A psychic once told me our greatest experiences

are in the spontaneities of others. Does this include

the anniversary effect? When our knees were brushing

on the couch of someone’s rental and my resolve was

sinking and all I could muster were the lyrics to

Pale Blue Eyes? I was suspended in the menagerie

of you and your love for Lou Reed, when I saw the thing.

I saw it stuffed in the corner. It was either midnight

or 3:00am. It was either real or it wasn’t. I think it was

real because I fail to pin it down. I think it was doomed

because of the crooked lamp. You won’t ever admit it

but you see the shape, right? Do you know how many candles

have been blown out since? It’s like watching circles

attempt themselves into triangles. That’s what we were—

that night and every night thereafter—a tongue to

a missing tooth. And now the psychic is not where she

said she would be, and though the hollow-eyed deity

fled years ago, the angels are still losing their wings.

AND IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE JUNE CAME RUNNING WHEN I REALIZED MY ARMS WERE CROSSED. WHEN I COULD NOT REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I THOUGHT FAST BUT THAT IT WAS PROBABLY JUST ANOTHER HUMID AFTERNOON. NOW I AM MET WITH THIS TERRIBLY CLICHÉ FEELING THAT I AM ABOUT TO CHANGE AND FOR THE BETTER.

OH GOD.

HOW TITILLATING IT IS TO TAKE THE PHONE OFF THE HOOK.

I THINK JUNE HAS SUSPECTED ME FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. I THINK THE CITY GROWING CLOSER HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH IT—WITH WANTING TO BE IN THE ROOMS I AM ACTUALLY IN, ON THE TRAINS I AM ACTUALLY ON, INSIDE THE DAYS I AM ACTUALLY LIVING. AND I AM NOT SAYING I WAS NEVER ALIVE NOR DEAD BUT PERHAPS A STALE STAR FLOATING THROUGH THE ETHER.

BUT NOW IT SEEMS NOBLE ENOUGH AND SO I REALLY WOULD LIKE TO GO—

I WANT TO COME IN HOT AND FRESH AND BEAUTIFUL. THE WAY A WINDOW LEFT OPEN DURING A STORM IS BEAUTIFUL. THE WAY GRASS STAINS ON BALLET TIGHTS ARE BEAUTIFUL. THE FAST THINKING RETURNING LIKE BLOOD TO A SLEEPING LIMB. I CAN BE MY OWN CAN OF WORMS.

I CAN EAT IT ALL.

THERE ARE SPIRITS DECOMPOSING AND REINCARNATING RIGHT THERE IN THE WET DIRT. WHICH IS TO SAY THE WORMS KNEW. WHICH IS TO SAY THE TREES HAVE BEEN COMMUNICATING AND I AM ENVIOUS OF THEIR DISCRETION. AND SO WHAT CAN THE MOUTH DO BUT BECOME COMPOST? BECOME SOIL FOR WHATEVER SEEDS I HOLD IN MY TEETH? IT IS INEVITABLE BECAUSE JUNE PROMISED.

AND THE BODY PROMISED BEFORE JUNE.

AND THE CROSSED ARMS PROMISED IN THEIR UNCROSSING.

AND THE ETHER PROMISED WHEN RELEASING ITS STALE STAR BACK INTO ORBIT.

FINALLY.

A GLIMPSE CAUGHT THROUGH THE CONDENSATION.

FINALLY.

EVERYTHING I DIDN’T KNOW

LOVE HAS TOLD ME.

It kisses me with chapped lips and feels like Indian burn.

I swear I could cry at the drop of a hat.

Where have the words gone?

First, I have to believe things are simple.

What is simple?

Forgiveness without resentment.

The elixir of spring.

A new self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sometimes I think I am a blind and unfeeling instrument of my own torture, looking at life and seeing it not, or it looking at me and choosing me not, and having no choice but to accept and ask not.

As if I am so easily satisfied?

Suppose I have been following March’s ritual a little too closely, of almost changing, of teasing relief, of thinking only as a noun when I ought to be thinking like a verb.

I see simplicity like fake spring and you see simplicity like a pair of underwear, and it makes me love you even more than I did yesterday.

It makes me think back to sixth grade algebra, to the exact moment when I learned two negatives make a positive.

Green lights were still green back then.

Now all I see is red.

She aches just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl

What is simple?

Maybe Hell is easy to freeze and we’re all too depressed to fuck, but what do we really know about the world we ignore?

I feel like lint on God’s lapel.

I think I have accidentally become spiritually recluse.

Why did I trust my opinions more when they were slightly undercooked?

No one wants a burnt cookie or a steak too well-done, and when I have nothing to say curdles into shut the fuck up. Except now all I do is wait and wait and wait and for what?

Chapped lips.

A languid bleed.

An almost and definitely not.

I let everyone else concoct the recipe first, as if they have never burned a meal in their entire life. And in that waiting waiting, what do you think hardens? Certainly not the meal.

Please don’t let on that you knew me when / I was hungry and it was your world

If I can’t consume reality then I want reality to consume me.

Yes it will come to this.

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I put my hands to the warm air in disbelief. It is 63 degrees in New York and I am sweating in my leather jacket. I do not remove it on principle. I WANT TO SWEAT. I want the sun to lower itself enough to kiss me on the mouth. I’m listening to Caroline Polachek. Nothing else matters.

I had an epiphany not too long ago that I have been, for quite some time, living peripherally. If you’ve been here for a bit you might have noticed I am prone to words like “contradiction” and “juxtaposition” and essentially anything that generates a push and pull effect. I am drawn to these because I was a timid child with an unruly demeanor. I could poke and prod at anything I wanted—and often did—until it revealed itself to me. Then I would run. I would run the distance until I was no longer being chased. Then I would run back and ask why it stopped chasing me. It was a good epiphany, if there is such a thing as a bad one(?) But if we’re talking contradictions, I am now opposed to almost every little familiarity. I think this as a good thing too.

+

In three months I will be thirty. I think about it, I don’t think about it. When I think about it, I think of Joan Didion writing: It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. When I think about it, I think of watching my ex-boyfriend turn thirty. I was twenty-three then and very clearly remember feeling how young I was compared to how old he was. In hindsight, it wasn’t so black and white, but at the time it suggested certain doors were now closed and permanently locked. It suggested that time was not as abstract as I had been treating it and that I was perhaps measuring him against a clock I had only just begun hearing.

+

Suddenly the ticking was everywhere. Suddenly I was no longer twenty-three but twenty-five, and then twenty-seven, and then in the back of a cab going nowhere fast. What I recognize most is not youth but elasticity. Even when the rubber band snapped, I told myself it was only a sting. I could still poke and prod and stretch and bend and run and keep running. Everything would repeat. I grew fond of the clock. It did not yet feel scary or problematic. When it did, I chose to ignore it because you can do that in your twenties! And yet, in those transitory moments I often wondered about my ex and if he felt wiser, if he feared the clock, if he still remembered my birthday. How long would it take to forget each other’s birthdays? Do we ever forget? I wondered in different cabs, with different men, different ignorances, always with the same minor chord. There are roughly eight and a half million people in New York City, how silly to think of the past.

+

After we broke up, I was in a very Antithetical™ part of my life. I wanted everything he wasn’t. I wanted nothing of what I was. Both the clock and the city accommodated my logic. Everything glimmered and paused and rewound and fast-forwarded and I got whiplash from every angle of every possibility. It did not matter that I had the same friends, same job, same routine—everything was different. It was the year I accidentally brushed shoulders with David Schwimmer. It was the year I regretted not shouting PIVOT! immediately after (leave me alone). It was the same year I was always a beat behind myself, and more underground than above. When I was briefly above ground, I would be miles from the city on a beach. One time I had fallen asleep and woke up two hours later with third-degree burns on my forehead. The rubber band had snapped in a way, but I didn’t care. My hair was the longest it had ever been and the burn eventually turned to tan. My life was officially mine in a way that suggested there was no such thing as South. I entered a revolving door at twenty-three and came out a good deal older and on a different street. This could only happen for someone who had been—surprise!—living peripherally.

+

When you spend enough time with certain people, you slowly adopt their habits. Good, bad, doesn’t matter. This did not make me immune to complications—precisely the opposite. I was a girl who fancied herself a “woman,” who claimed “moral enlightenment” following a break-up, who tricked herself into believing she was “untethered,” who not only “followed the wind” but “controlled it”. I developed a fear for the clock but I did not yet consider myself in the equation… until I began considering myself in the equation. Fuck. How tragic it was to learn my emotional balance was not as high as I once revered. How tragic that friends could be as fair-weather as lovers. It was antithetical in that I was the furthest from untethered. The clock wasn’t lightening up, I just tried Very Hard Not to Care.

+

I have now returned to this very Antithetical place. Though maybe it has returned to me, or maybe I never left, but much has changed. I am no longer living underground. I have since healed from my third-degree burns. I have changed my hair a dozen times and the South very much exists. I am explaining this all, rather chaotically, to one of my best friends in a thrift store with aisles no wider than four inches. Moments ago she asked, “What’s new?” And I responded, in a Vito Corleone accent, “You ask me this at a very antithetical point in my life.” She knows me well enough to know what I mean, but I tell her anyway: It is easy to see the beginning of things and harder to see the ends. But when I don’t think about it, I don’t see beginning or end; I see myself as I am now—reaching for an apex I am both hesitant and desperate to touch. My twenties are almost obsolete but I am not sad. Decades are as the seasons. While necessary, I am happiest watching them change.

Sometime last week (or last year, who knows) I went to the Brooklyn Museum expecting to be bulldozed with impetus. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen and now I’m out $25. This is okay though because I am able to self-rationalize through girl logic. For example, I am out $25 but I didn’t have to carry my trench coat through the museum. I am out $25 but as a patron for what I so passionately revere. I am out $25, but my shaken espresso was perfectly rationed and I got a free donut to boot. “Did you know David Lynch was a Dunkin’ loyalist?” I text a friend. “No but now I know you won’t ever let that go.” Correct. I tend to prioritize shrewd commentary towards anyone and everyone in my life who criticizes my Dunkin’ love affair. I do this through accidental occasionally on purpose discovery. By accidental, I mean I did not Google what kind of coffee David Lynch drank. Someone who knows someone who knows a prominent musician used Lynch’s house studio to record an album in 2017. One morning, said musician snuck into David Lynch’s kitchen and “to great surprise” discovered Dunkin’ Donuts capsule coffee exclusively. There was emphasis on the surprise but I was not surprised. Everybody hates Dunkin’. Everybody except one of the greatest artists of our lifetime—and David Lynch.

The only reason I didn’t mind being out $25 was because I could finally see the sidewalks. And yet, I was foolish to assume we were on the precipice of spring. This city coquettes at least a dozen times before spring actually comes. Now, I am once again digging for my consciousness under fifty feet of snow. I am thinking that I have peered into more fermented eyes this month than ever before. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, behind the blue light. In fact, I wish I didn’t know how to tell time. I don’t want the obligation of tracking my mortality anymore. No, I want to forget the common fate. I want the world to renounce technology forever forever forever. I want the flowers to tell knock-knock jokes. I want to see flowers beyond their flower coolers. I want the blizzard to leave my mind. I want Jim Morrison to keep calling me poppet. I want two quarters to make a dollar. I miss the sidewalks. I want to see the silly little sidewalks of New York. I want to place the Northeast under a prodigious hair dryer. I want to sweat profusely. I want to stop staring and crumpling and burning various pieces of paper because I am MAD at winter. I want to yap my soul to the devil and I want you to call me. Call me now.

IF YOU SEE ME PLEASE DO NOT FOLLOW I AM TOO BUSY
LITTERING THE WORLD WITH MY DNA IT IS NOTHING PERSONAL, FRANKLY I AM JUST BORED OF DRUNKEN PIGEONS BANGING
ON THE GLASS OF MY PSYCHE IT’S ALL IN POOR TASTE, THE TAX
WE PAY FOR CONSCIOUSNESS LIKE OH, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’RE ALIVE! BUT YOU’RE ALSO FORBIDDEN TO PASS GO AND COLLECT $200
JUST BECAUSE WE SAID SO! DON’T YOU KNOW EMPATHY IS DEAD?
(NO) DEAD (NO) DEAD (NO) YOU CAN’T GIVE WAY TO THE WRONG ROOM DARLING (NO) YOU MUST FABRICATE SOMETHING OPERATIVE INSTEAD YOU MUST BLOODY YOUR BREAD YOU MUST ONLY THINK ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOU MUST DO IT CONSTANTLY! WHAT ELSE WILL YOU
THINK ABOUT ANYWAY? STRANGERS? (YES) HISTORY? (PLEASE)
GOD? (EH) MAY AS WELL HANG YOUR MORTALITY IN YOUR ENTRY
WAY SINCE THERE IS NO STABLE PRONOUN FOR WHAT COMES NEXT
THE COLLECTIVE IS DRAINING AND THE HORSE IS UNRECOGNIZABLE GOD! JUST LOOK AT THOSE KNUCKLES! THE HANDS OF TIME ARE
SO INSENSITIVE I CAN HARDLY COUNT ON THEM.

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JANUARY IS HERE AND I AM LATE AND I DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT ELSE TO SAY EXCEPT THE BORDEAUX IS TOO HEAVY THE CASHMERE IS PRICKLY AND SOMEWHERE AN ELEPHANT IS BEGGING TO BE ADDRESSED. I CAN’T QUITE RECALL THE SCENT BUT IT REMINDS ME OF BLEACH. OH GOD, CAN YOU FEEL IT?

THE OTHER NIGHT YOU LET THE PASTA BOIL FOR TOO LONG AND NORMALLY THIS WOULD BOTHER ME BUT JANUARY IS HERE SO I GUESS I’M DIFFERENT DIFFERENT DIFFERENT.

BUT ISN’T IT FUNNY? HOW THE EARTH IS SO CONSISTENT IT IS ALMOST TOO CONSISTENT TO FEEL AT ALL? I MEAN ONE DAY YOU’RE FLYING AND THE NEXT YOU’RE DEAD NO WONDER WHY WE LIVE AS IF THIS WORLD WERE BRICK. THE GLASS IS TOO CLEAN.

STILL, I KEEP THE PECULIAR IN EARSHOT AND I DO NOT PUSH IT BECAUSE IT IS DELICATE TOO DELICATE AND REALLY IT WON’T BUDGE UNLESS THE HOUSE IS BURNING AND EVEN THEN MAYBE NOT. I JUST LIKE TO ADMIRE IT.

BUT I CAN’T GET TOO CLOSE. IF I GET TOO CLOSE IT WILL ESCAPE AND I DON’T WANT IT TO ESCAPE. THAT WOULD BE DEVASTATING MOSTLY BECAUSE I’D FEEL COMPELLED TO CHASE IT AND GOD CAN YOU IMAGINE?

SO I KEEP IT NEXT TO A CANDLE WHICH I POURED ON A FRIEND NO BENEFITS AFTER HE JAMMED HIS FINGER IN MY MOUTH MULTIPLE TIMES LIKE EW WHY ARE MEN SO CHEAP AND UNFUNNY? I WANT TO FEED THEM ALL TO THE PIGEONS SINCE BOTH NEVER STOP COOING.

WINTER IS KIND OF AN ENDLESS COO TOO ONE THAT MAKES ME QUESTION WHETHER THIS LIFE IS LIFE AT ALL AND NOT SOME VAST WAITING ROOM—

A WAITING ROOM MADE OF SKIN.

SKIN THAT CANNOT BE BURNED.

SKIN THAT I AM ALWAYS INSIDE INSIDE INSIDE OF.

SUPPOSE I AM DIFFERENT THEN, BECAUSE I WANT TO BE DRAGGED THROUGH IT HAND BY HAND DOT BY DOT. I WANT SOMEONE TO TEACH ME ABOUT FAITH OR VELOCITY OR WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE. PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE.

I ANTICIPATE A TRUISM OR TWO WHICH IS PRETTY COMFORTING. NO ONE SHOULD REALLY LIE ON THEIR DEATH BED SINCE THE CONSEQUENCES ARE ALREADY PARDONED, EXCEPT MAYBE ME I AM THE EXCEPTION. I LIE MORE THAN THE AVERAGE.

IT’S NOT MY FAULT. I JUST BELIEVE LYING IS A WRITER’S SPINE SINCE NO MATTER WHAT YEAR IT IS I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SOMETHING BETWEEN A QUESTION AND A STATEMENT.

BUT I SWEAR I DID POUR CANDLE WAX ON MY FRIEND AND I ASSURE YOU I AM NOT SORRY SO I GUESS DIFFERENCE IS A MATTER OF PERCEPTION. I’LL TRY AGAIN NEXT MONTH.

It’s always winter up there.

*

In my travels between everywhere and nowhere, I have been thinking mostly of Mary Oliver and her poem Wild Geese. Every morning I say to my reflection, “You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Though in my case (and forevermore) it becomes, “write what it writes.” There is no hiding in writing just as there is no crying in baseball. We know this, I say sternly. It is most obvious. Just listen to me. Are you listening? But talking to yourself in the mirror is so horribly unserious, if not a little tantalizing. Like what am I really expecting here? The mirror consoles nothing, confirms nothing, yet remains the arbiter of everything: No, you do not have to be good, but you do have to do something about those dark circles under your eyes.

Well, fuck you too.

*

When I was eight, maybe nine, I had a fear of throwing up. Totally irrational. I have no idea what summoned this fear, only that I hated everything about it. The smell, the feeling, the noise, the exhaustion… just evil. Pure unadulterated evil. I hated it so viscerally that for an entire year (3rd? 4th grade?) I was sequestered to “indefinite lunches” with the school psychologist. It went a little something like this:

“So, how does the thought of vomit make you feel?”

“Well, that depends, how does the thought of vomit make you feel?”

I saw this as an even exchange. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. He, unfortunately, did not. Instead, he’d scribble on that cheap yellow notepad of his (what I presume) words that fall under “What Adults Believe About Kids”:

Patient appears relatively sound, if not a little sarcastic. Appears internally distressed during our discussions but keeps a composed exterior. Engages in counter-questioning, demonstrating early mastery of verbal deflection. Has a flair for the dramatic. Notoriously fidgets, indicating symptoms of anxiety and impatience. Patient’s appetite appears unaffected; intake standard for age. Patient also has voiced satisfaction in minor abdominal flattening. Calls it “the gateway to recovery.” Insists on control over involuntary functions. Makes intermittent eye-contact, likely a means of gauging whether adult is friend or foe. Appears to be a remarkably brilliant and prosperous young lady. No recommendations offered beyond continued observation and documentation.

*

I saw that psychologist for a whole year and retained nothing, which means none of it really mattered. I don’t even remember when the fear disappeared or how, except maybe that I simply grew up. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes. The only thing I can recall with absolute certainty was that I hated the way he dressed. Too much tweed. Also that some adults are hardwired to convince children they’re insane when they’re not.

*

Maybe you’re thinking, what is the relevance here? Well, that depends, my dear readers. How does the word “vomit” make you feel? If you’re a person who writes, even casually, you’ve probably known some version of that same gag—that instinctive tremor at the possibility of things coming up and out before you’re ready. Writing, like vomiting, is rarely graceful and never fully under control. It heaves itself into language. Strips you of your dignity. I often recall Didion calling writing a ‘hostile act,’ an imposition, a kind of personal gag (if you will) upon the reader. I suspect many of us dread exactly what she’s referring—that moment when the words are no longer theoretical but an ejection of everything we’ve consumed—bitter and sweet. There is no hiding in writing just as there is no crying in baseball. You do not have to be good—you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting—but you do have to let it all come out eventually; with whatever grace or horror it brings.

*

And so I return, as I always do, to that reflection, to the idea that fear is as optional as goodness. I linger and I squint and I shudder and I study:

Patient appears alive and more existential than ever. In serious need of under-eye cream. Streets suggest something with caffeine. Patient obliges, doubling her intake. Still fidgets anxiously with hair, pens, emotions, men. Often considered “mysterious” but is really just private. This does not imply patient has “something to hide.” Cynicism fluctuates depending on whether or not patient is having a good hair day. Patient has spent over 7,000 minutes listening to The White Stripes and seeks to increase her streaming in 2026, though does not believe in New Year’s resolutions otherwise. It is assumed that her Google history consists mostly of dream analysis and David Lynch interviews. Patient has been ordered to meditate by close confidantes but believes dramatic sighing is meditative enough. Finally, patient took long walks to see if geese are more honest than humans. She concludes they are, but only marginally.

She remains under observation until further notice.

This is how December feels to me—    pure bliss.       My poor circulation and I     against the world.     The world sealed in a glistening cocoon.   In a glistening   cocoon,      champagne turning   to frost,  frost turning     to bids,   birds flocking to the sun.  This is me flocking with        or without you.   This is me dreaming with    or without you.      I have never been too proud   as to refuse pleasure.     And why explain?     I will be doing whatever I want,      whenever I please— following the silence,       the light,   the    v     o     i     d.       There is no such thing as humiliation.    There is only joy,    which is a       subway ride to the                 end of the world        and back.      Which is thick as smoke,   soft as ribbon. Which is at the station    where   nothing waits     and everything   comes—    through     the            t  u  n  n  e  l  s,      the frost.   Yes, this is how December feels.       A sweetheart laid bare for all to see.      A sensation that the mind and   body       finally sleep   in the same room—       A room    beneath the moon, shedding     another frozen tear          for her star-crossed lover.       A star-crossed lover   bending God’s nostalgia    into a truce.      A truce waiting in the fields—   wherein the fields,    amongst frozen grass,   I retrieve a song I          lost                months ago.  Wherein the song, a past that is still    my business.   Wherein the song, an undying flame   so eerily   familiar,    I almost             mistake it for something         blue. 

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Summer is not just a season of temptation but giving into temptation. You could say the sun hanging high is your only excuse. Come, share a cigarette in the park. Lie beneath the clouds and name them. Smoking is fun, but doing it with someone you love is infinitely better.

II.

I am writing to you from the river, marveling the romance of a cigarette. One glance and you know who I am, what I am about. It’s rare that I even care if something about me makes sense to others, but cigarettes are like Guernica’s bull or Rothko’s reds. They’re the commas in the grand scheme of chaos. These days they’re the only thing I am sure of, and the fact that I love you.

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We were a pattern, we were always a pattern—
                      of needing to escape          grief,           needing to keep 
our options          open,           needing fate to intervene. 

              You told me prayer is whatever is done      on your knees. 
Sometimes in filth,           sometimes resignation,            almost 
                   always in hunger                    or boredom 
                                            or desperation. 

                      When I prayed,      it was mostly for us. 
But it didn’t feel holy,            and I often wondered if it was    just 
                      another thing I couldn’t get right.

If God thought I was too performative, 
                      too cagey,                  too vague, 
                                            too greedy. 
If my melodrama left    little          to be desired. 
                     
Maybe he took my words personally—
                      I was just desperate for      something        greater 
than hope,                     and who better to turn to 
                           than   God    himself?          

                      It’s what people do, that’s what you said.
They recite their          Hail Marys       and         Our Fathers—
                      though I wonder if it should be 
                                       the other          way     around?

    I never did learn the difference—
                             I bet God didn’t like that. 

I always moved as if I had somewhere          better   to be.
                             I bet you didn’t like that either.           

After two weeks, I gave up       prayer. 
                  There’s no holy alibi for    bad patterns—
and anyway,         I could never get 
                                                   the cadence       right.

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The first official day of summer and it tastes like a stale Marlboro red. Though this city rarely loses its lust and often defies even the grimiest days of the year, today is not one of those days. Today, romance is a rogue popsicle stick melting on the pavement. Today, the city gets to run its laps around me and that someone I shouldn’t have kissed. I don’t dwell on what he might have meant when he said he missed me—I’m far too seasoned to waste the day on such ambiguity. Instead, I think of all the times where I’ve missed someone and said nothing. Maybe I ought to credit him for his bravery? Maybe he’s less of a coward than I originally thought? Then again, I miss you is nothing more than a low-grade emotional reflex—circumstantial at best, opportunistic at worst, valid only after midnight. I blame the Heat for his loose tongue.

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I love Didion. I love Plath. Anyone who comes across Moaning in Public can easily discern this. I love Didion’s pseudo-neurotic precision. I love Plath’s need to name pain down to the very mineral. And I’m not even sure the word “love” is enough. I’m supposed to “outgrow” these women (says who?). I’m supposed to graduate to something grittier, more obscure, something a man on Reddit hasn’t yet accused of being “too feminine.” But I’m not really interested in taste that requires renunciation; I’m not here to bend to society’s will. Loving Didion and Plath doesn’t mean I’m opposed to Morrison or Smith or Angelou. Reverence is not a zero-sum game. I am allowed to have multiple altars, as are you! If loving Plath makes me basic, I dare you to pry Ariel from my emotionally literate hands.

Neither of these women are above critique, but we should ask ourselves what kind of critique we’re making. Is it rigorous or just reactionary? Thoughtful or performative? There is a difference between literary interrogation and digital disdain. One attempts to understand, the other exists as a form of elitism. Didion didn’t invent the personal essay but she did master it. Plath didn’t invent pain but she did shape it. The world is subsequently overflowing with male writers who have built legacies with the same navel-gazing philosophies we mock in women. But who is rolling their eyes at the omnipresence of Bukowski or Kafka or Dostoyevsky? I love these writers too. They are irrefutably brilliant. But no one seems to be scolding them the same way. No one seems to expect men to evolve out of their emotional excavation the same way they do women. So where do we draw the line?

Art’s continuum is generous and elastic. It resists the binary of “worthy” versus “unworthy,” “authentic” versus “derivative,” and mocks every attempt to fence it in. A generation can quote “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as many times as necessary because we do tell ourselves stories in order to live. We also tell those stories to others. Constantly. Storytelling is a critical component to our psychological wellbeing and community. It is foundational for our empathy and redemption. A conversation where every voice echoes and repeats and evolves. Didion and Plath are neither genesis nor apocalypse—they are milestones on a map too sprawling to be fenced by the snobs and trolls. Mocking the familiar is easy, even lazy. I admit I’m a little guilty of this, as I actively enjoy playing contrarian. But when I catch people scoffing at these women I want to lean in and ask: So who then? Who’s the new sacred cow? The obscure darling(s) to which I must genuflect to avoid cultural death?

Read whoever you want. Read that again. Read whoever the fuck you want. The canonical. The obscure. The new. The old. Read the beloved. The controversial. The overwrought. Read those you hate. Those you love. Read for love. For argument. For opinion. Read for perspective. For pleasure. For escape. Read what bores you. Read to be wrong. To be right. To be moved. Whatever makes you cry (or moan) in public. Read for friction. For curiosity. For contradiction. Read the forbidden. The abandoned. The obvious. Read the underdog. Read everything. Until your eyes burn. Until you meet yourself in the margins.

You’re allowed to stay with the voices who made you.

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Sitting in my car in some abandoned parking lot listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell! and staring at the American recession: seagulls munching on microplastics, shopping carts rusting at odd angles. Everything is decaying in technicolor and I’m only half-resentful of the God I only half-believe in. I want to ask how much earth He’ll scorch before he fin…

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I pour a glass of water and try on my skin for size. Loose in some places, tighter in others. This is okay. No, this is better than okay. This is good. Growing pains are good, even when they test your patience. There’s a man on the subway wearing a coat with broken buttons, open just enough for the wind to suffuse his rotting. Once spring’s reckless gospel comes around, he’ll relapse—spiritually, emotionally, absurdly. He and I will chase saxophone echoes seven blocks out of our way like some lovesick fools in a French New Wave Film. Subtitles will likely appear under our feet: Unwell parties, both in search for something beautiful and impossible. I’m smiling, though it’s antagonistic for a cynic. I can’t help it. This city transforms me into a deeply hopeful person against my will. A cushion for ego, a tether to reason. I cross paths with strangers who consider my aura “tender,” and suddenly I want whatever I’m offered—false starts, open loops, delusions with no moral compass. I have stood on the outskirts of Heaven, and now that I’m back inside I like what I see. Everything is exactly as I left it. It looks good, it feels better. A kiss of death is a kiss of life, or however it goes. Yet, I am still mystified by something I can’t quite place. I seem to crave a softness that threatens the woman who’s always running on chaotic instinct. This city rewards the impulsive, the unwell, the half-feral romantics who text like poets and ghost like cowards. It doesn’t just tolerate longing, it gentrifies it—sells it back to us in $9 lavender lattes and subway poetry that feels unnervingly personal. All I know how to worship are larger-than-life feelings and poorly timed urges. But these days, there is a gentleness in my chest—like a flower blooming in a wasteland—I am softening in the most humiliating places. The deli aisle. The Q train. The bathroom at 12 Chairs. The fifth floor at the Whitney Museum. Anywhere below 14th street. A tulip opens itself to me and suddenly I declare love is Real. A bodega cat curls against my ankle and I want to lay with it forever. I cried in Duane Reade the other day because a little girl in pigtails offered me a broken lollipop and I couldn’t recall the last time I was touched by such innocence. For a moment, I wondered if she were not an oracle but a former version of myself in glitter Sketchers. Maybe she saw herself in me—the ache, the absurdity, the involuntary art of being undone by small, stupid beauty. How many lives have I lived? What have my hands touched? There are so many things I don’t know by name, only by face. Sometimes I want to be them again. When the city offers tiny revelations, I think, maybe I could be more than a ghost to my own past. I am never not wondering. Maybe someday I’ll know why.

At the end of literary playlist part II I mentioned I had a bone to pick with Lili Anolik. This bone isn’t necessarily personal, as I’m sure she’s perfectly tolerable over a martini—but like a shift in barometric pressure, barely perceptible yet migraine-inducing, Anolik sets out to tell a story about Eve Babitz. The real™ Eve Babitz. The snubbed™ Eve Babitz. The shadow-of-Joan-Didion™ Eve Babitz. But to seduce the average reader into caring, she must first dangle Didion like bait.

The first bone I have is that she writes as if she’s the only person who’s ever read Play It As It Lays and Eve’s Hollywood more than once. This would be fine, if she didn’t then spend the entire book swanning around in Babitz’s silk robe while simultaneously blowing smoke in Didion’s face. She calls Eve a “buxom Zelig,” yet assumes the same role herself by desperately elbowing into the frame. It’s not enough for her to set the stage—she has to saunter across it, commandeering the spotlight as if biography were just another excuse to preen.

And yes, I read the whole thing—every meandering, wine-sloshed, name-dropping page. I gave her my time because I am a Didion-disciple, a worshipper of neuroses rendered poetic; the targeted consumer sans tote bag. But now, regrettably, that time is non-refundable. I will however give her this: Anolik knows how to sell a book. She understood that Eve, brilliant as she was, wouldn’t sell as many units on her own. That’s why Joan comes first. Didion is the marquee name, the teeth in the trap, the reason your best friend’s cousin snagged a copy at The Strand. Joan is the lure. Eve is the line. Joan, the virgin. Eve, the vice.

It’s a tired trick—polish one woman by dulling the other. Anolik’s Babitz is the Patron Saint of Female Chaos, a Dionysian muse who doesn’t just kiss death on the mouth but fucks it repeatedly. And Joan? She’s the wet blanket at the orgy; cold, removed, stiff. A skeleton with a typewriter exorcising avoidance. The dichotomy isn’t just lazy, it’s insulting and egregious. It mistakes polarity for depth, reduction for insight. It compresses both women into some flimsy binary: fun versus frigid, life force versus lifelessness.

Somewhere around page 190, Anolik admits that the infamous letter—Eve’s visceral jab at Didion’s size (“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?”)—was never actually sent. It’s the book’s summit—a ghost peak, an emotional Ponzi scheme. You ascend through anecdote and insinuation, scandal and half-truth, only to find the climax is actually a mirage. The moment meant to validate the entire Babitz-versus-Didion construct dissolves into some social sleight of hand. If the letter was never sent, then the feud is entirely subjective. And if the feud is subjective, what is Hollywood’s Eve but a questionable ruse? The whole thing becomes a hall of mirrors: Eve as Eve, Joan as Not-Eve, and Anolik’s reflection bouncing desperately between the two. What we’re left with isn’t history, it’s cosplay. Both women flattened, once again, reduced to opposing forces, retrofitted for the “cult classic” crowd.

What Anolik wants, I suspect, is entry. She wants to be an asterisk in Eve’s margins, an epitaph in Joan’s lore. But unlike Babitz who mythologized herself with the careless genius of someone already drunk on her own myth, or Didion who wrote like she was cross-examining herself in court, Anolik comes off needy. Desperate, even. She’s not in control of the narrative—she’s thrashing in it, grasping at glamour by association. I won’t argue that Eve didn’t deserve the spotlight. She was a genius of indulgence. A philosopher of the pleasure principle. A woman who wrote like a martini tastes—sharp, cold, and a little dirty. But no amount of revision can change this simple fact: Babitz may have been the sunbaked secret of Los Angeles but Didion will always be its obituary.

All of that to say, I am disappointed that Anolik couldn’t hold them both in her frame. I am disappointed by her choice to let one woman bleed so the other might shine. Not only is it a tired, pedantic move, it is a failure of imagination. The book crackles but never burns—full of heat, devoid of light. It wants to feel dangerous, like a gossip column written on Chateau Marmont stationery, but it’s really just a girl smoking at a table both women left years ago. And that’s fine—not every book is a success—but if you’re going to light a cigarette in Eve Babitz’s name, maybe don’t use Joan Didion as the filter.