joining the NLG and speaking more in rooms where it might matter. I tend to the sparks coming from the corroded batteries in that one little light. I brush away the synthetic glow I mistook for heat. I am 25. I remind myself. I am 25 and I am trying and there is still something real bubbling through my polyester veins.

[bare-vincent]

3/29/24

Almost midnight

I wish I hadn’t had so much wine tonight because the alcohol makes me honest and I was out to dinner with my parents. I felt myself dancing on my tongue and trying to come through but I can’t I can’t I can’t. She’s safe with me.

We go to find our wedding venue tomorrow. I love him. I hope our friends all move to Boston and we can drink as much as we want and I can hold them all close and go “see? Isn’t Back Bay lovely?” And fill their fridges with sauce and lasagna and giggle endlessly at their silly faces and stories. I miss them every minute we’re together.

[bare-vincent]

3/26/24

Morning

My hair smells like rosemary and I’m older now. I always am. I got more linen boards in the mail (larger sizes) and some small detail brushes. I went to Manhattan Friday to see Fall Out Boy in the fifth row of Madison Square Garden and get drunk and text everyone I knew when I was 15. We went upstate for a few days afterwards to stay with my friend’s aunt and bring home her grandmother’s table in a rented pickup truck. My fiancé’s best friend carried it up when we got back to Cambridge and we all went to dinner. These are the things that happen now. Being older and perfumed with $40 conditioner. I buy oil paints and drive home antique furniture with friends and this weekend I’ll host Easter dinner. And I am 25 on a good day. The rest of the time I am 14 and very confused about who I am. I review contracts and I cook dinner and I teach children how to paint over zoom. And it’s all wonderful in its own way, I think.

I have to clean blood from the sheets and even that doesn’t feel quite so terrible. Spring is coming.

[bare-vincent]

3/10/24

Guilt comes home and I realize it might never have left. I feel guilt for how I love. I’m too ravenous. Too hungry. Too desperate for the world. I need to feel it all. Does no one else feel it? How insane this life is? We have it once. And to want to kiss and fuck and love all I can is something shameful and strange. But I want to melt into everything. Let my edges dissolve. And I can’t and it kills me and I feel it inside me. A deep gnawing pit that comes homes. That lives here. That’s what it means to “come home”.

I remember being young (but not too young) and it was hot and sweaty and the feel of a man’s chest under a damp shirt. Feeling how warm he was. The heaving of his breath. I was done from that moment he crashed his lips on mine in the back corner of the hotel even as I sniffled through a cold. The pilot light flicked to life and I’ve been starving ever since.

[bare-vincent]

2/29/24

Do you ever get in bed just to realize you need to trim your nails and then everything feels wrong?

It’s midnight and I have meetings in the morning but the wind is flinging rain against the window so hard it sounds like glass. I went to a concert last night. Two Door Cinema Club with Joywave opening. I drank vodka sodas and went home at 10pm. I think if I can just be okay then everything will be okay.

[bare-vincent]

2/12/24

Afternoon

Being American feels bad, if anyone has ever wondered. It is bad. It’s like my body wants to run away from itself. Everywhere is blood soaked. A crime happened here. A burial ground. Sirens in the distance and I want to go home but I am home and I want home to be better. Can it get better? Is there better? It kills and eats and chews. “Shop like a billionaire” at Temu and watch the billionaire at the Super Bowl with her boyfriend’s number dangling from her throat. Choke heavy as she flies home to her own bed. It’s what she deserves. Don’t talk about it. Blue ribbons around trees for the wrong reasons. The plastic stretches pale around the bark and it feels milky behind my eyes too. A fish will swallow it whole one day and maybe I’ll swallow the fish. I can avert my eyes all I want but that cheap ribbon will float inside me. I don’t buy all the things I can afford to avoid and I pass fistfuls of the remainders along. But it feels hot. Something is burning fast. On purpose, I think. I know. They have to do it fast. Always faster. No time to think no time to argue just move and then years later, when the retrospective airs, look out over the middle distance with those heavy eyes. Tell yourself we did what we thought was right while the camera watches and the children recoil. No one ever knows better, isn’t that right? Pull your trembling other onto your lap and rock them gently. “They were just people,” whisper in their green apple hair, “they didn’t realize…” trail off like all lies do. It feels bad because you realize it shouldn’t feel like anything at all. The dirt under your nails and gasoline soaked jeans should keep you from feeling it but you showered and only have the one pair. Where do you go to get dirty nails? How do you coat the rawness of your skin without sinking? Petroleum slick in the waves.

I want to live without my existence rippling out pain like a cracked whip. I don’t understand how others just lay in the foamy churn and lap up the burnt froth. How they don’t scream and cry and try to scrape it all off. Napalm lips and pleather coats melting and it’s hot. It’s burning. And I don’t want to be this anymore. I’d rather turn myself inside out.

Private equity bought the firm where I review contracts with three letter names and I feel it all on me like engine grease. They die and I am an American and one is because of the other.

I thought when I got this job that I had burned bright young. That I was over it for now. I’m not. There’s nothing to be over. There is only that fast burn always running. The child in a car. The calls. The investors paying out for steady cash. I don’t like it here. I can’t churn out legal lube for PE fucks. I simply won’t make it.

[bare-vincent]

2/1/24

Early (late?)

What the fuck is wrong with me. I miss crying in that green sweater I got from the church thrift shop in 10th grade with my hair in boxer braids and my nose shining red through the drugstore concealer. Do you ever feel like you’ve been here too long? Like a computer program outliving its useful life and beginning to come apart at the sides.

I’m sure if I could dig through what’s turning me into a soggy lump it would be laughable. He’s busy? I feel stupid? The apartment is a mess? Nothing is new. The anger and the sadness have been here all my life. And I cry alone on the couch because the bed is too warm and offers too much comfort and I’m not very good at things I don’t think. Never have been. Why does it feel so good to scratch the wounds? To cut into the cruelty. I was never big enough to go at it with a razor blade. Carving into my hips with a pair of craft scissors and a bit tongue. Too limp to even beg for attention properly.

I was a child. She was a child. A bleeding child shoving tissues deep in the trashcan and wiping sweaty cheeks. I’m still her I think. It hurts and I don’t know where to put it and it feels like something is going to come undone. Maybe it already has. And I know in the morning my body will ache from the West Elm crushed velvet couch and I’ll feel silly and tired and curse my puffy eyes. It won’t help the mangled version of my face I’m currently dealing with. Marked with those deep cysts and purplish splotches so I can’t forget them even if the painful lumps go away. And I’m not very pretty and not smart in a way that matters in this life. And I’m a foolish little thing. Sad for no reason. I shouldn’t be here I don’t think. I wasn’t built for it. I was built to cry in that green sweater. But I sold the sweater and it wouldn’t fit even if I kept it.

[bare-vincent]

1/25/24

Night

My trainer pays for his wife’s Botox so she won’t get filler and I spend all my money on skincare and clothing and looking nice just to hate the sight of myself in the mirror of my luxury gym and my friends hate their arms and their legs and their frizzy braids and I’m tired of not knowing how to be beautiful.

[bare-vincent]

1/22/24

Morning

January is moving so fast I can hardly see it.

I think about my biography every time I finish a painting. Will anyone ever have a reason to write it? Let alone to read it? I’ve found the way I want to paint now. Oil painting below with painstaking layers of linseed glazes (like the still life I copied off Pinterest). And then dried and varnished (if I remember) and covered with oil pastels wherever I need to build up the color. Sprayed with a milk casein fixative and, eventually, mounted carefully behind museum glass in a frame. I need to take more care to take pictures of things I want to paint. Specifically people. I think that’s why I paint so many landscapes, why I’ve gotten so good at them. I only ever take pictures of places and not people. I can copy pictures I’ve seen but not really. Not the way I want to. I’m showing people something I’ve never really had for real. There’s something in that but it’s less freedom at the easel.

I think I’m going to try some master copies of portraits. Really doing it properly with the grid and colored pencil underneath and everything. I’ve run out of half finished paintings now. A year of painting on and off and only three days to finish them all in pastels.

I don’t particularly enjoy practicing drawing. Sketching in charcoal can be fun but graphite is so tedious it makes me want to cry. But there’s this sense I can’t shake that I’m not a “real” artist unless I have mastered the photorealistic pencil drawings you’d see in an art school. I could never sell a single painting but I think I’d feel for real if I could do that.

Of course I have no plans to sell a painting. Let alone multiple. I’m an attorney and an artist and it’s too early to slice away the first half of myself. I only dream of being a full time painter when I don’t have time to sketch on my lunch break. There’s a lesson for employers in there somewhere but I’ll be cold in the ground before I hand it over.

Afternoon

We take a break sometimes to kiss in the kitchen and I can’t help but blush. Six years and an engagement ring later and he will still occasionally change into a handsome man wandering the house with his heavy steps. And then there will be a cacophony of tumbling dishes followed by “fuck” and he is himself again.

I wonder often about what makes a relationship last. I think it’s having secrets from each other. The knowledge that you will never know everything about them but you’re as close as anyone ever should be. There’s always something private. They remain, to return to my college self, the “other” in a profound way. We take ourselves for granted. We have to. Constant awareness would be crippling. And so I partition out a few bits of myself and keep them safely behind the curtain. Most of them spill out into friendships or diaries but a few are really and truly my own.

[bare-vincent]

1/16/24

I am sitting on the bathroom floor covered in blue magic marker to see where I can put more tattoos. I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. The shower is running.

[bare-vincent]

1/14/24

Afternoon

The wind is screaming past the glass now. Gusts pulling branches from the trees.

I look for home in every photo. Is that brownstone in Back Bay? Is that train running down Comm Ave? Are those snowdrifts piled over the common? It pulls me in. Do I know this place? Most of the time I can’t tell. But occasionally I’ll see enough to place it. And sometimes it’s Boston. And even when it isn’t, I can’t help but feel that it might be, in another world. It might be home in a way I can’t quite place.

I am hungry and haven’t eaten much today, let alone enough. I have to get up to eat and to clean and to shower so that tonight I can cook and tomorrow I can paint. There’s laundry in the wash. Another basket ready to go down. I like the folding, but the sorting and the stairs are less fun. It sounds like something just fell off the wall but I’m not sure what it was. It might have been something on the balcony, battered by the wind. I don’t feel normal but I never have. I want to feel good. And then I can clean so I can cook so I can draw so I can paint.

Would anyone love me if they knew? That’s the question, I think. I don’t have anything deplorable. No irrepressible violent urges or even tendencies towards harm. My secrets are the kind that get aired in memoirs to the tight smiles of your children and acclaim of people who adore late in life memoirs full of tender secrets. Things that are not particularly interesting the moment they’re known. I can feel hindsight burning through them from years ahead. Who hasn’t loved that way? Who hasn’t felt a wanting roll in like fog and still managed to stumble home?

(The clouds are glowing pink. Cut open by that impossible periwinkle of twilight clouds.)

When I ask if they would love me if they knew, it is not because of the things themselves. It’s because I don’t think we were ever meant to know someone fully, as much as that has meaning. We all have cruel thoughts and wandering minds and odd tangents. A person cannot be wholly themselves and the other. A mirror is best when it has nothing of itself. But we beg to know and be known. Or, at least, I do. And so I create. I make things. I write and I draw and I sit with my head on my knees and I stare out the window at those wriggling branches and let myself feel horribly lost.

(I am young because I know I am getting older. It makes sense my birthday. The sky is now one cloud, dark and bright as the sea.)

My fiancé is watching football now and I’ve had strips of candied coconut so I can shower. Life is very strange indeed.

[bare-vincent]

1/12/24

Afternoon

Every once in a while I am struck by something that I don’t quite have a name for. I will be walking by a mirror and I catch sight of myself and think “oh, I get it. I’m very beautiful.” And for a moment, I do get it. It’s always that phrase. And always the same feeling. It is the opposite of the alienation of boredom where the world flies away and becomes strange. Everything feels close and warm and very familiar. And I stand there and enjoy it, being beautiful. Because in a moment I will look just the same but I will feel rather different. I will no longer get it.

Evening

I think what I was describing earlier was really just what it means to experience art. The lightning flash. I hate that my understanding of this comes from Heidegger, an unrepentant Nazi with a spine of loose jello and the mixed fortune of being good at phenomenology. And it’s fascinating that he was correct about Rothko and why he succeeded where other half-baked imitations fail because fascists love scrubbed marble statues and uncritical scans of chapel ceilings.

This is the problem with art. And why I hold it so tightly to my self. When done well it is a burst of truth. We call it beauty but it’s more than that. You experience good art and suddenly you get it. It’s not a communication of an idea. It is the idea. And I feel so compelled to create at every moment in my life but I never feel like I am saying enough. I paint things and I draw and I sketch but it’s all so hazy. And I have an image in my mind of a painting I want to make but I can’t paint humans too well. So I just sit with it bursting from my every fiber.

Night

One of the more difficult parts of drawing or painting is getting people to see a tree, and not necessarily the tree you are looking at.

[bare-vincent]

1/9/24

Afternoon

I overslept today and never woke all the way up. I’m both tired and sleepy. Different feelings. Each posing its own challenges to my job of sending emails and having coherent thoughts.

I want to write about going to my best friend’s house last night but I am stuck between the land of plausible deniability and total vulnerability. There is enough detail here that it will be clear who I am to anyone who knows me and yet there is no one here. I am hiding my face while standing naked in an empty store. The door is unlocked but there is no sign. And yet using the real names of others feels wrong. Violating. So I think I’ll use pseudonyms. Nicknames feels too juvenile and clunky. Referring to them by nothing is confusing. Juliet for one and Viola for the other.

We went to Juliet’s apartment and I brought a large bag containing 2/3 of my closet and two much smaller bags with champagne and chocolates and a card asking them each to be a maid of honor. They said yes and I smiled so much my cheeks ached. We sat and ate pasta and drank wine and talked and they tried on the pile of clothes and picked out items to keep. My closet has empty hangers for the first time since childhood and I feel free of something unknowable. At one point Viola was trying on a dress and asked if we also assumed we would never make it to 25. I am 25 now. We all nodded. Younger, even. “20” I responded. It feels so far away now. I’m asked about my plans and my long term goals and I am gripped by the realization that I am nothing more than happy to be here.

I read back through my journals and see the tear stained pages begging for an end to the pit of loneliness that moved in at age 9. That icy, burning weight.

I think of my young legs shaved twice and moving quickly down the street, bare feet crunching over sand and pebbles. I think of my long hair tangled and mascara smudged and arms thin, wrapped around my bare torso. And the loneliness still throbbing. The brief flickers of warmth that began to dance around the edges of my vision in college, only to get locked away in the pandemic. Crawling towards them again in law school and finally, last night, sitting on the couch and listening to stories of dating and death and vibrators. The loneliness no longer there. Occasionally an ice crystal will dislodge from the freezer burn around my kidneys and trickle into my veins. But the warmth of my life soon melts it away.

And yet for every transcendent pleasure of friendship or love or comfort, there is a deep pain for the world that limits such pleasures on arbitrary lines. It is impossible to find true love for others and not be doubled over with the eventual realization of how monumental the loss of even one human life is in this world. The political fiction of war brings me nothing but a mass of writhing wounded bodies tamping down the dead.

This isn’t a diversion into self flagellation. Or, at least, not purely. My motivations and concerns are more practical than Catholic. I spent 90 minutes on a web training for federal government procurement procedures. Government contracting. I save my detailed thoughts for my paper diaries but I will state for the record that my line is well documented and the resignation letter, should it ever approach the line, is drafted and sitting in my desk drawer. There are plenty of agencies who need bureaucratic support to administer programs. I do not suffer hypocrites and I do not live to suffer.

I found myself wincing at the casual mention of armed drones as a handy rhetorical for parsing legalities. It is not that people think these things are right or even necessary, it’s that they think they are removed. We are a world alienated from the effects of our actions. But if I throw a vase across the kitchen, it breaks. Impotence is a fiction akin to war, though somehow a more hateful one.