It's 3am and I can't sleep. I ate shit on the stairs while catching the L train today. I fell face forward like a big, dumb log. Tripped on my own pants. Another casuality of fashion. The lady behind me gasped. A man awkwardly reached for my hand to help me up but both my hands were stubbornly stuffed in my pockets. I never even took them out to break my fall from grace; just two defensive little fists full of keys and a lip stain I had been anxiously fidgeting with for an hour. I used to fidget with my actual lips when I was bothered by something. It was a terrible habit that often lead to a bloody mouth. Now I just fidget with lip coloring devices that make it look like I have a bloody mouth. I'm sure there is a metaphor there somewhere and I'm also sure I was very distracted when I ate shit on the stairs. For the life of me, I couldn't seem to get my hands out of my pockets to get back up again. My thoughts drifted to a guy I briefly dated that always tried to hold my hand when I just wanted the freedom to hold my coffee cup. Miraculously I managed to get up with both hands STILL shoved in my coat without the help from anybody. I kept moving with my head held high. I'm always falling down. I never feel my body. I never want help.
I'm so clumsy. I'm so defensive. I'm so dignified.
It was a bad day in a great city.
A couple sat across from me on the train and I couldn't tell if they had been together for four months and the honeymoon period wore off or if it was four years. The woman had the sort of cadaverous stare you get after a lifetime of living the wrong narrative as the wrong protagonist but have no idea how to burn down the library. Her companion was on a laptop with too many stickers; each one presumably masking some insecurity he wasn't dealing with. His stickers were stupid and he had the stupidest expression on his stupid face. A pained neanderthal manchild deep in thought about how to word a tweet while the whole world passed him by. He furiously typed away with his mouth wide open while she aimlessly looked around with the widest eyes I've ever seen. She never blinked. He never breathed through his nose. She looked dead. He looked dumb. I bet he snored. I bet she cried. The only indication of intimacy between the two of them was that the side of their legs were touching. I felt sorry for them both. I hated them. I've been them.
Bored. Lonely. Tweeting to strangers to fill an endless hole. Trapped. Oblivious. Dead eyed. Wide eyed. Hungry. Dumb.
Thinking I'm connected to someone but it was just a knot we couldn't untangle.
It was a bad day in a great city.
I'm living alone for the first time in my entire life in a city I've dreamed about since I was a little girl. Five months ago I lived in a tiny room with an amazing roommate in a city-I-never-dreamed-about-but-liked-anyway. In that city-I-never-dreamed-about-but-liked-anyway I had a band, friends, a crush on a neighbor to get over a longing for an ex, and a job at a record store. It was fine. It was typical. I was broke. I ate tacos. I drank beers outside. I wrote songs. I smoked joints. I had an apartment infested with roaches. They used to crawl on me in my sleep and I got in the habit of sleeping with a hammer so I could kill them. I don't normally kill things but I hated them. They had boundary issues and triggered grotesque feelings I had about the time I was a little girl staying on my grandparent's farm in Nebraska. Bugs were crawling all over me in my sleep but nobody believed me. Nobody heard me. The next evening my parents finally saw what I was talking about and my horrified mother had us sleep in the van. My dad didn't join us and fell back asleep in the house. Maybe he didn't hear her. I don't know what I hate more now. Bugs or not being heard. In this new bugs-crawling-all-over-me scenario, my roommate and I heard each other and dealt with it together. We used humor and bleach as a coping mechanism. Eventually I bought a bed frame and taped the bottom of the legs with double stick tape to deter anything from crawling on me in my sleep. It seemed to work. Looking back on the experience now, I was living in my own personal hell but I called it heaven for some reason. How could it be hell? It was the city of angels and there were so many lemon trees. When life gives you lemon trees, make lemonade.
I've never seen a bug in my new place. There are also no lemon trees on my street or crushes on any neighbors. I did recently have my first out of town visitor. We cried in every single room in my new apartment. I felt both accomplished for being at a place in life where I had so many different rooms to cry in while also feeling incredibly frustrated for being at a place in life with so much to cry about. I appreciated the company, nonetheless, but my eyes look so tired from the experience.
There were no bugs. There were no lemons. But I was heard.
It was a bad day in a great city.
I ordered a purple velvet couch and the UPS people stole it... or lost it... or lied about it. It's still unclear. I had to file an investigation and ended up getting a lot of pillows to sit on. I was refunded my money and chose to keep sitting on pillows. I actually prefer it. Furniture is bondage and I'm probably not at a place in life to be embracing couch ownership, even when said couch looks like a velvet kissed coffin. It seems fitting that I would associate my first piece of grown up furniture with death.
I did end up buying a shitty ikea record shelf. I almost died assembling it.
It was a bad day in a great city.
I live in one of the most exciting places in the world and today I bought Draino. Even typing that bored me. I didn't need it. Upon closer inspection, a lid was stuck in my sink and not a lifetime of hair drama. I pulled the lid out with scissors and also a rubber band. It was really simple and now my sink functions. I don't know why I made it so complicated. I had been brushing my teeth in the shower and washing my hair in the kitchen for a month. I even went out of my way to buy the Draino but was so distracted by the normalcy of this purchase that I had to make it dramatic. I used my card instead of the cash I had JUST pulled out specifically for the Draino and then I had to transfer the funds back into my account so a phone bill charge would go through. There was a lot of math over Draino. A lot of heartache. Mistakes were made. I didn't even need it. Typical Automne.
It was a bad day in a great city.
There are so many steps here that lead to streets with the names of old lovers I've wronged in some way. I think of all of them when I turn corners to walk on new streets with names that mean nothing to me. I wonder why so many streets are named after men. Currently I live on the same street as my ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. I used to stare at a framed picture of her that hung up on his wall. She was really beautiful and meant a lot to him. I often wonder how weird it must be for him. In a city of this size, his exes from two different worlds are neighbors. Such a strange thing. While the street isn't named after any of us, my phone often auto corrects the name to “Nimrod Street”. It seems fitting. Biblical, even. I wonder if the three of us will ever go hunting.
It was a bad day in a great city.
I haven't spoken to a good friend in a while. I'm not even sure if we still are good friends. We just kind of blew away from each other during a storm. Enough time has past where I've settled into our new indifference but sometimes I think about her. This is life, I remind myself. Sometimes you lose things in storms.
It was a bad day in a great city.
I associate romance and intimacy with invisibility. I hate how strongly I can feel. I hate how my feelings become bigger than who I am. I disappear in them. It always starts off like a fire and I either end up disfigured but still alive... or I become ashes blowing away. I know it doesn't have to be that way. People have nice fires that never burn them alive or burn everything down. Not everybody panics and calls Smokey The Bear to sort shit out. I'm not those people. I've been to their dinner parties and crashed on their couches and cried at their weddings and got drunk with them in bars but I'm not those people.
When I'm not creating or connecting, I feel like I don't exist. I'm bad at watching movies because I always want to make them. I'm bad at going to shows because I want to be performing. I'm bad at dinner. I'm bad at small talk. I'm even bad at vacations. I've practiced meditation and being in the moment but sometimes it feels like my whole existence is just proving I'm alive instead of just being alive. I hate to say it but after a certain point, most relationships make me feel dead inside. It's rare for a person to give me the same joy I get after writing a good song or creating a piece of art. There is no bigger high. I've been trying to change my philosophy on this. I am trying to look at relationships as another form of art and connection that keeps evolving and not an institution I'm sentenced to. I'm trying to make better choices. I'm trying to find the balance. Sometimes I love eating alone in my kitchen. Sometimes I hate sleeping alone in my bedroom.
It was a bad day in a great city.
I googled people born on my birthday and found a photo entitled “the most beautiful suicide”. In 1947, a woman named Evelyn McHale jumped to her death from the Empire State Building and gracefully landed on a limousine. A photographer captured the image. She looked calm. White gloves. Pearls. No sign of trauma. Legs crossed. Arm raised. Well dressed. Dignified. Not clumsy.
How Virgo.
When they removed the body, it was another story. She completely liquified.
How Virgo.
She left this note:
“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.”
Her sister identified her body and she was cremated. There is no grave... but I guess the internet has become a sort of grave for such things. This picture haunts me. It's relatable and horrifying.
It's also so beautiful.
Yesterday I heard about another person dying. It's been happening a lot lately. I guess it always has. My first crush when I was a little girl died in a car accident when I was a teenager. Shortly following that, a lot of my mother's friends kept dropping off. Sometimes cancer. Sometimes heart attacks. My brother had a friend that hung himself. My grandfather died on my birthday. My grandmother died on the anniversary of my best friend's death. Even my name translates to “beautiful season of death”. Sometimes I feel like my whole life is shaped by death. Maybe that's why I'm obsessed with living. Every week, another death in a different city. Motorcycle accident, cancer, suicide, heroin...
Last week a lady that was my age threw herself in front of the subway and stopped the trains for 4 hours. The conductor said, “It's not an emergency. All trains are being stopped because they need to... remove something from the tracks.”
So callous. We all knew what that meant. We got off the train. I walked for too long in impossible shoes but it was such a beautiful day out. Somebody had to clean up the remains of a human being... underground... but above ground the sun was shining, my feet were killing me, but I could feel spring blowing on the nape of my neck. People grabbed beers. Texted friends. Hailed cabs. Changed directions. Changed plans. I watched a mother explain to her confused daughter that they were going to walk home that day because the weather was so nice. She seemed like a good parent. That little girl didn't need to know about death just yet. I smiled at both of them.
It was a beautiful day in a great city.
