Hello! Welcome back to fotocopy. I hope the New Year has been gracious and kind to you all. A million-billion and one thank yous for reading, telling your friends, and subscribing to my project. I’m back now after more than a month away, which wasn’t that restful, if I am honest (I was disgustingly sick with whatever winter bug we were blessed with this year, and I was also very broke), and it made me miss writing weekly.
What I’ve been doing: I wore blue eyeshadow for the new year and drank too many badly-mixed cocktails at our local dive, never finishing them. I left them lined on the table, all five stalled at the same midway point. When I woke up in my dress I didn’t shower, which feels like progress: when I was younger I watched my father shower three times a day, which I now understand as compulsion. I got sick on the fourth day of the year, it crept into my bones and lower back as A and I wandered Harvard Square, the tobacco shop, the bookstore, JP Licks. We went to his apartment and I didn’t leave for a week, restless and dizzy from sickness, watching movies and eating the chili we made on my last healthy night. I cried when he massaged my back and hips from how painful it was. How much pain was from my cold, and how much pain was residual from everything else, I’ll never know, but it melted off my muscles like golden butter residue left on a knife.
Less sick, I watched my hands get illuminated by the changing sun, and I shoveled snow. I wore a fur coat I’m scared I ruined, salting the sidewalk and creating a path as the kids left school and were walked back home to their parents. I took a lot of edibles and charged my phone. I left Instagram and got addicted to Reddit. The world was bleaker on there, so I deleted that too. We did the crossword in bed and then we had sex. Or maybe we had sex and then did the crossword. I can’t remember our order of events, just the yellow light on our skin in the morning, paler skin lately, and my mother’s hands reflected onto me. I called my mother, and I ignored her calls. I looked out to the frozen Charles as A drove me to work, on Reddit they said some MIT kids were walking on the Charles, and people on Reddit were (surprise, surprise) angry. I know it’s dumb, but I wonder what it would be like to walk the Charles, at night, nothing around me but the deceiving ice. I would bring ice skates and a sleeping tent. The helicopters would come to get me in the morning, and I’d make the front page of r/boston, r/cambridge r/stupid r/fool and r/what r/is r/wrongwithher. Most nights, I woke up at around three am and read the news. I slept in late, waking up to wash dishes, rearrange the living room, go thrifting for my costuming work. I thought a lot about the right colors, the right fabric, the right measurements. High on an edible, I went to Men’s Wearhouse with A for his suit fitting, and I touched all the bowties, impressed by the singular Edwardian designs, velvet colors, and packaged quirk. A is in the wedding party, and I have been invited as a witness, and that feels very grown up.
In February, I tweezed my eyebrows with precision, I washed my hair, I thought about cleanliness and sobriety and a good night’s sleep. I thought about desire. Once my desire loomed on empty and wet Somerville streets, where I was on the drunken way to knock on a door, only to have the elusive figure behind it refuse to let me in, so I sat down on those wet streets, myself wet and defeated, staring at the greasy asphalt until I had no choice but to call it: my Uber of shame across the Charles. Desire now is a softer animal, an animal regardless, but tamed and rewarded anytime it purrs or snarls, showing its teeth. It’s a warmer existence, a safer existence, happier on the brisk cold and snowy walk back home, holding a hand that will always feed it, open the door, and rub its back and nose. Desire is nothing compared to a bigger beast, Happiness, which is the color of smoke against a February snow, illuminated by abandoned streetlights. The night felt like a salve.
A salve, repeating to myself as I wash and refill the old cat’s drinking glassware with fresh charcoal-filtered water in the morning from a glass pitcher: my body is a bell. My existence nowadays lingers towards non-existent, I only am known by the friends I work with late into the night, talking til six in the morning, a single glass of wine in hand. The friends I bump into at any particular square on the way to the gym, the post office, or the Goodwill. The man that sleeps next to me, no matter how strange the house. The neighbor next to the strange house, the old cat, doesn’t hear my hand and is startled by my touch. Otherwise, my body remains silent — out of touch, not for sale, consumption, alteration, devourment, fabrication, judgment, alliance, or appreciation. This has been in process for a long year now; I took bits of myself away, and if people noticed, they barely made a hoot, and that felt like peace. My brain felt clearer and bigger, yet smaller. I could identify a shadow of a white moth floating above the sidewalk, but I still couldn’t fathom how quick I am to belong and then not — be a person today and a piece of tree bark in my next life, assuming I karmically get it right now. A texts me an asteroid could hit us in lucky-number-seven years, by then I hope we will share a last name and possibly own a house and have children to populate the rooms of that house, inherit some Persian rugs from his parents to warm our toes in that house, as we have breakfast and the asteroid hits; I will make sure we all will be making faces at each other to distract from the fire or maybe the great big wave from the Atlantic, coming to crush us into the tiniest fractions of beings we could possibly be: the feathery wing of a white moth, the milky cataract glow of an almost-blind old cat. This is what I think about, no longer real on the Internet, and I feel better.
Do not think I am brash in my greyness (blueness?) conspiring in me due to the cracking of the trees by thick wind, the kind of air that sways the house. What I am doing to refill my body as a bell with shiny silvered noise: when the noise exists, I am fully present in its company. I keep my wool slippers handy next to my bed. I sniff the old cat’s head, which smells like the inside of an old honey jar, familiar, bygone sweetness. I hug you deeply. At a coffee shop, I wrote across two pages of a notebook: 2025 MANIFESTO, embroidering my goals in thickly drawn stars. I text my friends to come to shows with me, ask how they are and if they want to chat on the phone soon, go to dinner, or come over and sit next to the old cat and sniff her head. I cut strawberries in fours to eat in small white bowls with our hands. I shovel snow and salt, a pathway for small children and neighbors unknown. I salt my wounds in the middle of the night and gauze them in the morning. I take off blue eyeshadow and opt for a shimmery olive green. I sink my ass, knees, chest, and face into the warm water of a deep bathtub and wash my hair this way. I graze the outskirts of the Internet for Sanskrit chants and Lady Gaga music videos, The Sopranos lore.
I present you these things, an offering, to bring us closer — your needle, my thread.
Thank you for reading!1 I am so happy to be back. I was delayed in my return because my brain felt like mush all of January/most of February until one day I woke up and could properly think again. I do feel like not writing was adding to the mushiness, so what I learned during my summer vacation away from fotocopy was how integral a creative schedule is for my wellness and my practice. I think for the sake of my other creative goals this week (painting again, learning to make my own clothes, writing a chapbook!) fotocopy will continue bi-weekly, with a few extra issues peppered in now and then. I’m so happy to be back, happy enough that it bears repeating. Thank you for not unsubscribing (lol), and like always, tell your friends to subscribe!!
I feel like I over-consumed television and movies while I was sick and holed up at A’s house, but my favorite movies that we watched together was The Shape of Water, which I didn’t like the first time I saw it back in 2017 (I’m sorry), Conclave, and Interstellar. I think I understood Interstellar perfectly, which is a toxic trait I have, much like thinking I could pass the LSAT with minimal studying. I watched The Substance and The Piano Teacher alone with A walking in at the most deranged moments and watched Anora with Nora (hehe), which was probably my favorite movie of these past two months. Demi Moore will probably win the Oscar, and it’s well deserved, but in my heart, Mikey Madison reigns the winner. I’m also watching The Sopranos for the first time right now, and I am obsessed with Carmela’s jewelry stories, especially her Christian Tse diamond and platinum mesh necklace I can only dream about.
When my brain learned how to understand sentences again, I read Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History with Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell. I learned that eels are the coolest fish ever, and I was right to be obsessed with them. I also read Lifeform by Jenny Slate, which simultaneously scared and endeared me. I have to credit Slate for inspiring me to finish this piece with her work, especially the essay The Swan.
I am currently listening to FKA Twigs’s Eusexua, the new Tennis single, and my playlist 🌀bject permanence, which I created in 2020 to commemorate the Golden Age of Indie Music. The caption I wrote for it: “one day all the songs we know will be b-sides.”
Here is a photo of Belle/Belly/Bellanor - a sweet old lady in my care for the next two weeks.
Til the very next, which will be very soon, and with love,
-Gabo
For the new year, I’ve renamed my thank you/recommendations section of fotocopy as “Some Dessert,” inspired by Ali, who said reading the ending was like getting dessert after I expressed disillusion with it. Thank you for lifting me to the upmost heights when I need it the most. I love you <3
The cake photo I found via Pinterest and was made into a graphic by me.