The First of Many...
Sharing Last Night's First Reading
Hi pickles! I read some of my writing last night thanks to the incredible co-hosts of @pitypartyreadings, Sophie and Noah! Sharing what I read below <3
Reading 1: Tonic Travels
She orders at the bar with her hand on her hip, swinging her elbow perpendicular to the floor as her overgrown fingernails scratch her waist. Ouch. The porn-stache bartender scans her teetering awkwardness seeping through the cracks in the urban decay of her purple Vice eyeliner, smudged on her waterline like a Long Island housewife with a flailing personal fitness practice and a deepening mid-life crisis, she’ll order a gin and tonic she won’t finish. She knows he can see the date’s not going well. She’ll leave soon after.
Instrumental piano music brings her to tears and sometimes she’ll feel so overly confident in the comfort of the orange seats of the soon to be retired G train subway cars post-date, she’ll think they’re back together, talking, but the moment passes, she turns her head, and no one is there. Time stood still then.
She stands up to lean into the hyperextension of her own ligaments against the closing doors, and finds, even still, pulsating love, yearning for a purpose, pumping oxygen to the drummer in her chest as her heart’s center bears the weight of her shaking legs.
Andrea Gibson said to “let your heart break so your spirit doesn’t.”
But there’s a congregation of mustached men wandering around McGolrick Park with distasteful mullets and enough jangly keys hanging on their waists to unlock all the secrets of the Catholic Church. They wear their basses on their backs, and you’ll never hear from them again. The couples of North Brooklyn have reemerged from hibernation and as they intertwine arms in McCarren, mimicking the roots of the eastern redbud trees that frame them, with their lattes and Paloma pastries glued to their outer extremities, you feel proud to be a lone, standing tree and single.
There’s a man who listens to the grass sing in McCarren and a man playing the guitar down Driggs all the way to Grand. The men on the subway sigh to each other, “Yeah, I’m not looking for anything romantic,” as the curvature of his elf-like boots punctures every jolt and every turn on the L between First and Third Ave.
Just as she’s waiting for a much-needed text response, a man in a Hefty trash bag makeshift dress slides the preceding train car door shut, yelling out of key, “You don’t know how much I love you / I need you / I need you / I need you / I love you”. She needed this affirmation.
At dinner, she cedes to temptation and makes eye contact with the awkward waiter holding the bottle of Sancerre as he says “…how about a taste?”, she thinks “how presumptuous,” only to remember what it means to be in love.
She returns home to replay scenes from the night before with her roommates as an impossibly cruel laughing seizure overcomes them in their snickering storytelling “he was having a bloody nose and I had the hiccups,” it didn’t work out. She’ll go on another date soon.
Reading 2: Stillness in Motion
There’s a comforting discomfort between stillness and motion. There’s stillness in stolen time. Stillness in stolen thoughts, looping memories of lovers past, wounded hopes, and stained smells. The stillness of lateness, the power of passivity,
to be still within, to continue to traverse the external trajectory of chaos, dates, job, me time, runs. The stillness of bubbling with the guilt of your impolite tardiness when you arrive 40 minutes late to dinner. “The trains were a mess,” your friends know this is not true.
Will the stillness find equilibrium with the crossfire of the internal and external? Will they forgive you?
The buzzing stillness with each breath after you brush a stranger’s pinky with yours. “You think that was my soulmate." But then wouldn’t it have worked out?
The stillness of the ticking microwave, staring into a splintered reflection of your eyebrows and a Trader Joe’s Chicken Sausage and Eggs Breakfast Burrito as you dig your elbows into the marble counter.
The stillness of the dead phone. The stolen phone. The stillness of perplexed faces on the subway staring in unison at the Citi bike on the subway, a mutually agreed upon stillness overcomes us, overcomes our reason to care.
The stillness of the first date. The stillness of the first text. The stillness of the nauseating
Uber ride home, the impending Venmo, and the biblical hangover.
The stillness of planted ankles pressed together on the subway like grocery store sushi, where you stand against the tidal wave motion of the A train’s blaring horn. Stillness in chaos.
The stillness of no emotion in motion. And as you fold into the subway seat, the cart screeches, you are still. Weekend after weekend. Month after month. Year after year.
The stillness of sweat as the former ballet dancer finds balance from within. Stillness despite dripping onto the yoga mat as you hold on for just one more breath. Stillness in sprints.
The stillness of twiddling thumbs, twisting knuckles, scrunching toes.
The stillness of anger, of words you wish you hadn’t said, of realizing you’re maturing. The stillness of time. The stillness of pausing to hear the owls hoot in the morning.
The stillness of dead-end conversations that linger on. The stillness of sharp haircuts, inflation, rainy Saturdays, sunny Sundays. The stillness of long hair and rebelling against haircuts.
The stillness of 70s peace protests and framed pictures from the 80s.
The stillness of long bathroom lines and short waiting room times. The stillness of salty tears, serpentine staircases, and soft smiles. The stillness of wet grass wallowing in the wind.
Stillness in knowing what will be will be. Stillness in slow elevators and secrets. Stillness in motion, in sustaining friendships despite the petty pace that won’t slow down. The stillness in life and in death. The stillness of health. The stillness of each breath. The stillness of a silent laugh, the stillness of sleep, the stillness of the morning.
The stillness within you.
Reading 3: OCD
I never say the right thing and I’ll go through a
box of Band-Aids in an hour. Magnesium in the morning and
yoghurt at night. Compulsive truth-telling and always being late,
please, Emma, Gemma, Maggie just a final touch.
I can’t stop fixating on cobblestone streets from my childhood I can’t locate geographically but feel viscerally in my frontal lobe. Lefty loosey righty tighty.
I’m on my proverbial knees, begging for mercy as the short-term memories arduously tread through my brain’s simile of water;
as if each moment in time has grown heavy legs, now pushing through the waves like a triathlon-er resisting the tide, defiantly making it to the calm finish line of my mind that is each present moment. Each memory defends its honor from banishment to long-term storage, ceasing to release, relinquish, and retreat; each memory becomes more immortal than my very own mortality. Splashing and haunting. Who will find them?
Every single moment I’ve ever felt is dormant in the forefront of my mind.
I’ll remember that waiter from The Butcher’s Daughter who’s now sighing way too loud in my Pilates class. Not going back there. Like ever. Oh, and that time I saw my friend’s sister’s friend on Bedford who definitely doesn’t remember who I am but I did. I do. I’ll remember the face of that guy I saw on Hinge standouts out at Minnows every Saturday.
That address I wish I never felt familiar with but can’t avoid.
That fight I wish I hadn’t started in the kitchen in the middle of the night in 209.
I’ll remember what love felt like,
scarcely forgotten.
I’ll remember that time blueberries made me sick and the other time I cheated on a German test when I was eight and had to sit in the corner after Herr Ruby scolded me and I chewed on the hem of my disintegrating cardigan. That song we loved. That time my bra was showing in class during a Chinese presentation and the teacher was the only one who told me to check the “missing button.” That time I started swimming the wrong way during a final race. That other time I farted for seventeen hours straight on the Cathay Pacific airplane ride and my mom thought it was a sewage issue with the bathroom and had the flight attendants convinced there was a structural issue with the aircraft as they crawled around the cabin on their hands and knees. Until I farted again during the car ride home.
Reading 4: Songs of summer
Three years have passed since we were last bubbling with the final fizz of graduation and yet somehow the whispers of semester cadence still echo in the ether:
the reverberating breeze of the class call brushes past the helix of our ears as crisp summer refreshes our senses like an exhale of Orbit spearmint in December, howling to call us home.
Like witnessing an ex tightly clutching another girl’s hand walking in your direction, nostalgia never ceases to haunt or test us. We bleed just to know we’re alive.
The willow trees brush together in the wind to rejoice in a singular motion. We wait for the trampled grass and wrinkled figs to return to the soil and branches they vacated. The ground is covered in a mockery of wrong choices.
The sticky smell of maple brown sugar lingers on my fingertips like dizzying grandmother perfume, the sneaky residue of oatmeal fixation.
I do not talk of beginnings or ends. It’s May now. Dancing in July is not far off. Daylight savings came and went and there’s a brewing mist of a storm’s reckoning in the streets as the gutters and drains welcomed a forceful outpouring of April showers.
I’m waiting for wine at lunch and unexpected sun burns in just the right places.
New York summer has returned to cover the backdrop of winter’s thaw and our Garden of Eden is finally in bloom. To be in your mid-twenties is to be ill-prepared for the creeping feeling of knowing our parents are getting older and hangovers where we recover in silence, around the kitchen table, heads hanging like ripe grapes off the vine. Inches from snapping. Why must we ask questions that make us drink until we see nothing and Why did we ever rush to grow up? The pigeons are hungry and the trash cans are full. If a bird poops on your shirt, buy one from a street market for $40 - especially if Jerry Garcia’s on it.
If the G train is running on time, you’re witnessing history. This is the feeling of summer
Summer is finding a scrunched-up dry cleaning receipt in the front pocket of your jeans after a night out. Burping without heartburn. Exercising without procrastination. Chatting with the kind, older Polish men at the neighborhood ice cream spot about how much they like the strawberry flavor. Outdoor showers with good water pressure. Scheduling a first date outside. Rollerblading in the park on a Sunday. Scheduling a second date inside. Biking to McDonald’s and successfully balancing the golden arches bag on your handlebars during your return. A good plum. Remembering to forget that time you saw dogs drinking out of the human water fountain. Getting to Thursday dinners on time for summer happy hour. Stores in Greenpoint that sell suitcases but also happen to fix phones. Finding your roommates borrowed socks and underwear at the bottom of your drawer from last year…and even though she’s just downstairs, you keep the goods situated right in their spot, hiding behind your passport and old contacts, almost like a security deposit, a binding agreement that they’ll be in your life forever. Those socks are an anchor, a friendship lifeline. Summer is to remember Jane Austen and Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice and where women have come from, after the witch trials that is. From the dowries and the endless courting. From the corsets and carriages. From Queen Victoria and walks in the garden. The Bridgerton-era sure looks grand, but could you imagine it? The maternal mortality? The sickness? The heartbreak? The rats? Is it really worth all the bewitching? Summer is female freedom.
If you didn’t cheat on one of of his German tests did you really live