the july roundup
alternatively titled, what the fuck is going on anymore
i am 26. i am wearing a dress. i am on the floor, and abbey is eating popcorn next to me, and july is gone and august is here and soon my life will change again. soon i will finish sorting my clothes into the yes and maybe piles, soon i will zip up my duffel bag and tie up my hair, soon i will be eastbound. and then the atlantic ocean, nighttime, the stewardess coming round, offering a water, offering a coffee, the window between night and morning broken through and the hot asphalt of spanish tarmac baking into a mirage of freedom. soon i will be in barcelona, and then valencia, and then madrid, and then bilbao; soon i will be speaking spanish and ordering coffee and letting the waiter suggest the best tapas and falling asleep sunburnt on the beach after staying up until six am drinking wine and kissing strangers and taking ecstasy and doing all the things good girls aren’t supposed to do. except i’m not, not good or a girl, and i’m tired of pretending i can be. it’s august, it’s hot, it’s all ending. i can’t stand the cage, can’t stand the heat, can’t stand the heartbreak or the sweat pooling in my collarbone or the way everything i wanted to work just didn’t. i want to be free, want to be nobody, want to forget i ever existed and forget everything i thought i knew since all it’s ever done is broken my heart. i don’t want a heart, don’t want a past, don’t want a self. i want to be cloudlike, rainstorm, treetops, vistas, formless. i want to exist beyond the veil of humankind, exist in something like amber, exist like a ring that has fallen through the floorboards of the cave and which will only be unearthed in some far off future, some far off life or hunter or academic uncovering the dust to find me. i want to be nobody and i want you to love me and i want to forget i ever knew you existed. i want to stop existing completely, not in a death way but in another way, the way you start to long for when everything you ever thought would save you turns out to be the worst thing to ever happen to you. there is no grace, no merit, no happy ending. you don’t deserve a happy ending. you wouldn’t even know how to write one if you tried.
barcelona, then. another place another time another life another haircut. another boy, another girl, another reason to cry alone on the train and imagine you are somehow prettier and much more mysterious crying than you really are. soon you will take the train everywhere you want to go, soon you will eat foods you never dreamed of eating, soon you will embarrass yourself to your new friends and pray they can forgive you for being born american. you will be someone else, except, wait, you can’t ever be anyone but yourself, you can’t actually change. the core remains the same even as the costumes get updated, revamped, old shirts thrown out and new boots replacing the older, less fashionable ones, and you’re in the bathroom getting a trim and you don’t like how you look anymore and you look at your best friend and say cut it and she takes off eight inches in eight minutes. you are new, you are the same, you are never going to escape your past; your past is nothing, your past is everything, there is no such thing as the past; no such thing as ex-boyfriends, no such thing as broken hearts, no such things as childhood trauma or trailer trash or hiding under the rocking chair from your father only for him to jump on the rocking chair and break your nose. you are fifteen, eighteen, six years old; you are eighty and you are dead and you are not even born yet. the entire world is the tower collapsing and the entire dawn is the smell of lilacs. you are burning yourself in a bonfire like a witch tied to the stake, except you are lighting the match and you are inviting the darkness and you are never, ever allowed to forget where you come from. you are from nowhere you are from everywhere you are homeless you are pastless you are narrativeless. who are you. who will you be. will the light still break in the morning, will the cats still come when you are crying, will the ship thrashing in the waves survive the nyquil thick storm raging in the ether? will you find a home, will you fall in love, will you finally find a way to become so small and so insignificant that you breathe out and become nothingness incarnate; the last of you transposed into sunlight, the last of you magic-ed into oxygen, ether, soil food, and all the other little bits of air and light and energy. can you empty yourself enough, can you kill whatever darlings you once had, can you forgive yourself that he didn’t love you the way you wanted to be loved? a paper bag that used to carry something and is now empty, collapsing on itself, collapsing through space-time, collapsing the way you collapsed on the floor when he told you he was cleansed, he was sober, he was going to live after all. you can never un-collapse something. you can stand back up and glue the pieces and tell yourself you’re not going to listen to the story in your head, but you can never really upright the fallen. think of a forest. think of a tree. if it falls and no one hears. if it falls and no one listens. if it falls and no one cares. how horrible, to be falling and no one can hear it. how terrible, to be in love with the axe.
nothing matters!!! here’s some articles ❤
getting a paywall for any of these? copy & paste the url into this link to access a paywall hopper.
‘They are preparing for war’: An expert on civil wars discusses where political extremists are taking this country by kk ottesen
My grandmother’s botched abortion transformed three generations by john turturro
there’s nothing scarier than a hungry woman by laura maw
***the grand unified theory of female pain by leslie jamison***
the breakup museum by lesllie jamison
the only moral abortion is my abortion by joyce author
teju cole by aleksandar harmon
fashion has abandoned human taste by amanda mull
*** denotes the best thing i read this month, or in this particular case, one of the best essays i’ve read in my entire life.
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