11am, december 31st. staring blankly at a cigarette in one hand and a cappuccino in the other, foggy lisboan new year’s morning rolling through you, all the ghosts of the last three years coming back to haunt you — more dread for the day, more cobblestone beneath your feet. what is it about traveling that brings out the best and worst in people, simultaneously? i can’t go back to who i was before that day. i can’t ever see the world as as small of a place as i did before i walked onto that airport terminal and into the second half of my life.
i’m lonelier, now, paradoxically, but i handle it much better.
as in: i’ve stopped wishing for someone to fill the loneliness. as in: i’ve stopped reaching out when the hands i reach for are always reaching the other way. as in: i don’t expect anybody to understand me the way i want to be understood, and so i don’t bother trying to reach them.
can i write about the mess of being in your twenties without anyone relating to me? and do i want to be related to, or do i want to be worshipped? if everyone can relate to you it’s because you’re simple. absent. unspecial. shockingly utilitarian in your interests and niches and obsessions. if nobody can relate to you, well. just buy another ticket, i’m sure there’ll be someone in country number 29 that wasn’t in country number four, or ten, or twenty-two. don’t you know you can always keep running? don’t you know there’s no end to the path in front of you? they’ll bomb the moon off its orbit before they stop sending aid to israel. and you, in your stupid little thrift store boots, and your stupid little thrifted pens, eating hummus in a syrian restaurant trying to erase the stench of your american-ness from you. spritz your perfume behind your kneecaps, teach your little brother to use chopsticks, turn the shower water off when you’re washing – oh, yes, you’ve made a convincing play, a whole landscape for you to flit around in like you’re not entirely miserable still. go off with your friends from the states and recoil at how loud they are. you don’t raise your voice in public anymore, not since night two in madrid when you got into a fight with a moroccan boy who wanted to take you on a date the next day after being mean to you all night and you cursed him out so loudly the entire hostel kiddy pool turned around to stare at you. and now more quietly, but still the same issues, the same struggles, the same blindingly red and desperately bright star falling down out of the sky into isolation.
what the fuck are you trying to say? i’m too european for denver and too american for europe. (okay, relax. you’ve barely even scratched the surface. just because you wear red lipstick with no foundation doesn’t make you fucking parisian.) i’ve gone and ruined another place i used to call home. i keep them on a keychain, all the apartments painted pink and blue, the yellow walls of san diego, the white walls of the insane asylum, the dark blue of the tent on the pacific crest trail. don’t you know i’m soooooo much more interesting than everyone else? make yourself sick with your narcissism. make yourself sick and don’t even have a good reason for it.
i’m too poor to keep traveling and too depressed to stay still. i want healthcare, and university education, and i’m so fucking tired of nothing seemingly going my way. except there’s no need to be nice. there’s no need to mince words, or police yourself for the future audience, because we’ve killed the audience. they say kill the cop in your head on twitter; well then, kill the audience in your head in the writing workshop. you follow me? no more “seemingly.” no more allowing grace & double caution for things & people who would never even give you half of that. “nothing seemingly going my way” can become “nothing has gone my way in a year now, and i want to throttle the life out of every throat i find that still sings itself half stupidly into the waking night.” “nothing seemingly going my way” can become “nothing has gone my way in well over several years now, and still when i lay my head on my pillow at night i dream of finding you again.”
take the tour to sintra and when you wake up nikki will say the tour guide is cute and you’ll say okay and then when you walk outside in your retro miniskirt and thrifted sweater he will pop his eyes at you and you’ll think, nice. and then spend the day giving more attention to the tour guide than the tour. and then walk with the tour guide in the rain and tease each other, and have him playfully shove you, and check him with your hip in return. and then when you get back to lisbon and he drops you off from his little van he took you out in, go inside and get in bed and cry because he didn’t kiss you. and then cry because it didn’t work with vasa, and he didn’t even have the decency to wait until you left for lisbon to break up with you, even though you haven’t even thoguht about him really in weeks; and then cry because you’re crying, and cry because you’re lonely, and cry because of cyrus, because why not at this point. a smorgasboard of tears and that masturbatory feeling of good pain when you really just say fuck it and let yourself cry, giving yourself to it, really getting into it, curling up around yourself in the fetal position and letting yourself be melodramatic and saying things like “i deserved better, goddamnit!”
why not?
why not believe you deserved better, even if you seriously doubt you’ll ever get what you do deserve?
two days later. donnie is rolling a joint and joking with nikki and jared. “fred didn’t even know what being funny was until he met joelle,” he tells them.
you walk into the living room, squinting as you search for your glasses. “who’s fred?”
everyone bursts out laughing.
fred, you remember, was the name of the tour guide.
you can say i’m too stupid to be properly heartbroken.
you can say, my friend’s family sent me on a $3000 trip to portugal and all i got was this blinding headache.
you can say, my friend’s family sent me on a $3000 trip to portugal and all i got was this burning resentment of the world’s wealth and stupidity.
that’s unfair. you’re being unfair. don’t you know you’re not allowed to say these unfair things? you are supposed to be kinder, more grateful. mollified, at the very least.
but who will mollify themselves for you?
who, in all your years roaming these strange lands, has ever thought to reach the door and hold it wide for you?
stop complaining. put on your eyeliner. wing it. down your glass of vino verde. bark out directions on the cobblestone streets. kiss nikki at midnight. secretly fume that you don’t have anyone to swap spit with. whatever. you’re on a mission. you’re going to a rave and you have a bag of cocaine and you’re not paying for your drinks tonight. you are going to embalm yourself in the moment, the sickeningness of being alive answerable only in the form of house music. so what if nobody you’re with really gets house music? you’ll put them on. you’ll do your best. you’ll do what you can.
get to the rave. realize there is no way in the building from the door you’re standing at. refuse to panic. become agitated even though you do manage to refrain from panicking. tell everybody else, “stop panicking!!!” try the street elevator. try the cable car. try the third corner. try calling the venue. nada. walk thirty-thousand steps up two streets and back another four before you get to some old smoldering white abbey. mutter thank fucking god under your breath. slip inside. quickly realize this place is too crowded for you to even shuffle. well fuck. now how are you going to seduce someone if you don’t even have room for footwork.
say okay. say, i am capable of accepting changes in the plan. say, i need a fucking drink already.
dance.
return, and worry, and fret, and seethe, and rage, and then go to bed at 7pm eastern time. wonder how you got here. wonder how anyone gets anywhere. wonder when you’ll finally kick the writer’s block that’s been lugging you around like a kid on a leash for the last six months. break the leash. resolve to practice sketches every day. practice sketching for two days. sketch the marina in lisbon. sketch the trees in nikki’s backyard. sketch your mind leaking out of your body like a puddle on the floor. stop talking about your brain leaking out of your ears. it’s not cool and nobody knows what you mean. judge yourself for judging everyone else. judge yourself for feeling unhappy with how things have turned out. not just this trip but the entire last three or four rotations around the sun. wonder when it will get easier. wonder when anyone will even give you the space to talk about how difficult it’s been. but do you really need an audience? didn’t we kill the audience already?
didn’t you have to spend the last ten years learning how to even contend with the fact that you might be sometimes wrong?
haven’t you built most of your adult life around the contention that it’s better to be free than always right?
you can be right or you can be free. you can be alone or you can be lonely. you can be angry or you can be dumb.
i’m sorry you haven’t liked living very much, little bird.
you deserved something much more spectacular than that.
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