working on it

Let's go to bed.

[ifionlyhadapen]

Letters to Arash V.1

Arash,

I spent my day asleep on the beach, wasting away with the rotting sun. It gets hot here. Apparently there’s a hole in the ozone layer right above this country, and there is very little to stop your skin from burning. People here are so isolated from everything. They were raised so far from the blaring sirens of the New York City streets, maybe like you were, but it’s almost like they are removed from struggle. I only know American noise. 

I like this life here, being able to spend my days on the sand, not worrying about much else - well, maybe the sun.

It’s silly to think that we passed each other as you flew back from India to New York but I guess I’m used to calling you late at night anyways, when you’re only just rising in the morning and drinking your chai tea.

I miss talking to you. Remember that time we took a subway an hour to Queens for a museum exhibit that had closed? Thinking about us slamming our fists against the clear glass doors, hoping for someone to open makes me smile.

I’m glad we’re doing this, talking this way. It may be better than our long coffeeshop conversations. Probably not, but we can try.

Always,

Vanessa

[ifionlyhadapen]

If we all fell asleep alone,

in each others arms alone,

waking up to the emptiness of a pillow beside us alone,

would that make us more likely to return from the darkness of a bar that plays remixes of Today’s Hits!

with someone to love in your right arm?

or do you fall victim to the sadness, the realization that loneliness defies itself, forgives itself, and completely contradicts itself in it’s self-proclaimed esoteric glory?

[ifionlyhadapen]

Spaghetti and Meatballs

It was lunch time in the cafeteria, we were 11. The room was cold from the thick moisture of the air conditioner and the ceilings were high. You sat beside me because I had met you for the first time that day. We were eating spaghetti and meatballs. I was nice to you. 

You grew up. You grew up, and the girls liked you, and you were learning about their thoughts and feelings. But I was still there, and you knew. I was your friend.

We shared our love for music, my first joint, leaning against the hood of our car like we lived in Texan country, but it was just South Florida, and we wanted something to complain about.

Somewhere along that time where I moved to a city and you stayed behind, you got caught up. And your smile wasn’t as toothy, you were talking about God, about the possibilities of human capacity, and how maybe we all “just weren’t meant for more”. 

I think I have always loved you, so it was hard to put you in a cab tonight. Telling the driver where you were headed, because I’m not sure if you’re headed anywhere. I walked down the block alone, listened to those dollar-beer drinking, lanky summer interns cat call me in the night. I left you and went back to all of this. This Ikea couch, these Warby Parker glasses, the scaffolding above the laundromat across the street. 

But I was happy to see you. 

[ifionlyhadapen]

I walk into the living room, a space so small you might as well crawl onto your hands and knees, and she sits in that plastic chair I spent $49 dollars on in Ikea. Her hair, a black that admits mom and dad never paid enough attention to her, lays lifeless on her back. She’s poised as she sits, upset with me, upset with the excess of makeup melting under her eye. I try not to care, because I’ve fallen victim to kindness and that’s what I get for being so foolish. A blank, fearless stare, from the girl who once laid closer to death than I’ll ever understand. 

[ifionlyhadapen]

At 7-years-old, I looked at my substitute teacher; she wore a blue button down and her hair in an afro-like frizz. She placed her hands onto those old wooden tables I probably couldn’t fit in anymore, and I saw her fingernails. They were short, stopped about halfway. I had always bitten my nails, but I told myself that mine could never be that short. My life, unlike hers, would be put together. Nails long, afro tamed. 

And in my shower tonight I hummed the theme song of an obscure television show that was cancelled after a season - and though my hair laid wet and straight against my bare back, I wondered if I had it together at all. My nails are still bitten, my friend keeps asking me if I ever feel lonely, and there’s lack of conditioner in my shower.

You tell me.

[ifionlyhadapen]

reunion

3 years

talking about that time you and i laid in the back of a dirty Subaru in a desolate parking lot at the local pizza joint

that’s what it was called, too.

The Pizza Joint.

and when i saw you today

and you grilled burgers, wiping the sweat off your forehead.

i spent 3 years of my life there

3 years and 2 of them thinking about you.

so when i heard you calling orders, wearing a backwards baseball cap, and smiling uncomfortably at the sight of me

i wondered what it all meant.

what purpose you have in my life.

you told me you were sweaty, gross and uncomfortable,

i saw you just the same.

[ifionlyhadapen]

air set at 63 and I’ve tried so hard to make this work

and all of these buddhist ideas about now about today 

about how we run our lives because we were born and because we will die

I don’t know much about that, but I know that I am really trying to make this work.

[ifionlyhadapen]

celebrity

the way Lou Reed pronounces “sangria”

Jon Snow killed a white walker at the Crosby Hotel

[ifionlyhadapen]

Broken Love/New York, NY

What does it mean when I write about broken love? I fled from Miami because of the heat. It slows a city down, makes it rise with the sun, with people photographing parks, of which they don’t know by name, but by reputation, by photographs from the Internet and friends of friends who told them this was the best place for a piece of salmon, and it barrages the beauty of the damaged city. It’s not meant to be this swarm of assimilation, this moisture. It’s a city divided by curiosity and I’m afraid it’s sinking with the season.

[ifionlyhadapen]

i bought a kantha quilt on the internet. the shade of my lamp melted off with the light. and there shoes everywhere. it’s getting hot. i set my air conditioning to 64 degrees. i am happy i have air conditioning.

today i wanted ice cream, but i got frozen yogurt. what ever happened to haagen dazs?

summer is coming and i have no plans. so this is it. 

[ifionlyhadapen]

“It”

Watching tapings of the Graham Norton Show

Thinking about the feeling of wearing no clothing,

Of having nothing to hide.

The purity of skin, fat, bones,

Sadness.

What about that?

And I feel, too often, like I’m hiding.

Teenage angst. But I’m 20.

I shouldn’t be here

It shouldn’t be about sadness and hiding and loneliness and angst.

And what the fuck is “it”?

Is “it” the time where watching the Graham Norton Show,

Thinking a lot about Nutella,

And how horrible it is when your wet hair drips down onto your pillow?

“it” must say it all, “it” must sum up my current stage of life.

I once took a class where they called it “adolescence”.

I guess that’s it.

[ifionlyhadapen]

The Last Picture Show - Bogdanovich 

[ifionlyhadapen]

and in the photo, topless, unsmiling, she holds a book titled Candy.

but by the way she holds its gentle pages, I know she did not read the book

and that upsets me

because she is so beautiful

so comfortable

and I want for her to have read the book

to have smiled, or cried and have wiped her literate tears off her bare breast.

[ifionlyhadapen]

therapy

“To be honest, Rosie, I’m most afraid of the little things, the ones that don’t seem to matter at all.”

Her clear-framed glasses sat on a rigged edge of her nose. She licked her upper lip as a piece of her hair fell to her eye. I looked at her, wondering why people paid for advice like this. Most of it I could give myself in my head. I even responded to myself, it’s the little things that matter most, the ones that make us human.

But Rosie didn’t seem to bare that kind of advice, this time.

“Look, we’ve all got fears. Whether big, or subliminal, they exist and we have to deal with them,”

But it’s how you deal with them that makes you---

“You just can’t pity yourself. It’ll ruin you.”

I tapped my fingers on the edge of the arm rest.

[ifionlyhadapen]

dealership romance

A young valet at the Lexus dealership drove me around the lot the other day. He said it was nice to meet me, and I smiled like I had other things in mind. 

And then my mom told me you had spoken about me. Said you liked me. 

I want to know what it’s like to kiss you, because I’ve never understood romance.

I’ve thought about it. But I think about a lot of things. Even if your face sometimes eases into my consciousness, you don’t feel so different from other things.

I liked hearing about you, about what you had to say, but I’m not sure what you mean to me.

No more than that flirtatious valet did driving me around.

[ifionlyhadapen]

excerpt 2

I had seen Georgia a week before, her eyes looked sad. I had found out a few days earlier that she had a different boyfriend, and that she hadn’t been with my friend with the blue eyes since before the summer. She asked me to come to a charity event with her, said the speaker was world-renown. We lived in New York City, and I didn’t care for world-renown.

[ifionlyhadapen]

excerpt

We had been doing a class assignment Freshman year in my dorm room when someone knocked at the door. I had always left my door open, so I called for whoever it was to come in. It was a good friend of mine, her name was Georgia. She was the prettiest girl most guys had ever seen, and he wasn’t an exception. She asked to borrow my straightening iron, and that was that.

He began to ask me about her a lot. What her name was, where she was from, if she had a boyfriend. I told him what he needed to know, and the rest was left to him. He was in front of her at the printer line in the library early one morning. He let her go first. They were together for months after that.