nothing romantic, nothing revealed
stranger to self and other
in the spirit of staying faithful to my string of impulsive decisions (you're going to laugh — i spent $5.65 at Starbucks, and then, still being hungry post-latte, i very boldly spent another $5.25 at Breka. it's incredibly out of character for me) i'm writing without having anything well-developed or substantial to say. i need to be careful not to turn this page into a product. i am despite myself still vulnerable to the calling of the publication of worthwhile ideas, the issue being that most of the time i don't have any worthwhile ideas; most of the time i'm anxious about the same two things over and over again.
a kind stranger took their backpack off the seat across from them and asked if i wanted to share the dinky little round table, so given the unexpected environmental affordance i'm writing instead of going straight home after a downtown appointment. i have a free evening and too much of myself spread thin across components of my life that don't entirely belong to me, and it feels good to be selfishly reclamatory — to say nothing of substance. take that, high and mighty writerly identity. the stringing together of words to form linguistically cogent sentences. i'm going to press publish to my audience of 45-odd eager readers expecting some profound insight about my slice of life and finding instead that the teenager is feeling verbose and petulant at the West Hastings Breka. this one isn't going into the creative writing portfolio.
this isn't a satirization of the Substack aesthetic, it's just me. so what if identity is molded by my environment. so what if i'm a Substack girlie and not entirely out of choice. a year and a half ago i was still enamoured by the aesthetic of reading Plato (who was i), but it's a lot less beautiful to actually be reading Plato, and to be constantly doubting your reading comprehension and then also whether you're referencing him accurately in conversation. maybe one day, but i doubt it — ideas make my head hurt. the ideation mechanism is too close to the rumination one. it's the most interesting part of being alive and the most frustrating, but part of me doesn't even want to give it the luxury of the former clause. is it really so interesting that i am nineteen and wish for a lobotomy on a bidaily basis? that's like, every third kid on the street with enough self-awareness to realize how fucked it is to be a kid. in true Substack aesthetic fashion i too romanticize being old. i wish to be forty and unburdened with angst, i wish to be a goat farmer or a barista in some chic European town, most likely i will graduate into an accelerationist economy and try really hard to chase the feeling of contributing to something intrinsically meaningful which is to say become a middle school teacher in an effort to mitigate the siphoning of intuitive human connection spearheaded by the excitable Elon attitude and the shoddily regulated AI explosion (i'm not well-read on this and i don't want to fight about it but the vibes are not good). Annie, i apologize in advance — it writes like Mary Oliver now:
i wish for children, that one's new: an uncomplicated, unidirectional, intuitive and biologically facilitated love. i know i'm skipping a few steps. being twenty-seven is probably pretty great too. being twenty-two is probably pretty great too. in theory i'm looking forward to all of it. in practice i'm really tired and would have a good cry if there were something to cry about.
in Ariella Garmaise's profile on Rayne Fisher-Quann, Rayne talks about how "nothing she writes is particularly revealing. In 'home for the holidays', for example, she offers meditations on grief without ever naming who it is she is grieving. You get the refraction of a feeling without any identifying details—a reference to a boyfriend here, allusions to trauma there". i'm walking the same line. i doodle outlines of angst without properly filling them in. let them speculate! it's more poetic without the details, anyway, more poetic to float the vague concepts of identity formation and existential dread and accommodation vs. assimilation, more Substack-aesthetic to integrate your experiences into the universal canon than to spell out the specific pains of every interpersonal relationship and personal struggle. i'll give you one: i never wake up in time to properly style myself so i’ve worn the same pair of sweatpants like six times in the past two weeks. that isn't a commentary on coming of age or adulting or a contribution to the tortured artist image, it’s just being chronically sleep-deprived (still!), which is also extremely unglamorous and more attributable to Mark Zuckerberg and functional freeze than mysterious creative contemplation. life has been so unromantic lately. i don't want to misconstrue myself.
in any case i'm tired of wanting to be known. i think intentionality is overrated — the pining and reaching and yearning for comprehensiveness, the We're Not Really Strangers, the psychoanalytic neuroses about unearthing upbringings and contextualizing every long-departed interlocutor who has used your body as the sheathe for a blade — it's all true, okay? look, yes, i'm bleeding and i'm bleeding all over you. no, i don't need an ambulance. i mean, i do, but if it were that easy i'd have called one by now. it's all true, let's move on. we are both wholly individuated and also not that interesting on a profound, abstract level. every conversation is an echo of one i've had before, every idea recycled from a patented lineage of reactionary cognition. we commune with a higher plane of ideas along all-too-well-trodden paths. the kind stranger in question and i have, in between the paragraph of first mention and now, been cursorily acquainted. we agreed on how these days there are too many leaders in the world relative to good followers (an echo) and people shouldn't try to force themselves into roles that aren't in their nature. i didn't ask them what they thought of human nature even though i felt the familiar opportunistic impulse from an older version. i don't even know what i think of human nature. what, really, does it say about me one way or another?
the kind stranger cracks their neck with both hands like i do, the way that looks kind of suicidal. they say "and" followed by a pause when they segue conversation topics in an effort to keep it going. "and, what are you studying?" "and, do you have any siblings?". it's kind of cute how i can see it coming every time there's a slightly prolonged silence, an undercurrent of anxiety underneath, the benign kind that drives many a functional social interaction. it was an energizing exchange, but relational investment is thorny, and i’ve already lost so much blood. i don't really ever want to see them again.
CHAT GPT IS COMING FOR MY JOB???????