I. Love Island
I had all these ideas in my head, but they’ve been drowned out by Love Island. I love Love Island. I love repeating oh naur back to the contestants, all younger than me, fitter than me, bolder than me. My brain sizzles watching them — the way their mouths move under the Botox, the eye-color changing surgery, the men’s tattoos, all different versions of the same symbols of masculinity (wolves, lions), wealth (clocks), freedom (Martin Luther King Jr.), love (roses, surrounding the Martin Luther King Jr.). These are all things promised in Love Island. I love Love Island. Instead of writing, reading, cleaning, showering, or packing I read about Love Island. The world is easier on Love Island, except when my hair is distractedly greasy and I have to pause my laptop to go wash it, and in the shower, I am reacquainted with my body, my skin, my smell. In the mirror, I can see how the dark spots on my face have faded and the wrinkles barely an embroidered line on this face — the vessel for my transmission of Love Island. I comb out my hair and fall asleep, my face has exhausted me. But tomorrow I will not look in the mirror — I will watch instead.
Coat it in beauty, sun, oblivion, or it’ll become a mirror. A hungry mirror whose reflection startles you — catches you when
Zane says he doesn’t feel a connection to Kaylah who is in the dark waiting for him to pick her at the fire pit
Sophie, sly smiling, knowing (what do these poor souls know) that Zane will pick her after the night they had at Hotel Amor
Hotel Amor is not named after the Spanish word for Love, they joke, it’s named for more more more
More — then, what pain when Zane doesn’t pick Sophie but rather picks Kaylah only to then break up with Kaylah and then shake his
big dumb head no, when Sophie, trying to compose herself not let it break through, on television, asking yet again big things of a small man when she deep down knows the answers, given to her before, same plate
how disappointed she is again to let herself known to a bad (big dumb) man — who it didn’t matter to, twist on Kaylah twist on Sophie
and now he is left purely alone, his natural state
how he must secretly think he is meant to be —
I can’t watch anymore Love Island.
II. Malls
We went to the mall, and I hated my outfit and my greasy hair, and I wore the wrong shoes. I bought something off the makeup counter in Macy’s, I felt sixteen, like my mom dropped me off at the mall to hang out with a boy, only she didn’t know I was hanging out with a boy, and my friends were on standby in case my mom called their moms — they were also at the mall, separate from me, hanging in different stores. I haven’t shopped at a mall for a long time, so I forgot how to do it, everything is too blurry and folded to look straight through fabrics and sizes and fitting rooms where you can actually take your clothes off and stare into a mirror. I had a lot to buy but was distracted by all the mirrors in the stores I peeked at, my greasy hair disgusting me but my skin looked amazing. Lately I am so obsessed with my skin, what peels off and what pops from —lately my leg hair is long and so are my fingernails, to hear the click click click of the purchases I make instead, online. What was it like, A asks me, to be a child? Well, I used to go to the mall with my mom and we would walk through the shoe department at Dillard’s and then The Limited and I would always go into Gilly Hicks to buy lacy little underwear even though no one was looking at my lacy little underwear. One of the first times I knew I was pretty was outside the Gilly Hicks when the girls followed me outside and asked me if I ever wanted to model, but I wasn’t old enough yet and I don’t think I wanted to. That was the same year we took my dog to the mall to get our photo taken with Santa, a weird whim my mom had, even though we didn’t celebrate Christmas. I hadn’t thought about that photo until right now. I have no idea what I would buy at malls, mostly would steal jewelry from Forever 21, it was easy enough — you slip the rings on your fingers and walk through the store ripping the tags off until its just tiny white shards, almost like toilet paper, in your hoodie pocket. What was it like to be a child? My parents never asked me where any of my stuff came from. I think they assumed I was a good kid with generous friends.
At the mall food court, we ate teriyaki chicken, and I had some bites of McDonald’s and then we read that Luigi Mangione had been arrested at a McDonald’s and I felt guilty. I didn’t feel like participating in this American pastime anymore. But we walked to the empty side of the mall where more emptiness lay out in front of us: storefronts, candles, ornaments, the rush of the people. I wanted to sleep on that dirty green carpet. Finding our way back to the car, the mall felt small and closed in, only a few people left, my hair even greasier than it was in the morning — all those little shards of mall particles mixed in with my scalp and sweat, the anxiety of Holiday Shopping, of a revolution, of a gluttonous stomach. When we left the parking garage, it was raining, much too wet and loud for Spotify so we put on the classical radio station to soundtrack the rain and the silence, and we held hands. What does it feel like to be a child? I remember the Miami storms and that year when cars were falling into canals, so my dad bought a car window hammer for my mom’s car, that was the only God-like salvation I felt close to when we drove back from the mall in the rain, following the canal.
III. Mountain Lion
God made the mountain lion cross the ten-lane freeway into Griffith Park, and then Man wrote a short novel, which I read on a welcomed Love Island recess in bed all in one sitting. God gives the mountain lion ten years in the park; God lets the lion’s father bared his fangs in anger, leading the lion into a name and some sort of love, perhaps a love he couldn’t understand but could survive in. Los Angeles loved their lion and mourned their lion when he was euthanized on December 17, 2022. My brain quiets enough to let my body cry for the lion. I cry into the lion tattooed on A’s shoulder, the Persian Lion — once revered as many in the land and now only two exist in Iran, a male and female, locked in the Tehran Zoo. The mountain lion once killed and ate a koala from the LA Zoo and was spared, forgiven for being an animal. Better cages were built instead.
When the mountain lion died, parts of its remains were frozen and kept at the Natural History Museum of LA County until March 4th of last year, when he was finally given a proper and private Indigenous burial. A red-tailed hawk called him back to his ancestral lands. I like to think he is not hungry and fucking a lot in another, better world.
Epilogue
What decides what is a natural state, the cage or the mountain? The brain or the body? Is the fog of the sage smoke or the smoke of the screen, consuming my thoughts and my search history? I want to sleep as the green mall carpet shifts into a patch of open field, away from the little hunger living in my eyes.
My dog — the one that rests on the lap of an unknown Santa in a makeshift family photo, does she roam free now alongside the red hawk transcending onto the new world, where the mountain lion’s paws beat the earth softly? Or does she sit on the couch, like she used to, understanding Love Island for what it is: a sick human experiment into our souls, remembering some pain stored elsewhere — an animalistic urge in animalistic bodies, to rage and hurt and cry and yearn for beyond both bared fangs and warm embrace?
This last piece was inspired by Open Throat by Henry Hoke, which I read in one sitting in an attempt to quell my brain. It’s one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. This was probably the first time in fotocopy history that my head felt empty when thinking about writing this issue. I could only write once I was in my room, alone and silent. Consider this a very rudimentary first draft of something I hope to develop later.
While editing this I listened to Weyes Blood’s full discography, especially And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, and her 2016 album, Front Row Seat to Earth. She has the best album titles and I love reading her interviews. I also played Cat Le Bon and Group Listening’s Here It Comes Again album. It was the only thing my brain could absorb in a meaningful matter.
The season of Love Island I am watching is season 6, Australia. Watching Love Island has become a test of discipline for me, and I failed this week. That being said, Mimi forever!!
P-22, the puma that lived in Griffith Park for roughly ten years, is the lion both Hoke and I refer to in our writings. Reading about his life made my heart hurt and made me feel the smallness of being human. I love him and hope he has found true peace in his final resting place.
I’m also into long fingernails, sleeping through my alarm, and tuning in every Sunday to watch what I call my telenovela.
looooooooveeeeeeee love love, and see you Monday
-Gabo