Hi, this WAS a paid subscribers-only essay loosely inspired by the song “Bags” by Clairo + commemorating a year since I moved to New York, but I’m unlocking it for free subscribers! If you want other exclusive content & to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber below. Either way, I’m glad you’re here. xoxo.
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The first time I heard this song I realized that I would always be in the same kind of summer. Whittling away precious hours watching reruns with the AC blasting. Not touching, but almost. It’s a song in which nothing happens but what you imagine is actually more important than what actually happens. That’s a crush, that’s unrequited love. The constant suspension of disbelief. A heatwave, standing with the fridge door open. Wine at an inappropriate time, before five pm, and paired with potato chips. The soup of the heat outside and all the swirling thoughts you have about wanting someone but not wanting to destroy the dynamic you have, the kind that’s equally as precious as those wasting summer hours, confusing the hour with the minute with the second. Knowing you’re wasting every single measurement of time.
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Isn’t it unethical, all these things I’ve done, I ask. The first Aperol soda of the summer melts in my glass. A man sits at the bar next to us, a stool between us and him. He drinks a glass of prosecco. Prosecco is one of the last things I’d order at an old Italian sports bar-turned-sceney hangout. And yet here he is looking sad, alone, probably because of all the unethical things he’s done. A Hopper painting, a Joni Mitchell song. Brave and unnatural to be this alone in a middle of a city where there’s no privacy. The weekend is long, there’s more aimless time to spend. Caught between saying something or keeping it all to myself.
Mitchell told me I should be just fine. Madeline told me I should be just fine. I should be just fine.
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I don’t remember where we were going, but I’m in Charlotte’s kitchen while she’s getting ready. She flits between rooms. Maybe it’s the night of our trek to deep Brooklyn (Bushwick). Or the night we go looking for Conor Oberst unsuccessfully. An aimless Sunday when we have nowhere in particular to be. It doesn’t matter where we’re going. The time is contented. We have hours and hours ahead of us to spend. While she applies eyeliner, I try to rattle off a list of my favorite songs even though Charlotte didn’t ask. Like what usually happens when someone asks me the much-dreaded question—what’s your favorite [book, musician, movie]—I forget my actual favorite.
While we were walking away from Tompkins one afternoon, we talked about how silly it was to characterize yourself by the music, movies, books, or art that you loved. A way to try to find permanence, I suggest. If we collect things around us that we love, maybe we’ll be remembered by what we loved because some other person will inevitably like that, too, and remember that we did. If anything, it makes for very repetitive conversations at parties or on dates. There’s nothing worse than that repetition. It becomes a rehearsal of taste, rather than a discovery that leads to closeness. The worst kind of talking is the kind that’s used to fill empty time.
We’re about to walk out the door when I remember it. Wait, can I queue it before we go?
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It’s been four years since I first listened to “Bags.” I was about to move away from a city I loved and didn’t want to leave. I pressed my forehead to the smudged window on the train down Commonwealth Avenue and hit repeat. I was living not too far from where Clairo grew up. This time of in-betweens seemed to be a perfect moment to become fixated on one song. A song is a fixed thing. The words and melody don’t change, only you. And the life around it as the song goes on to live beyond its recording. I’d play it every day, several times a day, for months to come.
Skip to the part where you know what the answer is to the question you can’t seem to ask. Taking it slow. Timing is everything. I don’t know if I actually believe in timing. I guess this could be worse. Knowing the truth can be worse than living in uncertainty before the truth breaks everything open. The glass of wine that is poured but not finished, what’s stashed beneath the bed, the long lazy nights in front of the TV, flushed cheeks. I can see this too—being suspended in time with someone with whom you don’t have to do anything at all.
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A year doesn’t change much. I’ll still be new here for another two at least. There are stretches of time that I don’t seem to have much to show for at the end of them. Think about what you know now, my therapist says.
I know it’s a short enough walk from West 4th to Houston that transferring to another train is a waste of time. There’s always a longer delay for red lights than your instincts tell you. Pull the turnstile towards you, don’t jump it. The buses aren’t that bad. People move out of the city, they come back. There is no single reliable train. The West Side Highway is not in fact the road that runs through Central Park. No one really cares if you cry on the street. The cops are even bigger idiots here. Sometimes if you time it right, you can see the sun between the buildings and that can be all you need. Bed-Stuy as a neighborhood is knowable. Your favorite part of the city can be a bridge. In every part of this city, there will be someone you know, from this life or another.
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I’ve said this before, but I repeat myself for the sake of being remembered. Some conversations are worth having again. It’s increasingly clear to me, I say crossing Avenue A into the dense humidity, that it’s impossible to share the same reality, what she means to him is completely different from what he means—
to her—you finish my sentence.
I should probably keep this all to myself.
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Falling asleep with the TV still on. My legs are slung over the back of the couch. When I’m almost asleep, I realize that I can’t remember the last nightmare I’d had. My dreams become textures I don’t care to feel through much anymore. Shades of the unreal that can be painful reminders of realities that don’t exist. (I think of the line from Past Lives: This is my life. This is where I’m supposed to be.) Earlier in the night, John tells me about one his lover had–or was it a regular dream? I listen ardently though I begin to forget the story as I drift. The faulty leg of the couch fell off when three people sat on it, sinking the couch backwards and us with it laughing. We’d just been talking about the missing submarine that went looking for an old disaster and found a new one. I’m half-awake on the broken couch, my friend a few inches from and sleeping deeply. In my lucid dreaming, my feet get close to touching the bottom of the ocean, but I come up for air before water enters my lungs.
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I know you’d make fun of me for this. It’s too personal—too much of a mirror held up to what real life is like, what we’ve already experienced. Like reading your diary. If you wanted to tell me, you’d just tell me. My cheeks flushed at that. I bury it because there’s a part of me that knows as much as I try to shroud myself in fictions, I’m so easily read.
Sometimes all I can do is savor the time and not let myself get ahead. This day has been long and great, the kind I always want. It comes with the knowledge that it won’t end any time soon, both by its length and its goodness. There gets to be a point when you spend fifteen hours with someone that talking becomes unnecessary. Sometimes that silence is a gulf. I don’t know how to cross it. Other times it becomes obvious to me how little I need to say to be understood. Moving wordlessly through the streets, knowing exactly where to go because of the number of times before I’d gone to these places there with that same person. Picking lavender from someone’s yard, eating ice cream for dinner. Watching the rain spill from the sky before the light rushes back turning the saturated city green again. The air is heavy with all the humidity. I can push through it if it means another hour spent coming up with more reasons to stay together. It occurs to me this could go on forever. That we wouldn’t have to try very hard. We could keep hanging out nonstop for another seven days if we wanted to.
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It’s been a year since I lugged a small number of bags and my two cats up the four flights of stairs to my first New York apartment. It was about to be my first summer in the city. As my dad expertly parallel parked on St. Marks, a wind of garbage was kicked up by our arrival to the last spot on the block. This wasn’t reassuring to him that I was in the right place, but it reassured me. I’d been waiting for the right time to move for a long time. Madeline texts me: I believe in manifestation. I guess I do, too.
Once I complained to a friend about how inconvenient tragedy was. There’s never a good time for grief, they told me. They were right. On the drive to New York, my estranged grandmother passed, unknown to us, sometime between the rolling hills of Virginia and the New Jersey Turnpike. Summer is the worst time to move to the city. I was suffering from heartbreak. I’d killed my old life to make a new one, a grief response. Somedays I’d see it as a happy accident how I ended up where I did. Those seven stages of grief are never in order. It’s impossible to check one stage off and never have to experience it again. We’re always backsliding. Anyways, the timing was fucked. I knew that. But I knew if I waited for the right time, the time would never come.
Will it matter in five minutes? Will it matter in five days? Will it matter in five months? Will it matter in five years?
This was something my old therapist repeated often. The answer would be no with each passing increment of time. It helped for a while. Now it doesn’t help because I want things to still matter in five years. Five minutes and five years are not that different after all. Every second counts. The song I loved four years ago still matters. Give it another year. I know what the answer will be.