Difficult loves
loving, losing, living
Hi, thanks for being here. This essay was inspired in part by Italo Calvino’s Difficult Loves, but you don’t need to read the book to follow along. If you like my work and want to support the project as a whole, consider upgrading your subscription. And if you’re here without subscribing, you can do that below. xoxo
+
Adventure of a careless reader
I wanted to write about Difficult Loves. Both the book and all my own difficult loves. Unsurprisingly, this is difficult. Especially when you can’t finish the book.
I carry my copy with me to read on the train. The book becomes worn in my bag. It looks like it’s been read. I could pass as someone who actually finishes a book in a month. The cover won’t stay flat against the pages. I’ve underlined and written in it. Nothing too brilliant. Groceries, inane observations. A phone number for an X-ray clinic. Halfway through the collection, I pick a random story or page and start reading. Most nights I fall asleep with the book between my sheets. A substitute, a dummy book of spells.
I’ve yet to be moved. And isn’t that my metric for everything? If it doesn’t move me, then run for the hills. I love the depictions of mundanity, but some stories are empty rooms. Trouble happens when characters leave the house. They lose keys, bathing suit bottoms, dignity. This feels true for whenever I leave my house.
I take the book out of my bag and read a bit out loud to my friend at the restaurant we like. They are only serving wine now. I don’t think he is listening. I still read, I guess mostly for myself. Maybe I’ll get Calvino this way. We go dancing instead of reading more and talking more. This feels right. The drinks are terrible. A negroni that tastes like salsa. A couple steps on my feet repeatedly. When we are about to leave, we realize someone has stolen my friend’s hat. In goddamn Williamsburg. I can tell he’s upset. The hat was special. A tiny reference to Radio Alice stitched on the back. It’s hard to not want to make things better. But also impossible.
We go in opposite directions at Lorimer, tired, making plans for tomorrow as we walk away from each other. We’ve been here before. And I’ve been this lucky before, to feel no more difficulty beyond the time between when we met up and said goodnight.
+
Adventure of a moviegoer
Go back to who you were before you shattered.
I pull out my phone to type this out in my notes app. I’m seeing Decision to Leave at the Village East on 12th by myself. I’ll spend the next few days repeating this line to people in my glowing review of the movie. The phone illuminates my face. This is bad form. I can feel the judgment from the better moviegoers behind me. I would be annoyed at myself if I were someone else. Everyone's a little annoying in this theater, so I have a pass. Before the trailers, a man explained to his date the filmography of Park Chan-wook. I tuned him out the second I heard the word auteur. A person in the row in front of me takes on and off their puffy jacket several times throughout the movie.
I’m the only one in my row. I’d said goodbye to my friend after dinner to come here alone on a Friday night. I’d been feeling pessimistic despite nothing explicitly bad happening over the past few days. Before the movie, I stopped in an undergrad-infested bar on E 9th. There’s no table for you, the host told me. But you can sit at that little window nook. The second sentence she sang like it was a show tune. I took the window seat. Which is essentially the waiting area for parties of more than one. I wanted to believe she didn’t pity me.
Put my pictures on your wall, lie awake without falling asleep, and think only of me.
I almost text this to someone. Without context. I stop myself. When I leave the theater, the night is still technically ahead of me. It’s Friday and I’m very alone for the first Friday in a long time. It’s a melodramatic feeling, but the city at this hour is all melodrama. I start to head towards St. Dymphna’s. I stop myself. There are no pictures on my wall, but the rest is true. Home to lie awake and think only of me.
+
Adventure of two diners
This is brunch at Dimes on a Saturday. We are both bleary eyed. Pickle brained and red from the cold. Happy to see each other. The museum was impossible today, the trains could only bring us here. When we try to order a broccoli melt, the server looks at us like we’re actors on a tv show she’s accidentally muted. Our fourteen dollar dishes arrive. Every food served here is green. Matcha pancakes, wheatgrass smoothies, little gem salads, avocado puree. Model food, someone once said. It’s surprising when it is actually delicious. Inevitably, we talk about love. When you say it’s a beautiful true love story, I believe you.
+
Adventure of a hopeless romantic
You believe in true love, he says to her. He says it like a fact. And it is one. She does. Whether or not it exists here in this city, that was not yet a fact she could prove. They had known each other since the summer, but hadn’t seen each other since the end of it. Always meeting in seasonal extremes. Before sweat slowly hiking down her back. Now her fingers unfurl as they regain warmth. It was good to see a kind face after so much time and change.
Looking around, it wasn’t hard to tell who was there on a first date. A woman seated beside her at the bar licked each finger after she finished her goat-cheese crusted flat bread. There was nothing to be disgusted by, and still she felt her friend wasn’t wrong when she said everything seems disgusting lately. Did she believe in true love? Did she even know what that meant? She believed in friends. The ability to find someone who she could be wholly herself with. Then she wasn’t very sure what it meant to be herself.
Questions impossible to answer or ask in one night. He had somewhere else to be soon anyway.
+
Adventure of the insomniac
Calvino again. People who are awake fall into two categories: the still and the already —
Still: A whirlwind meeting, a friend’s thirty-six hour date, another friend’s nine hour date, half of a pill that sobers you, two am pushing towards three or four depending on when you can settle down enough to stop buzzing, you never know who you’ll meet or where tonight will take you —
— Already: Early morning when it’s difficult to fall back because the light is so bright. Circadian rhythms so disrupted they’re broken altogether. The panic before the day has started and the lack of preparation to face it. Rustling in the other room. Did I wake you? I should probably go home. Coffee first? Foreclosing the possibility of going back to sleep. In Williamsburg, in the seven degree morning wind chill, in a condition between wisdom and absolute stupidity.
+
Adventure of the new rules
Don’t tell someone they look like someone else (At a party: “You look like Daisy Edgar-Jones.”)
Remind yourself to ask questions every once in a while (“Have you ever won anything from a claw machine?”)
If you ghost someone, stay gone forever (Just this week, three ghosts reappeared and were greeted politely)
Always wink (Never wink)
When planning a hangout, it’s absolutely fine to say no partners (Throw a party and tell everyone to bring their partner, their crush, and their partner’s crush, a stranger)
Do not touch the small of my back to move around me at the bar if you’re ugly (Unclear how this rule would be enforced)
If you like them, text them within three hours of hanging out with someone (Three minutes)
+
Adventure of the house hunters
She is Goldilocks and all of Brooklyn is a chair. The wrong chair. She sees an apartment in Bed-Stuy. She sees an apartment in Crown Heights. She sees an apartment in Clinton Hill. She sees an apartment in Greenpoint. She goes back to Bed-Stuy. Every area is up and coming. Too big, too small, too wrong, too right that something must be wrong with it.
She falls in love with too many apartments. Anywhere the light touches. Tiled bathrooms with deep tubs. Wood floors that creak endearingly under the line of people viewing the apartment at the same time. The advice a relative gave her was to never look at anything above your price range–even a small amount above–otherwise nothing will ever look good to you again. But everything looks good until you look closer. The second a broker calls back about an apartment, she leaves the subway she just paid for. Two steps at a time. The apartment is perfect. Except the shower head is installed smack in the middle of the wall. No showering unless you’re this tall (5’1). Don’t worry, the apartment is at the back of the building, so you won’t hear the train, which means there will be no light. It’s about deciding which deal breaker is actually not going to break you.
All the brokers are fucking with her. She is convinced. The broker who gave her recommendations on how to get the most food for the least money at Lucy’s. What was his angle? He talked on the phone with some random person about how it’s suddenly a renter’s market. Was that to gaslight her into renting that bad apartment? There was a grease caked onto every cabinet in the hallway-sized kitchen. He looked at her with such disdain when she asked if the apartment would be cleaned. In this market?
An apartment is a state of mind. When things have to work out, they will work out. She chants this to herself as she climbs the crumbling stairs of another fourth floor walk-up.
+
Adventure of one night
It’s Saturday night. Come to this party where I don’t really know anyone. People want to know who you are. They want to know what you do, how cool you are by your association to people called cool on the internet. This is how you become cool. There’s bound to be only a degree of separation between me and another person here. People in common. We shrink the world every weekend. That’s how we met anyway. You teach me all the time that a friendship can be made or remade. In a matter of days. Everything is implicit, when it’s explicit it begins to lose an appeal. We listen to people talk about their micro-fame. Later I ask you how much it matters to be hot. Your answer: you don’t have to be hot, you just have to be compelling. I should want to be in your world.
I couldn’t put this into words before.
By the window, you’re in a chair that probably costs the same amount I pay in rent, I’m on the floor beside you. I take a few pictures of you that I forget about until the morning. The party smells like boys. Boys everywhere. (This new way of hers of being among men—the night owl, the hunter, the worker—made her different. This had been her adultery, this being alone among them, like this, their equal.) We go to a different party. The light is soft like how a candle looks when it’s just been lit. Before I lose my phone like I’m in a Calvino story, I talk about math with a PhD student. There are answers, definite ones, we agree. Then you make me see things differently. The answers were ones we made up in the beginning.
The worlds we’re in change from room to room, party to party, group to group. You say to someone how we see each other more often than we see the people who first introduced us. It wasn’t much, but for me, maybe it was enough.
