the point of it all
Pierre Bonnard, Stairs in the Artist’s Garden, 1942
Housekeeping: Please fill out this friendship survey! We have ~200 responses so far but it would be wonderful to get to 300-400. It’s 40 questions, your responses will be used for the rest of the book and it will be so very appreciated. There is some chance I will contact you to interview you if something feels particularly resonant with the project :) Thank you very very very much!
I make the same extremely simple salad every week, sometimes multiple times a week: heirloom tomatoes (if in season), avocado, red onion, tinned fish and lemon. As a kid, I was obsessed with a similarly rudimentary dish: tomato and egg scramble, a dish commonly served in Chinese student canteens. There’s not much in life I find more supremely pleasurable than eating tomatoes in soup, gazpacho, Bloody Mary, salad and stew form. An unusual number of my fantasies center around splitting cioppino.
That’s a figure of speech, by the way. One of the weirdest things about me is that I rarely fantasize about anything. I don’t tell people that because they find it strange. But if I had to fantasize about something, it would be us sitting at the bar of a North Beach restaurant eating cioppino, and I would be wearing those white Dolce and Gabbana corduroy pants I got off Depop that are slightly tight on my butt, and I would probably splatter tomato stew all over them, and you would laugh. Like any good cult leader, I’m addicted to wearing white.
On TikTok Mina said the key to developing personal style is to have a list of codes, symbols and themes that you follow every year like a fashion house. I always return to the same motifs, wearing white, eating tomatoes, reading books. I was thinking that I don’t know if there’s a place I associate more with comfort and safety than the Guildford branch of the Surrey Public Library. Gray carpet with teal and chartreuse linear accents. Ugly blue lounge chairs. I went there every day for a summer to do SAT prep. I would read there for a few hours, get some sort of iced frappuccino drink at the Blenz Coffee upstairs and then walk to Guildford Mall across the street to investigate what I could buy with my allowance. Which was, most of the time, one nut-covered chocolate ice cream bar from Purdy’s. My mom would pick me up, we would gossip in the car.
The most important thing growing up has taught me is that in every important way I am just like the girl I was. Everything I loved at 15, I love at 29. And all the things that I desperately wanted back then that I thought would complete me have been so nice to have, more than nice, but they were just gravy. I could go back to Oishi and get the $10 lunch combo and then buy Revlon’s Really Red at the Rexall and apply it to my chapped lips in the fluorescent lighting of the girls’ bathroom and appreciate it so much more now. Hanging out in Mr. Pocock’s classroom during lunch hour and after school with my friends was the point of it all. I have a better haircut now and I know how to use lip liner and I don’t get nervous at parties and I feel comfortable in my body and I can buy the clothes I want and those are all lovely accoutrements of adulthood. But I figured out the meaning of life a long time ago—reading a book under the table while the teacher talked, whispering with my friends. It just took me a while to realize.
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I get high off the vertiginous rush of being loved by you. I remember the exact moment I decided it’s fine to let you take care of me. You’re so good at it.
Sometimes I feel like a sea sponge or a mollusk. It’s not to say I’m so good at meeting my own needs, because I’m wildly dependent on other people, but I’ve architected an ecosystem that satisfies me. I write, I work, I see the people I love. There are moments I find my own placidity disturbing. I can charm any girl, feel comfortable in any room. It was never going to be a question of whether I can make you happy.
Can you make me happy? When I let you take care of me, I also let you disrupt me, arrange me, open me up. It’s so uncomfortable to let you feel me in that particular way. I’m scared of you in the exact same way you’re scared of me. We have different vocabularies, but I think we feel the same thing.
I’m gentle, except for when I’m violent. I’m receptive, except for when I’m aggressive. I should smash my phone. It would make you happy to buy me a new one. Which is the same impulse as how I can’t bear to let you walk around the world wearing pants that don’t fit quite right.
Byzantine empires, lives of the saints. I can get overintellectual with the best of them. But I think we both know that isn’t the point of it all.
Reading recommendations
Romantasy at the end of the world. Has culture stalled? Groove Theory, 30 years later: “There are more ways to fall out of love than there are to fall in love. Statistics tell that story. Your friend, crying on the end of a phone for the second time this year, tells that story. The velocity of the crush when measured against the exhaustion of several realities tells that story. And so, the circle makes sense to me. The series of returns makes sense, to say, I am not done seeking you, I am not done figuring out every way the light can fall over every part of you it hasn’t been fortunate enough to fall upon yet.” Becca Rothfeld on what it means to value “women as women.” “Learning is painful, pleasant and, above all, communal".”