I am not chosen, I am not special. Every kiss is a one-time spark, then a discarding. Two bodies meet at a party, then never follow up. Two husks gather dust in a tepid memory.
I have no captive audience. I no longer update that one person on my every pain and triumph. When big news reaches me, I process it alone. The next time I see a friend, I forget to mention it. I don’t notice until tomorrow. I am its only witness.
I lay about, and I’m no longer waiting for someone to come home to me. It’s easier to pick up a novel at the end of the night. I watch a niche film on a whim. I tell Letterboxd what I think of it. At least one loyal friend likes my post, and I smile at the notification.
Twice, I’ve been offered a bigger bed by friends who are moving. No, thank you, I’ve told them, twice. I keep my twin bed. I like the space it spares for the rest of my room. I like that there is no suggestion about how the space could be better used if another body were filling it. I like the monkish atmosphere, the fact that any mess I make is mine, with the trust that I will clean it up in time.
I speak less, reveal less. I train more, devote myself. I study. My creativity is a practice now, not an aspiration. I’m getting a little better every day. I go on walks in a city where walking is for leisure, not transportation. I never get very far, but I am contented.
My friends are falling in love. They’re too shy to call it that. But I see how I separate them when I enter the room, how they begin itching to be left alone again. I can make them laugh, I can make them feel seen, but I’ll never make them feel special. Not love-special.
I know what they don’t: on the other side of love-special is The End of the World. I was there not too long ago. Lying on frozen concrete, shouting slander at strangers. A layer of sanity had snapped. If I’d lost him, I had nothing left to lose. I was late to work, again and again; when I finally made it there, I’d spend half the shift leaking tears at my desk. I checked his location every hour, imagining how much he must’ve hated me, though he told me he loved me still.
That was embarrassing. But not as embarrassing as when it was good. Imagine us walking down the street arm in arm, curling up into each other at the cinema. Sitting on (gag!) the same side of the booth at restaurants. Picture him leaving me a stash of love letters to open while he was away, me wearing his jacket everywhere like a shell. We made each other playlists, dawdled in amusement park lines, habitually picked up an extra soda from the convenience store to share. I rested my head on his shoulder when we took the subway side by side. I was so dumb as to consider his two cats my own. He called me baby until my own name sounded foreign. I used the phrase my boyfriend in far too many coworker conversations.
It was all terribly, horribly, unimaginably cringe.
Distance is cool. Having interests is cool. Being hot is cool. Wearing an eye-catching outfit is cool. Bouncing around to trendy events is cool. Maintaining an air of gentle intimidation is cool. Having nuanced thoughts and opinions is cool, if you’re not too intense about them. It’s cool when other cool people want your company. It’s cool to start your own project or community. It’s cool to be nice to people when you already have what you want.
Being single is cool. I’ve lost faith in the power couple. I think any couple anointed with that label is composed of two kinda boring people that exaggerate the interesting parts of one another in a forever-reflecting mirror proximity. Consider Romeo without Juliet — that’s your everyday incel. Hamlet and Ophelia, in contrast, are interesting on their own. Individually cool, even if just for suicidal Shakespeareans. But, Romeo and Juliet? That’s Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively.
There are couples — we all know them — upon whose downfall we pray. We think, It’s only a matter of time. They’re horrible to each other, and we’re saddled with hearing all about the nightmares. What’s more, we’re bored by them. Leave him, we think but never say. If it’s that bad, just leave. We who are unburdened by the drugging lull of lust don’t see any perks in the arrangement. We think of all the better things we could be doing with our time than playing therapist to somebody who already has one.
If this is what love entails, then what do we make of friendship?
Friendship is cool. Friends don’t ever get into that mushy, gooey, gross stuff; if they do, they don’t call it friendship anymore. Carrie and Big are indefatigably cringe, whereas Carrie + Samantha + Charlotte + Miranda = cool. These ladies are sitting up tall at a table together, sipping cosmos, not punching each other in the face or tossing McDonald’s all over the kitchen.
Tableaus of friendship are leagues more endearing than those of sex. My view from a Culver City living room couch as the front door opens for more and more visitors on a movie night. In a friend’s tiny Soho apartment, her roommate chain-smoking out the window as I’m asked to play some songs on the speaker. On a clear March park bench in Lincoln Park after a stroll through the zoo, chatting idly and all day long with a fellow hometown expatriate. There’s nothing meaty or fleshy or weird about this, nothing out of taste without context. Nothing to be put on tape and leaked, salacious and reputation-ruining. Friendship is solid and steady. It doesn’t ask for all of you. You hold it separate from you, and you admire it. You put it in your pocket, you don’t inject it into your veins.
I sometimes wish my friends would pay more attention to me. When I think about it harder, I admit that the craving is for an attention not inherent to friendship. Yet, I shy away from pursuing romance. I’ve been too hurt by love. I’ve seen its ugly underbelly, and I’ve come out on the other side to wrinkle my nose at it. When I read my journal from last year, I pity the wrapped-up fool I was, so willing to toss aside her future for this incompatible man. I’m disgusted by my coarse sentimentality, my blatant desperation. Girl, get up off the floor.
Then, I grow pensive imagining what shape my next great love could take. As I try to give it form, I grow more concerned. I cannot reconcile coolness and passion. The stylish types that catch my eye could never make me feel that insane — I wouldn’t be able to take any one of them seriously enough. Again: coolness is distance. And a great love requires digging into yourself little by little, picking at scabs, chewing through your cheeks until you’re holding your own bloody heart in your throbbing hands, offering it up without being asked. Love is proximity is vulnerability is taking your guts out and lighting them on fire. Love is ugly and public, no matter how good a secret you think you’re keeping.
I don’t think I’m up for it anymore.
I once considered myself a hopeless romantic. These days, I consider romance hopeless. A classic pivot. Still, I cannot deny the beauty of the doom: the swan song, the desert flash of the atomic bomb. But that beauty is only so clear to the two artists interlocked in the sculpting of the mold. It’s a Rorschach test, and almost everybody else says they only see a blob of ink where the lovers see the face of God. It’s all too mercurial for me.
In my own time, I’ll calculate. I’ll write the numbers in before I begin painting over them. There is a yearning in me yet, though I retain it for my art. Amber encases a prehistoric bug, and so I model my own methods of preserving awe and ugliness. Remember how I cried my eyes puffy and I drank myself thick over you and you and you? It was tragic and it was sloppy, and the only thing that could keep me from resenting it entirely would be to make something out of it. So, a cynic sings a love song.1
Real love, real love, real love makes your lungs black. Real love is a heart attack.
