Evelyn Patneaude

It was home for four days and hungover for three.

“I’ll never want anything bad ever again,” I say.

“Yeah, until you do.” Dad hands off the luggage.

In the TSA line, wrinkling my face.

Hauling my things. Waiting at the gate.

I was a writer, though I was not a particularly good one.

I was relieved when I remembered I was a flight attendant. You were a passenger, you sat in Comfort+. We were celebrating 100 years of Delta together.

“Thanks for flying with me—oops! I meant us, like, with Delta.” I giggled after we touched down at JFK and you were the first to shoot out of your seat. Everyone else soon followed you in filing out the front.

You had been conducting business on a laptop. You were so busy, that even thousands of miles in the air, you were still expected to conduct business. I couldn’t believe it. Eventually, we loved and we wed and we even bore children; it was a special thing, it was a miracle.

I was hungover at Sea-Tac. Tears were welling in my eyes. I was watching babies and moms and flight attendants. I was a writer, though I was not a particularly good case. The nausea was unbearable. Dad handed off the luggage. I hauled my things. I was the last one to board. My clothing was ill-fitting.

In the window seat, I cursed weakness— “I’ll never want anything bad ever again.”

I was a writer, though at one point, I was in bed, in arms, in the dark, listening to songs that sang me to sleep, and that was fine enough.

 I’ll tell you a story about feeling sensitive to things, like the weather or every song that plays in public, because you are young or something… I’ll tell you about yesterday, when Anne told the family she wouldn’t be able to make it home for the holidays this year.

              Anne’s mother dragged out the phone call, bargaining: maybe Anne could just pick a stretch of days in the middle of November, and she could come home and the family would prepare for her a miniature, personal Thanksgiving feast—she could take a cheap red-eye there and be back in time for work on the day she returned. Anne felt her head pulsate lightly. She said it was a good idea and that she’d think about it, before then informing her mother that it was time for her to get going to today’s job. Anne’s mother said she understood, Anne knew that she had hurt her mother’s heart, badly, and the phone call ended.

              Anne hadn’t slept at all, really. She could blame it on the back to back double shifts at the other job, that the residual stress was keeping her head up and racing even when it lay on the pillow, but really it was an active choice she had made last night—one she made almost every night—an attempt to extend the day, push it a little further, win back some of the time that she or work had whittled away.

              During the phone call Andrew had awoken and taken his shower, and he was now sitting on his bed, reading something on his phone. Anne carried her hot coffee into his room and sat down next to him atop the mattress, at first being quiet, then saying that she missed her family.

              “That’s funny,” Andrew said, “I was just thinking I missed my friends.”

              Anne poked her head over Andrew’s shoulder and inspected a paragraph or two of what was on the screen, an interview with a musician.

              “We should get going. We’re supposed to be there at noon.” Anne spoke all gloomy and whiny, to which Andrew felt annoyed, muttering something about how Anne said they “had an hour” and that was less than an hour ago.

              He quickly followed suit in getting up anyway. He grabbed the plastic trash bag containing their supplies. Anne put on her big coat, the one Andrew hated on her, and said to Andrew that she was scared of the wind.

              (Anne was in the midst of a “recession,” so she was allowing things to be bad again.)

              Outside, the streets were emptier than normal, the sky was on high exposure, the trash was blowing around, and powerful gusts of sharp, cold air came rushing at Anne and Andrew, pushing against them as they hustled to the train. Anne’s eyes stung and welled with tears, her face was flushed and wrinkled, she was victim and small and penetrable. The few people on the street were merely scattered zombies or ghosts, half-alive and drifting in a random direction, wearing distraught faces. Anne thought it was harrowing—everybody crossing their arms and pinching their coats closed and looking at you like you had some kind of answer. Anne thought, I have nothing for you, so don’t look at me, please, and the wind knocked her all the way down the stairs and in through the subway doors.

              Anne’s lip quivered as she and Andrew rode to the nice part of town, though she noted that it was no longer an explicit sadness that was causing it. It was instead now something expansive and abstract that was causing her lip to quiver, something emanating from everything around her. It was seeping out of the expressions on people’s faces, it was being presented in codewords in passing conversation.

              “Do you have your earbuds? Let’s listen to the playlist I made.” Andrew said. Anne was gazing forward at the man across from her, darting her eyes away whenever the two accidentally made eye contact.

              “Okay,” she said, and fished some earbuds out from a cumbersome black leather purse.

              The songs were the same as they had been last night, when she first played Andrew’s playlist on the way home from work, but they had since been infused with a kind of dark magic, there now lie hidden meanings and secret frequencies that dug into Anne’s eardrums, a supernatural ability to make her submit to emotion.

              Anne was sensitive to the world, like she was something soft and not yet fully formed, a confused baby or toddler experiencing, for the first time in its life, the terrifying fact of scale.

              The corners of Anne’s eyes crackled with teardrops, and so she shut their lids in acceptance, not letting anything overflow. She continued in facing forward. The world would understand, just by witnessing this expression, that she was a complicated young woman. Andrew rocked his head around to the song playing in the earbuds. He loved that one.

              Anne and Andrew careered through the streets of the nice part of town, remarking to each other about the sheer strength of that wind. If you looked at the street corner that they were waiting at from this specific angle, one where you saw only the arterial parts coupled with the big mirror-looking apartment complexes and offices, against the color of the sky that day, it closely resembled their hometown.

              They reached the address of the job-site, and by cracking the code on a lockbox, they made it in through the side door. Upon entry, they discovered the following, in this order:

              The townhome was four stories
              An entire story alone was to be considered the “living room”
              There was a spiral staircase, several hidden rooms, gilded statues of lions, a million dollars in a safe, rare objects from Africa, etc. And also, three temporary inhabitants who didn’t seem to care about any of this, each were laying on a separate couch on a separate floor.
              Anne and Andrew were awestruck. They were turning to each other and smiling/shaking their heads in disbelief to everything they stumbled upon. Some people would be mad, deeming this place to be a display of gross wealth, but Anne and Andrew loved to be in nice places. Every time they went to a job, they would say, “This place is so nice,” with a bright expression.

              So, Anne pretended to mop a corner of the kitchen. Andrew tore the sheets off one of the five or so beds. They hastily ran a paper towel with a bit of liquid cleaner from the dollar store across a few surfaces, they lounged in the dining room chairs, they tested out some of the upstairs couch guy’s colognes in the bathroom, they took turns dragging around a broom; mostly though, they talked about how badly they wanted to eat donuts. The ceilings were so high. It incited hope, maybe, Anne thought.

              They killed the time to make the extra money. Anne was feeling antsy and impatient though, a way she often got when she was bad, and so she made an overly-bold claim to Andrew about time mattering more than money to her right now, something that she maybe 75% believed. Then, she moaned that she wanted a donut, so badly.

              Anne and Andrew rushed to transfer over the laundry, cramming a sopping bundle of white bedding into the dryer, and they exited through the side door, and the whole time the woman was still laying on her couch downstairs watching a TV show.

              They texted their “boss,” who was Anne’s cousin or some other kind of relative, she wasn’t sure but she knew they were related, that they finished cleaning the place.

              Andrew had to pick up a thing from his older sister, which he didn’t want to do for some reason. Anne said that Chinatown was on the way there, and that they should do it anyway because that way they could get Chinese pastries first. Andrew pictured thick red bean paste encased within a shiny, greasy bun.

              Anne and Andrew got on the train, and then Anne gave Andrew an insecure look and went, “Wait, but what I really wanted was a donut.”

              “Well, do you want to get a donut instead?”

              They changed routes and ventured forty minutes out of the way to get The Best Donuts in the City.

              The two bickered over something before realizing that they were now standing outside the donut shop. They bickered some more as they stepped inside, Anne scoffed and said “whatever,” and instantly the two were snapped into a shared trance state, wherein they ordered four donuts from Eastern European ladies in mint colored retro-style diner uniforms, and then they sat down at the counter, pulling each donut out of the paper bag one at a time, digging teeth into sweet chewy, airy dough, ripping off pieces and submerging them into steaming black coffee, the whole time speaking strictly of how good the donuts were—they really were The Best Donuts in the City.

              They passed a diner on the walk back, and they opened the door, peeking inside, feigning to each other that it was only out of curiosity and that they’d merely glance at the menu; they then allowed themselves to be guided to a hard wooden booth by a voluptuous waitress.

              Anne ordered the Tuna Melt and Andrew ordered the Reuben, and the music in the diner was working the dark magic, every song was not only intelligent, but had personal connections and importance to Andrew and Anne, every note was potent in its drug, and, yeah, it was just magical.

              Anne felt beautiful in a new white dress with buttons down the front.

              “I love to wear a new dress.” She talked at Andrew.

              “We really do just talk at each other.” Said Andrew. The Tuna Melt was so salty and crunchy. The two of them were listening intently.

              (When I’m bad or low, the only thing I want is to be with you and eat something good.)

              After all that food, they took the train to Andrew’s sister’s place. They got off at the nearest stop and hurried the rest of the way on foot, weaving around construction that bled into the sidewalk. The subway track that ran above their heads capped the height of the world beneath it, forming a ceiling that existed outside, and the roaring sound produced by the train resembled something alien or Sci-Fi. Anne was stomping ahead in big boots, trudging against that wind, against darkening sky and resonant UFO sound. Anne’s heart was sore about all of this, and it ached as she observed passing shops, so short and packed together so tightly beneath this ceiling.

              Andrew’s sister lived behind a front door with a mirror on it and then up a flight of stairs within green walls. Andrew’s sister spoke in her signature winded, deadpan manner when she said that they’d all have to do Thanksgiving together here in the city since nobody was going back home. Anne sipped water. Anne’s eyes tracked a spice cabinet, and then some paintings which had been made by the tenants, all post-art-school-twenty-somethings.

              Andrew got the thing from his sister.

              When Anne and Andrew went to leave, they fumbled with the lock on the door. Anne was thinking that every apartment had a different sort of lock. One time, at a different cleaning job at a dark high-rise that overlooked the middle of the city and had an infinite hallway, Anne begged a Chinese woman to help her unlock the door because everything in that building was too streamlined and modern for her understanding, and she was beginning to panic. The Chinese woman repeated broken bits of phrase many times over, “No English, No English,” but Anne insisted, frantically waving the Chinese woman down, until at last she came over and effortlessly twisted the knob open.

              The train home stalled for a little while due to a problem with the doors. The conductor spoke over the intercom, commanding everyone to get off at once and wait for the next one to come. It was early evening and everyone on the platform was subdued, on their way home from work. Anne eyeballed the large family that was scattered around her.

              The father stood before her and held one daughter, infant, while entertaining the chatter of two more, slightly older. A seat away from Anne on the bench, the mother sat with the son standing in between her legs, and she lifted him up to speak some mushy, baby-talking Spanish, and rub their two faces together. Anne was watching the boy’s tiny shoe dangle over, then graze, a carton of eggs poking out the top of the big vinyl bag of groceries.

              Anne thought about babies and families and groceries, turning to Andrew and giving him an exaggerated, pouty frown.

              (When I’m bad or low, the only thing I want is to be with you and eat something good.)

              At last, the next train had come. Anne and Andrew took it to their stop, and it was there that they were confronted with a daunting view, drawing them to the platform’s edge like summer bugs around a humming oil lamp—the city, in all its magnitude and silhouettes, its blinking red lights, sparkling, sitting away, over there. Fixated, they became entirely motionless, still tethered to one another by wire of the earbuds, which they had once again been sharing during the ride back. They stood there for who knows how long, before opting to walk the final stretch home.

              “I don’t want to go home yet,” Andrew confessed, his way of saying the day had been good. He made sure to match Anne’s pace so that the earbuds wouldn’t abruptly unplug.

              When Anne and Andrew reached the stoop of their apartment, Shawn was standing out there smoking a cigarette. Everybody fell into place, exchanging about their days and their current feelings. A firetruck drove past them, silencing their conversation with its blaring horn. Another firetruck followed, and then another, and then one or two more came barreling from a different direction, all of them headed toward Tio Grocery on the corner, and so were Anne and Andrew and Shawn and everyone else on the block.

              The firetrucks were stalled in front of some apartments. There was chatter and the faint smell of gas lingering in the air. The firemen paced around. Yelling and hollering and other commotion took place. Two boys came by on their skateboards, and Anne watched as they slowed to a stop and picked up the skateboards in order to assess the situation. They were perfect young city boys with backpacks on, riding skateboards.

              “I wonder if Tio Grocery is about to blow up.” Anne posited.

              If Tio Grocery blew up, the three of them agreed that they would most definitely be within the blast range and they would die. They laughed. Everybody was waiting around for something good to happen.

              But one by one, the trucks were dismissed. The scene dispersed. People went back to the laundromat or the Chinese takeout place or wherever it was that they were before, and the perfect young city boys hopped back on their skateboards and slid away. Well, I guess Anne and Andrew and Shawn were walking home now too.

              Meanwhile, in the nice part of town:

              The sheets were piled up in the dryer and they were lightly damp. And they were beginning to get all mildewy.

              A week went by and the woman who was occupying the downstairs couch turned off the TV. She had finally finished the series she was watching. That was pretty good, she thought.

              She got up and she yawned and stretched and then she hobbled over to the washer and dryer, bringing along with her a collection of empty plastic water bottles. She was about to shed her clothes right then and there so they could be washed at once, but when she leaned down to inspect the machines, she discovered the mound of white linens that had been left behind by the cleaners: moldy.

              She was slightly disturbed to learn that there was mold in her dryer (Well, at least it wasn’t actually her dryer, none of the three guests actually lived here, they were just staying for a few weeks because the company had set them up in the place) because she knew that mold was dangerous and could silently degrade humans over time, if it developed in the hardly-visible pockets of a kitchen or went ignored on shower heads. What disturbed her more though, was the fact that she hadn’t even known about the mold; the fact that she had left the sheets in there for a week because she had only left the couch a handful of times.

              Jeez, she thought, that’s sobering.

              She couldn’t understand how life had amounted to this. It didn’t add up. In order to even end up in this position in the first place—that being living as the kind of woman gets put up in four-story townhomes in expensive areas of major cities, just to do work that could be done using a laptop and sitting/laying on your side on a couch—she had spent years and years of her life living as the “hard worker.” She stayed after class and up all night, she did round after round of interviews for internships with tech-conglomerates, she multi-tasked and she networked and she “lunched” with the right people and she had always been so busy.

              College was ages ago by now. She was well into her career. She was comfortable and tenured within the company. But it was not until this now, this very moment, moldy sheets before her, that she realized she had always been so busy. Wait, what had she been so busy with?

              She suddenly felt her chest squeeze. She suddenly felt the three stories of townhome above her slam down upon her body and smush her like a hydraulic press. She picked up her phone, and she texted Anne’s cousin or whatever he was to let him know that last week’s job had not been properly completed and that her sheets were left moldy. She yelled upstairs, aiming her voice all the way up to the top floor guy, the guy with all the colognes, to ask him if he wanted to get in on the fast-casual-build-your-own-salad-bowls mobile order for dinner. He yelled back, “Sure.”

              The two perfect young city boys rode their skateboards to the station and got on the next Manhattan-bound C local train.

              And then it happened again, when Anne was walking around all wrapped up in fur coat and scarf and things like that, obsessively stalking the outsides of apartments and houses, the insides of delis and stores, the menus posted in the windows of restaurants, the patrons sat in the tables behind them. It all seemed to glow and throb, distinguish itself as meaningful and singular, and then dissolve into everything else. Anne shuddered. Anne was searching for a way to define this feeling. Sensitive is all I could think to call it. It’s like being born; you open your eyes and all you can do is cry.
              

 My drunk coworker was loudly rattling off about something gross and inappropriate to one of the guys seated at the bar top when she whipped around to me, scanned me with drowsy eyes, lids low enough to manage an almost devilish appearance, and asked, “Are you…musically inclined?”

              I replied no, not really. “I actually used to play piano though,” I explained. “In fact, I played it for twelve years. I only stopped recently.”

              She wanted to know why. Really, it was that to me, my fingers always felt heavier or somehow innately less capable of clarity and precision than a pianist’s fingers were supposed to be, and I felt equally handicapped in understanding all the counting and numbers that simply playing a song required, so it would take me months to master a single piece, and then the moment I’d stop studying it, I’d forget all the nuances in articulation and dynamics that I’d been hammering in over those months. And at some point, I’d go to play through it and I’d come to an abrupt pause in the middle of a measure because I’d forgotten something key—a specific crossing maneuver with one of my fingers or an emphasis on a certain note—and, paralyzed by the fear of having to go through all that horrible practicing all over again, I’d decide to never touch the song again.

              To prolong the humiliation of stuttering my way through a piece, I’d talk with my piano teacher about music and movies at the start of every lesson for as long as possible. He was near senile and blind in one eye and he usually forgot the things which we discussed within about a week, so I could get away with describing the same movie two, three, four separate times. This made for an ideal strategy, because I liked talking about music and movies, but I didn’t like playing the piano.

              It went on like this, at the imposition of no one’s but my own, from the ages of roughly seven to nineteen.

              “I mean, it’s not like I wanted to be a concert pianist or something like that, you know, so there wasn’t really any point in doing it.”

              “Well, okay, you just have like, the vibe of somebody in a band, though. Like, you should be in a band. Like a rock star, like Janis Joplin!”

              I said thank you, and thought about how I liked drunk people because they were nice. I felt bad, knowing that I would still have to text Mom to let her know that her employee had clocked in drunk again, but for now, I really enjoyed how nice she was. The business was slow that evening, likewise the two of us, and it was becoming time to wrap up the summer.

              When the summer first began, I had just gotten really into The Beatles, and I would often drink myself into a state of subdued Beatlemania, in which I was asking the nearest person at every party, barbecue, or bonfire if I could request a song, just one song please, when in reality it would be two, “Polythene Pam” followed by “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.” This way I could get away with hearing two Beatles songs, because the transition is smooth enough that most people, if unfamiliar but particularly if under the influence, would not notice.

              In a white truck speeding down a midnight highway, I splayed my whole body across a boy’s and I proclaimed, as I struggled to select “Polythene Pam” on the phone with my index finger, that I was “this song’s biggest fan.” I was overjoyed that I had mixed enough into my system to ward off thoughts of what was going on. All that remained was excitement and infatuation and John Lennon’s voice, as well as heat in my stomach and weight over my eyelids.

              Before he picked me up, I was sitting criss-cross on the floor alongside three other girls, balancing a laptop atop a fat suitcase so I could use it to play music out loud. It seemed I could count the surrounding objects in the bedroom on one hand—a plain mattress, a mirror, a desk, and a few piles of assorted trash or luggage, here and there. It was Savannah’s last night in Seattle, for now. She’d be flying back to New York City, and from there she’d head to South America for a three-week study abroad program. After that, me and her and some other girls were all to move in together and become roommates at a nearby house. The e-mail from the house’s landlord, containing a lease attachment, was currently on its second or third day of going entirely ignored in my inbox.

              I browsed the infinite stream of songs, grinning as I curated, taking swigs from a plastic cup. My drinking pace had just seen a sudden increase sometime in the past few minutes, and it was because of an interaction that occurred over the phone, that went like this:

              CALLER: Yo.

              ME: What’s up.

              CALLER: Are you free?

              ME: Uh, no, not now. I’m at Savannah’s.

              CALLER: Do you have a second to talk about the move?

              ME: Umm.

              CALLER: Would talking about it here reveal too much?

              ME: Uh, yeah.

              CALLER: Okay well—

              ME: Yeah, sorry, I don’t think I can right now. I’ll call you when I’m free. Maybe in an hour or so.

              There was a brief moment in which neither party spoke.

              CALLER: Okay, sounds good. Bye.

              ME: Bye.

              Upon hanging up, I observed a sly, unconscious shift taking place in my thoughts, moving towards a new goal of “no longer being present.” I brushed the interaction off, saying to the girls that he was always trying to talk with me about something. I would not be calling him later, I decided, and I drank faster.

              More than an hour passed and during group conversation, which up until that point had been primarily concerning alcohol or penises or sex or something similar, I started to say something, then cut myself off.

              “Actually, never mind. I recently realized that I talk about myself too much when I do substances.”

              No, no, the girls agreed that being vulnerable was the good thing about being drunk, even if saying that comes across kind of bad, because you should be able to be open with your friends regardless.

              “Okay,” I proceeded without resistance, “I just feel like I’m the kind of person who’s always doing too much. Like, I always want to drink more. I’m always saying, ‘Let’s get another drink!’ I’m always the one who suggests doing more or getting another round, and I just want to play music loudly and jump and dance and run around, go faster or harder, or something. I think it’s a problem.”

              “Dopamine,” as a word or idea, or possibly an addiction, was given some consideration by the group, but it was quickly decided that, No, no, a person being this way would also entail that they are “fun,” and so we resumed. I sprung from the floor and danced my way into the kitchen.

              A few nights later, I began to question if there actually was something about me, something that maybe made me more susceptible to fast, corrosive things. It had been on a night in which I snorted most of a group’s eight-ball and paid for none of it, and it was when at last I glanced up from my phone, and shifted my previously draped position on the boy’s lap to one that was now upright (The two of us, planted on a swivel-chair in front of the TV, rocking rhythmically in a side to side pattern for hours on end). I surveyed the five others in the bedroom who were not him or I, and I noticed something, that despite the collectively vacant state, I was alone in my ability, and my desire, to somehow furiously scroll through content on my phone screen; I had been smiling uncontrollably, giddily swiping and tapping to “like” posts, forming run-on sentences about them as they flashed by.

              “I don’t know how you do that,” the boy groaned, “that makes me nauseous.”

              I imagined that the wires or pathways in my brain were thinner, more brittle than the average person’s, that they had been “burnt” or “fried” beyond repair. I wondered whether the image of my brain “melting” or of “holes forming inside of it” more accurately described what was happening to me, and then I thought of another stimulating visual, myself, like a chimpanzee or a rat, in some kind of unethical experiment where the scientists had gotten it hooked on a drug or pumped it with large doses of sugar, and I was now stuck in a loop of drugs or sugar and probably also masturbation, until I suffered some kind of aneurysm and died foaming at the mouth.

              “Can’t cocaine cause aneurysms? Wait—what even happens when you have an aneurysm? Is it the same as a seizure?” I blurted out. The words dissolved into the cross-streams of conversation just as fast as they left my mouth and went unanswered.

              I muttered something to myself then returned to my phone, straining hard so I could focus on inputting “what happens during aneurysm” into the search bar.

              The previous caller and I had already deliberated over my recent behavior at the beginning of the week. His name was A, and as of today, he and our friend S would be leaving in less than two weeks to sublease a one-bedroom in Queens, under dubious terms. A was currently occupying the role of “best friend,” but, over eight years of knowing each other, he had been just about everything once. He was the person whose opinion I trusted most, on films and music, and also on what I was thinking or feeling at any given period.

              He used the word “ratchet” to describe how I’d been acting as of late. We were side by side in a booth at a local healthy-fast-food restaurant, with S across from us. I didn’t say much, and then said I was “okay.” Almost immediately he apologized, but I kept my head down and picked at my chicken soft-wrap thing, because I knew I had been bad. In fact, I couldn’t have been more conscious of it.

              I had dragged out the answer for an entire season, whether I would be staying or leaving, a decision that unfortunately was ultimately my own. When confronted about my plans, I spoke to the two of them in sweeping, emotional claims about values and desires, declaring that it was only right that I leave with them and I leave now, and then I’d go home or I’d go out and I’d feel every word retract itself, retreat back inside. I became convinced that I was an untrustworthy source on myself, and so there was no way of ever truly knowing what to do, meaning I could not take any course of action or decision; I had no way of knowing who or what was right about me. I had grown so tired of it, always ending on the exact same sentiment, “I don’t know what I want.”

              I tried to let the deadline pass by in the background. Maybe, they would hop on a flight one night while I was out or inebriated and I couldn’t be reached. So ultimately, the answer had become that I was unable to give one, because I was constantly out or inebriated and couldn’t be reached.

              “I mean, it doesn’t hurt because it’s like, mean or anything—you’re not being mean or offensive. It’s just true, and that what’s hurts, for real. Like I’m fine, it’s just true, so it’s sad,” I gave a half-hearted laugh, and continued in looking at nothing in particular—my hands, the brown plastic tray which the chicken soft-wrap thing had arrived in.

              I had grown so lovingly avoidant of A, afraid of his judgment and disappointment in the way a cheater fears his spouse, in the way a bad kid fears the social worker, and unable to stop causing this judgment and disappointment due to my constant tries to avoid confronting it. There was nothing I wanted less than to be seen as malleable, passive, or common, but in this moment, I knew that it was far too late. The sum of my actions pointed to this as being the case, and I could no longer expect to be represented just by who I wanted to be, for any alleged potential or ideas.

              It was quiet as three of us sat and chewed our food. I made no effort to hide my defeat. I envisioned a few elusive, underdeveloped snapshots, like memories, of the self that I had been developing into. I saw her in the basement of a soon-to-be home, where she sat on her bed doing school essays or substances, and I saw her going along with it, coasting, doing whatever came next.

              I promised I’d have an answer soon.

              The rest of the following night, which was Savannah’s last night in Seattle, would play out with few surprises: I drank too much, and then some more. I was onto her roommate’s boxed “buttery chardonnay,” and then the canned IPAs that had been relegated to the back of the fridge. I ate handfuls of chocolate chip cookies straight from her freezer and waltzed right out the front door. I got in the white truck, I rode in the white truck, I brought the boy to my bedroom, in my parents’ home; I brought him into my bed, I looked at a text notification from A that simply read, “You never called,” I replied that we’d talk tomorrow, and when it was all over, I fell asleep instantly. I jolted awake, alone and sick and nude, at six in the morning.

              I stayed under the covers extra long, and I thought about how giving up always felt slightly good, at least physically.

              After enough time, I got in my car and drove to meet A. I would be informing him that my answer was an unfortunate, painful no. He would have to know that after all that crying and running around I had done, all those bold statements about my life and feeling, that I was too embarrassed and too scared to do something. I’d have to stay here. It just made sense.

              I left for work with $188 less in my bank account than when I had arrived, and my heart was thumping; I was running late.

              It was the next day that I stood in the garage, in front of both of my parents, my one-way, red-eye ticket already purchased, and I said with a smile, “I think I’m going to do it.”

              They were setting up for tomorrow’s yard sale. Dad was unloading a bunch of intensely yellow NERF guns from a bag and pouring them onto a plastic fold-out table.

              “Nobody moves anywhere without checking it out first,” he said.

              Their expressions were so angry, they were almost disgusted. Mom’s brow was furrowed, and her lips were pursed tightly and frowned, making them appear thinner than normal. I thought about how people looked stupid when they were angry. I considered that this was because anger was an inherently stupid emotion. Sadness could sometimes be born out of thinking or reasoning, but anger always required that you abandon all awareness.

              I wished they’d just be honest, that what I was doing was making them sad or worried, instead of acting angry. You’ll miss me too much, and it’s all happening so suddenly, that’s why you feel this way. I’ll miss you, too, of course.

              It took a full day, but Mom calmed down. During the yard sale, I came up to her while she was sitting in a camping chair beneath a tent she put up in the driveway. She was wearing a visor which cast a shadow over her face. I asked how it was going and she said terrible, it was 1:00 PM and she had only made forty dollars.

              Mom had these two middle-aged, mentally challenged registered sex offenders helping her run the sale; they rented rooms from her out of the house that I had lived in until age five and, in exchange for a bit off this month’s rent, they were helping lift boxes and count change and such. They were stumpy and balding and wore square-rimmed-wire-frame glasses and stretched graphic t-shirts and they had names that I never bothered to remember—Roland and Ron or something. One of them was thumbing through cash from a fanny pack and aimlessly talking at my mother about what specific few items had sold.

              Mom waited for him to wander off to go perform another menial task, before she turned to me and confessed that it was okay.

              I felt conflicted, but mostly I felt guilty. I thought about how much nicer it would be for me to have tried and then have failed, to be ultimately stopped by external forces, to be left with no option but to bow out and excuse myself to the life that had been laid out for me here—that way, it wouldn’t be my fault, I’d have tried, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t up to me.

              I told her I didn’t need anything, I didn’t even need her blessing, I just wanted for her to not hate me. Mom asked how many times, exactly, had I done cocaine.

              “I don’t know, like twice?”

              I smiled back at her big, mainly in awe at the fact that I’d been tattled on, likely by my brother. I thought, Wow, it only took the whole summer.

              Mom said something that implied I had been experiencing “withdrawals” during our vacation in the first week of July, and I broke out into laughter. I explained that she really shouldn’t worry because once I moved away, I would no longer be able to afford cocaine—it’s an expensive thing.

              With that, it was done. I had finally made a decision, and I couldn’t resist celebrating. I spent the rest of the day in a state of mania. I was impenetrable. I went to work alongside Mom, and I was beaming at the patrons, racking up the tips, sneaking to the back bus-station to make arrangements via text to split that eight-ball with the boy and five others. On my way to their apartment, I first met my dealer privately at a park, and I spent my wages on my own secret half-gram of cocaine, in case it wouldn’t be enough.

              At some point within the constant spewing of words that took place in that room, I broke the news to the boy, on accident—it just spilled out, as things tend to when you’re like that. I told it like it was an adorable secret, I told it with joy plastered across my face.

              I was perched on the foot of the bed, leaning forward to get extra close, opening my eyes wide, staring into his. I used the expression, “running away.” I was “running away” from home.

              “When you are you leaving?”

              “Ten days! It’s crazy right? I sort of can’t believe it.”

              His face first wore confusion and then disappointment, and in an instant I realized that what I had done was deliver the bad news. Him and I had ten days left, is what this translated to. I grabbed his forearm and pulled him out of the bedroom, maneuvering into the kitchen on a pair buzzing, pleasurably static-feeling legs, and I poured us a glass of water to share. We stood face to face, placing light touches on each other’s arms. I kept saying, I’m sorry, did I ruin your night? I think I ruined your night. (“It’s okay, I just thought we’d have more time.”)

              Hurriedly, I explained that, “Actually, this was a lot like another time in which I had been standing in a kitchen in a situation like this, back in the Spring, where I went to a party with my brother right after being broken up with, and I ended up doing some bumps, and then I was like, talking with him in the kitchen and I was just repeating, ‘I’m heartbroken, I’m heartbroken,’ but I couldn’t feel any of it in the moment—like, I knew I was devastated, but there was too much dopamine in my brain, it wouldn’t let me actually feel any part of what I was saying. It was pretty interesting.”

              I thought that sharing this would help in some way akin to empathizing. His general lack of response caused me to feel frantic, urgent. In search of a fix, I insisted that we “inject ourselves with dopamine.”

              I rifled through my purse, retrieving the personal stash from its home inside an empty mint tin. Using the tips of my acrylic nails, I scooped out a bit for each of us and presented it to him as some kind of apology for the unexpected departure, or if nothing else, an opportunity for a moment of private intimacy.

              While we swayed in our swivel-chair after, I told him I was curious to see if my “comedown” was going to be more manageable than normal, because I had been “fortified” that day by solidifying a decision in my life, meaning my brain would be stronger and less vulnerable to negativity, or, if it would be worse than normal, given the emotional potency of the day.

              “Probably worse.” he said.

              At around 11:30 AM, I would be in the driver’s seat of my car with the door open, near-vegetative, with him crouched outside beside me and holding my hand, and I would hang my mouth open, shake my head in astonishment, and break my silence with “Every single thought is negative. This is the lowest I have felt in my entire life.”

              Not too long after this, Dad was hospitalized. It was some sort of kidney or liver problem. On my final weekend in Seattle, I paid him a visit. Making my way over the I-405, I had a vaguely threatening thought or premonition that the day was rife with “intensity.” It was humid and gray and drizzling when I stepped out of the car and in through the hospital’s automatic doors, and I was burdened, unable to ignore that each day now contained the “end” of something, the “last time” I would be somewhere or see somebody. I took the elevator up to the seventh floor and located Dad.

              He was lying in a dark room, with a football game playing on a small screen before him. He had not been expecting me. First I rolled the thin, grip-bottomed socks off of his swollen feet; I then used the remote on the side of the chair to elevate his torso, and I wrestled to squeeze a soft pillow in the thin gap behind his shoulder blades, propping him up. I stood beside him, and together, we gazed forward at the tiny football players running back and forth, one team, green and the other, red.

              He talked in a labored, nasally voice, like a dying old man in a movie, when he asked about work and if I had plans for the night.

              I confessed that really, I was tired, and all I wanted was to eat some true Seattle-style teriyaki before I left. I hadn’t slept in a day or so. I hadn’t slept much recently.

              He urged me to instead eat at some nearby trendy Asian-fusion restaurant he liked.

              “You’d just be stupid not to.” he heaved.

              I giggled and repeated his words back to him, “I’d be stupid not to?”

              I looked up the menu on my phone and entertained the idea of going there, eating it by myself, just so I could text him a photo of whatever kimchi-mayo burger I ordered and tell him that he was right, it really was the better choice. It felt like the closest I could get to a sentimental farewell dinner. There was a discomfort hanging over me then—a pity for my own father, like he was my sick school-aged son, innocent and incapable. The room was illuminated by only the glow of the TV’s football players and the light gray sky from the window.

              Dad told me that since my new apartment in Queens was so close to a Costco, I should try and get a job there, because Costco pays good and treats their employees well. I reaffirmed that this was a good idea. I work at a sports bar, I thought, and didn’t even know that it was football season already, I don’t even know what teams those colors are.

              I lingered, though it seemed to be silently understood that neither of us had any real words for each other. Dad said he should try and get some sleep, so I ate the unfinished aerated apple slices from his bedside food tray and headed for the elevator.

              In reality, I had planned to go out with my friend Crystal one last time.

              The two of us trudged through what had, in the time since I left Dad at the hospital and arrived at the university area, gone from a misting to downpour of rain, sharing the canopy of a large black umbrella, complaining about work or related matters. We would stop by the corner-store for drinks, something either boxed or canned but surely fruit-flavored, and then we would reach our destination, a going-away party for a person who we did not know.

              We drank, then spilled our drinks on the cramped basement floor during a performance by an amateur punk band; we then shut ourselves in the bathroom to do bumps of cocaine, lacking any attempt at subtlety, and reemerged to a DJ set. We huddled close to the table which the DJ controlled from, and by linking arms, we transformed into a single unit, bouncing and thrusting itself around—attached and inseparable.

              Embracing, or more collapsing onto one another, we proclaimed our friendship and just how much we’d miss the other. As we teetered in place, I could only think or speak in phrases that sounded like, “lovely warmth,” “warm love,” and “I love you.” With both hands, I gripped Crystal’s head and pulled it close, kissing the top of it, before then pressing my lips against hers. We broke away with sentimental pouts.

              I saw myself as taking part in a grand finale, explosions and bodies and music and all those things, like fireworks or New Year’s Eve, but it was likely just the two of us exuding this, persistent in dancing even as the room steadily emptied, even as it was time for everyone to hover at the front door with their cigarettes. We scurried out behind the house to catch another meeting with my dealer, boasting loot—a bag of organic cacao nibs, a pack of seaweed snacks, a bottle of honey—from the kitchen, which we had stuffed in our purses on the way out.

              When I got behind the wheel at around seven in the morning, I would be afflicted with incessant thoughts of Mom and of A. (Always Mom and A.) Near the halfway mark of my drive, while passing a big lot of yellow school buses, I would also become afflicted with a specific sensation that I had felt just one other time, a tingle, then a burn, that rose from chest to throat. It caused me to tense and squirm, to take sharp gasps, and then to swerve into the near lane. My heart was racing. I was warm all over. I’m dying, I thought, this is how I die, and I need 911. I clicked the hazard button on the dashboard and continued to steer with one hand, using the other to fumble for my phone’s emergency dial.

              Any thoughts related to contacting medical professionals or law enforcement were however, promptly interrupted, replaced by a scene I dreamt-up, of my mother rushing through white hospital hallways and charging into the room where I now resided, overdosed or comatose, bedridden five days before I was to fly across the country. She’d throw herself over my stiff body, and she’d be sobbing into me—her family in financial and emotional ruin, she’d be devastated that nothing could go right.

              So, I called Crystal instead.

              ME: Umm, I think I need to, um, go to a doctor.

              CRYSTAL: Why…?

              ME: My heart is beating really, really fast. And I’m driving. And I’m scared.

              CRYSTAL: Damn. I’m sorry. Don’t you think it’s probably more emotional? Like, an emotional thing?

              I protested, because I was fairly certain that I was dying, but she must’ve been right, because instantly, my breathing slowed.

              ME: I don’t know, but I almost just crashed. I’m too far to go back, but I can’t go home. My mom’s going to know I did drugs, if I come home at seven AM. She’s going to know. I should’ve stayed at your place. Fuck, fuck. I called A and S, but neither of them answered. Fuck, dude. What do I do?

              CRYSTAL: Damn. I don’t know.

              ME: I can’t go home, I can’t. Ah, okay. I’m going now. I love you, bye.

              And I hung up the phone. A few minutes later, I was parking my car outside A’s parents’ home.

              I got out and crept towards the front door, hesitating to nervously assess the driveway. I stared his father’s Tesla down like it was a mean-faced guard dog behind a chainlink fence, warning that I dare not step a foot closer, and I slunk back to my car, where I called both A and S again at least two more times, to no reply.

              Home, which was a mere two stoplights away, was still indisputably remote and inaccessible, blacked out in my mind, no longer an option. I understood my situation to be futile—A and S would not wake up at this hour, to take me in and fix me up and coddle me as I wanted them to—but I spent the next hour or so roaming the early morning streets anyway, feeling apocalyptic, awaiting a response.

              Exhausted, I retired on the sidewalk, and finally my body expressed its worn, expended state to the fullest, in all its perspiration and aching, the thick air around me amplifying the experience to a feverish quality. Feeble and hollow, I reached my conclusion: I might be stuck as a slimy or spineless character, things might not change just because I was now trying to select against my nature, by abandoning the things here that had perpetuated it. I had a proven pattern of slipping in and out of things, of regularly being unable to hold convictions or promises true, and this was evident by the fact that I would rather spend my final days whittling myself away using whatever was fast and accessible, than spend them close to those who truly loved me. On the concrete, I wished that somehow destruction and excess would lose their appeal, and I would want to use my time exclusively on things that were nice or true or sweet, like eating hearty food or going to see the latest terrible action movie with Dad.

              Realistically, no alternative was bound to happen, and I ended up crawling into my own bed, alone. I dug my face deep into the pillow to shield myself from Mom and the sun and tomorrow.

              There were now two days left and I still hadn’t packed anything. I sheepishly implied that I required, and then I sheepishly accepted, Mom’s help in vacuum-sealing away my mounds of clothing so that they could fit into my two pieces of checked luggage; I could easily figure out how to vacuum-seal something myself, I’m sure, but I wanted Mom to be there, helping and caring and chatting.

              On Sunday, things felt nice. There was a sense of shared victory each time we discovered a new “best combination of garments,” fitting them into the storage bags like jigsaw pieces, there was a sense of teamwork when we ventured out to purchase more bags from the store after filling everything we had. By Monday, it appeared again that Mom was tense, some combination of grieving and resentful, and I was sorry. I was cautious, anxious for her approval, feeling like a young intern turning in his papers when I weakly approached her to ask for her opinion on how I stowed my shoes, or if I should even bother bringing shampoo.

              The night before my flight, I made sure to party in the way I had been, in the setting of a house, with cans of hard ciders and low attendance, one last time. I’d eat and drink and dance until my stomach couldn’t handle anymore of it. That’ll do it, that’ll get it out of my system and I’ll never want any of that stuff again, I half-sincerely hoped.

              I’d try to throw everything up in the bathroom, but I’d be stopped by a friend, who’d force an antacid tablet into my mouth, then hold me and make me promise that I’d “get better.” “Get better,” meaning stop doing cocaine and stop losing weight, which to me felt like the easy part in all this. I thought, I don’t really have a choice in those matters, those would come naturally with leaving these conditions, and the damage from tangible things pales in comparison to what I’m doing to my brain and my spirit by choosing to live passively. The two of us laid atop his bed, slightly too close, close enough that we would adjust ourselves whenever someone else entered the room, and he continued in his rant about “wanting what was best for me.” I’m not miserable, I’m actually positive, I’m actually hopeful, and these are merely vices, just signs that I needed to change—all things I had wanted to express, but I was too drunk and all his preaching had worn me out, so all I could do was provide some mutually encouraging commentary about his own prospects at a new university this Fall.

              At around 7:00 or 8:00 PM in the airport security line, A and I were engaging in a fruitless back and forth over who had been more promiscuous over the summer, to S’s annoyance. We side-barred the debate when it came time to check our passports with the TSA agent and ferry our carry-ons through the scanner machine. On the plane, I folded up the encumbering fur coat that I’d been sweating in to avoid packing it, and I shoved it onto A’s lap to use as a pillow. I put my head down on the lump of fox pelt and closed my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t be capable of sleeping during the flight, but there was no point in doing anything else. I felt A gently tuck strands of my hair behind my ear, before planting a quick kiss on it, and I smiled.

              I avoided eye contact with him, though, after I learned the answer to our question, that he had me beat, two to one.

              When we landed at daybreak, the city was an apparition. It was gray, it was white, and it was hovering in the distance, resting comfortably on the horizon. There were streams of light bursting out of the thin, gray clouds that striated across the bright sky, and nobody spoke a word during the Lyft ride, all the way from Newark to Queens. I felt pleasantly tired, fuzzy as I sunk into the backseat, and I thought about how I had been unable to visit Dad again before leaving for the airport, of how Mom had hugged me and made me promise I’d “be back in a quarter,” and of how my brother had stood impatiently a few feet away from me, offering a firm handshake as opposed to a hug, and said plainly, “Good luck.”

              I was caught off guard, confused, left wondering why he’d want to leave it like this. I told him he’d have to come visit, since Mom and Dad couldn’t so easily up and leave their business.

              “I would pay money not to go to New York.” he had chosen to say, for whatever reason, and we finished packing all of my things into the trunk, and then the two of them went home, and then I went to the airport.

              To use A’s words and not my own, “The story of a young person doing drugs and moving away to New York City can only be so much, you know? It’s restrictive in that way.”

              He’s right. Here’s a different one:

              A, S, and I lived together in that one-bedroom apartment in a quaint Bukharan-Jewish part of Queens. We ran to the gym every morning and on the walk home, we bought cheap, overripe produce from the street vendors. On the second week, we learned that we had less than one month before the real tenant was to return and we had to be out. It was a scramble, for jobs and for money and for a place to live. We woke up and took separate trains to job interviews in Manhattan, then we met up and took trains to apartment tours in Brooklyn.

              There was no job, no school, no social network or even friends, really, and it seemed soon that there would also not be a home. Walking under some scaffolding, I thought about how there was nothing I could say to anyone that would make me look good, nothing I could use to justify myself.

              Until we had something, at least one or two of those things, we decided that the only thing we could do was eat. So, for about one week, we spent all of our money on food.

              $3.75 for a Pineapple Roast Pork Bun. $8 for a massive Combo Lamb and Chicken Over Rice. $9 for a Honey Turkey Sandwich with Brown Gravy and Fries on a Hero. $1.50 on a can of Zero Sugar Ginger Ale to wash it all down. We’d hit the streets at night, stopping for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins, crossing over to the deli to get bagels or empanadas. We ate cups of layered frozen yogurt parfaits, we ate jerk chicken that had been smothered in sauce and wrapped tightly in tinfoil, we ate donuts straight from the dumpster outside Dunkin’, we tried three different trending iterations of “smash burgers.” Sometimes, we’d trek thirty minutes or ride the train across boroughs just because something sounded good. We’d lock eyes, shooting maniacal grins at somebody’s joke-proposal of getting more food, then we’d fold over from laughter upon realizing we were actually going through with it.

              We were running through the city, cackling and stumbling, clinging to one another, rushing on foot to whatever restaurant or corner-store it was, it never mattered what or where, yelling, saying, “How lucky are we?”
              

 I am working at the All-You-Can-Eat Japanese Barbecue in Lower Manhattan. I am a hostess. I tap my nails on a tablet screen. I wear an earpiece and I say things like, “Host to Stephanie, Host to Stephanie: Is table ‘cat-two’ ready for a party of two?” into the mic, and they always say “Give me two minutes, give me two minutes,” or they say nothing at all. For two days, I worked at a bakery in Upper Manhattan. It was one of three locations. Each location was run by a different brother, all Greek. I listen to music the whole way home. It’s not really listening, to be honest, it’s just playing it in my ears. Tonight, the trip home takes extra long because there’s construction and they changed up the lines, and I accept that I’ll be confused and I’ll miss at least one part of it, a transfer or otherwise, so I just do it all slowly and without worry, and with music playing, for frequency or for drone or for vibrating feeling. It was hot, that afternoon, when I went all the way to Costco. And I was sweating, dragging a red wagon behind me. And I was hungry. And I spent money that day—$5.75 to wash and dry my clothes, $11.75 for shared custody of two frying pans. At the bakery, my job was to grab slices of cake and move them. Freezer to fridge. Fridge to other fridge. Fridge to tray. Tray to other tray. Tray to box. My feet were hurting, on the way to Costco, and you don’t get to sit or eat at the Japanese Barbecue. You just get to sell memberships. It’s called the “Chubby Club.” I ask a plump Asian American man in the lobby how he found out about our restaurant, in order to collect data for the demographics report due at the end of every night, and he informs me that he is already a member of another restaurant under the “Chubby Club.” I was hungry, when I was in Costco, so I sought out every sample in the store, and I even waited in line for a bite-sized piece of breaded chicken. This caused some stress later on when I realized that I was probably going to be late for my shift at the Japanese Barbecue. I spent the money on the pans and the food and on doing the laundry, and so there’s not anything in my room. A package that is addressed to me contains decaf tea packets and a salmon-pink bath towel.

              I am entitled, I thought on the train home. “Am I entitled?” I asked on the train home.

              It was all there, laid out for me, and I just put my hands on it and I rubbed them all over and I made a mess, I stressed us all out. I start to crave what already happened. I think, I was wrong, and the right thing cost tuition, the right thing was Mom, washing the sheets and chopping the vegetables, or it was naked and straddling in the summertime, with fingers in hair and in mouths, smiling and shy and looking away. I think, The secret must lie in one of these.

              But another package, and I now have a mattress; tomorrow, the mattress cover.
              

 “You at the Indian John Hill Rest Area.” Me, holding the phone, taking the photo, showing the photo.

              Me, earlier that day on the train surrounded by fans of the country artist as they make their way down to the stadium.

              Me, floating on a crystal blue lake.

              Me, looking out the window on the drive to said lake, trying to think my way through the problem using brute force. Me thinking, Where should I be.

              Me, giving up and rolling down the window and playing the music louder.

              Me, eating more, drinking more.

              Me, with distractions.

              Me, looking down at him on the bathroom floor. Wondering which of us is more out of it. Play it cool.

              Me, with bad habits. So many bad habits, shame.

              Me, half-awake, half-asleep, thinking rapidly.

              Me, getting in my own bed the morning after.

              Me, waking from the dream and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

              Me, and why’s everybody so upset?

              Me, laying on beds that aren’t mine.

              Me, my body tingling and slow, my eyes take long indulgent blinks, my mind pleasureful and numb, thinking I want to curl up like a warm kitten, movie on the TV and the scenes don’t mean a thing to me, scenes passing like a slideshow of unrelated ideas.

              Me, driving home after, thinking I’m a lot like a “Smiling Shining Golden Buddha.”

              Me, driving home after, thinking It’s so funny how on-the-nose life is about the whole “balance” thing, that things really are perfectly equal, 50/50, the life was sucked out of me last night but tonight I breathed it right back in.

              Life seeming big and limitless and this being unquestionably true whenever I’m with you. Of course, we can do or be anything. What other way of living is there?

              Alone, I think of what I’ll do today or this weekend. Who I’ll see, what I’ll eat, where I’ll be, a trip a few months down the line, alone I’m settling.

              Settling, maybe I’ll settle near the crystal blue lake. Maybe in the future I’ll just pick a state, and then from there I’ll just pick a city, like the ones I saw along the drive, like Ephrata, WA, a city that’s ten minutes long and has fast food and a movie theater and a gas station and a decent-size Mexican population and three thrift stores and everything is closed on Sunday.
              

 Near tears at a taco place in Tulum, I ordered the tripe and the tongue and the regular beef, too. And after I had finished my food and what was left of my brother’s, I went to the bathroom to try and throw the whole cow up, but I couldn’t get it to go. I got performance anxiety, in a new bathroom, in an unfamiliar city. I thought, What if I’m taking too long, What if somebody’s been standing right outside the door waiting with judgment and disapproval, What if I walk out and as I approach the group, my eyes meet someone else’s and we’re left to silently share the disappointment.

              Though none of this happened. I took my seat at the table and, despite being sickly full, I fantasized about picking at the bones on the remaining plates.

              Stepping back out onto the street, I felt wine-drunk; I was flushed and dazed and slick with sweat from the thick blanket of humidity that swallowed up all the air around me, and the oppressive heat that endured even in the dark of evening. Specks of vibrant light from the corn carts lining the sidewalks blurred in my peripheral vision. I walked in the blind-spot of the group, in the back left, every few steps my face wrinkling up like I was about to sob, before twitching back to normal. Just in case something happened to leak out of my eye though, I bit my lip and kept my face on the ground or at a nearby wall.

              I recalled the day after the end of my first and only love affair. Eighteen, it was late Summer, early August, and up until that point, the season had been a dream, a lapse in time in which I moved neither forward nor backward, but floated carefully in between two people. The ordeal was as much taboo as it was classically innocent and pure. Nothing had been actualized. Nothing had been made formal. Nobody was fucking anybody behind each other’s backs, nobody had been broken up with yet, and for the longest time it wasn’t even acknowledged that something was going on. And so the fact it could be so agonizing without being anything at all, caused me endless, spiraling confusion, and it would absorb every thought; it would manifest as physical pains, which felt phantom, impossible to grasp or define. Several times a day, I’d lock myself in the bathroom and lay on the floor and feel these pains, like strangulation in my heart and my brain, and I’d wonder how not choosing had somehow turned out to be more of a burden than being bound to something.

              I knew it had to end eventually, it was wearing the three of us down. But I'd get home at the end of the day and the sun would be rising and I’d still have yet to sleep, and so it would just have to happen tomorrow. Or maybe, I would wake up and it would just resolve and go back to the way it was, solidifying that it had been a dream after all.

              Once I moved in a direction, I broke things off with the old boy, I spent the whole next day with the new boy and our friends—watching the carp circle round at the man-made lake, eating an ice cream cone, fucking around in the aisles of a superstore, attempting to break into an abandoned office building downtown, climbing the big statue of a troll under the bridge, falling asleep on the couch to some Chinese movie on the TV—and I spent it mourning the dream; I was waiting for someone to pinch me. I sat in the passenger seat of his car at the end of the night and shivered, even though it was damp and warm that day, and then it started to rain.

              Diana and Mom talked at the poolside earlier in the afternoon, meanwhile I taught myself how to swim again because I hadn’t done it in nearly four years. I took clunky, spaceman-like steps. It required all of my strength just to tread water or propel forward a few feet, and after it was expended I’d stand upright below the two women as they caught up on each other’s lives, side by side in lounge chairs. I listened thoroughly without participating. I stood there, staring up at the sky or at the one other man who happened to be in the pool, reminded of childhood in a way that disturbed me deeply.

              During one of my visits to the edge of the pool, Diana directed an innocent question my way—about school or work or the near future. By now, I knew that it never really mattered which of these was addressed specifically, because you’d end up having to answer for all of them anyway. I choked down defensive feelings, warm in my throat, then I wove her a story. It was one about working at my parents’ business, about moving out of their house soon, about returning to school in the Fall, about the job I was supposedly studying for, it was about myself and it came from myself, but in that moment everything was happening in the third person. I was watching from above or behind it seemed, over my own shoulder, as the words leaked out.

              Reinforcing the parent-child dynamic, I pushed off the pool’s floor and ran away, like a little kid, thrashing through the water in the opposite direction of the chairs until Mom’s voice, which would now have to answer on behalf of me, faded in the distance.

              I stopped in the middle of the pool and tried to concentrate on something, an engaging thought or perhaps a dead bug floating on the surface, to distract from the fact that I suddenly felt very empty, like I’d been deflated. All I could think was, I just rolled over and died. It was another small betrayal, saying those things about myself, going along with it, and I was starting to get the sense that I could afford few more small betrayals and even fewer days of passive life. It was to the point that every day was spent thinking on the potential long term consequence of not being true, and in this moment, I could see it. It was the image of the future shrinking and twisting into something dark and minuscule, something I had no control over.

              Powerless, I returned to Diana and Mom. They had moved on in my absence and were now going over parts of Diana’s life that had been previously unknown to me: the different places she had lived, the current whereabouts of her son’s father, and then, the story of an engagement which had she had abruptly called off; it had been with an American man, and it was really just for the papers she said, but since the man had refused to help take care of her son, she left him.

              She ended the story, saying with a bittersweet smile and a subtle head shake, “I don’t know how it even got that far.”

              Their conversation continued onto their sons or their husbands or the president of The United States, but I had been paralyzed. I replayed her anecdote in my mind. From her tone and her expressions and her story alone, I understood that she had snuck me a warning.

              It was like I had been delivered the news that I had twenty four hours left to live, or maybe, it was like a shiny key had been placed on that apartment poolside for me to find, by God or something similar. Her scenario, so significant and so far from my current point in life, served as confirmation—there would be no guarantee I’d have the strength to be true in the future if I didn’t have it now. It was a damning thought: you could know that something wasn’t right, and knowing it wouldn’t change a thing. You could do or say things that you didn’t want, things that weren’t true, till death, and never have lived a single day of your life.

              Ordinary conversation amongst two adults then transformed and took upon new importance, there was now an unimaginable weight that accompanied routine topics of marriage and divorce, of moving cities or countries, of an old friend, a name not heard in many years, of children and parents, of aging, of the self and others. It was all daunting, it was all long, it was all massive, it was all malleable, it was all variable and indeterminate, and worst, it was all entirely up to yourself.

              While I at first felt a sort of morbid curiosity, I quickly grew too sensitive for another word. I fled to the center of the pool, the peak of Tulum’s sun beating down on my shoulders as I turned my back to their voices. I was all tender and raw, like my skin was stinging, like it would sizzle at the touch of another. The other man had gotten out of the water and now lay sunbathing in a chair before me, a large brown dog resting on the concrete beside him.

              “That man,” Diana had said of him while I was over there, “he has a baby, maybe one year old, and they come here together, and the baby will just swim around.”

              I’m finished, I thought.

              A few hours later, Diana’s boyfriend Eduardo drove us to Tulum’s “beach area.” Me and Mom and Diana and her eight-year-old son Dan crammed into the backseat of the KIA. Pressed tightly to the window, I watched the sun set against a vast expanse of jungle, occasionally broken up with a half-finished hotel or condo, which was always giant and white and bore a sign with a name that elicited exotic or serene imagery. When we arrived at the “beach area,” it became clear that there was actually no such thing. Diana and Eduardo were already well aware and disapproving of this fact, and made a point of explaining that the influx of foreigners and tourists was the reason for there being no public beach access in the city of Tulum. We drove down a tight row of boutiques and spacious restaurants and spas, as well as the entrances to countless resorts and hotels and nightclubs, a good amount appearing vacant or abandoned, then we parked and got out to walk up this same road before returning to the car to go get the tacos for dinner. I didn’t really understand why we came in the first place.

              During the drive, Diana held Dan on her lap while he played flashy, overstimulating games on a tablet. In Diana’s words, Dan had autism or ADHD or was some other form of doomed by life, he had been kicked out of four schools in Mexico City, and it was only here in Tulum, which was expensive and sweltering and filled with blond Argentinians and explicitly not a place she wanted to be, that he had found success through one of those private Montessori school programs. Dan didn’t understand English, so Diana took this opportunity of being in the company of Americans to express her innumerable frustrations with him. I leaned my head against the window, thinking how it always made me terribly sad to hear that somebody didn’t like the place they lived in.

              When we returned to Diana’s apartment at the end of the night, I slipped out onto the balcony and stood in the warm breeze. There was all the sweeping and rustling and thundering sounds of a storm, but the air remained a sauna. In Tulum, I thought, inside and outside are reversed, you go outside and the outside feels like inside. I then began to cry. I wanted to call someone, but back in The United States, it was the 4th of July, so everyone was busy. I rotated my phone in my hands and looked down at the moon’s reflection on the pool. I went back inside and climbed into the bed beside Mom. I quickly turned off the light and flipped my body away from hers, trying to sob as discreetly as possible, part of me secretly hoping that she would wake up in a panic and grab me and shake me and ask what was wrong, because maybe she could help me in figuring it out.

              The next day we piled into Eduardo’s KIA, again forgoing seatbelts and personal space, and we left for a Mexican road trip, across the state line and to the big pyramid. I bought ice cream and coffee from the gas station, and I held my camera to the window and pointed it at the little pastel houses, at the churches and the graveyards, at the rundown shacks that stood lonesome in fields, at stray dogs and guys on motorcycles and grandmothers in white dresses. I saw my first Wonder of the World, and my biggest takeaway was that since my brother had stepped on the back of my shoe and broke its sole, I was vaguely mad, but acutely aware of the fact that I didn’t want to be mad about anything while at a Wonder of the World. Everything was good.

              The return to Tulum was magically longer and more claustrophobic than the journey to the big pyramid, but there was a palpable intimacy inside the car, the kind that can only be found on the final night amongst a temporary group of people. Once more, I opted just to listen. I alternated between Diana and Mom to my left and my brother and Eduardo in the front seats.

              “I remember one joke, from that show—how do you call it? Parks and… Parks and Recreation? He was kind of, uh, stupid, no?” Eduardo said of actor Chris Pratt, from the driver’s seat.

              “Well, I hope that you two can stay together,” Mom said of Diana and Eduardo, from the middle seat, and was then met with a slight laugh and a reply to the effect of an “Oh, we’ll see…” from Diana.

              Earlier in the day we had been in a Mayan Cultural Center when I received a flurry of e-mails from my future landlord demanding documents. I scrambled to gather scans of W-2s and recent paychecks, not looking up from my phone, bumbling through the traditional textile display. Mom was trying to help me by repeating a series of lines that I was supposed to echo in my reply. I was mostly just going, “Okay, okay, I got it, yeah.” The room we were in was stuffy and it was dedicated to wedding attire, and I wanted her to just forget about me, to keep her attention on those white gowns with the colorful embroidery on their square collars. I wanted the landlord to forget, too, maybe for everyone to forget.

              The next Saturday, I got into an Uber at around four in the morning to travel to the apartment of some girl who I’d never met. I hadn’t been back from my trip long, but I had already said “yes” to so much. My answer for all the important stuff was still “maybe,” of course, but to everything and everyone else, it was “yes.” Yes, for sure, I’ll be there, of course, I’ll drink it, I’ll have it, I’ll try it, I’ll do it. This was the ultimate realization of the passive being, I thought, only grasping at yourself through a “yes” that you know will lead to nothing meaningful, or a “maybe” that will avoid anything with meaning.

              Licking my lips, I asked my Uber driver how his night was going, and he said I was his last ride of the night. He couldn’t believe I was still going out. I grinned real hard, I licked my lips some more, and then I started asking questions. Where are you from, How long have you lived here, Why’d you leave India, that sort of thing.

              When my Uber driver told me that he had studied computer science for two years before realizing “it wasn’t for him,” I beamed with excitement. I became rapidly invigorated. Another sign, another green light, another “key” just for me. Anytime somebody made a choice, I wanted to jump up in the air and cheer out loud for them, because it meant that choosing was equally as possible as waiting around.

              I shot up in my seat, “Dude, you and me are on the exact same fucking wavelength right now.” I emphasized. I ground my teeth together and sucked on my bottom lip.

              My Uber driver’s story of quitting his Python and Java classes to save up and one day open his own gas station was as inspiring to me as any biblical tale, was more powerful than any stimulant, more euphoric than anything coursing through my body. That man was my hero and my brother and he had shown me that it really was possible. I said him and I shared a certain spirit, that we were both hustlers at heart, and then I threw my head back and went, “Oh my god, I need to follow my fucking dreams.”

              Mom wasn’t so thrilled about that idea when I told her. She looked like she was going to cry. I felt like I was going to cry. We didn’t get to reach a conclusion on the matter though, because she had to leave for work.

              I followed her out the front door. I had wanted to skip out on my shift that day and instead drive an hour North to see my friend perform his music, and even though I knew that it’d be dead at work, doing this now felt spiritually impossible. I knew they wouldn’t need me at there at the restaurant, on a Wednesday evening in late July. Nobody would be there to watch the baseball game. It’d probably just be the regulars at the bar top, with their eyes fixed on the TV or forward at nothing in particular. I was standing in the driveway watching her load her things into the car.

              She was all like, “It’s up to you, really, I mean, It won’t be busy, you know that, you’ll probably only do $300 in sales, we can go with two servers and not three.”

              I was like, “But I feel bad, I already won’t be working this weekend, and I don’t want to be a bum.”

              Then she said something like, “Well yeah, I think you should work because you haven’t worked all week, and it just seems inconvenient, driving all the way up there in your electric car.”

              Damn it, damn it Mom, I kept thinking, Just tell me that you’ll think I’m a bum if I don’t go to work. Just tell me honestly that if I don’t go, you’ll think a little bit lower of me, your opinion of me will move one tick closer to negative, and then I’ll do it, I’ll go to work at your restaurant tonight.

              I realized that enough minutes of stalling in the driveway had passed for me to officially consider myself to be “wasting time,” and also, that I was effectively cementing myself as a bum with nothing to show for, by standing around and not leaving right away to go work on things like I had said I was going to. I reiterated to her once more that I didn’t want to be a bum, hoping she’d get the hint.

              Please Mom, I was thinking, just tell me that you want me to go to work because if I went away to go have fun instead, you’d think I was stupid or lazy. And then Mom, please get mad. Get mad and tell me that I just go and do whatever I want all the time, that you think I look too thin, that you think I have it too easy, and that I’m going to move downtown and go to college in the Fall like you’ve been telling everyone I’m going to, no questions asked. Just tell me what to do.

              She got mostly into the driver’s seat, and then was like, “It’s fine, really. It’s up to you.”

              I went to work that night and made $75 in tips on top of my hourly wage. Good. I went to the nearby expensive grocery store and I spent $17 of the tips on sushi, after I had loitered in front of the sushi display for five then ten then fifteen minutes debating what to get. I came home at the end of the night and my eyes were wet and my head hung low.

              My buddy was lingering there in the kitchen with me while I boiled water for tea in the electric kettle, and he started talking about his day, about something that pissed him off. He then said the scariest thing to me.

              It just kept happening, that people would say the scariest things to me. They said things about their lives and choices that left me open-mouthed. They said things like, “just finish, just power through.” They said “I think you’re just going to let the clock run out.” They said things like “double down.”

              I fidgeted with my belongings on the counter, stacking my books and pens as he talked, and then he said, “Feeling productive is just as good as being productive.”

              I covered my face with my hands and folded over. Luckily, I had no tears left to give that night, or else I would have sobbed. I just let out a long groan. I poured my tea too full and left the room. As I ascended the stairs, the mug was tipping and splashing its molten contents all over my arms, searing my skin, soaking the stack of books I held, forming puddles all over the floor.

              I could never verbalize it to any of their faces, but when people said these scary things I would immediately be overcome with the thought, I want to be dead and not alive. I’d never outright choose this, because it’s the wrong thing to do, but I could treat it as a passive third option, occurring in the background as I decided between doing what was true and doing what wasn’t true. If I hovered in between for long enough, the bad habits would catch up and compound and make it so I’d never have to make a choice.

              But then I remember this one time, eighteen, Winter, where I felt strongly that I wanted to be dead and not alive, but that I’d still never act upon this because it was wrong, so I decided that I would roam the streets late at night alone, on the off-chance somebody else would do it for me.

              I didn’t get very far before a car drove by real slow, then came to a stop at the red light beside me. I couldn’t see through the passenger side window, but I knew that we were making eye contact. Unconsciously, my pace quickened. The light went green and the car drove forward in the direction opposite myself, but then it made a U-turn right in the middle of the intersection. Now I was practically running—floundering, zig-zagging, spinning around trying to pick any direction where I could escape. The car came up right beside me. I felt my heart beat fast. I felt tears form in my eyes, a kind of helpless tear that I hadn’t experienced since being a toddler. He rolled down his window and he was saying something I couldn’t discern and he kept motioning like, Get in, Get in!

              The options were “escape” and “not escape,” so I went with “escape.” I ran and ran until I got into a different car, the car of my lover who I had called to come to rescue me, and then I made it home. After that, it was done. I never had to consider those options again.

              When I cornered Mom into talking about my dream with me again a couple days later, I kept using words like “dire”—It feels dire to me. I said it was “do or die.”

              I didn’t cry when Mom said that I had never worked hard a day in my life, when she said that I was only chasing a person or a feeling, when she said that I didn’t get it or I was plain young or plain wrong. But when she said, “I don’t understand, why can’t you just wait?” I collapsed onto the bed; the tears just wouldn’t stop.
              

 Summer so far, I took the train downtown during the festival and I walked around and I bought three bracelets from a lady off the street and I watched all the kids in the park, spilled across the soccer turf in clusters, passing bottles and pizza boxes and joints around in a circle, there was loud music in the skatepark and I spectated but I didn’t care at all. After four visits to the bathroom, in which I locked myself in the big stall and jingled my keys, I was smiling at everybody on the streets, I was Donald Fagan and I was Prince and I was glamorous, in a fur coat, with long hair, I was singular and distinct and by myself but never for a moment was I alone.
              

 After our day at the university’s natural history museum, it had become clear to me that I was once again purposefully wasting my time. We had nothing of value to say to each other, and quite honestly, it was causing me to act like a dick. On more than one occasion while in the Living Arts and Cultures room I privately rolled my eyes at comments he made, and a couple of times I caught myself gaining a sort of bully-like satisfaction from shutting down his tries at humor. By the time we reached the third floor, which was filled with fossilized impressions of Cambrian sea creatures in glass boxes and imposing skeletal casts of various dinosaurs, I was experiencing complete exhaustion and could no longer put up with even the most basic conversational courtesies. On the way out, I put my hands in my pockets and thought about everything I was currently putting off. We split a piece of fry bread with two different house-made jams in the museum’s cafe, sharing a brief moment of genuine mutual enthusiasm over the lemon curd, before I insisted on dropping him off.

              Already I had felt the resentment bubbling during our first time together. I was unnerved by how much irony or satire had permeated his statements, I grew skeptical of his every word. It seemed like he was behind glass, like there was some invisible barrier that would forever prevent him from doing or saying anything that was real. It was when I asked him who his favorite Beatle was, and he gave an unconvincing answer of “Ringo,” said like he had never actually had a favorite Beatle and just picked “Ringo” because it would imply some kind of pre-existing knowledge or opinion that claiming “Paul” or simply echoing my answer of “George” would not, that this was solidified in my mind. To me, it was indicative of some kind of greater charade within our interactions, or maybe just the interactions that take place within situations like these, in general. I found myself strangely frustrated; it appeared that he would rather sheepishly perform than confess plainly to not caring about something I cared about. I was further provoked when he proceeded to say that he “hated John Lennon,” and not simply because I loved John Lennon, but because it served as absolute confirmation to me that he was, as I suspected, performative—I had established that he had no real feelings about The Beatles, so this couldn’t be the result of any genuine convictions—and that also, he possessed deeply boring opinions.

              I looked forward to arriving at his place and drinking the cheap, sugary boxed wine that he purchased earlier at the corner store, which to him represented sex, but to me meant more of an excuse to say whatever I wanted.

              Side by side with him on the bed, I downed my cheap boxed wine beverage, which was an electric blue color, and used the damaged MacBook situated in between us to select YouTube videos that were solely for my own enjoyment. Much of my energy was devoted to laughing; I just kept laughing to myself, thinking it all felt so funny. In that moment, I had determined that we were actors in a stage-play. Part of me was hoping he would agree and see some of the humor in this: two people who did not know each other, who had curated images of ourselves reliant on this lack of knowledge, who did not have to care about or even like one another—there was something inherently interesting about it, it was all so fresh and novel to me. He didn’t budge though.

              For several mornings leading up to the day of our arrangement, I had awoken and promptly masturbated to the thought of myself successfully seducing him. When I did this, it was hard and fast, in a strictly mechanical manner, like checking a machine’s vitals to make sure a certain function still worked. It felt like a neutral, asexual task, like how a horse breeder might collect the sperm of his prize stallion. Now, I observed the stranger beside me, in this dark room that was mostly just a bed, a half-stuffed suitcase, and a sticker-coated guitar propped up against its pedal board, unable to think anything other than that our situation was unequivocally hilarious and meaningless. I felt no sexual or romantic intrigue, no lust or infatuation, no tingling sensation from our touch. I closed my eyes and accepted that everything was inevitable.

              I started to think about things that made my stomach twist and my chest ache, I started to remember what it was that I was avoiding, and for a moment I visualized what I really wanted, which caused my eyes to sting a bit, but I decided it was too late and there was nothing to do but laugh. It’s not even going to work, I thought, because I don’t like you. And every time I looked up at him, I thought about jamming my thumbs into his eyes, and it made me giggle uncontrollably. Shut the fuck up, I thought. Fuck you, I thought. I grinned and I wondered if I looked sexy, showing off my eyeshadow and smiling with just my top row of teeth.

              A week or so later, I endured three episodes of an HBO comedy show with him, ignoring his blatant sexual urges during the first two, then conceding during the third, because I still had a few hours until the party I would be going to started and didn’t yet want to go home, where I felt I would then be pressured to find productive things to do. It was a drag—once more I suppressed violent thoughts beneath flirtatious expressions, trying to keep my eyes shut for as much of it as possible—but it got the job done, the clock moved forward. Five days after this, I had found other ways to kill time, in the form of my third party that week, one I truly had no business in attending.

              Upon my late arrival, I was greeted by my only known point of contact, who offered to get me a snack or, “perhaps a drink,” and so I happily took it upon myself to concoct two tequila sodas within my first hour of being there. I drank steadily as I studied and politely interacted with a crowd that resembled nothing of myself. The guests were seemingly all intertwined through webs of polyamorous relationships, involved in local music, and many attended the liberal arts college out West, where they studied race and gender and sexuality. They wore animal accessories and motifs, such as dog ear headbands, they sported intentionally deterrent or unattractive hairstyles, they spoke freely of their social groups and personal identities and sexual interests. While I had initially avoided putting thought toward our differences, the latter subject caused me to feel distinctly alien. I poured a third shot of tequila into my red solo cup and filled the remainder with water from the kitchen sink.

              I was tucked away in the background when two vaguely familiar faces entered the room—a pair of girls who hosted the party where I spent this past New Year’s Eve. It would be only a few minutes into our interaction before the mention of cocaine, and less than an hour after the mention of cocaine before we were piling into the backseat of a mulleted young man’s car in order to purchase said cocaine. Upon snorting my first line off of a cracked iPhone, it hit me that I was in a situation where I could, in fact, purchase cocaine, and so I swiftly compiled two twenties and a ten from my purse to obtain a half-gram of my own. We re-entered the party. After standing in the kitchen, where I had become subject to one of the girls’ longwinded retellings of social dilemmas, which invoked in me a foreboding dread, and then sneaking away to do more lines, the host would then ask everyone to leave, citing that the house’s plumbing had failed and the water was not safe to consume.

              The night quickly descended after I agreed to meet the two girls at their shared apartment. Once inside, the prior girl’s tales of great evils within her love and social lives continued, and were compounded by detailed lists of everyone who had tried to get with her, a review of the party we had attended along with assessments of who there was unattractive and attractive, and I felt numb to the sheer amount of names and opinions I was hearing. Eventually, we were joined by the mulleted young man and his partner in crime, a small White boy who went by “Cajun”—Wow, like the seasoning, I had wanted to say—for rounds of Nintendo games, lines of cocaine, half-episodes of TV shows, and smoking on the patio.

              For awhile, I sat staring at the remainder of my final half-snorted line as it rested before me in a thick glass tray, unaware of the number of lines I had done but fully aware that this one would officially mark “too much,” and then I leaned forward and snorted it. Immediately I stiffened, my eyes widened, and I started to lightly caress the surface of my chest and reach for my esophagus, as both of which were now rapidly increasing in feelings of warmth and tightness. I imagined myself turning to one of the four other people in the room and saying, “I think I did too much,” and it causing panic or discomfort to ensue; I pictured the mulleted young man reacting like, “Oh Hell nah,” and so to avoid this, I took a vow of silence. I remained fixed to a singular point in the room, the middle of the large gray couch in the living room, like a turret, confined to one place and capable of small movements only in my upper half, all the while bearing witness to a TV that was somehow simultaneously rapidly shifting in its content yet also never quite being changed when it should.

              The longer I spent in this position, the more I grew paranoid of the people who were around me, of the unopened texts on my phone from friends and acquaintances and the boy from before, of the social environments I had been experiencing as of late—of how utterly dynamic and intense it was, knowing people and being around them. Horrified, I thanked the girls for their hospitality and excused myself. I drove home very slowly under the dark blue early morning sky as my mind unraveled further. I was unable to shake my disgust towards the fact that everyone around me was a part of some kind of network of relationships and feelings, meshed together like the veins or arteries of some massive, terrible nexus. My mind replayed the girl’s words from earlier, everything about the ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends and ex-friends and sex and love and the drama of it all. I drew up a mental image of her all Medusa-esque, with red eyes and writhing snakes for hair, and I was then certain that I had irrefutable evidence of something evil lurking within my life, and that I had to get out, get away, never see anyone I knew ever again.

              At some point while frozen on that couch, I had responded to a text from the boy asking if I wanted to go to a museum with him on Tuesday with an enthusiastic “yes.” I had even personally suggested the university’s natural history museum. I spent the next few days unable to understand why I kept doing things like this.

              On the drive back to his place that Tuesday, the boy had the nerve to tell me that the Alex G song playing over the speakers was “the most ‘Beatles-sounding’ Alex G song he had ever heard.”

              Without hesitation I snapped, “What do you mean? Explain.”

              “I don’t know, it’s just, really Beatles-sounding.”

              “How? What about it?”

              “Just like, the sound of it, like the structure is like a Beatles song.”

              “But how?”

              “I don’t know, the way the song is composed.”

              “Yeah, I don’t know about that.”

              I smiled in utter disbelief at what I was doing to myself. I stopped the car in front of his place, which was really an old duplex that had been converted into an AirBnB, and he asked me if I’d like to come back later so that he could cook us a steak. My body instinctively registered this invitation as “a trap,” and so I declined. I told him I had leftover salmon that I needed to eat. He exited my car, and we did not kiss goodbye.

              I drove toward home, watching the minutes on the phone map’s arrival time steadily increase as I continued to make wrong turns for no reason other than distraction. It had gotten quite hot, and the sun was beaming directly onto my scalp through my car’s open roof. I was trying to convince myself that I was not just doing fine, but perhaps even doing great, by blasting my music and feigning carefree pleasure. In the opposing lane, two cars collided when one took a wider left turn into the other’s lane, and it produced a loud crunching sound. I sat in traffic, with all the windows down, sweaty and delirious, and there I made a mental note that I suffered from “severe cowardice and avoidance.”

              I decided I’d better pay a visit to a psychic. There was a gaping hole of time after dinner anyway.

              I located the nearest psychic boutique, fifteen minutes away and open twenty-four hours a day, and I drove there straight away. It was in a strip mall off a busy arterial route, with a faded sign outside that depicted a seated Buddha with multicolored spots lit up along his vertical axis, advertising “Chakra alignments.” I stopped for a moment at the door to inspect a potted plant with a pile of garbage in it, before pressing the bell, causing a small husky to erupt into a fit of barking inside. I watched as a stout, leathery, older woman in a loose purple article of clothing emerged from the long hallway inside, then she locked eyes with me and held up her finger. Her eyes were bulbous and protruding. I nodded profusely. She disappeared with the husky, and when she returned alone, she opened the door and welcomed me with a gravelly, “Hello, love.”

              Once inside, I struggled to decide if the space more resembled an apartment or an office. The woman explained her services and rates, and I looked away from her, allowing my eyes to defocus on the floor, and said “Okay. Thinking.”

              I decided on the $85 tarot card reading, the second cheapest option.

              She led us into the office room on our left, where we would sit across from each other at a table with a vinyl tablecloth over it, patterned in a design that could only be described as “witchy, occult clip-art.” She introduced herself as Tara, and I thought Funny, Tara sounds like tarot, and then she requested I declare my full name and date of birth, so I did, and she dished out her sturdy, shiny cards before me, arranging them in a neat pattern, each one coming down with a slap from her long acrylic nails. The first card placed had a winged man on it, with a caption that read something about indecision, and so I vaguely alluded to Tara that I had come to her today because I had felt avoidant, evasive, stalled at a crossroads in life.

              Tara said that my financial fortune looked good and that I would soon be coming into money. I replied that I had actually just gotten a second job the day before, waitressing at a waterfront seafood restaurant. She scanned me in a way that I deemed almost mischievous, seeming impressed with herself, and said, “that makes sense.”

              According to Tara, I was a positive, outgoing person, who was always giving to others but seldom receiving; I had experienced hardship and struggle in the realm of love, but ultimately, I was on “the right path.” I compartmentalized this information as “things that the sort of person who is visiting a psychic would like to hear,” and I felt like I was back in my car again, listening to the boy say things he didn’t mean just so that I could hear him say it. Or really, I was back in the bed again. Oh, shut the fuck up, I thought again, and stifled a grin. I stared at my reflection in the mirror behind Tara and messed with my hair.

              I figured I might as well try and get something out of this, so, envisioning that Tara was a Magic 8-Ball rather than a woman, I asked her if I should move away to New York City. Without consulting the cards in front of her, she answered quickly that moving right now would not be right, that there was still much I needed to deal with here. She said it with a certainty that suggested she might not be telling me so as a psychic, but as an older woman talking to a younger woman about life. Despite having just ruled that her word didn’t hold any merit, and that I didn’t care, for some reason, right then I felt crushed.

              I protested, saying things about how staying felt like another symptom of my indecision and inability to do scary things, that to me, not moving represented choosing comfort and security over exploration and experience, that life had felt “expended” here. I even went so far as to tell her that on Saturday, I had experienced a terrible revelation which led me to believe that I absolutely needed to leave. Tara simply repeated that a move right now would not be right, and this was because a negative energy had been infiltrating my life for the past “five or six months” and was causing me to behave unlike myself.

              She then asked me if I knew anything about “chakras.” I felt defeated. I told her that I did not. Tara proclaimed that my chakras had been “blocked” during this five or six month period, and that the only way to release the negative energy surrounding me was to work on opening them back up. The solution would be fairly straightforward: a week long Chakra Opening Course taught by Tara herself, costing $650 total. By the end of it, only after my chakras had been properly aligned, I would be able to move forward in life.

              Tara persisted in her sale. I didn’t say much at all. I realized it had been awhile since she had slapped any new cards on the table, so I asked her if we were done, and she said yes. I thought that, before leaving, I should entertain a few self-indulgent, desperate matters.

              Embarrassed but undeniably curious, I went for it, “What about my love life?”

              Tara said that my soulmate was “there, but not fully there,” and they would come into my life fully once my chakras were fixed.

              Oh, well of course, I thought.

              I looked down at my hands, then back up at Tara, and staring into those protruding eyes whilst picturing myself sat typing in front of a laptop, I believed that, if Tara really were a psychic, then she would be able to see this image too, so attempting to “beam” my thoughts through her protruding eyes and directly into her head, I spoke slowly and unconfidently, and I asked her, “Am I… putting my efforts toward the right thing in life?”

              I felt nervous—something about the imaginary task which I had created, of transmitting an idea that carried so much personal weight via telepathy, was now very real and intimidating. What would I do, I thought, if Tara were to tell me that my dream had been false, that I had it all wrong, that I really was wasting my time—that I’d have wasted nearly every second of every day, because even the time not spent on avoiding or distracting or pretending was equally meaningless?

              Tara just looked mildly annoyed and said, “Yes, you are on the right path,” and I don’t know why, but I went ahead and let the relief wash over me.

              “Oh, okay. Yeah, okay! Okay!” I verbalized, to myself really, and not Tara.

              I opened up my wallet and dug out four twenties and a five to give her. Tara walked me to the door and told me to come back as soon as I was ready to begin my chakra opening, and I exited with the knowledge that I would never return, because I had already gotten exactly what I needed.

              After all that, I proceeded to pull as many triggers as I could, firing blindly in every direction. I picked a college to attend, I picked a house to move to, and the next week, I worked two shifts at the waterfront seafood restaurant. And then suddenly, it felt like everything in life had been infused with a newfound sense of urgency and importance. It felt like I was illuminating golden light from the inside out. It felt like I had been abducted in the middle of the night and replaced with a newer, better model. I was waking up every day feeling so intensely about my future, I was walking into coffee shops and genuinely thinking about “God,” and I just kept wondering, How am I going to make this all happen, and I concluded that I was going to need all the time I could get.

              The manager at the waterfront seafood restaurant called me less than a week after my second shift to inform me that I had been fired.

              “I hope you have a better rest of your day,” he said. He had no idea how thrilled I was.
              

 My uncle calls from prison, and I ignore it and let the melody ring out, continuing to put light creams on my face and dark, sticky wax on my eyelashes and eyebrows. I resume the YouTube video that’s been playing out loud on my phone as background audio, just for him to call and interrupt again a few minutes later. For whatever reason, I decide that this time I’ll pick up. I move my finger onto the green answer button before I can change my mind.

              “An inmate at Airway Heights Correctional Complex is calling. This call may be recorded and monitored. If you wish to make this call private…” the automated female voice starts, and I feel an onset of regret for having answered.

              She informs me of my options, that to accept the call I must press “one.”

              I linger between the video’s play button and keypad’s open button, and then I dial one.

              My uncle starts every phone call the exact same way, like “Heyyyy”, with the end extended all sing-songy, and then the tone gets flaccid as the word trails off, so he sounds sort of disappointed, like he’s constantly about to deliver bad news. I say “Hi” back. My uncle goes into a few quick sentences about being surprised that I picked up, which he always does, because I don’t consistently answer his calls.

              At the moment, I don’t know why I’ve answered, it just felt like I was supposed to.

              I brush off his comments— “You actually answered!” —in an apathetic manner. I then try to talk as normally as possible. I figure if I were in his place, I’d just want someone to talk to me like things were normal. I tell him about the really good sandwich I ate yesterday, that I went to the gym this morning, that I’m currently looking for another job.

              My uncle tells me it is his twenty-seventh day in this place. I laugh and ask if he’s been scratching tally marks into the wall, and he says that, actually, he’s been using a piece of paper that he keeps next to his bed. He uses this paper to track his daily workout of pushups and dips and pull-ups, and that’s how he knows if another day has passed, if the workouts have been checked off. He gets one hour on the indoor track and he was recently granted one hour in the room with the metal bar, which can be used for either pull-ups or dips. He is also fortunate enough to receive an allowance of three books a week, of which he can request the genre, and unlike most of the other inmates, he gets some kind of cheap tablet, which he uses to call me and speak through its grainy, underwater-sounding internal microphone.

              “I can’t just waste away in my bed here, you know? I have to be sure I’m not just wasting away.” My uncle says, and I respond truthfully that I completely understand him, that “the worst thing you can do” is to lie in bed, to do nothing. I think of the past few days of my life spent lying in bed and doing nothing and wince. For a moment, I fantasize about being in prison, which I’ve concluded is the place where I’d finally be forced to do nothing but read and workout and write my magnum opus.

              My uncle shares with me that there is another inmate on his row who, every morning, can be heard fighting with the guards because he refuses to shower or even change his clothes, or do anything for that matter. I ask my uncle if he thinks the inmate is perhaps just trying to die. He says he doesn’t know.

              My uncle goes on to tell me that the longest he had ever spent in The Hole was forty-nine days, and that was almost twenty-five years ago. The inmates were on strike, they had refused to do any of their jobs, and anyone found to be participating was sent straight to solitary confinement. My uncle didn’t have a job. When the guards asked him if he was refusing to work, he told them no, he didn’t have a job, and they then instructed him to push a cart full of rags down to the kitchen. He said he wouldn’t do it, not when everybody else was striking. They told him they’d send him to The Hole and he told them fuck you.

              “You want to know something sad?” he asks. I don’t consider if I really do.

              “What” I say.

              “That was the last time I ever saw Katie. She and Dad drove four and a half hours to come see me—they didn’t know I had been put in The Hole that morning. I could only talk to them for twenty minutes and it was through a piece of glass. After that they drove home and I never saw my sister again.”

              And all I can say is “Jeez.” I pat my fingers into the concentrated dots of pink blush on my cheeks to disperse their color.

              My uncle tries to ask me about college and the future and where I’m going to live and what I’m going to do. I give unsure answers, focusing hard on not betraying any resentment or stress, which gives the conversation the texture of a job interview. I’d rather talk about the noncompliant inmate or his dead sister. I’m feeling hostile towards the subject of myself and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to push the conversation elsewhere. He asks about something and I confess plainly that I’m really sad. I don’t know why. I hadn’t planned on telling anybody that today. I didn’t even want to talk to him in the first place. Maybe I just do this to shut him up.

              My uncle says he understands, that it’s no different than what he feels, having been ripped away from his comfort and everything he ever knew. I laugh and tell him that being abducted by guards in the middle of the night and driven four and a half hours East of the prison where he’d spent the last twenty-five years of his life, without any warning or explanation, is perhaps slightly worse than what’s going on with me. In my head though, I consider the idea that maybe all pain really is the same, but I don’t say this. He seems to respond: he tells me that it’s really the same.

              My uncle hopes that my mom can get him out of this place soon. I have no idea if this will happen, but I cautiously assure him that it will anyway.

              I think about what happened in the car a few weeks ago. My mom was complaining, lately everyday was phone calls to prison wardens and higher-ups, followed by phone calls from my uncle to see if he was going back to his prison-home yet. She had sounded so exhausted. She said she couldn’t think about how bored he was, and then she suddenly started to cry. This was scary, because I was pretty sure I’d only ever seen it happen once or twice before: I remembered seeing my mom quietly suppress tears at a farmer’s market because she saw some decrepit old men who apparently reminded her of late father, and I saw her cry out of frustration on her forty-fifth birthday.

              My mom repeated that she couldn’t think about how bored he was, only now with regret. She said that every time she took a dance class at the gym or ate a home cooked meal, all she thought about was her brother alone, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that came in cling wrap. She said when Katie died it was the same, that she couldn’t enjoy anything without seeing her sister, who had died of a bizarre medical tragedy at twenty. I told her I was sorry.

              We mutually, silently decided that to distract ourselves, we would instead direct our attention to the newly opened deli on our left that had replaced the Korean-owned convenience store, which was named either “Polar” or “Arctic” Market, I could never remember which it was.

              “I think it could be like, Malaysian,” I guessed of the deli’s cuisine, basing this solely off of the appearance of the smiling mascot character on the sign. It turned out to be Laotian.

              There’s a short silence before my uncle finally announces he’ll “let me go.” I wish him luck on his pull-ups and dips and pushups and I hang up. I don’t resume the YouTube video I was watching before.

              I’ll never know for sure if he did it or not. But it’s not my place. I spent too much time within the bright white walls of the visiting room, under lighting so harsh it resembled the view during a dental examination, the vast tiled floorspace occupied by nothing but tables and rows of vending machines, trying to write stories on scratch paper with a box of crayons, eating Red Vines and not listening to a word of my mom and uncle’s conversations about lawyers, custody battles, property, or wills, my mom’s tone always exasperated, at a loss, like she was explaining all of this to a small child. The correctional officers would sometimes come into the carpeted play area, which was designated by a short white plastic picket fence, and force my brother to dismantle his intricate replicas of specific guns from Call of Duty games that he had been constructing with LEGOs, and almost always they would make us recycle our drawings in the lobby as we exited, but still every time we’d try to take them home, in case one of the nicer ones was working that day. When I was still small enough, my uncle would pick me up in his arms, toss me above his head, clap his hands one to three times while I was suspended in the air, and then catch me, and I’d make him do this over and over until we were asked to stop by a guard or it was suggested by an annoyed look on my mom’s face. I swear I was so high up in the air, and that I hung there for a length of time that was just impossible enough to be supernatural. The prison was just far enough of a drive to be an event, warranting its own special car games, landmarks—our favorite being a tiny, raggedy tree that wore Christmas ornaments year-round—and a set of CDs that an amateur DJ had gifted my mom.

              It’s not my place. I could never be a fair jury. At some point, it must have been around age fourteen, I thought about the fact that I’d never gotten the chance to be a fair jury, and I was so intimidated by the abyss this created that I stopped going along with my mom to the prison entirely, I even skipped the Christmas parties and the Summer barbecues, which were my favorites. I mouthed to my mom from the passenger seat, “I’m not here” when my uncle would call and it would automatically transfer to the car speaker, and I patiently waited for the ringing to stop each time the prison’s number overtook my own phone screen. It wasn’t until I was nineteen years old that I went again, to the Summer barbecue, where I picked at a paper plate consisting of baked beans and mac-salad with black olives in it and iceberg lettuce that was drenched, drowning really, in ranch dressing. I carefully spectated the inmate fathers with tattooed faces as they played lawn games with children whom they hardly saw. I felt satisfied. There was no sudden change of heart, no burning reason for my coming. It was like answering the phone today, it just felt like it was supposed to be that way.

              After I had returned from my visit, I was in bed with a boyfriend, and I painted him a picture of the fascinating environment that is a barbecue at a prison yard, I repeated all the hilariously wild things my uncle had said about his time there, like how he would refuse to share rooms with fat inmates, or the story about a sociopathic Chinese man who burnt down his adopted parents’ home.

              It was then that I finally saw the news report from my uncle’s sentencing, thirty years ago, when he was the same age as I was laying in that bed. I hadn’t avoided knowing to protect his innocence or maintain his image in my eyes. To me, he’d only ever existed as a prisoner; it’s not like knowing would change all that much between us. I avoided it, I think, because I believed it would somehow cause some kind of severe, irreversible change between my mom and I, that she would be further complicated in a way that felt intimidating, almost menacing. That if I told her I knew, her face would contort or darken into an expression I had never seen her make, and I’d be faced with some kind of grave consequence.

              As a child, the crime had only ever appeared to me in dream-like flashes. I imagined everything playing out in a cartoon logic, like a Disney scene in which the mean bearded villain captures the dainty princess and taunts her by holding his sword up to her chin. Using a mixture of sources, I constructed a mental image of my uncle, joined by a faceless secondary character—the other suspect, his best friend, the supposed true culprit, whom I had given the appearance of a “general criminal” with facial scruff, dark clothes, and a black beanie atop his shaved head—grinning maniacally as they dangled the girl from the balcony of an apartment complex, the setting taken directly from an old rental property my grandfather once owned. It always ended the same, with my uncle bailing out at the last second, after realizing what was happening to the girl, darting down the steps and out the heavy exit door.

              I didn’t want him to, but I also felt zero inclination to protest, when my boyfriend pulled the article up on his phone and read pieces aloud. When he got to the part about a chunk of concrete being used for a final blow on the girl in the park, he grimaced and repeated the words “chunk of concrete”, looking to me for an answer. I had none for him.

              “I feel like you of all people would be the first to agree that it was ‘the man’ who did it in this kind of situation. You know, like when a girl gets killed it was most likely her boyfriend or some other close male, something like that.” He said, seeming more earnestly surprised, curious about the situation and my thoughts, than anything else.

              I thought about how the article had described the girl as writing countless diary entries about my uncle. A teenage girl writing diary entries about a boy she was obsessed with. I thought, it is true that dead girls are, more often than not, a result of close males. But in the moment, I didn’t feel like I could explain the cards I had been dealt.

              I tried thinking about it in a utilitarian way. I tried to make life a math problem, an equation, though I was never very good at math. I thought, there’s my uncle, there’s my mom, there’s their dead sister, there’s the dead girl in the park, and there’s me. There’s love and death for everybody. How could I choose so that I was choosing for us all?

              This is my current answer, my attempt to reflect all my feelings at once. It goes in a zig-zag pattern, like this: I answer a call because maybe all pain really is the same. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because I’m busy. I answer a call because my mom cried in the car. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I answer a call for no reason. I skip a call because of the dead girl. I skip a call because I don’t feel like talking that day.

              I skip on joining for the majority of visits. But I’ll go to the prison sometimes, particularly for those special barbecues or potlucks, because all pain is the same, and I like the feeling of being buzzed through the double-door security entrances and walking down the stretch of courtyard that leads into another two sets of security entrances; I like the taste of the “French Vanilla Latte” that my mom always gets from the coffee vending machine, and I like the smell of the visiting room when you first walk in and the guard at the entry post pushes his invisible ink stamp into the top of your hand. I like to see it all again, everything and everyone so unnatural and unchanging. Every correctional officer is still fat, and my uncle’s face bears almost no signs of age, his small, athletic stature and his buzzed haircut and his green eyes and his light gray sweatsuit are all still the same as they have been my whole life, and likewise his brain bears almost no signs of age, his older sister still glares at his humor, so juvenile that it’s almost uncomfortable, his naivety is charming and sad and confusing all at once, and when he smiles he looks just like a dumb child.
              

 Just clicking things on the laptop. Wonderful. Tao Lin Taipei situation. Just remembered Mishima book in my bag. 1/2 line left. Car. The Beatles in the car will likely be good.
              

 Dad fell for a classic tourist scam. I had my back turned for maybe forty five seconds, and somehow he was already five hundred yen poorer and signing something on the small clipboard that she held up at him.

              If I had caught the old woman scanning for victims outside the temple beforehand, I likely wouldn’t have rushed ahead and left Dad by himself. But she must’ve seen him there all alone, looking left and right to see where his daughter had run off to, looking soft-bellied and American, and she must’ve seen the yen symbols in his blue eyes. I wondered if she was really this conniving spirit or if she was a victim too, some devout but senile grandmother who genuinely believed she was doing charity, good and honest charity for the Buddhists.

              I quickly closed the yard or so between us and I took my place between Dad and the old woman. I was prepared to wave my hand at her, to tell her we were “Daijoubu, daijoubu,” but the transaction part of the scamming ritual had already taken place. Signing her paper was merely the customary ending practice—it probably also doubled as a means of squashing escape attempts, because that way the old woman could simply dig her finger into the victim’s name, suggesting it was like a signature on a contract.

              I knew that she discreetly slipped her mass produced Buddha-goods into the hands of oblivious foreigners, and then, either by channeling a teary-eyed believer or abusing the language barrier with the sort of fury that suggests punishment and damnation, demanded that they pay up. I glanced at Dad’s thick wrist and the string of black elastic and black beads now decorating it, and I was overcome with a feeling of adolescent embarrassment. I thought, The old woman was really the same as those guys who drift through Hollywood Boulevard or the Las Vegas Strip, the ones who call you “boss” and force their CDs into your hands, and you still fell for it, Dad.

              While I was condemning Dad in my mind, the old woman shifted her attention my way. She swept in towards me with remarkable efficiency, producing a stretchy beaded bracelet from seemingly nowhere, grinning and hurriedly speaking something unclear from her position several inches below my line of sight. I watched, unmoving, as she seamlessly rolled the bracelet onto my forearm and over the top of my sweater sleeve.

              I paused for a moment. I looked at the thing. The beads were red and green and yellow and white and black. A gold holographic plastic tag with Buddha on it was still attached. I carefully removed the bracelet from my arm. I then put it back on, adjusting it so that it was now on my wrist and beneath my sleeve, like a bracelet is supposed to be. There, that’s better, I thought.

              I could’ve rejected the cheap trinket, but instead I did nothing. I looked down at my new bracelet, and then down at the old woman, and I smiled.

              “Arigatougozaimasu.”

              She looked pleased. Of course she was pleased. She passed me her clipboard. It contained a form separated into three categories: “Name,” “City,” and “Requested Have.” I wasn’t exactly sure what a “Requested Have” was, but Dad had written “Peace.” So, I concluded that it must be a wish, whether for the world or for oneself, I didn’t know.

              But it didn’t really matter what I was meant to write, because once I registered this as an opportunity for a wish—and not just any wish, but supposedly a request that would be sent directly to a higher power—it was done. I scribbled my Requested Have down so fast, I did so without a single thought. I’m pretty sure I did it without a choice. It had become second nature at that point, my brain had developed an automatic response to the stimuli of words like “wish,” to the thought of hopes or dreams or the future, to the sight of repeating digits on clocks or motorcycle license plates, to any part of living, religious or innocuous.

              At all the Japanese shrines, you’d flash through my head as I prayed. I tossed a coin, ten yen or so, into countless rectangular wooden boxes with slots in them. I clasped my hands together and I bowed—I really meant it too. When I squeezed my eyes shut, I tried to make my visions as expansive as possible, in hopes that they wouldn’t come across as immature or greedy, like I was regarding Buddha or God or whoever as some kind of low rate prostitute who’d grant me easy love for spare change. I worried like a girl, that I was aiming too low or that you’d never pray for me like this, so I buried the wish under a bunch of vague, conceptual matter. I would try to cloud it up as much as possible. I thought, Maybe if my want is abstracted, then what I really need could be better understood by Buddha or God or whoever. I thought, They’ll punish me, in a twisted or ironic way, if I waste their time on something trivial like this, so I have to make it look serious. With my head down, my hands folded and pressed tightly to my face like everything depended on how this one prayer was sequenced, I repeated allusions like, “make it good, make it good, please give me a good life.” I’d picture streams of heavenly light and the smiling faces of immediate family, and bold words like “prosperity” and “growth” would appear as text, and then be spoken aloud as if some dramatic narration behind this overly sentimental movie scene.

              By the third shrine, I realized this still could be interpreted poorly by Buddha or God or whoever. Potentially, it could be seen as me treating them like Genies, Genies who grant superficial or earthly desires, so I started to include a few sentences along the lines of “give me experience, give me wisdom” into my script, because that seemed a little more open-minded or mature, or in line with the faithful view of life. I theorized that a selfish person would ask for only happy or good things, and I wanted to demonstrate that I deserved to have my wish fulfilled because I was willing to experience whatever came along with it.

              I started to wonder if I looked desperate, praying at all these shrines. I started to actually get desperate, praying at all these shrines. And in my desperation, I started to worry. About the wish, but also the praying. I sweated the details. At one of the shrines, I forgot to cleanse my hands with a ladle full of purification water from the basin, and I didn’t clap twice before my prayer as I stood before the main hall, like I then saw the woman after me do. I worried that now my wish wouldn’t “work,” since it was asked without the proper actions to seal it in place, actions which I was now aware of and had no excuse not to perform. I hoped that by bowing at the gate as I exited, this would make up for my mistakes, and that way Buddha or God would not ignore my prayer out of spite. They would have to accept my apology. At another shrine, a piece of my omikuji ripped when I tried to tie it to a row of metal bars atop the steps. I feared this would happen—I’m no good with delicate actions, like transfiguring little paper fortunes into little paper bows. I deliberated: did I just nullify my luck? The paper had told me I possessed “Dazzling Fortune,” and under the “Romance” category it said, “This is the one. Do not waver.”

              I couldn’t risk that not being the case. I couldn’t risk anything. I buried the ripped portion somewhere deep in my purse, where it could be neither lost nor found. I thought, That has to count for something, carrying it with me everywhere, right?

              I bought good luck charms at the shrine offices, dainty blue or vibrant red pouches with white strings, to later be attached somewhere I could see them. I imagined surrounding myself with them, hanging them from my car’s rear-view mirror and above my bed, so luck would be inescapable. I stuck my head in vats where incense is burnt and I fanned the smoke on my face till my eyes watered. I prayed to a towering bronze Buddha that weighed one hundred tons and had stood for seven hundred years, and an hour later I prayed to a black clay Buddha that was the size of a house-cat and hidden away in a cave behind a set of wooden bars.

              On my last day there, at the biggest shrine of them all, I wrote my wish out in as plain of terms as I could, sealed it away in an envelope with whatever spare 1 yen coins I had left, and dropped it into a final rectangular box with slots, labeled “onegai”—wish, or please. It was my last chance. I’d board the plane in four short hours; I’d fly home with the things I bought for you. I was eager, terrified to see you in America the next day. Dad was sitting on a bench underneath a covered area the whole time, while I prayed and wrote and spent my yen. The weather had been rather sunny and temperate the entire trip, but on that day it rained, and it rained hard, and I was the only one with an umbrella. Dad was wet and tired and seemed to really want to go home, but I wasn’t ready to leave yet. I was still trying to bargain with higher powers.

              Here, I had spent my days eating and walking and believing in everything. I was giving magic and miracles and coincidences and grand plans a shot, in the hopes that they would prepare me for my return, and I would be stronger and luckier from then on. But I was running out of time, running out of one-yen coins in my plastic pouch, and running out of compromises to make with my wish. So I threw up my hands and surrendered it to fate in full sincerity. Do your worst, Buddha, God, Kami-sama—whoever it actually is. My final plea was disgustingly honest: Please, keep us together, however that may be. Please, keep us in each other’s lives. Please, make it good.

              To cover up my self-indulgence, I threw in a sentence about wanting good things for Mom and Dad and my brother.

              Outside the temple that one day, the old woman somehow managed to get another thousand yen out of Dad. I wrote my name and my city, and “Love,” my Requested Have, and I returned the clipboard.

              As we walked away, I noticed that I was beaming, even giggling a little, at the thought of accruing more luck or scoring another brief communion with someone or something that could grant wishes and miracles. And then suddenly, smiling felt so ridiculous, and then all of it did. Praying for love like a teenager. Begging for you to want me, like a little girl. This was not something adults did, I was certain. And this was not something I did, either. In that moment, I just hoped that Buddha would interpret my request as some lousy call for humanity to show universal kindness to one another or something, and simply ignore all my personal desires to be with you. I hoped that he would read it no differently from Dad’s self-conscious assertion toward either world or inner “peace.” I began my descent along the steep path of stone steps ahead.

              I looked down at my new set of beads. Red and green and yellow and white and black. They reminded me of an accessory that you would often sport on your wrist, a stretchy band with a set of plastic rectangles depicting Mother Mary, I think. You bought it from that old Chinese guy’s stall at the market downtown, the one where you can barely shuffle through what minimal square footage is available of its two slim aisles, because the place is suffocated by bins of plastic lucky charms, shimmering boxes of incense, rabbit’s foot keychains that wither and fall apart on the same day they were purchased, and endless mass produced Buddha-goods. One time he even scammed you—he charged you extra for a set of matching bracelets you bought us, which of course both of them ended up breaking at the hinges not too long after.

              I wondered, Should I give you my beaded bracelet? I didn’t care for it very much anyway. I figured I might as well, it would be one more thing to give you. I then had a subsequent counter to this thought, which was, What if doing that effectively erases my Requested Have? What if I have to wear this bracelet in order to preserve its powers?

              Or, maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe, if I were to bestow it upon you, the source of all my wishing, this would actually strengthen it. Does it function like a love potion?

              I must have used my remaining magic on the journey home, because I was able to tame every negative thought on that ten hour plane ride; I evaded tears with my mind-powers, I bolstered myself with the good fortune I’d amassed. I watched most of a terrible movie on the seat’s built-in screen and couldn’t wait to tell you how terrible I found it. I landed, and eventually I worked up the courage to call you and ask if it was okay for me to give you your gifts, and you replied I could come whenever. I got in my car and sang songs with the window down and basked in the end of a Spring day.

              The closer I got to your house though, the more my hope was replaced with dread. I was two stoplights away when I noticed I couldn’t sing the songs on the radio anymore and one stoplight away when I noticed my chest was tight and my heartbeat hard and solid, pounding against my sternum like it was trying to bruise me from the inside.

              I gave you the gifts and told you about my trip while you idly played with a guitar in your hands. You were nice, but I sensed that you wanted me to go so you could get back to whatever it was you were doing. I could feel myself overstaying my welcome as I hovered in the kitchen. I announced I was going. I was antsy when you stood up and I realized you would be walking me to the door. I had anticipated this moment. You hugged me goodbye. I had wished for a kiss, or at least for you to fuck me, like you had the day before I left for my trip.

              I had this whole fantasy in my head, that in my absence something had shifted, that from here on out I was brand new, luckier and freer, and not only was I going to be able to accept how things were between us, but my strength in doing so would eventually allow for my wish of being with you again to come true. I got in my car, and finally I cried. I had returned home, and now there was no good or bad luck or wishes or boxes to drop my yen in. I didn’t think about the fact that I hadn’t hung my lucky blue pouch from the rear-view mirror before coming, and it didn’t even cross my mind that the old bitch had placed a curse on me.
              

 I love driving it 7-10 over, just a little uncomfortable or noticeably fast for the passenger; that’s my sweet spot.

              34 in a 25, because I’m late for work, you understand I’m sure?

              I mean, I’m always late though.

              The other night, my boyfriend tells me,

              “You are driving like a bat out of hell”,

              as he witnesses me slip down the hills of our neighborhood on my bloodthirsty quest for grocery store donuts.

              I’m wild, not particularly well fed or rested,

              and it’s making me worse at tasks like working or thinking or driving.

              I have just gotten off my shift, it happened to be the Super Bowl;

              I was going haywire entertaining the requests of slobs and alcoholics for four hours straight,

              bringing them more Coors Light and

              turning up the volume during the halftime show when they asked,

              feigning concern and care

              like a good server.

              Whipping the car around feels both good and bad—the feeling of static in my head is relaxing, but I’m freaked out by how poorly I’m functioning.

              Today, I speed through a red light on the way to the bank and have to repeatedly tap on the brakes so I don’t collide with a car turning left out of Starbucks, and

              as a result I end up missing my left into the bank. I take the next one and think maybe I can somehow maneuver my way through the Burger King drive-thru and into the bank parking lot, but it’s no use:

              there is a barrier. I’m separated

              by a mere yard or so, just barely below the brown brick rectangle that is

              Washington Federal (WaFd), trapped outside of a car wash.

              Fuck. Fucccckk. I grit my teeth and park the car and squeeze my eyes shut real good because I just wanted to use the drop off window,

              not go inside,

              I just wanted it to go one way and now it would go another way,

              which is a frequent pang of mine.

              I’m not going to drive all the way around just to make that left turn again, so fine,

              I’ll go in.

              I brave the cold and cut through the crumpled, balding shrubbery that defines

              the car wash and bank parking lots,

              and slip into the bank,

              where there’s always many nice Asian ladies working.

              Hello, nice Asian ladies.

              Suddenly I feel at ease, pouring $400 of my accumulated cash tips directly into savings.

              That was a smart move, I’m sure that will benefit me or at least make me feel like it did.

              Ahn or Anh or maybe it’s An, is the lady who helps me out.

              Last time I came, I told her I’d go to Vietnam with her one day, and the thing is I totally mean it.

              Thanks ladies.

              Now I’m feeling better, feeling perfect

              and conniving, getting ideas and stuff.

              I strut back to my KIA Soul and hop in the driver’s seat.

              I like the mess and clutter, though looking around I consider that perhaps

              taking the time to rid of it would benefit me or at least make me feel like it did.

              Nah, nah.

              I actually like that notebook that’s stuffed between the passenger seat and the console. I like that empty Dr. Pepper Zero can in the door,

              that full Coke Zero can in the cup holder,

              that broken Hot Topic claw clip that’s sitting in there with it.

              I like the torn-up and crushed unread New York Times Magazine on the dash.

              Fuck,

              I never even see the back seat, but I love all the bags and stuff back there.

              You know—the backseat was actually once a second wardrobe of sorts, but my mom cleaned it out without my permission while I was away in South Korea.

              It’s okay, I’ll start it up again in no time.

              I’m driving to get my “Afternoon Pick Me Up”, cause that’s what I need.

              When I pass McDonald’s, they have an advert with the words “Afternoon Pick Me Up” on it, with some slushie thing

              and fries and a sweet tea.

              Practically a sign that things are going to be perfect.

              I’m trying to look at my bank app while driving

              because even though I told Ahn or Anh or An that I didn’t need my balance listed on the receipt,

              I have just now decided that I’m curious.

              Only when I start braking a bit too hard near the light do I realize I’m checking my phone. Okay, I’m a bit disappointed in myself.

              But as I take my turn and start coasting towards my destination, I get all these ideas in my head, so then I keep

              trying to open up the Notes App while driving to jot them down

              and I realize I’m distracted again, but it’s too late—I already feel good about it.

              I arrive at the bakery and once again

              I feel that relief,

              like I’m visiting a strip club or something,

              when they instantly get to pulling my espresso shot and pumping my peppermint syrup at just the sight of me.

              Always puts me at ease, ladies.

              This thing’s electric, I say, so I can basically just drive forever. And there was a little while where I basically did just drive forever.

              I’d drive around for a few hours

              almost every night without fail, not even to speed on the highway or go anywhere in particular,

              but just to cruise

              up and down Aurora Avenue, occasionally stopping

              by the bathrooms of WinCo or Dick’s,

              occasionally swerving into the opposite lane because I was craning my neck to watch the prostitutes in a line outside the motels that would later be shut down

              for having prostitutes in a line outside.

              I’d write some bullshit in that thick blue notebook stuffed in between the passenger seat and center console;

              I’d kill

              and kill and kill time

              till it was no longer an option.

              I’d go home and park the car,

              punch my finger into the circular power button,

              and the heat would stop pumping

              and after a few minutes

              the music, too.

              I’d press another button, this one to open up its little charging port, then

              I’d step out of that Big Black Metal Monster and pick up the thick charging cable which snakes out from under the garage door and

              plug the thing in, so it would be fat with miles

              and ready to go again tomorrow night.

              Overtime, doing this actually degraded the battery of my KIA Soul EV, is what a guy who works at a car dealership said to my Mom, who is the car’s registered owner. Apparently, with the older models, it’s better to whittle down the miles and then charge it all at once. She told me this in the doorway the other day after we got home from our morning Pilates class, and I was like, “Well that’s stupid. I feel like I shouldn’t have to do that.”
              

 At the countertop, we discussed her food choices before I left for work.

              “Well, last week she got a tofu banh mi, a large vegetable pho, and eggrolls from the Vietnamese place next door. And she was doing something really amazing: she was taking the banh mi and dipping it into the pho broth, as though it were like a French Dip or something. I think I joked it was like a French Colonized Dip.” I recounted from our last shift together, picking at my fingernails.

              Mom eyed me, first appalled, then softening to a look of curiosity. “I guess I’d actually probably like that, the soggy bread and all.”

              “No yeah, I didn’t think it was gross or anything, I just thought it just was sort of crazy and I’d never seen anybody do that before. I mean—both are great, so I’m sure it tastes fine, I’d just rather eat them separately.” I threw her a bone before indulging a little, “But after I commented on how it looked good or whatever, she made a big point out of telling me she ‘never eats bread’, so this was a treat. Like, you don’t have to justify it to me, or like, prove you’re skinny, you know?”

              “That’s so much food, though. I mean, you and I could probably split one banh mi.”

              I immediately thought about how this was not true.

              “She was probably doing the thing where she starves all day again. She probably didn’t eat anything, started to feel crazy at work, then by the time she went to call in that order, she was in full panic mode and got everything that sounded good.”

              “It’s freaky. That’s like, bulimia behavior. Seriously.”

              “Nah, I don’t think she’s bulimic,” I hurriedly concluded. I figured that, if Sara were bulimic, I’d somehow unconsciously know this. She’d have to look different, I conceded to myself, if she were cancelling out every sizable order from Le’s Pho Thai with an hour folded over the toilet. And for some reason that I have yet to dissect, bulimia seems impossible for someone of her age—38 years old; in my eyes, that’s a phase solely for when you’re young. I was 18 when Mom caught me digging around my uvula, after which I mostly stopped, so by now the thought of a grown adult woman shyly retiring the bathroom at a dinner party is absurd to me in the same way that it would be absurd for said grown woman to have a “crush” or put on a cheerleading uniform.

              I posited to Mom that Sara was simply a classic binge-and-restrictor. We agreed that she was, above all else, drunkorexic. While she would much rather the calories be spent on champagne, she occasionally slips up and orders three things from Le’s Pho Thai instead of one.

              At work, I observe Sara and food. I watch her use her stubby fingers to tear citrus fruits into bite-sized pieces or shakily scoop handfuls of those dried salted edamame snacks. I watch her snag singular pepperoncinis from the garnish tray or loose onion rings from a customer’s “Onion Tower” order waiting under the heat lamp. I watch her take sips of a murky, lake-colored liquid which resulted from a mixture of water and an unconvincing health-food package labeled “Greens Powder” that resides on the bar top. I watch her make concoctions of Sugar Free Red Bull with splashes of sparkling water and dribbles of canned juice. I watch, with judgement, when she douses her perfectly good pho broth in streams of sriracha.

              Sara often orders the “Happy Hour Crispy Fish Soft Tacos” from Jimmy in the kitchen; I’ll walk to the back station and the two tacos will be sitting next to the line of to-go bags, half eaten on a plate, their contents trailing out. If my eyes aren’t mistaken, she somehow orders them with less of everything. Jimmy and Angel—the seventeen year old Mexican cook who was found out to be seventeen only a couple months ago—refer to Sara as “Flaca.” Sara once told me she doesn’t really like “fishy-tasting” fish. She once told me she doesn’t really like rice. She once told me doesn’t really like sweet things. She once told me doesn’t really like chicken. Or beef. Donuts. “Chewy things.” I wonder what Sara does like.

              I guess Sara likes to drink champagne at work on her days off—she also likes to “party,” whatever that entails at 38. She used to have a boyfriend named Ian that would come in and drink with her, or sit at the bar while she was working. Ian was skinny with baby gauges and slick side-swept hair and his debit card had a character from Dragon Ball on it. Maybe a week before Ian told Sara he didn’t love her anymore and kicked her out of his apartment, his ex girlfriend had sent him a text asking if he “still thought about them sometimes.” Ian showed it to Sara on their camping trip like, “Wow, isn’t this crazy?”

              So I haven’t seen Ian in awhile. Even Sara doesn’t show up during my other shifts as much as she used to, but I’m pretty sure this has more to do with the argument that Mom and her had over whether or not it was ethical to dose her new puppy with CBD so it wouldn’t cry and disturb the neighbors while she left it at her apartment all day. It was too awkward for me to bear, so I just stood off to the side pretending to do stuff on the POS system until Sara announced she was leaving. On the way out, Mom told Sara that some unnamed employees came forward to say she seemed drunk at work on Saturday. She froze in shock, her normally squinted puffy-eyes now wide in fear. She started to sputter something, and then I didn’t hear the rest of the altercation because I couldn’t find a reasonable enough task to fake within ear-shot of the front door.

              Maybe she was drunk that Saturday—she could’ve been hungover Sunday and I wouldn’t really bat an eye, Sara drifts through Sunday shifts in a haze anyway. By the time I’m there at 4:30 and I start to clean up after her, she is effectively checked out for the evening. Her eyes are half lidded and her expression is permanently fixed on confusion, like she just missed what you said, only it’s everything you said; it freaks me out. It’s just us, and Sunday evenings can get slow. It’s just us, every week, pacing the open floors and flopping bleach-soaked towels onto rickety high top tables dusted in crumbs, fidgeting with our hands, packing up DoorDash orders of burgers with two of every sauce.

              Sara is not terrible to me when we’re together, in fact mainly we’re just quiet, which makes me feel guilty for all the times over summer that she wore that romper to work and I stared at the blurred tattoo of Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory on the crisped skin of her exposed upper back, thinking something like, “There’s no way she feels anything in particular toward this painting.” I don’t even really care that she frequently “steals” my customers and pretends to have not been keeping track of whose “turn” it was to take a table, or that listening to her conversations with the regulars can sometimes be grating, or if she’s kind of dumb or a mediocre employee or merely a selfish addict like Mom seems to think whenever mildly annoyed with her. For me, it’s mostly dread I feel when I’m around Sara.

              Sometimes when Sara comes in on my shifts and gets drunk on champagne, she singles me out. I can almost feel it start to happen; she’ll narrow her eyes at me from across the bar top as I stick a lemon wedge on a glass or illegally fill up a pint of Post Doc IPA. She’ll ask me how I’m doing, and regardless of my answer, she’ll proceed to tell me I’m a natural at my job, that I picked up serving faster than anybody she’s ever seen. She’ll tell me that I’m going to love bartending when I’m actually legally able to do it, because it is addicting. In fact, one night, I’m going to get my first thousand dollar tip-out, and I’m going to get addicted to it. When slightly more drunk, she tells me that I have perfect teeth and a good jawline, dragging her hands along her jowls, moaning that she has no chin and that she just wants to “lift this stuff up.” At the door, she tells me I’m so tiny. I try to remind her that she’s tiny too, but she just passes right through me.

              I arrive at work, as I do every Sunday evening, primed to endure. Already there’s a vice grip on my chest upon clocking in and a stiffness in my demeanor when I begin to tidy up the bar top. I relocate bottles of Basil Hayden and Captain Morgan and Tito’s back up onto the shelf, I place the pitcher of iced tea and any half-used cans of pineapple or grapefruit juice back into the lower fridge, I retrieve a hefty bucket of ice from the kitchen and greet the cooks along the way. I divvy up the back counter space between Sara and I’s belongings, trying not to let resentment breed like a miserable wife when I straighten out her crossword puzzle and recycle the unneeded receipts, because I don’t want my parents’ place looking like some shitty sports-bar with trashy sloppy waitresses, which is also why I always wear a long black skirt and a nice black top and I never forget my apron.

              Sara floats over in her usual hoodie and slightly-too-loose leggings, no apron or hair tie in sight, and we exchange some exhausted “Hello”s and general commentary about being tired or bored or broke. She says something about how she can’t stop sleeping, how she sleeps ten hours a night and is still exhausted. I try my best to end this interaction quickly because my weird heart symptoms are worsening.

              The two of us stand behind the bar top, not saying much, periodically sighing. I lean on the back counter, using my remaining concentration to attempt to read a singular article in the New York Times magazine I received that morning. Sara is hunched over, furiously calculating something on her phone and recording it on a paper. For a second, I begin to think that perhaps she’s doing something productive, like paying a bill I guess, but then I see that the Safari window is open to “MayoClinic” and she’s hand-graphing a chart with sections labelled “CARBS,” “FATS,” “PROTEIN.” The header reads “1700 CALORIES.” Higher than expected. I smile to myself, then shake my head. I can’t finish this article, I can’t even finish a fucking paragraph.

              The shift proceeds, lumbering on or flashing by I can’t decide, and I cope with this by making endless loops around the perimeter of the restaurant. I tread through the bus station and the walk-in; I feel light-headed when I distribute menus in the dining room and deliver the same predetermined lines about the oncoming death of Happy Hour to my tables, each new patron somehow appearing less charmed by their young waitress than the last. When I make trips to the back station to fetch silverware or to pour thick gobs of House-made Avocado Ranch into a little ramekin, I eye the unsheltered remains of Sara’s Happy Hour Crispy Fish Tacos, and I imagine how nice the sensation of biting down on them must be. I then shake this thought off as best as I can and go back to peeling and gnawing at my lips until they’re flushed red and stinging with indiscernible filmy layers of skin all over. When I begin to feel the sharp stabbing sensation in my chest, I press my fingers firmly into my sternum and twist them around, hoping to arouse some superficial pang that will distract from the one underneath. I try to keep myself moving so that I don’t feel any of this, but it’s just not busy enough.

              Later, I inspect Sara as she taps away at the back POS screen with her hard shellac nails. I zoom in on the translucent patches of her scalp that betray clunky attachments to black hair extensions of implausible length. I trace my eyes below her dyed purple roots and onto her face. I notice her eye makeup, the smudge of silver pigment across the lid and the way black elements have dissolved and started to disperse their speckles over the course of the day. I take in the curve of her side bang and how it frames her small round face. I feel like I’m looking at her for the first time, a bit. I might actually be. I don’t usually look at Sara’s face all that closely, out of fear that if I did I might understand something, fear that something permanent might happen between the two of us. I consider how her face is pudgy and squashed, plump relative her generally dehydrated complexion and malnourished appearance. Damn, maybe she is bulimic.

              I make it home after a brief three hours at the restaurant with disproportionate tip money for my okay service and effort. Mom first asks how much my sales were, and then if I ate my favorite shrimp salad at work, and I try hard to be nice while rushing through these conversations, and together we put fresh sheets on my bed.
              

 Last year, I forged an intentional devotion to live music.

              This resulted in me spending a good number of weekends at dinky house-shows surrounded by kids with gaudy appearances, and also, purchasing tickets to just about any concert I deemed mildly interesting enough to justify the price of. I wish I had a number that I could give you. It is likely that most of my money in 2024 went to Ticketmaster and 12 oz iced lattes.

              The purpose of this operation, I maintained, was “experience”—social, or otherwise—and “experience”, I did. Plenty of shows were by and large unpleasant, many forgettable, a few mesmerizing, most passable. Occasionally I’d meet somebody nice to talk to or dance alongside, sometimes I’d end up sticky with sweat and aching from blows to the eyebrow piercing, regrettably more than a few times, I would just stand around and twitch my body to a drumbeat in some random backyard before quietly slipping away after one unsubstantial set.

              Outside of a few small shows, I’ve been relatively distant from live music as of late, which has allowed me to do some thinking on these concerts and where they stand in memory as individual experiences. I came up with the idea to rank them in an Instagram story post or TikTok slideshow, but that seemed stupid and unrewarding and I just knew that my eyes would probably glaze over after the first entry, so instead I’d rather write a series of increasingly longwinded, multi-paragraph explanations of whether or not I had fun.

              Like plenty of other things in life—food and thoughts to name a few—I keep track of all the live music I’ve seen via the Notes app. I’ve got a humble document titled “Concerts” wherein I accrue the names of every artist I see, even the ones in backyards. For the purpose of being both consistent and relevant (well, to be truthful this is partially because maybe not everything is worthy of precise record-keeping) I’ll be excluding any of those “local” or smaller shows I attended; this includes the aforementioned “houses” in my area1, but also “raves”, or shows put on by my friends. Let’s just keep it normal.

              Also—I’m not actually here to critique the quality of individual performance or how the acoustics came through in each venue; often this has nothing to do with it. My list is really only concerned with the so-called “experience” derived, the most visceral and lasting impressions of each event as memory. Basically: I am biased and there is no rubric.

              #15: Justice

              WaMu Theater, Oct. 9th 2024




              The photo I so regrettably took…
              Thank God that I got the Salt and Straw October limited flavors before this. And for free? Can I just say: thank you to that employee, whatever her name was, like Yvette or Evonn or something, the girl who gave me that free ice cream. Wow. Seriously.

              I can actually feel myself physically fighting against writing about this show. Whatever, it’s like, ever heard of “less is more”? Every single song—and I don’t even know how one would determine when exactly a “song” was played during this set, as it was sort of just continuous EDM noise—was like the epic Avengers Endgame version of its original make; it was actually unbearable.

              At the start of the set, the purportedly sleek stage design drew some excitement from concertgoers, myself included. Admittedly, I even cheered and took a photo when the giant cross design first appeared in white LEDs, looming over the stage and, for a brief moment, projecting the illusion that this concert would allude to some of that dark, rebellious grime that Justice’s singular iconic album so decisively put forth. Never again. I’ll never let myself be tricked like that again. Already within the first few “songs” (?), the once impressive lights expended their charm completely, having fully transformed into a painful and overbearing distraction, an utter mess of lasers and strobes; less than 30 minutes in, I felt that my senses had been thoroughly assaulted. I was left exhausted, and not from exhilaration, but from demoralization. This is probably what it felt like to be a part of MKUltra.

              For a duo who’s most popular song is literally called D.A.N.C.E., Justice sure made it impossible to do such. Their iconic melodies and tracks, more depressingly their sensibilities as a whole, were completely buried under the sheer amount of overstimulation. As a result, there was no center of gravity present within the crowd, no circle of dancing or movement to be pulled into, save for a few pockets that would inevitably burn out due to the excessive and directionless manner in which the songs were mutated. There was little stamina, and this wasn’t just because the demographic was primarily comprised of aging Millennials, it was because Justice chose to fry us with flashing lights and beat drops instead of just utilizing the elements within the songs that made them initially fun and exciting over a decade ago.

              Before you get on me for expecting too much of artists who are past their “prime”, I absolutely did not go into this concert expecting some 1:1 reenactment of an “Indie Sleaze Party in a Basement Where Justice is Performing and Freaking Cobra Snake Shows Up and Takes Iconic Photos of Everybody Yo!!!!!”—I knew I was going to a big venue, I knew they were older, I am also quite aware that you cannot recreate the past. But man, I really thought I was at least going to, I don’t know, hear a Justice song.

              I “danced”, I guess, but I feel totally disingenuous and embarrassed for having done such. I actually cannot emphasize enough how much better it would’ve been to just listen to a couple songs off Cross (2007) in the car rather than attend this show.

              #14: Show Me the Body

              Showbox, Oct. 8th 2024

              Attending this was a last minute decision, one largely driven by the fact that tickets were only $15 if you went through a weird semi-hidden link on Instagram. I had actually seen Show Me the Body once before—almost exactly a year prior to this, same venue and all—when they toured alongside The Garden, and in my memory, they stood out as a highlight. During their set, I recall being unable to move whatsoever as the crowd’s intensity achieved total singularity, which is an underrated physical sensation. So sure, yeah, I’ll go see those guys again for 15 bucks!

              Unfortunately, this was probably the most awkward concert I have ever been to (and I have a pretty high tolerance for second-hand embarrassment).

              For starters, this was a five set show for which there was no reentry. With my next statement, I’ll likely leave some readers with a sneaking suspicion that perhaps I don’t actually like live music, but—5 sets is a slog. 5 sets at a “hardcore” show is nothing short of agonizing. And listen, I think most people (even those who claim to enjoy this sort of music) would actually agree with this sentiment if they allowed themselves to admit it, because you can find evidence of this at shows everywhere: folded arms and nodding heads, half-hearted head-banging, a “pit” that’s more of a pitiful nuisance than an inescapable vortex, the sneaky check of the time on phone lock screens.

              It would be over two hours until Show Me the Body was on, and already by the first band I was put into a damned state. Quickly, I was reaffirmed in my belief that the worst thing about hardcore is somehow not even the uninspired, chugging sound of the music itself, but actually everything else about it. I felt myself physically recoiling at some of the sentiments shouted out by the bands—nonspecific references to “the scene” as though it were simultaneously an endangered species that required protection from invaders and also a tangible collective of individuals who furthered some cause for world peace; superficial calls to action (“Everybody better go fucking crazy!”) that would go largely ignored; skin-deep political organizing. The ubiquity of these forced, overt audience-artist interactions at hardcore or punk shows can be mostly attributed to the fact that the music is simply not nearly as motivating or invigorating as the surrounding mythos would like you to believe it is, which means its performers have to literally spell out what they think a “hardcore show” is supposed to look and feel like. The outcome can only be described as a disembodying level of embarrassment.

              Okay guys, now is when you’re supposed to start like, punching each other and stuff for Palestine.

              Even Show Me the Body couldn’t save us. The pit remained mostly a gaping hole, an oval shaped outline made up of what was primarily everybody in the audience avoiding this one kid in a COVID mask and overalls who was spinning around like an idiot. You cannot make this stuff up.

              Some of it was alright—this was far from Justice levels of unlistenable festival parody music. My interest was piqued by the act “Special Interest” because their music seemed relatively out of place among the lineup, and overall, I thought punk outfit High Vis had the strongest and most genuine character of the night. Show Me the Body was fine, I guess; I liked that they played “K-9” this time.

              I was upfront for the majority of this concert. It was unnervingly roomy, I swear everybody wanted to sheepishly gesture toward the barrier all like “No, you go ahead”. Even the apparent super-fan beside me, evidently the only one in attendance, appeared to fade away about halfway through the main show.

              #13: Sanguisugabogg

              El Corazon, Apr. 28th 2024

              My brother had an extra ticket to this concert—actually, I think he really just needed a ride, but I accepted both proposals with little issue.

              “Metal music” is sort of his “thing”. Metal, in its many forms, is pervasive within my family unit, a constant throughout my life. When my dad would pick me up after a long day of 4th grade, his car would be tuned to SiriusXM “Octane” Radio, which led my brain to develop a robust catalogue of Slipknot and Disturbed lyrics that I have yet to replace with useful knowledge; today if I end up in his car, there still remains a 90% chance that I will hear something the likes of Metallica or Death or a band that my brother showed him. Even now, at this precise moment, I am typing this to the muffled audio of said brother shouting along to a Megadeath song from the home gym.

              It’s inevitable that I would have grown used to the genre as diegetic sound. Though speaking honestly, I never developed any real affection outside of nostalgia. I consider myself familiar and tolerant, but not necessarily friendly, with its guttural nature. This informs what I would like to call my “ethnographic approach” to metal shows: “I’m just passing by, don’t mind me, just scoping the place out.”

              While starting to write this, I’m realizing I don’t remember this concert all that well. That should sum up its placement enough. Here’s my attempt at a recollection:

              We arrived late at El Corazon—which many a Seattle resident could probably identify as the “establishment next door to the big scary clown sign that stares at the freeway by the 165 Exits”—and stood behind what might have been a few hyper-realistic statues of audience members during the tail-end of opening act Jesus Piece. Oh hey, they finally moved.

              Sanguisugabogg is not a band I know anything about (I definitely don’t know how to spell their name), so when they finally came out I just kind of rode with it. The vocalist was this stocky man with a surprising charm and natural capability to rouse the crowd, which was almost exclusively middle aged genre-heads and guys who look like they’d be very into things like War Hammer or physical activities that are specifically associated with viking fandom and/or Renaissance fair culture, ie. archery or axe-throwing. Metal shows retain this advantage over hardcore or punk shows, that being the cultivation of a tangible community of sorts; this means the audience is far more likely to actually respond to stimulus such as, “This Next Song is About Ripping Your Fucking Guts Out!!!!” with some level of energy.

              There was certainly no awkward roominess here; people kept stage-diving by me—one guy eventually plummeted directly onto my head, breaking the glasses I had just gotten repaired at Costco that week. In the grand scheme of things this is fine, they didn’t really look that good on me anyway.

              Oh yeah, at one point the vocalist threw a foam football or something into the crowd, inciting a game called either “Murder Ball” or “Death Ball”, I don’t remember, which went on for two rounds before an old man, wild-eyed and thoroughly greased with sweat, emerged the victor.

              I spent most of this concert in spectator mode, but was honestly fine doing such.

              #12: Panchiko

              Showbox, Apr. 21st 2024

              An acknowledgement must be made—I give this show full credit for the origination of this review idea, because I walked away feeling decidedly negative and eager to share it.

              Initially, I expected for this one to be at the start of the list. Panchiko is not a band that I fuck with: I don’t believe their lost-media-liminal-2000s-Japan-nostalgia schtick to be anything more than Gen-Z bait, a watered-down and truly impersonal interpretation of a broader aesthetic movement. I don’t even believe their cute little 4chan story, for that matter. And now I’m actually going to shut up about this, because if I don’t, I’m going to get on some tangent about I Saw the TV Glow (2024), The Substance (2024), Longlegs (2024), and a bunch of other bullshit that I dislike for similar reasons. Whatever, onto the show.

              My coming was motivated by a low ticket price and a genuine curiosity, the hope to perhaps give peace a chance. In the end, the show only served to confirm my preexisting notions about the band; as expected, any poignancy or mystique surrounding the whole “edgy lost media vibe” that Panchiko tries to sell was completely absent from their performance. Few interesting sounds or interpretations of the music’s unique elements, even those pre-existing within the tracks, were to be found. Certain moments, like the sample in D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L or the gaps of electronic whirring in CUT, both of which legitimately interesting ideas, felt rushed or skimmed entirely. I was disappointed with the lack of inspiration and grace behind the individual performances of songs, but mainly, I was upset with how the band carried themselves.

              There was no attempt to take any of it seriously on Panchiko’s part, and that was pretty much established from the get-go. Members repeatedly joked about their old age in a way that was more exemplary of lacking confidence than it was being playful— if people were laughing or bantering back at them, it was more than likely due to the frontman’s squeaky British accent. The stage presence could ultimately be summarized as “lame”.

              The audience was mostly kids, which is obviously fine, but it kept reminding me of seeing Alex G in 2022 and sensing a general confusion as to how a concert is supposed to work within the crowd. The kids next to me kept anxiously and audibly checking a Spotify playlist of the “Panchiko 2024 Setlist” as they waited for D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L to finally play. It felt like the crowd intuitively knew this performance was lame and whack, and that while they were just going to stand there as the music lulled, they’d still post an Instagram story of it later. It goes without saying that nobody was really dancing or singing all that much, which is maybe a product of the groomer-type dynamic between Panchiko and their fans. Instead, the majority of the crowd’s engagement was shown via recording songs in their entirety.

              It was the sort of concert that ended with a shrug and a quiet dissolution.

              Also: sorry to Glare, who were the openers. So many people skipped you guys, myself included. It was an accident, I swear.

              #11: Joeyy, Laker, and Smokedope2016

              Showbox, Sep. 5th 2024




              I’ll preface this by saying that when I saw the collective “Shed Theory”—Joeyy, Laker, Dream Caster, Henry Mosto, Ricky Chix, among others—in July of 2023, it may have been transformative. Aside from the number #2 and #1 spots on this list (and maybe also Drain Gang in 2022), I can think of no other concert I’ve been at in which the atmosphere, of both the music and its artist(s), was so fully embodied. Totally submerged in sweat and haze and sleepiness, we the audience were crushed together within the stuffy confines of the venue (Madame Lou’s, which is more of a bar), likewise the performers outnumbered the stage probably twenty to one; I truly cannot stress enough that the characters onstage were innumerable and the concert was endless—like, at least three hours long, at one point featuring a fake-out in which a man vaguely resembling Joeyy came out on stage. Eera played two full DJ sets. I’m not even sure if this was planned.

              It was steamy and dreamlike, like being in a jungle or the inside of a humidifier; it was lazy and euphoric, accurately capturing the subject matter (“nodding”, lean, painkillers) of the songs; most palpable, it was uncannily evocative of the specific experience of being stuck at a fucked suburban “house party” where a number of guys you kind of know are low-key trying to record music while being severely hindered by the effects of substances—which, if that’s not the essence of Shed Theory, then I don’t know what is.

              But I am, in fact, speaking of a different concert from the one featured on this list. This time around was not the same, which I had established going in (Reiterating, I am well aware that you cannot redo an experience, this is maybe why I placed the emphasis on live music to begin with). Hence, I was quite lacking in any expectation. It would be just Laker and Joeyy, joined by Smokedope2016. And while I felt mostly indifferent towards the main acts, I was actually intrigued by Smokedope2016 and really did not want to miss his set. I missed his set.

              I came in halfway through Laker and immediately felt a sinking “out-of-place” feeling as I realized just how much things had shifted since last time. I could not, for the life of me, get a grasp of the irony barrier between the audience and the performer; it wasn’t that I thought the swarm of teenage boys present were miraculously unaware of the Shed Theory concept (the image that Joeyy and Laker have constructed for themselves is explicitly embedded within their music and personal marketing), it’s just that they weirdly seemed to be treating this event no differently than they would a Ken Carson concert, or more accurately, a high school prom where a Ken Carson song is being played.

              It had officially been made clear to me that Shed Theory no longer occupied the same cultural space as it did just shy of a year before this concert; the way I see it, their niche turf was quickly overturned by similar gimmick-acts such as Phreshboyswag, who have in turn already been “phased out” by the online cultural-iron that flattens all in its path. There’s never not going to be a certain charm that comes with the small or humble beginnings of an artist, but even putting aside my prior experience, this show just felt a bit off-putting—a sad reminder of weird things like aging and falling off.

              Oddly, I’m finding difficulty in expressing this feeling, but I’ll just say that there was a knowingly dreadful mood draped over the whole thing. It was as though I, as well as the performers, somehow possessed the knowledge that this marked the impending end of something finite, and despite our mutual awareness, they would drag it to its slow death anyway. It was like looking into a sick dog’s eyes.

              If nothing else, I’ll admit to indulging myself during what can only be described as the “TikTok Rizz Party” level DJ Set that took place in the intermission, which featured “Vanished” by Crystal Castles, some tracks from the recent mediocre Bladee album, “Just Your Doll” by Snow Strippers, “Still into You” by Paramore, and “Love SOSA”, of course. Some great favorites for the kids.

              Also, Joeyy performed “I’m Not God, But I Wish I Was” alongside Smokedope2016 and it made for a nice moment. He was smart not to overstay his welcome, performing probably shy of 45 minutes.

              I shook Joeyy’s hand before exiting the venue, once again understanding that things probably wouldn’t be this way ever again.

              #10: Bktherula 

              Neumos, June 27th 2024




              Only in digging up this image now do I remember the full Yori Sport outfit. Haha.
              My justification for attending this show: This is cheap, and Bktherula looks like a nice woman. Both ended up being fairly reasonable assessments. Well—sort of, I paid $20 for two hours of parking in Capitol Hill.

              The day began at the Jollibee in Columbia City, where I ate mac and cheese and mashed potatoes in yesterday’s clothes. I drove through pelting rain to browse dry shampoo options at Ulta, and then did so again to arrive at venue Neumos on time for the show. I would be going it alone this time. On the way there, I brushed up on the discography of the artist, since I didn’t really know her all that well.

              The opener, Skaiwater, who I had never heard of before this show, left me partially mystified by his presence. (I would eventually realize him to be the guy behind that TikTok audio that goes “Oh my god”. In typing that just now, I recognize that it is meaningless when typed.) He was outright flamboyant—carrying a shoulder bag—but the young guys in the crowd still seemed earnestly invested in him and matched his excitement nonetheless. They called out “Skai!” in a way that lacked fear of being accused homosexual, almost as if to throw up their shoulders like, “I can’t deny it, the man’s got style”.

              Bk herself performed briefly, but once again, this was the right call. For the entire show, she stood in front of a screen that continuously looped a deranged animation depicting her as Trollface, with loud Windows XP style pop-ups that read “U MAD??”. This, coupled with her beaming white eye-makeup and honest charisma, made for a captivating arrangement. She was fun and appreciative in a down-to-earth way and probably also way too warm in that sweatsuit—Neumos is a historically sweaty operation. I thought it was sweet that she offered to hang around and take photos with fans for awhile after.

              The turnout was notably small, but there was some real joy amongst the clumsy youthfulness of the crowd. I met a couple nice kids, including a girl so ecstatic to be there that she proudly proclaimed Bk “was her ringtone” to at least three people, myself included.

              There was a twerk-off on stage at one point, and then they rushed all the girls off promptly; that was weird. What’s important is that things were mostly enjoyable, and that’s always going to be admirable if it stems from an artist that you’re not personally invested in.

              For better or for worse, my main takeaway as I walked back to the $20 overnight parking spot alone was a longing for something more, experience or connection or otherwise. My body felt heavy and dizzy, like I had just failed to confess to my crush and was forced to watch the moment pass by with indifference.

              #9: JPEGMafia 

              Showbox SoDo, Aug. 15th 2024




              I’m not a huge fan of JPEGMafia’s (I cannot bring myself to refer to him as “Peggy” here) attitude towards his art or his fans. Prior to this concert, he posted an insanely whiny Instagram story threatening to “leave any venue that turned down his speakers”. First this filled me with severe secondhand embarrassment, and then contempt, so much so that I went out of my way to purchase $1 earplugs at the concessions stand; I typically opt to endure noise. Despite how this is beginning to sound, I do like a decent amount of JPEGMafia’s discography, and I was in fact looking forward to this show. But in the spirit of accuracy, that excitement was more due to opening act Jane Remover, who’s music I like probably just a touch more.

              I hate to start with something like this—partially because it’s reductive and unhelpful, but mainly because it’s unfunny and is the exact kind of commentary you’d expect to hear from somebody who follows xiu_shoegaze on Instagram and makes self-deprecating jokes about liking Aphex Twin and Death Grips wherein the supposed punchline of this joke is the reference to a name alone—but the crowd at this show was precisely what you would expect: mostly teenage white males who “like rap music” in the hyper-specific manner that entails Kendrick Lamar, MF Doom, Freddie Gibbs, Kanye West, Playboi Carti, JPEGMafia. You best believe they were absolutely fucking up “Not Like Us” when it came on in the intermission.

              There’s nothing particularly wrong with this (well, whatever) but it did mean that Jane Remover’s performance ultimately fell on earplugs and stiff bodies. In the moment, I remember being thoroughly disappointed by this reality. My friends and I tried to rally some semblance of action, but it was quite literally futile. Though writing this now, I don’t actually blame anybody there for not “getting hyped enough”; this just comes across as an error, a miscommunication between the performer and the audience. While I can picture a clear overlap between the Jane Remover listener and the JPEGMafia listener no problem, that chunk of the Venn diagram was simply not the one present that night. It just wasn’t happening, for whatever reason. Maybe it happened in LA; it probably worked out good in LA. Maybe RXKNephew was the better pick for the Seattle show, or the better pick overall. Once again, I wouldn’t doubt that the crowd was probably just a touch too primed by the “Ken Carson show” mindset.

              When it came time, JPEGMafia’s performance was good. He covered a lot of ground, and to my relief did so with few corny comments. At the expense of his being so comprehensive, individual songs—even big ones like “BALD!”—were sometimes reduced or simplified in order to accommodate the vast setlist. This is an approach I tend to respect, but I think in this case it managed to inflict the feeling of furiously skipping through your Liked Songs on Spotify until the initial desire to enjoy music is gradually burnt away and all you’re left with is exhaustion; the crowd went really, really hard at first, but the energy had noticeably dwindled by the time the Devon Hendryx era cuts were being dished out. For the most part though, the audience assured that they were capable of having a great time if they actually knew the artist on stage (I’m sorry, Jane Remover), so things panned out to be sweaty and aggressive in the way you would hope a JPEGMafia concert would be. Expectations were met, eyebrow piercing was impaired. Successful, if you ask me.

              #8: POiSON GiRL FRiEND 

              The Crocodile, Oct. 21st 2024




              The insane setup
              Having seen another Japanese band at the exact same venue a month prior to this show, I was able to gather some insight as to how Japanese performers fare in America: for one, they love encores. Expect one, but realistically three, of them. Second, they get extremely sentimental about the whole ordeal. There will be tears, of joy or deep appreciation, the whole thing will be surprisingly saccharine.

              I have to be careful not to accidentally overstate that excitement I had for this show, because while this was a big deal to me—a great amount of my early high school memory is set to the soundtrack of MELTING MOMENT (1992) and LOVE ME (1994)—I knew it was going to be an instance of an artist far out of their element. This would be POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s first time in North America, despite the bulk of her discography being over thirty years old. On top of this, Seattle was the first show of the tour. It could be bumpy, awkward, maybe even bad.

              Adjusting my expectations accordingly, I took down a plate of sashimi at a nearby restaurant before being dropped off at The Crocodile slightly earlier than I wanted to be. I lingered and observed; the audience that night exuded a visible texture of youth performativity and signaling in appearances, like, you could really tell it was made certain that every canvas or leather bag had an ostensibly “authentic” distribution of silver hardware to Monchichi/Kewpie/Miffy keychains prior to showing up. Since I came alone, I got to partake in some eavesdropping when the guy behind me failed to flirt with one of said Miffy-bag-charm-layered-haircut girls (of the particularly stiff and unreceptive variant, at that). I eventually met some sweet, conversational people, luckily one of whom would turn out to be the only other person with a strong conviction to dance.

              The opener was this girl Alex Sloane, who nobody knew, but at some point she played a song that I was sure I had heard from Instagram Reels. Her presence was characterized by a glaringly obvious low self-esteem: smooth dark hair swept back in a perfect ribbon, she delivered psuedo-PinkPanthress music that featured lyrics of daydreaming and longing, as well as the occasional meek “My name is Alex” or remark about how fortunate she was to have been invited along for the tour. She reminded me, in a tragic way, of those dutiful girls in high school who did dance team and ate KIND bars and feigned a childish level of disgust when the conversation turned to crushes or sex. At certain points, I think I got a bit too transfixed by her ballerina or doll-like beauty and had to shun myself out of being a weirdo. All this aside, I was actually enjoying the “girly” schtick she had going, well that is before she wordlessly clicked on her MacBook and scampered offstage.

              The main attraction was somehow even more emotionally disorienting. Accompanied by just one guitarist and a projector that depicted black and white footage of her aimlessly roaming the streets of Japan, POiSON GiRL FRiEND spent much of the concert propped up on a stool, reading the lyrics to every song off an iPad placed on a music stand before her. She was a bit older, and more serious, than I expected. At one point, she pulled her phone out of what appeared to be a plastic Jack-O-Lantern bin used for Trick or Treating; she then attempted to play a file containing pre-recorded maraca sounds for a track, but eventually gave up because the audio would pause whenever the screen turned itself off.

              In this sense, everything she did carried with it melancholy, from her crumbling vocals to the way she stared off at nothing in between songs. At first, I felt a very real concern that she was near tears—and rest assured she definitely did end up crying—or that the concert would potentially end on an premature, depressing note, like when you see a clip of a classic rock band performing on their “final tour” and the only thing you can think is just how painful it must be for them (physically or spiritually). However, after a couple songs passed and some of the kinks were straightened out, I started to consider that this was possibly very intentional—a part of the act, a way of embodying the heartbreak and devotion that lies at the core of POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s songs. Once convinced of this, I watched with intrigue as she would give a quick “thank you” to the crowd before darkening her facial expression at the cue of the next song.

              A couple of times, she got up and danced in a particular demeanor of stiff arm-swinging motions, which was endearing to myself and everyone. Of the crowd, me and the nice girl I had met earlier were of few to reciprocate, which was admittedly not surprising in the slightest. By then I had long gathered that a demographic like this is quick to “exciting” forms of engaging with live music— “moshing” whenever possible, the “Ken Carson effect”—but bewildered by something like dancing. Interestingly enough, this closely resembled the environment during the Jane Remover set: an audience more “polite”, almost patronizingly so, than they are involved. There was cheering and woo-ing and plenty of “We love you!” throughout, but not much display of affection in the most obvious forms of swaying or singing (most songs were in English—but in all fairness there was a good amount of Japanese and French present, so it’s no surprise that nobody was bursting into chorus there).

              I wonder if this pattern amongst crowds comprised mainly of musically “aware” or “sensible” Gen Z—who often acquire their initial music knowledge, or at the very least the bulk of their exposure to music and therefore live music culture, through social media—could be a result of amplified youth self-consciousness within a surveilled culture, particularly when in the context of such a competitive social realm of “being into music”. They see so many videos mocking “TikTok fans” or “Gen Z concertgoers”: for yelling inappropriately (famous at Mitski concerts) or singing too loudly, or for that matter singing too quietly, effectively outing themselves as “fake” or “new” fans. As a result, they’ve grown petrified by the idea of appearing inauthentic or, realistically, uncool. Ironically, this leads them to second-guess and censor entirely normal concert behaviors, like singing and dancing to the fucking music.

              The show definitely went on too long—three encores—and two people fainted. No, I don’t know how or why that happened. When the concert ended, the girl I spent the whole time dancing with turned to me and said something like, “Well, that was interesting”, to which I couldn’t agree more. It was interesting, and that was maybe precisely what it should have been.

              The two of us walked back in the same direction. We discussed her vast travel experience, as well as what we were planning to be for Halloween: she, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and me, Layla from Buffalo 66.

              #7: Mass of the Fermenting Dregs （マスドレ）

              The Crocodile, Sep. 25th 2024




              This would be the “other” Japanese concert referenced above, where I first learned about sappiness and excessive encores.

              I brought my metalhead brother along with me, and together we bobbed in the sea of White and Asian and Wasian nerds that were in attendance. They varied in specific niche or age group of nerd, to be precise, but you could tell that mostly they were knowledgable in guitar pedals or Japanese rock bands or specific genre-labeling like “post-hardcore shoegaze”; that they likely held favorable opinions of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), Perfect Blue (1997), Cowboy Bebop (1998), and still thought that Serial Experiments Lain (1998) and FLCL (2000) were novel things to bring up in the anime discussion. When “Never as Tired as When I’m Waking Up” by LCD Soundsystem played over the speaker in between sets, the guy next to me took the pleasure to explain to the girl he brought how important the song was—he’s right, that song rocks.

              My brother and I are White Nerds to be sure, but neither of us fits this particular mold. I think it instills some level of relief in me though, to be amongst a crowd in which I feel little personal connection to their niche: “Nah, I don’t really care about distortion pedals or whatever. This band is cool, though.” It would be good to carry a similar attitude irrespective of setting.

              I thoroughly enjoyed the first opener, Blush, who were a Singaporean shoegaze band. They were cute—legitimately, I just thought they were cute, that was all. The band also seemed to perfectly fit the bill of this crowd’s interests: endearing female vocalist and a whole lot of guitar fuzz (Wow, groundbreaking). The next performer was Cam Kahin, a solo act who would be unfortunately completely soiled by his distracting guitarist, a grown man in a Thrasher hoodie and cut off Dickies with a carabiner on the belt loop. The guitarist repeatedly bounded across the stage, stuck his tongue out, shook his head around; he leapt into the air and slammed down on his strings at the slightest implication of any “big moment” in a song. He greatly disturbed my brother and I, and I’m willing to argue the bassist onstage, too. If I remember correctly, Cam Kahin’s music wasn’t even really bad, just surprisingly generic given the circumstances.

              Mass of the Fermenting Dregs (Mass) came out to a dramatic and extended ovation; I remember imagining that they might not play any songs and would instead just chill there while we cheered, and I was oddly accepting of this. So much cheering. The nerds were absolutely thrilled to be there, repeatedly yelling out nice phrases in Japanese—who knew so many White people spoke passable Japanese?2 —to the performers, who seemed genuinely shocked and moved by the amount of love they were receiving. There was a lot of charming language-barrier-back-and-forth between the stage and the audience, which was honestly just as integral to the performance as the music (and certainly stronger in my memory).

              On that note, Mass impressively stood the test of time in terms of both energy and technical ability; they sounded really good. The vocalist powered through her screams to the best of her ability, beating her chest and vowing “ganbarimasu” when needed. I don’t know how they still managed to have the stamina to play some of those winding instrumental tracks that bordered on “math rock” and reached upwards of seven minutes, because I barely had the focus to endure them—so, props for that.

              The crowd was shy, but at some point it happened: some kids decided that headbanging and thrashing in place was not enough, and we had to actually move around to the music. It ended up striking a good balance wherein the uncomfortable Japanese music nerds formed a neat, judgmental wall to separate themselves from the antsy Japanese music nerds who wanted to shove each other. I have reason to believe that Mass was potentially not expecting this type of action to occur—likely due to a lack of experience in America—because despite the insane level of relationship-forming throughout the concert, they never really acknowledged the people in the “pit”, which I thought was funny.

              It feels pointless to say, as I’m sure you probably know by now, but the concert was extremely drawn out and absurdly tender, ending with multiple encores and a selfie with the audience.

              #6: Sky Ferreira

              Neptune Theater, Sep. 24th 2024




              Neptune Theater bias—a severely underrated venue. There was truly no better choice for a Sky Ferreira show in Seattle. The place is old and stuffy and perpetually illuminated in royal blue, which is a disturbingly accurate manifestation of the future-young-adult-alternative-indie-rock-concert-escapade daydreams I would conjure up as a preteen when listening to something such as Mac DeMarco: moody, atmospheric, serious. While shockingly small, Ferreira’s discography oozes visceral associations like these, of dated juvenile memory or fantasy, even more so, of the specific cultural moment they’re derived from. I mean by now, the mythicizing of “2010s”— specifically “2010s alternative”—is nearing the proportions that the 80s or 90s nostalgia had not too long ago (which one has to imagine was the biggest factor behind her ability to tour in 2024). Essentially, Ferreira is a lot more suggestive of a surrounding “vibe” than she is of her actual music. I can wholly sympathize with those who might’ve gone into this concert hinging on it to fulfill fond memories and internet-induced maladaptive daydreams alike, because I think to a certain degree, that idea was baked into the tour.

              I intentionally did not show up on time, because Sky Ferreira was going to do the same, and I was not going to let her best me at something I quite excel at. Ultimately, she would win and I would end up standing around in my own perspiration during the remnants of a new-wave inspired DJ set (which honestly deserved more acknowledgement from the crowd, it had potential to be fun). I was surrounded by girls, truly just girls, and maybe a handful of gay Millennial or older Gen Z males. Most girls were there with one to three friends, and remained in these bubbles; it was not a social environment, in fact it was maybe even hostile. As a noteworthy example, two Hater Ass Girls behind me spent much of the concert exchanging eye-rolls and passive aggressive comments regarding a neighboring trio of Drunk Girls who were apparently singing and screaming and moving around too much at a live music event. This culminated when at some point during the main act, one of the Hater Ass Girls finally used her words to inform the Drunk Girls that they were screaming too loud, or maybe moving too hard, I don’t know which was more offensive in their eyes—God, get over yourselves.

              I think those unfamiliar with Ferreira’s habits were growing frustrated or restless sitting through her playlist of Aphex Twin and Gang Gang Dance and Radiohead’s “Kid A” for more than an hour past the start time posted on their tickets. Eventually, she did show up, along with a band of three incredibly normal looking dudes, and they opened with “Boys”, a solid pick. Even though I claim to not care about an artist’s live sound, I can’t deny that her voice was stunning with vigor, demanding my attention throughout.

              Ferreira was awkward in a manner that was both demonstrative of all the aforementioned pubescent swag of the time, and also clearly born from an unfiltered authenticity. She came out looking exactly as I had expected, dressed no differently than what a Google Images search for “Sky Ferreira” might yield. Her demeanor was stiff, almost hasty, and for the longest time she didn’t so much as crack a smile (she appeared to progressively warm up, though). Mostly, she just walked back and forth from one end of the stage to the other, stopping at each side for a verse a time, always ending back in the center—this pattern would repeat for every single song performed that night.

              She compulsively flipped her hair. She obsessively fiddled with her ear piece. She took long pauses in between tracks to glare at her band, fiddle with her ear piece, adjust the heavy layers of her outfit, say a breathy “sorry” or “thank you”, and then flip her hair.

              She was drenched in stage light, which, due to her signature uniform of a t shirt, heavy flannel, leather jacket, black jeans, and combat boots, led her to at one point disappear backstage for an unknown amount of time to recollect—or, that’s probably not what actually happened, but it’s what I’ll tell myself in order to remain hopeful for her future. Meanwhile, the band members gradually moved from expressions of confusion to aggravation and then to concern, until consequently one of them followed after and was able to retrieve her. Luckily, since she did not once remove her dark aviators for the entirety of the show, she was likely not otherwise afflicted by the display.

              Not too long after this incident took place, Ferreira would announce that she was ending the show early, citing “sickness” as her reason. She skipped just a few songs, none of which I really missed, instead jumping straight to “Everything is Embarrassing”, which at last succeeded in defrosting the crowd.

              I won’t pretend to have a profound personal connection to the era or anything—the only time I ever experienced Tumblr during the alternative zeitgeist was to tour its self-harm and anorexia content, because Onision’s videos targeting mentally ill young girls inspired within my adolescent-self a morbid curiosity. But if you went into this concert expecting anything other than a late start, interruptions, little acknowledgement of the audience, and a premature ending, then even I reserve the right to question your credibility on this matter. As a Sky Ferreira concert, this checked every box it had to. The feeling of her music and character were captured to great effect: the self-indulgent youthful dream and the necessary disappointment that comes along with it.

              #5: Oneohtrix Point Never 

              Neptune Theater, Apr. 17th 2024




              I’m making the executive decision to not open with what ended up being almost the exact same tangent regarding Neptune Theater and “edgy internet subcultures”, but you can use your imagination: imagine it’s all submerged in color and spacey again. Yep. Old theater, new synth sounds. Here’s the part where I say some bullshit like “it’s basically an Eccojam if it were a physical space”, but if I were writing that it would probably be a little more flowery and with weirder punctuation. Great, now we’re all on the same page, I’m sure.

              (I guess I just really like it there. Maybe I’ll have to go see George Clanton later this year after all.)

              I went to this show with three people who probably—absolutely—all love Oneohtrix Point Never (OPN) more than me. It was a brisk spring day when we walked to the theater, observing dead pigeons and abandoned Lime Scooters along the way; I attempted to perform a cover of OPN’s “Child Soldier” several times before we arrived. Upon entry, we were greeted with the sound of electronic ambience reverberating and a peek of purple light spilling out from the floor’s entry. I impatiently waited for one of my friends to finish stashing his knife somewhere outside in order to get past the entry, now partially convinced that we were somehow now missing OPN’s performance in entirety.

              When I did weave my way in, I was relieved to find that it was not OPN on stage, but rather a delicate young Indian woman who stood before an archaic behemoth of buttons and switches. She was operating this machinery with a focus intense enough to justify her not facing the audience, but somehow still effortless in appearance—like I had just stumbled upon some deity singing to herself at a hidden waterfall. The lights enveloping the room shifted colors with the rise and fall of her tracks, which to be fair here, is really all her tracks did (the music itself did not particularly interest me). I had no clue who this woman was during the performance, but I later found out her name was Arushi Jain or Modular Princess, one of the two. She was a good choice for an OPN opener, nerdy enough to satisfy the modular synth-obsessed and gear-head crowd—she even did some live voice modulating—and stimulating enough to entertain us regular people.

              OPN arrived to an exceedingly warm welcome from the array of fans, whom a bizarre amount of bore a serious uncanny resemblance to him. (Not kidding, that was one of my main takeaways from the show: “Why does everybody here lowkey look like OPN?”) He was joined by a couple of innocuous-looking dudes who controlled a miniature doll-replica of him, as well as the stage, and projected footage of it onto a screen behind him; I have no clue as to what the inspiration or story behind this was. Generally speaking, I thought the screen visuals were a bit questionable or disjointed—I can’t really remember any exact ones other than a series of distorted cartoon clips, one of them containing Tinker Bell—but the lighting and excessive fog machine use made up for it in terms of atmospheric quality.

              While largely drawing from his recent album, “Again”, OPN managed to perform a respectably varied setlist, which is an impressive feat for someone with such a broad spread of a career. Unlike Justice, the special live remixes felt tasteful and rewarding—it was this concert, not Justice, that managed to succeed in wow-ing me with its reinventions of moments from an original discography. In the way a gleaming-Redditor-fanboy might excitedly perk up at a “reference”, I shared mutual joy with the crowd when OPN closed with a special track that reused the famous Kleenex commercial sample from “Sleep Dealer”.

              With that in mind, this was probably one of the most earnest displays of appreciation between artist and fan that I have ever seen. Everybody seemed magnetized, either staring in awe or closing their eyes and leaning their head back to really feel each song. I couldn’t help but steal glances at the guy in the dead-center who was sobbing uncontrollably during the latter half of the set, or the kid to my left who wore clunky ear-protection headphones and would react by bouncing up and down or flapping his arms or snapping his fingers, just two of many that night who were admirably honest about how the music affected them. Even though this is probably not the sort of music nor fanbase that would entail high-energy movement or extreme reactions, there was an encompassing and reciprocal positivity throughout. Do you dance to this kind of music? I wasn’t sure, but I tried.

              At some point near the end, OPN—who, in this context, I now oddly feel inclined to refer to as “Daniel”, as though he were my friend—expressed his gratitude for this enthusiasm, letting us know that his performance at Coachella just a few days prior hadn’t gone over nearly as well (Shocker). He played several extra tracks, checking first with the audience to see if we wanted an “evil” or “happy” ending, then took videos of the crowd to put on his Instagram story before exiting. I got the impression that he truly was not expecting a favorable experience, and I admit I was equally as surprised. Leading up to the show I was somewhat ambivalent; despite a love of OPN, I worried that the music wouldn’t translate to its best ability in a live setting, and I’d be left with a soured image of what was once cool and evocative to me (Not going to beat a dead horse here). Good thing the exact opposite occurred! Yay!

              #4: Ariel Pink 

              El Corazon, Mar. 9th 2024

              For some reason, I really wanted to go to this show; as in, I was practically begging my friends to come with me, repeatedly checking to see if they had purchased their $30 advance ticket to an event that had zero chance of selling out whatsoever. It’s not like I’m an Ariel Pink super-fan (if such thing exists) or something, so I truly don’t know what compelled me to place so much faith into this middle aged man’s performance at a tiny bar. But ultimately, I was right to do so.

              And sure, I’ll preface by saying: Yes, I know. I know. I am aware of where off-color-singer-songwriter Ariel Pink was located on January 6th, 2021. But he didn’t actually like, go in there, okay? I’m fairly certain he might not have even been there for that part. It’s not like he’s up for a pardon or some shit.

              That’s all you’ll get from me on that matter, at least for now. I don’t feel like typing about any of the other stuff either, beating a dead horse and whatnot. So: Yes, I know.

              Since this was a classic “El Corazon stop on a small artist’s tour”, which entails cramming an unwarranted amount of bands onto a single bill for the night, my friends and I knew to arrive late with the goal of skipping as many openers as possible. This of course meant treating the ginormous REI store next door as a personal playground of sorts while we waited. After enough 16 person tents were browsed and sci-fi reminiscent packets of sweetened “energy gels” were consumed, we headed over to face off with the bar’s security, who are always sure to play up a hardened “no-nonsense” attitude.

              Unfortunately, we succeeded in missing all but one opener, the noise group “Period Bomb”, whose absurd output of brashness and freakiness—wailing, moaning vocals; screechy guitar feedback, erratic gyrating—aroused little interest within myself and everybody else there. I was originally going to write some snarky statement about noise music, but it would just be wrong to insinuate the non-tonal or abrasive quality was the reason their performance sucked. I take no issue with either of those things whatsoever. I do, however, take issue with corniness and acting whack. I am therefore haunted by the vocalist’s addressing of a fellow bandmate with something to the effect of, “We got Rat Bastard here! [met with underwhelming applause] Do you guys seriously not know Rat Bastard? Fucking legend in the Noise scene!” This was followed up by more “scene” commentary, delivered in that sanctimonious tone, as if the audience was simply too uneducated or ignorant to appreciate what was shrieking and writhing in front of them. Yea, great way to attract more people to your already unwelcoming music.

              For most of the time leading up to his set, Ariel was just standing around by his merch stand, dressed in a frumpy Carhartt jumpsuit, with an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth, which remained there for at least 25 minutes. My boyfriend tried to briefly inquire him about the soundtrack for the Safdie brothers’ film “Heaven Knows What”, and Ariel simply replied that he forgot he had made it. His posture elicited a Jim Carrey “Grinch” brand of cartoonish brooding and solitary demeanor; he had permanently glassy eyes, and probably the most soft-spoken voice I have ever heard. He’s also definitely telling the truth in “Mature Themes” when he says he’s 5’4.

              And it was a great performance. The sound was polished yet still living and breathing, and I couldn’t contain my smile, couldn’t stop myself from dancing. His bandmates wore kitschy costumes, such as white briefs paired with a vampire cape, that played into the selectively referential “Haunted Graffiti” aesthetic of Ariel’s most iconic period. Ariel was himself on stage: he first threw under-his-breath remarks, then very outward and mic’d jabs, at his drummer, for playing fills when he apparently wasn’t supposed to; he introduced one of his songs with “this is a song from when I was transgender”; there was at least one moment in the beginning where I thought he was going to walk off stage because he was getting so frustrated with the sound guy. He closed with a series of audience requests, which were shouted with enough enthusiasm to confirm that I was far from alone in not wanting the show to be over. Highlights of the performance included “Round and Round” and, to bring it up again because I love it, “Mature Themes”.

              Oh yeah—I should say, literally none of this important, because the real event took place after the show had ended.

              Two of my friends wanted to try and give Ariel a copy of their CDs, and maybe even talk with him a bit, so we waited outside until we caught him solemnly smoking a cigarette by the backdoor. We approached, he accepted the gift, and though appearing guarded or shy, he was open to chatting with us. At one point, my friend asked Ariel something along the lines of if he had “seen anything good lately”, or “what he had been into”, and that’s where it started to unravel a bit, because he bluntly responded with “Honestly, nothing”. He insisted that he was a family man now, that the music and art worlds had severed ties with him; he then told us he was blacklisted by Live Nation, meaning he could not get booked by most venues (going so far as to say that he was essentially “banned” from New York and LA). For the next forty five minutes or so, Ariel painted to us a winding and ensnaring picture of Cancel Culture, the Radical Left, the Music Industry, the Democrats, and so forth, all murderous “psychopaths” that contributed to his disenfranchisement. I kept having to turn my ear towards him because he spoke in near-whisper. At one point, some kid came up and tried to get him to sign a vape and Ariel, mistaking it for a recording device, flinched and told him that he didn’t want any of this stuff to get out online. Eventually I had to leave, but my two friends remained there for an additional hour of his rant.

              I don’t know how much of this conversation I can tangibly or accurately record, and this in part due to it having been so circular and seemingly endless that I struggled to keep up even as it was ongoing. But in all honesty, my main hangup is that I genuinely felt a lot of intrigue and empathy towards his situation, so I don’t want to misrepresent or twist his words or tone—I fear I’ve already perpetrated this just by virtue of attempting to broadly categorize the subject matter. Frankly, I was humbled when Ariel defeatedly revealed to us that he was, in fact, paying El Corazon to perform there. Due to his status and difficulties securing venues, he would make no money from this “tour” whatsoever.

              I walked away with plenty to think about—plenty more conflicted feelings—and undoubtedly, a greater space occupied by Ariel in my mind, and his music, in my life.

              As I recollected my encounter with him, it fully clicked with me that the two people most analogous to Ariel, in terms of their story arc and role as a supposed “dissident” of the art world, would be Steven Morrissey and (arguably even more so) Vincent Gallo. Maybe this is where we discover the formula for being a great artist: be outwardly offensive and antisocial—but actually awkward and soft-spoken with a good work ethic—, make highly confessional and challenging art, get “canceled” at some point either due to said art or your inability to coexist with others while working on it, and then nosedive into being even more socially inept and provocative than before. In no way am I joking, this yields ideal results.

              #3: Charli XCX

              Climate Pledge Arena, Oct. 23 2024




              I almost didn’t go to this—sort of. At 7:00 PM on October 23rd, I was still at home reading on the couch, no sign of a Charli XCX ticket in my possession, but I knew wasn’t not going to go. For whatever reason, I had some completely unfounded and assured sense that I would end up at this concert. I casually rotated and refreshed the webpages of various ticket-purchasing services as I sipped tea and ate dinner.

              Then, after stalking the price trackers and securing what I wholeheartedly believe to have been the best possible outcome, I went for it: 30 minutes and $285 later, I was hustling down the wide walkways of Climate Pledge Arena alongside my dear friend3; 10 minutes after that, we were partying to the latter half of shygirl’s set, shoes slick with White Claw that had been spilled nearby.

              I can still feel the initial stun upon finding our seats—we instantly turned to each other and exclaimed in unison, “We’re so close!” Normally I’d be kind of a stickler for floor seats, but I maintain that the section next to the stage was the best arrangement, given the price and extremely last minute nature of the decision. (I swear I am not coping.)

              Stadium shows are always a trip to me. They constitute a separate category in my mind, out of respect for sheer scale. In a case like this, I can’t make so many comments regarding “crowd energy” or “social environment” or even physical sensations as I would a normal show, because there’s literally too many people. You can really only go off of the small section you’re apart of, or “the whole” as you perceive it from said small section. When I saw The Cure at Climate Pledge in 2023, I left a bit soured because I was trapped amongst seated geriatrics (Gen X), but the level of enthusiasm was visibly different even just a section away. In the case of this being the “Sweat” tour, I thought that the response looked reasonable. But realistically, I spent far too much money to focus on anything other than the spectacle.

              Unsurprisingly, much of my time was spent in awe at how seamlessly “brat” was lubed into every corner of the production. It was all outrageous, over-the-top—there was no way to keep track of the amount of wardrobe changing or grinding that took place onstage, or even just, times my eyes widened in response to something Troye Sivan did with/to his entourage of half-naked male backup dancers who looked like they were scouted from the aisles of the Venice Beach Erewhon4. Perhaps most encompassing was the format of the show itself; rather than perform in sets, Charli and Troye alternated every few songs, which created a revolving door into their non-stop Boiler Room set. Really, I think the ingenuity of this lies in the fact that it was attention-span proof: perfectly in line with the pleasure-seeking values and hyperdrive culture surrounding the album, it was all the best parts of scrolling TikTok (constant stimulation and dopamine cycling) with none of the guilt or loss, maybe only some of the eyestrain.

              This strong stylistic identity, coupled with the fact that it was the final show in one of the most ubiquitous tours of recent memory (and I say this affectionately, as opposed to some of the others), meant there was pretty much no room for audience burnout; I didn’t even notice there were technically three encores, I was that into it. In spite of the utter excess present, no set-lists were dragged out, no one overstayed their welcome, and overall, I was left wanting more when it ended. I immediately wanted another to experience another “Sweat Tour”.

              It’s funny—this concert was so colossal, that there’s actually very little to speak of its specifics. I have written literally nothing about Charli’s charisma as a performer, and I think that’s because likely everyone has been exposed to it by now. As you can probably imagine, it was better in person. As for Troye Sivan, I didn’t (and still don’t) know much about him, but he made short work of winning me over. I felt like he was a children’s cartoon caricature of a “cute boy pop star that is fawned over by the girl characters in an episode”, as though I were obligated to scream “OMG! It’s Troye!” and slap my hands to my face whenever he stepped onstage.

              I had a great time with my friend. We did indulge a bond-solidifying moment during “Girl, so confusing” just as many young women likely have by now, and it was beautiful and powerful and normal and we got two Taco Bell Black Bean Crunchwrap Supremes and ate them in my Kia Soul afterwards.

              I thought the gay Millennial couple in front of us seemed a bit less thrilled than they should be, but when it got down to “Track #10”, they passionately made out for its entirety—during which, one of them was recording, either the captivating performance or the make out session, or perhaps alternating between the two. Love wins!

              #2: Snow Strippers

              Neumos, Oct. 22nd 2024




              I said I was excited for the Ariel Pink show or whatever, but that pales in comparison to my excitement here. I was so determined to see Snow Strippers that, during their Spring tour, I had formed a vague and convoluted plan to see them perform alongside Elusin in Portland; it would require that I either drive 4 hours or take a train, which is sort of hard to justify for an artist that I’m not exactly emotionally indebted to. Regardless, it didn’t matter because I accidentally bought a 21+ ticket.

              (Okay. That makes me sound stupid. I am Not Stupid, and it was Not My Fault. The venue’s website listed their show as an All Ages Event, but the only ticket available at the drop was 21+. Later on, there were tickets that said “all ages” made available—but why weren’t they there at release? I emailed the venue and pleaded with its owner, but it was no use. I had every reason to assume that this was just a formatting error or something. Being young is tragic, right?)

              I was bummed about this, not necessarily due to a personal obsession with the artist, but because it truly felt like it was the time to be at a Snow Strippers show. Much like with the “Sweat Tour”, the increased attention on their live shows was inescapable. And while I had been a follower of the duo for awhile, the cultural property that they acquired in 2024 seemed special and ephemeral to me. I felt I couldn’t miss this precise fleeting moment, like it would be gone in a flash and later rubbed in my face by the next generation of teens in some form of false-nostalgia-longing social media post.

              “Ugh, why did I have to be 11 in 2024 instead of being at a prime Snow Strippers show?”

              Fortunately for me, it wouldn’t pass me by: they toured again in the Fall. In October, I returned to the humid shoebox that is Neumos in Capitol Hill. One of the openers—Damon Rush or damon r.—canceled, and I missed most of the other—Suzy Sheer—because I was busy getting a banh mi sandwich with my boyfriend. Though unreasonably distressed by both of these facts, it ended up working out perfect; I saw the exact amount that I needed to.

              Suzy Sheer was a guy, to the surprise of many it seemed, and a very succinct one at that. His set was probably thirty minutes max (I’m estimating, because I heard it start while I was in line), but he drew a high energy from the crowd within that short time frame. I could feel it upon entry, considering the time between me rounding the corner and first catching sight of him, and me being engulfed by the conglomerate of people, was only a mere minute or so.

              Miraculously—and this is an underrated positive at any concert—this high was maintained due to the short wait time in between sets. Within fifteen minutes, of which I was incredibly antsy, Tati and Graham came out bouncing to the familiar pounding piano sample of “Just Your Doll”. In an instant, my nervous system was returned to the exact physical sensations of seeing Death Grips a few years back, as I got swept into a mass of bodies that behaved much like quicksand or sludge, suddenly glued to my camo-laden peers and squirming in place. The audience remained in this stasis, gnashing against each other for awhile, but eventually would give and allow for more (albeit squished) movement. It goes without saying that I was ecstatic.

              As if attending their own concert, the duo exuded pure excitement from start to finish, jumping nonstop, sometimes pulling fans up to join them. Tati was unsurprisingly the highlight: white mini-skirt that appeared to be made of polyester or some other stretchy athletic material, dark suede boots with tassels all over, a youth boys’ size T-shirt that read “BEACH MODE: ON”—a truly great outfit. She whipped around the stage, dancing in her signature style of choppy-yet-natural, igniting the crowd, soaking in the constant and insurmountable beams of phone flashes. I’m not quite sure what Graham was doing the whole time—if he was doing anything, because more often than not he abandoned his post at the MacBook to dance with Tati—but every song was littered with interruptions like “We love prescription drugs”, “Night Killaz”, and the obligatory barrage of gun-cocking and air-horn sound effects.

              I could barely discern any “live vocals” over the sheer auditory assault in the room, but isn’t an emphasis on the amateur or trashy a key part of Snow Strippers’ image? (Check out the YouTube comments under their Boiler Room set, and you’ll find this is a divisive topic.) It’s suggestive of college parties over spring break where the “DJ” is actually just a Spotify user who happens to own a $130 deck, so the whole time he’s just doing really long cross-fades and occasionally throwing in sounds. The product of a lack of care or technical ability, or a deliberate creative decision (probably a bit of both), it communicates their sensibilities and message the same—so I support.

              In keeping with the griminess5, the audience was slick with sweat after less than one song: I was fully wedged between other sticky young people, my bra strap came undone at some point, and I was both losing hairs of my own and amassing the strands of others, plucking them via the moisture on my arm. Youth and relevance were at the center of the night, a sentiment that was once again reaffirmed by a short but thorough set. It was, without a shadow of doubt, the most visceral and carnal fun I have had at a concert in a long time.

              I don’t know what the future holds for Snow Strippers—if I’ll feel something close to what I do about analogous cultural flashes, like Joeyy—but I’m truly glad I was able to experience them in this moment.

              #1: Mk.gee

              Showbox SoDo, Sep. 3 2024




              Perhaps my 2026 New Year’s Resolution will be to stop “glazing” this guy. But that time is not now.

              My favorite concert of 2024 was, above all else, a pleasant surprise. Mainly because this artist is new to me, and not at all someone I would’ve foreseen myself taking any interest in. In fact, when my boyfriend first showed me “Two Star and the Dream Police”, I was genuinely confused as to what this guy’s deal was. I could not, for the life of me, determine whether or not he was one of those many forgettable indie guitar figures that emerged in the late 2010s and landed one semi-successful TikTok hit before fading away out of mediocrity. If you look at his record prior to last year, that’s certainly what he gives off: sort of sensitive and formless and beachy, no real identity outside of being “indie”. I mean, even the previous album title, “A Museum of Contradiction”, makes me roll my eyes.

              Somehow, “Two Star and the Dream Police” is actually astonishing and could not exist further from the landfill of superficial indie. It will maybe change “pop” music. I’m embarrassed just writing that. Point is, I do not know how he achieved this total reinvention. It probably took a lot of time and effort. Possibly even a miracle.

              I was still quite stumped by Mk.gee when the concert rolled around. So while I had no idea what to expect in actuality, I gathered a few hunches: the first was that my boyfriend and I would be among the youngest there (true). The second was that I would likely be underwhelmed by the live renditions of the tracks due to the vivid and specific qualities they possess (false). The third was that Mk.gee would not have any swag (unfortunately false).

              The opener was a DJ who, at times, was exhibiting some cool stuff, though I may have been the only one thinking this, because he was met with a pretty tough crowd. The audience response suggested his set was more of a prolonged obstacle in the way of seeing Mk.gee, which, considering he was mentioned nowhere on the tickets or venue signage and just sort of showed up and immediately got down to it, was perhaps warranted. There was a good amount of confused or embarrassed laughter throughout, but it didn’t feel malicious. For whatever reason, my lasting impression was that this guy was “sort of onto something”—I cannot verify this in any way—and also that he managed to give off the exact feeling of how DJs were depicted in 2000s children’s web browser games, namely Club Penguin.

              Shortly after, Mk.gee would arrive onstage almost entirely obscured by a shroud of white mist. For the most part he remained in this state, a silhouette of himself, against the morphing backdrop of deep reds and blues, and flashes of light throughout.

              I have to just get it out of the way: he was totally sick. I think part of me still doesn’t want to believe that the person behind “A Museum of Contradictions” could suddenly now sway me with his energy (or maybe I’m just flustered), but fuck it—he had me good. My eyes were completely fixed on that stage. He had the forthright disposition so few performers can properly execute, a “no-nonsense-play-the-music” dutifulness that comes across as naturally developed rather than postured. He was evidently serious about his craft, but not afraid to throw a deafening “Yea!” at the audience when excited, or end the set with a cover of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” that featured some screeching eagle sounds. At some point, he was nice enough to take off his hat, which meant we could sort of see him.

              More importantly, the best, most compelling aspects of “Two Star and the Dream Police” were at the performance’s core, each individual track done justice through careful renditions that exemplified their interesting qualities. The sounds that define the album—the resonant piano chords, nostalgic synth melodies, and iconic guitar distortion—felt present and palpable, as if every thunder of the guitar clipping was happening inside my bones. Certain musical interludes were extended, notably whenever it was that he switched from the guitar to the puddle of wire and pedal and synthesizer in the middle, but none of the live interpretations felt overkill or unnecessary, instead pulling the audience closer into their atmosphere.

              Needless to say, he sounded great: voice, guitar tone, all of it. I don’t see any reason to expand on that.

              Ultimately, I’d describe the crowd as “stunned”—there wasn’t much physical activity, at least where I was located. I’m sure you know that normally this would have me miffed, but this time I understood; I was thoroughly captivated. I perceived an air of amazement, occasionally present in glimpses of someone else’s joyfully fixated expression. With some of the big hits, like “Are You Looking Up” or “Candy”, a fair amount of dancing and laughter ensued. The audience struggled to sing along to the chorus’ meter during “Alesis”, which validated my personal difficulties in discerning Mk.gee’s lyrics and matching his vocals in the car. “I Want” stood out as my favorite performance of the night.

              Just saying, I still dance, even when mystified. Just something to keep in mind. A mild swing never hurts.

              On the walk to the train station, I raved about the sounds, the lights, the smoke, the resounding character of it all. On the train ride home, I texted my old piano teacher to tell him that he simply had to give this album a listen. At work the next day, I pushed Mk.gee onto all the old, classic-rock-loving regulars at the bar top, promising them that he was “doing very cool things with guitar”.

              I’m still reeling from it; I was listening to that damn album again yesterday. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a performance so much after the fact, so that alone should guarantee the number one slot.

              As is the case with any other experience, most concerts just come and go, so anything that lasts—the thrilling and the egregious—is well worth the trouble of standing around awkwardly at a million Show Me The Body or Justice shows. It’s just an added bonus when you get something truly special, like this.

              Oh yeah, but the guy at the merch stand was a total dick.
              

 Drive drunk to see you; steer extra careful when I spot a cop car. The whole way there, listen to songs that you like. Eat food when I don’t want to, just so that I can do something with you. Cry because one day I’ll likely miss you badly. Bite my nails. Sit on the edge of the bed every morning and waste my time. Used to walk to the park and write it all out because I was too scared to tell anybody anything. Repeat every couple of months, “this is the worst my skin has ever looked.” Make plans then dread them. In bed, heart rhythm gets abnormal and keeps me awake a little while longer. Reconsider a lot of my central beliefs. Think anything’s cool if you think it’s cool. Starve for hours. At work and at home, act aloof or cold. Cry because I want you to. Spend most of my days at the same few places. “Soon, you will learn to isolate the muscle.” Develop a condition in my hands. Get addicted to routine and pattern. Don’t really listen to some of my favorite artists anymore. Downstairs trying to prolong eating. Went to that party in April and ended up sobbing like an infant and begging for you hysterically. Drift through the Sunday shift like a spirit. Plane’s goin’ up: I have decided that everything should remain exactly as it is with no changes, and that my biggest goal in life is to sneak into my parents’ bed in the middle of the night like before. Swirl the Pineapple Green Tea with Lychee Jelly around the inside of my mouth real good so I can taste it before I spit it out in the alleyway. Start to hate dogs. Don’t text ‘cause I’m too proud. People disagree with the way I went about it all. Acid in throat. Watch a million movies with you—think of how I used to drape my legs overtop yours and try and subtly weave them in between, excited but not letting myself get carried away given our circumstances. Crave coke any time I drink now. Miss the way my hair looked, so much. Constantly going to the doctor and trying to get referrals to some kind of specialist. Wake up reinvigorated on Saturday. Study some bullshit at community college. Try to watch porn on “PornHub” for the first time in years: scroll until eventually all the girls’ bodies in the thumbnails just start to look grotesque or pitiful or ugly, and then plug my phone in and roll back over to sleep. Hope for hot water in tomorrow’s shower. Listen to that video you recommended. Be home in time for dinner. Drive 4 hours east to get a motorcycle that won’t start. “Nobody will read this stuff, but that’s legitimately fine.” Get progressively dumber. Changing clothes takes extra long now because the momentary feeling of not wearing a shirt or socks or pants is far too cold to bear. Obsessively scan the menus on different restaurant websites. Wake up due to lingering pain from bursitis of the hips, a poorly cocked wrist, and an eyebrow piercing that will never heal. Get bored of everything I write. Stare out the window as I silently work up the confidence to say it. Make the same two breakfasts for a year straight. End intercourse prematurely and mope about having done so for hours after. Can’t decipher any sensations in stomach or chest regions. Walk around the whole town with you even though I’m frigid and the boots I wear daily are shocking my heels more and more with each step. Remember that easier does not mean better. Unsend the message I sent via Telegram while inebriated. Dad buys me sushi from Sprout’s grocery store. Think of my friends. Have worse hygiene than before. Send five emails on Thursday morning. Starve for a year.

              Take off my clothes and crawl into bed with you. Don’t sleep, but somehow still dream anyway. Thanks for letting me come here tonight. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep but that doesn’t matter to me.
              

 I’ve ended the last two holidays on a near identical scene. I arrive home from my boyfriend’s house with a lingering dread from the overindulgence of the day, and opt to open Reddit and whine about this feeling in one of the app’s many communities dedicated to young women with eating disorders. My posts share a common thesis: “this is the most food I have ever eaten. Am I going to be like this forever?” I then carry on with consuming as much morbid or abysmal content as I can.
              

 This past summer, I spent a great deal of my free time grueling over a never-ending post surrounding my discomfort with current online culture. I did not finish it.

              The piece was contextualized by a lurking of fringe female Looksmaxxing Subreddits, an overconsumption of inflammatory content on Instagram and TikTok, and a certain distractingly detrimental pattern of eating behaviors. Ultimately, it became too convoluted and maybe too personal; it was one of those instances in which “unpacking” an idea only resulted in its further muddling. Whatever the reason it may not have been working at the time, I was attempting to answer a question which had been—and still is—gnawing at me: “Why do things feel so weird for women right now?”

              I had perceived a shift in the way we were consuming, discussing, and participating in popular culture. Most pressingly, it felt like everything that was current was also somehow overtly regressive; I actually felt a bit crazy bearing witness to the pro-anorexia content renaissance online, the ostentatious sexuality of “Brat Summer” and femininity of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Short n’ Sweet” campaign (though it would seem I was not so alone in that one) alike. These demonstrations were so shockingly on-the-nose, yet uncontested—we had welcomed thinness, hyper-femininity, and other forms of self-subjugation back into the fold with open arms. As if in some kind of torture sequence, it felt like I could do nothing but watch women and girls embrace some of the most backward ideology I had seen prescribed in my lifetime.

              My question could more accurately be seen as two-pronged: “Why is everything so obscenely regressive right now?” and “Why do we not care?”




              Sabrina Carpenter for Skims (2024). This shoot, unlike many others, actually drew a very small bit of controversy.
              Resultative the hang-ups of a feminism centered around self-delusion, women sought new narratives in order to find fulfillment or solace. From this vague notion, I posited that we had now begun to enter, or were already in the midst, of a new, post-liberal feminist era.

              Admittedly though, the prescription had already penetrated my being just the same—I think all the Instagram Reels were getting to me. Clouded by hunger probably, I moved away from my project.

              Then, of course, there was an election. It was not the election itself that plunged me back into this thought (I’m not going to liken Harris’ loss to a collective loss for women or feminism), but rather the consensus gathered online in its wake. Bombarded with “I Told You So” notes and essays calling for a “Leftist Joe Rogan”, I found one conclusion fairly ubiquitous: Liberals lost the online strategy war, and therefore the culture war. Across the board, Trump’s victory was attributed to his success with social media influence, his forming of a campaign that was greater in overall awareness and identity, thoroughly inescapable in its online presence. I’m certain that we could all verify this—even beyond the surreal stream with Aiden Ross, the shadow of crypto-conservatism was undeniably expanding online.

              This embarrassment for Democrats had been the nail on the coffin, the definite evidence needed that neoliberalism’s dubious grip on culture had finally slipped.

              Several weeks before the election, I had become engrossed in this idea of modern liberal culture, courtesy the works of author and UC Irvine professor Catherine Liu. She speaks, with great ferocity, of the Professional-managerial Class (PMC), which is essentially the caste of the modern white-collar worker (or, more accurately, manager or HR employee) that exists between the working class and bourgeoisie. In accordance to the interests of the latter, they maintain the status quo of culture. (If it helps, you should think of the PMC as the people who own the solar-panel-brandishing new constructions with signs out front that say stuff like “In this House We Love Black Women and Believe Science”, or perhaps try to remember the person who laid you off over Zoom.) The rise of the PMC liberal is fairly analogous with liberal or third-wave feminism—realistically, the former are the only group that benefits from the latter; the two collaborate, inform each other, and shape the social and political landscapes that we are familiar with today. Therefore a symbolic and literal loss of neoliberal, DNC-adjacent social influence would also confirm a similar reality for the most recent era or “wave” of feminism in the West.

              Recontextualized, my feelings of dissonance were suddenly made much clearer. Regressive media about—but more maliciously, for—women had blossomed in accordance to mass disillusionment surrounding the ideology and practice of liberal feminism of the PMC. The voter ascertained no sense in the Harris campaign’s projections of normalcy; the same can be said of women’s relationship to the modern women’s rights movement. Liberal feminism’s characteristic self-delusion, much like the heinous individuality politics of modern liberalism, asked women to view their “activism” and ultimately themself through this narrative lens (everything is okay, as long as you feel it is) that would inevitably bring about its downfall.

              If you can’t already tell, I in no way mean to imply that the shift into a new wave of collective thought regarding feminism is inherently a downward spiral—or is even really all that “new”. As it stands now, I cannot imagine a popular culture without omnipresent misogyny baked into it. But, the truth is that if it were not for the utterly permissive, counterintuitive, ubiquitously-embracing rhetoric that dominated liberal feminist thought, we wouldn’t have gotten to this point. If we hadn’t assured every woman that empowerment was individual, that “feeling” was more important than “being”, we wouldn’t have arrived at the reality that is “soft life” and diet trad-wife content standing alongside Bianca Censori’s outfits and the sudden renewed romanticism of Victoria’s Secret Angels online. By refusing to address and instead opting to willingly endorse these legitimate forces of female subjugation—femininity, sexualization, dehumanization—liberal feminism opened the floodgates to an emotional, ideological dissonance that is now present in today’s women on both an individual and cultural level.




              Two posts from divisive TikTok personality Liv Schmidt (2024). Schmidt makes somewhat playful but also very real content concerning being “honest” about thinness . Supporters often declare their respect for her “saying the quiet part out loud”.
              This growing disillusionment is also in part due to exhaustion towards the neoliberal disposition of policing. Liberal feminism demands very little tangible activism of women, but instead, a perfection of character; they must be painstakingly aware and “intersectional” at all times, willing to discard their feminist morals in favor of something “greater” (or honestly lesser), constantly policing themselves or placing their actions within a suitable narrative. It requires far more mental, and social, gymnastics to maintain this appearance, to be un-cancelable.

              Rife with themes of family, health, and most notably self-improvement, online right-wing content provides an antidote to the disillusionment crisis, in the form of the fulfillment narrative. Whereas liberalism requires a constant, painful exercise of justifying one’s own inaction and inadequacy—whether in the domain of activism or the self—conservative social media has succeeded in depicting the opposite. Online conservative figures sell these ideals every time they take a swig of raw milk or make a video calmly explaining how their husband “leads their family”.

              So what’s more attractive, even rational, to a woman lost or frustrated in her current self? The managerial voice telling her that it’s okay, nothing’s wrong, she just needs to unpack her systemic trauma? Or Nara Smith being softly embraced by her model husband while rolling out dough so her kids can have fresh bagels? As a result, you get young women posting en-masse about “girl” math or dinner, how they crave “soft-life” or alternatively, just want to be “hot” or “skinny”.




              A hyper-specific online subculture that I find funny: “Wonyoungism”, which is essentially just a “Clean Girl” archetype niche (self-optimization and perfection), but accelerated through K-Pop aesthetics. It’s based around Jang Won-young of Ive, who is the closest living resemblance to a caricature of a“K-Pop Star”.
              And trust that I could, and part of me wants to, rattle off endless examples of this pervasiveness right now; I could tell you about “Slavic Dolls” on TikTok or Sisyphean self-improvement archetypes like the Pilates Princess or the subtle propaganda of Ballerina Farm and putting bows on everything. (I’m particularly fascinated with the case of TikTok personality Natalya Toryanski, who recently came forward as a Trump supporter after much legitimately kind-of-funny-dog-whistling about seed oils and birth control, but I won’t get into it.) To be honest though, I feel there’s not really a point in “warning” about any of these threats on a case-by-case basis, as they may require a certain level of awareness to participate in. Women are aware of their frustrations with these systems, and particularly in the case of trad-wife and trad-wife adjacent trends, are aware that these images contradict a lot of what they had previously affirmed.

              Perhaps this is a way of avoiding the pain or confusion resultative liberal feminism, by removing the justification or narrative behind regressive action entirely. It can feel liberating, supposedly, for a woman to admit that she doesn’t want to operate under these expectations anymore—I don’t want to be “woke”, and I shouldn’t have to be.

              Ironically, this is still essentially synonymous with the cognitive dissonance of liberal feminism, feeling but not being. While liberal feminism enables you to respect or engage with even the most anti-woman realities—the likes of prostitution, pornography, cosmetics—so long as you maintain a perfect-woman character, the online right wing asks that you rather embody their perfect-woman character through a specific set of anti-woman realities. Either way, you have to justify and inevitably perform your own subjugation.

              You probably won’t be Nara Smith if you choose to commit to a form of trad-lifestyle, and you know this. As many have pointed out in the last two weeks, right-wing content is the product of far more financial backing than one could imagine: wealthy donors back conservative influencers, even Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm are both very, very rich. There is a knowing unattainability to all of this, whether in wealth discrepancy or simply due to the perfection of the feminine figure, but like anything the hope is that by embodying some of these characteristics or ideals, you’ll transcend this horrible, post-modern-lib-reality and maybe get some real self fulfillment. This is not the case, it doesn’t take a reading of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to understand that entire feminist movements have been centered around defying the oppression of traditionalism and its supposed “ideals”. You will find yourself disillusioned all the same.




              Nara Smith in a TikTok (2024)
              Something I often found myself begrudgingly repeating in the darkest days of liberal feminist extremities (when faced with waves like “Bimboism”, for instance) was the affirmation that “nothing exists in a vacuum”. This was usually in contest with “choice” arguments; it means something when you choose to wear makeup or undergo cosmetic procedures, and that something is in direct contradiction with feminism. Once again, I feel inclined towards this sentiment. These figures, incidents, trends, and patterns online don’t just arise out of nothing and subsequently fade into it. They are neither harmless nor isolated.

              Each time we appease or go so far as to adopt a facet of this culture—both the innocuous (“clean girl”) and the aggressive (“Your body, my choice”)—we affirm its reality and contribute a bit more to its realization. If you can recognize the power that these ostensibly small bits on the internet can hold in something as “real” and immediate as a presidential election, then you can acknowledge what they might mean for feminism, for yourself.

              Based off what I’ve seen, a shift has already occurred. Sure, social media is not real life because there’s face filters and people say crazy stuff or whatever; and you might be above any of the examples of trends or pop culture moments. But no one is ever fully exempt. Be cautious of this fact, or you’ll end up cutting your essay off because of hunger again.

              An Additional Quick, Unrefined Thought: 

              Just because you’re not a total normie (ranging from Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift extreme-level of normal to casual Nara Smith or pilates TikTok consumer) doesn’t mean you’re somehow evading this. As I cited with Brat Summer, something doesn’t necessarily have to be exhibiting subtle, classic conservative values to fit under this category. (I’ve seen people online refer to this indulgent or proudly sleazy moment in aesthetics as a “last hurrah” of sorts for women and gay people and whoever, prior to the election; I don’t really know how one can proclaim something like this without a tinge of embarrassment, for a number of reasons.) I feel like some of the more online or subculture-oriented trends of the moment, namely those that echo specific aspects of mid-late 2000s culture— “indie sleaze”, 2014 Tumblr aesthetics, slideshows of alarmingly thin Russian models from 2007, or even just the general tendency towards imagery that uses sexualization/sexuality in an uncanny manner to evoke certain liminal or nostalgic feelings— display a similar, knowing detachment from the implications of what they’re engaging with.

              In some of these cases, I would argue that it falls more on the side of irony or hyperreality in a way that doesn’t immediately relate itself to womanhood. I have more thoughts on this that I will hopefully produce into something tangible.
              First, I peruse the eating and calorie related subreddits as though they were a personalized newsfeed of sorts. Many of the users are the same as or far worse off than me, which is equal parts reassuring and frustrating. On r/caloriecount, the carefully lackluster dinner plates that have been shared—one roll, a pitiful serving of a choice gluttonous holiday carb, four crackers, a boring sliver of meat—make me feel some mixture of contempt and genuine empathy, which ultimately levels out to indifference. I inspect a few of the profiles behind the posts, where I’m met with a graveyard of requests for calorie estimations gone ignored and vents ranging zero to two in upvotes. This feels far too voyeuristic, so I retire to my home page.

              By this point, my eyes are glazed over and I’m wholly aware of how fucked the situation is. Conscious enough to acknowledge the hilarious soundtrack of Rae Sremmurd and Chris Brown provided for me by the SiriusXM station in my car, shameless enough to feel nothing towards it, I proceed in exacting my now perfected formula for self-harm.

              On the home page, I entertain childish text exchanges between couples on “r/AmIOverreacting”, regretful r/Confessions posts from cheating husbands which I deem too absurd to be anything other than someone’s bizarre fantasy of justice, and the occasional source of pure devastation (ie. a man’s post in which he defeatedly describes himself as developing “the brain of an eleven year old” following a series of tragic events in life. Commenters urge him to research neuroplasticity). I spectate the arguments underneath an r/VindictaRateCelebs post condemning Ariana Grande’s weight loss; the general consensus amongst the crowd is that making posts about “too little body fat being ugly” is mostly just cope for fat people.

              Cushioning this desired negativity is an assortment of content from really any other subreddit I’ve joined in the last six years or so—Overwatch updates, vegan recipes, Korean travel pictures, a naive conspiracy theory regarding Luigi Mangione, “slutty confessions”, unfunny Neon Genesis Evangelion memes—all of which bringing me to a near masturbatory level of stimulation. I’ve never done “downers”, I’ve really only done one cool drug and I acted like a total freak on it, but I imagine this is what it feels like to just take some pills and lazily touch yourself while thinking about nothing in particular.

              Prior to this numbing session, on my way home, I had stopped by a church parking lot to try and throw up some of the food I had eaten, particularly the decadent Porter-soaked chocolate cake I had most recently ingested. Getting out of the car, I positioned myself underneath a tree so as to seek shelter from the pelting rain, and the soil surrounded me in a deep black; I felt like I was on a little Taiwanese fishing boat in the middle of a raging midnight sea. Rickety and amateur, I dug three of the fingers on my right hand into the back of my throat and prodded around. Despite starting out this way, I was never actually very good at the bulimic routine, which is maybe the only reason I still have an attractive front row of teeth—I’ve always struggled in getting that homogenous, acidic type of vomit up, so instead it’s an uphill battle of repeated gagging and jerking and spitting until I get too scared to continue. I endured this (mostly fruitless) agony until I heard police sirens and, like a high schooler smoking weed for the first time in a public park, took that as my cue to leave.

              This is interesting to me, because in day to day life, I have mostly sworn off things like vomiting and scrolling in favor of abstinence. My Instagram app is limited by a mindfulness timer, and I’ve found it’s a lot easier to simply not eat something than attempt to sloppily regurgitate it in chunks later. I seem to only actively seek out self-harm in these extremities when met with the overwhelming presence of pleasure and comfort—I want to eat so much food that my only desire is to vomit, to socialize so much that I retreat to mouth-breathing isolation. Excess is weirdly powerful, alien to me in ways I can’t explain, particularly in its ability to seemingly completely alter my being: my bed had too many presents and boxes on it, and my stomach too much food in it, so when I tried to have sex today, the respective items and sensations brought an increased awareness and stress to the point of excruciating disembodiment. I winced in pain at every stroke and eventually ended the whole act. Curling up and withdrawing into myself, I took to thinking things only a scrawny and self-victimizing fifteen year old boy who just lost his virginity should: I am ugly and nonsexual, I am not normal. It was as though I spent the evening watching myself get gradually replaced by something I wished to bear no resemblance to, someone who indulges sensation and emotion in all capacities.

              The heat blasts on my face; I’m warm, rich, plump, soaked in comfort. It is a pleasant, gross feeling.