Friday night
I get second cut from the bar, the first time in a while, and I don’t have my book with me. The guests are loud and I need a minute, so I do my cash out upstairs and I linger, putting my head down on the unfinished wooden desk, undoing my hair, looking at myself in the mirror. When I go down and decide to stay for a drink, a full glass of Alvarinho, and I speak to a friend who’s waiting at the bar, we talk, and I say things I had only said when I was drunk and felt bad about afterward; but they ring true even in my sobriety, so I get drunker. I learned how to shoot tequila here, no salt or lime, just breathing and using the right glass. Do you remember being small? I want to ask him; another friend tells me he goes shooting every month and I should go with him if I want to learn to shoot a gun. I do! I do! I want to shoot a gun! and what do you mean, you didn’t like Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell? and what do you mean, you love me, and I should come by? What do I mean, I love you and I will come by? I take an Uber back home, the driver a little distracted and fast, the Riverway unfurling, the blue shadows of tree and pond forming then dissipating, Nina Simone crooning,
don't try to blow out the sun for me / baby
i'm not asking for what I know can't be…
i’ll keep you happy for the rest of your natural-born days
Saturday morning
And this is the feeling I try to escape when I drink, but it’s a vain feat, so now I try something simpler, to not drink. My eye feels gritty, like I punctured a tiny hole through my white sclera and let all the dust and hair and saliva from the night before seep in. I drink a large iced coffee at the cafe by the T stop, and I read my book and I watch the local news, the Celtics are playing, the Bruins are playing, a high school teacher from Attleboro is excited to bring his kids to TD Garden, a freshman at Northeastern dyed his hair green, the day will be gray, my face will be pale, I throw up in the cafe bathroom. On my way home I smell young lilacs, so I find them for a photo. I lie quietly on the shower; the water hitting my belly and eyelashes; I go to sleep, I don’t know what to wear.
Saturday afternoon
I can only see from one of my eyes, I say to Nikki, as she digs through bins of fabric scraps for a project (the exhibit, she calls it) with the vigor of a child pulling out grass from a park, a little outside of the playground, where other kids are playing politely — for now. I browse through pages of an old museum calendar, and crochet books, picking up Crochet for Babies; the smiling baby wearing a matching hat and blanket blurry from my mishap. I get nervous about art, my lack of making, therefore voiding any need to buy any more art supplies. I pick up old Martha Stewart Livings, and some canvases anyway. I pick out a painting of a foot. A collection of baby blue zines, Pisces Rising: Alchemy for Artists, to lay out on the floor, take a photo, open up, like a sign, like a chuckle from the Universe.
We take edibles but I forget and smoke more. I think about art while peeing, a Chinese foo dog in the bathroom watching me, and I think about my mother, who I haven’t called; her turquoise Chinese foo dogs at an altar in every house we lived in, and when I broke one she was angry, even when we glued the pieces back together, together. My mother is a Pisces Rising and I miss her hands, which look like mine, except browner, closer to the Equator, wrists covered in gold bracelets, seven of them, to count down the days.
Saturday evening
The man I am sleeping with picks me up from the party and goes up to say hi. The man I am sleeping with takes me home to change my sweater and we fuck in my bedroom and after I show him my favorite dresses that don’t fit me anymore. The man I am sleeping with says he’s not in the mood to go out, I am also not in the mood to go out, and I’m high, but not high enough to want to eat anything, but we should get food. And then he mentions gin martinis as a joke, and then I want one. The man I am sleeping with checks my eye and says it looks fine. The man I am sleeping with thinks I am a hoot. The man I am sleeping with gives me back massages every night and it’s so nice — to be touched this way, to be told to take care of my shoulder, my neck, my spine. The man I am sleeping with, I think, would not appreciate being posed in my art. So I will be quiet for at least now.
Sunday morning
I come home with more coffee and a ‘everywhere’ bagel and Emma and I talk on the couch, and then we read in silence. My book: A man who could physically kill me in under a minute is a man who is easy to sleep beside /
A wanderer on this tiny patch of earth. A white moth is resting on the windowsill. A writer is just one person under the stars, one person in a universe, writing about a whole entire universe.
We share a chocolate-covered date filled with cashew butter and quinoa lime crisp. We share the couch. We say we should go outside today. We talk about men. We talk about women. We talk about a party tonight. We talk about hair and California and Zadie Smith; albeit not all in this conversation, but in all the other conversations we have in this room. I will, most likely, leave this apartment at the end of the summer. It’s the last apartment in the building that hasn’t been renovated — I have seen how the dark wood trim around the doorways gets plastered up in white, omitting the details of its age. I have seen how the pantry wall will be taken down, and the fridge will be put in a place that makes more sense. I have seen that my room isn’t intended to be a bedroom, so I feel bad when I have sex and my neighbors can hear me while they watch television. I have an interview in an hour, so I shower, and I log into Zoom, with wet hair and a lapis lazuli pendant tucked away in my chest. What did you mean by, trying to find God in a drink, asked the interviewer, for my first question. That’s not what I thought you meant, he says after I answer. And my neighbors probably heard that too.
Sunday afternoon
So we eat and then go outside for smoothies and a walk around the pond. It’s too cold for muskrats, it’s too cold for us, but we look at lichen around the trees and then the trees themselves, their barks like brushstrokes of grey, black lining of dirt. I take a photo of flowers tied to a car, I can’t tell if the flowers are artificial. I take a photo of Emma holding fake porridge garnished with fake blueberries. I take a photo of a green bush and a blooming pink tree. We think we hear a cat in distress but it could just be the birds. We see cardinals playing out the front lawn of a house. The red ones are male, the females are gray and brown. I know this from house-sitting when the cardinals would appear to me in the backyard, and the cat and I would watch as they played with their reflections coming off a mirrored wind chime left behind on a tree. And one day only one showed up, and I panicked, and it was the day the cat killed a baby rabbit I befriended one dewy morning I sat outside, wrapped in a blanket, drinking tomato juice. I want to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and maybe some kind of herb, and maybe some perennial flowers. We pick up soil, seeds, and containers from the hardware store. We pick up a ball for our cat, who doesn’t get to go outside but should still practice killing.
Sunday evening
On our walk back I tell Emma about the lilacs, how they will bloom in the next few weeks, how they’re my favorite, and I steal them from rich neighbors’ yards. I love them so much I write poems about them; the last one written in a summer when I couldn’t afford deodorant, and I smelled like myself and the man I used to know, with perpetual dirt underneath his fingernails, and I let him touch the inside of me with those fingernails because I loved him, and I think it made my biome stronger. My eye feels better now, but I will take a nap in my contacts. I start my garden in the balcony off my room, using my hands to scoop dirt into the planters and I don’t wash off after, not until I text my friend telling him I won’t make it to the party tonight. My tomato seed packet gets blown off from my work space onto the front lawn so I walk down to recover it and find mementos leftover from my neighbor’s kid, who is back with his mother now, a paper monkey, foam stickers of dolphins, some beads. My dad used to have a tomato farm and I would run through the vines and help him pick tomatoes and eat them with my small child's hands. My dad had a black lab named Nico, who died out on the farm, when he talks about his death I hear his sadness. My dad had a red pickup truck with a cassette player and he played me Tracy Chapman, whose voice confused me with its genderless contralto, a beautiful and sad sound I still play and think of the farm, and now Harvard Square, where she used to busk. I think about buying tobacco in Harvard Square with the man with dirt underneath his fingernails from his own tomato-growing, I think about not seeing him or smoking cigarettes anymore, not drinking, reducing my vices. I think about my voice, singing alongside Etta James in the car of the man I am sleeping with now, he says I have a good voice, but I think it’s uncontrolled and not that strong, just loud. I lie in bed and think about this for a while, knowing that my planned party outfit is good, and it shouldn’t go to waste, so I eat a bowl of pasta and fluff my hair, I was always going to go to the party, I just needed to be coaxed out.
This week I finally got Alphabetical Diaries by Shelia Heti from the library, which is the book I quoted in this piece. The song quoted is That’s All I Ask by Nina Simone.
✿ I also read this article by the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard’s plant propagator, John H. Alexander III, about collecting fragrance data from lilacs in the 80s, with only two “sniff” volunteers and a high-speed computer.
✿ I started rewatching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has led me down a Internet rabbit hole of old movie premiere photos/awards show videos from the early aughts. This one from 2003, of Andy Serkis accepting best "‘Virtual Performance” at the MTV Movie Awards made me nostalgic for a time when nothing was ever taken so seriously.
✿ While starting my garden I listened to I Need to Start a Garden by Haley Heynderickx because I am cheeky and coy. Thank you to Emma for starting to sing, “I need to start a GARDEN!” as she carried my garden stuff upstairs. I recommend listening to this one like one long song.
✿I also really have been loving revisiting Lana del Rey’s Nectar of the Gods, which kills me every time, with lines like:
i get wild and fucking crazy, like the color blue / what sweet world is this? / honey on the vine
which reminds me of Maggie Nelson, kissing, and summer.
Til the next <3
-gabito