It was the summer I discovered that my sadness was not the seasonal kind. Summer brought with it the promise of happiness… but the gummy stalks of rhubarb crowned and the once mighty fiddleheads began to sag, the sungold tomatoes swelled up and then burst while I waited fruitlessly for the switch inside me to flip.
Thoughts were buzzing around the compost bin of my head like fleas. It was stale up there, and sour, as my cognition festered in its own surplus.
The issue was that I was running out of things to not do. After a listless winter of hibernation, sleep was scarcely a respite, let alone an escape. My dreams had begun melding into wake with an increasing, startling frequency. Unfortunately exempted was I from delusions of grandeur and elaborate fantasies, no wisps of wish fulfillment to provide even a whiff of salvation. If anything, it was the dreariness of my reality that was leaking, ossifying even those parts of me that touched the clouds, at once expanding and collapsing the etches of my consciousness.
I had entire dreams where I scrolled aimlessly on my phone, sending messages to every person in my contact list. I dreamed that I lay all day in bed, still and decomposing until a rancid liquid seeped out of my pores and soaked the sheets. I dreamed of infidelity, of giving birth to a grotesque alien baby that I callously shunned (even my dreams were derivative).
These felt so real that I was shocked to wake up in my own body, trembling like a brooding matryoshka who was waiting to hatch. And sometimes I did.
So, I spent these half-lives looking for evidence. I checked my messages, my call logs for remnants or premonitions. I sniffed my sheets. I ran fingers down my thighs and stuck one in myself for good measure. I popped three of my forgotten birth control pills, knowing that I could count on modern medicine to make my womb even more inhospitable than it already was.
But paranoia found me no matter where I went and so, I set off like a jungian detective after two lines of coke or one really large cup of coffee. I was fiending for meaning, only growing more desperate as I edged closer to a realization I suspected as empty.
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It was gray in all the ways one hopes to avoid in the summer, my sheets and silk (but actually 98% polyester) chemise were stained with the stench of the season.
I was far away from the real world. Any curiosity I once possessed for how it worked, or how it might work, or how it could work had been deftly extinguished; dimly replaced instead with my own private sadness. Things were happening and I passively let them wash over me, less girl and more leaky conduit. Drip.
It was comforting to placate any and all emotions with a reminder of my unreality, of the passing artifice that just so happened to be seizing me at the given moment. Like the time I cut my finger chopping frozen fruit with a twelve dollar knife. The blood was oozing like it had an audience. Giddy and lightheaded, I washed my hand under cold water and based on no real evidence, thought to myself that it would all be fine. Because everything is always fine, or it's over. And that would be fine as well, I guess.
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I saw Amélie when I was too young and it left an outsized impression on me for a movie I can scarcely remember. I blamed Amélie for two unconsummated desires that were currently plaguing my existence. I was not an emaciated french waif, nor was I pollyannaish.
In a scene that often distinguishes itself from the rest of my memories, Amélie looks onto the city from her apartment atop Montmartre, quietly enjoying all the life bursting below. She smiles knowingly to herself as she imagines all the people experiencing an orgasm at that very moment. She is happy to know that pleasure exists and that it was happening to someone, even if it wasn’t herself.
But I was no Amélie. I crushed small joys like fruit flies.
Everything was mundane and boring and I was constantly irritated with having to live. It was a pathetic and petulant sort of misery, where even the joy of distant others left me inflamed.
I was aware that this was not a cute look. I tried disproving my misanthropy, really, I swear I tried.
During early evenings (or late mornings) when the sun was at its strongest and everything seemed a little more enchanted than it really was, I would poise myself by my window like Amélie, looking down below, desperate to find something that made my anhedonia falter.
But my survey of the city was cropped short by the condo that opposed mine. I lived by the water, and I was reminded of this when I was confronted by a pale reflection of gashing waves on the artlessly stacked windows. Inside, life was either dull or absent. Plain ikea furniture lined the cubes, embellished with fake plastic flowers or fake fur shags. There were new appliances and new tiles and they all lacked the comforting wash of wear. These were not homes— they were long-term investments or short-term necessities. And the waft of their cheap impersonality was unmistakable.
Sometimes, on long weekends or holidays, the units would be crammed full of people in baseball jerseys and bright swimsuits that could only belong to someone who wasn’t from the city. I would peer out my window, hunting down any tender moments I could intrude on. I’d thought of them so often that they reeled in my mind— fingers accidentally brushing against each other on the kitchen island, the tentative dance of jointly unsheathing in a narrow hallway, a smile as warm as an incandescent light.
The closest thing I had to a neighbor was the gaunt, timid man who lived two floors below in the condos opposite mine. I saw him often on his dinner table-cum-desk set against the window, eating and typing in solitude. I liked to think about what he was eating and typing, and what he occupied himself with when he wasn’t eating or typing. And this was enough for me to feel a certain form of kinship. I’d often linger by the window longer when he was around, fantasize that he’d see me, and wave at me. And I’d wave back (not without a calculated hesitation).
But even this simple act of recognition felt too invasive for the segmented structure of our dwelling.
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What made this summer different from all other summers is that there was nothing to do. I guess this also made it like every other summer but this time, there was no real end in sight and so, no real reason to cherish it.
I had no job, no school and a degree that taught me that numbers were made up, including the ones dwindling in my bank account. Any aspirations I once held felt as distant as the winter, and I was unbelievably reluctant to confront either. What people never realized was that destruction was just as effortful as creation— it really was much easier to just sit still.
And so, I sat and thought about how embarrassing it would be to kill myself. I’m sure that if a McKinsey consultant somewhere ran the cost-benefit analysis of my existence it would show up void but my mother was always saying that I had a way of making everything about myself…
It took a loud whirring noise to snap me from self-pity— the AC had whimpered itself into silence and the fixed windows built to shelter me from the outside were working too well.
Restlessly stewing in my own sweat made the idea of leaving my apartment seem less dreadful.
A walk would be good, I thought to myself. All this existential heft was not making me feel skinny. I felt bloated with despair, uncomfortable with the way the visceral fat around my organs congealed with whatever it was deep inside me that was weighing me down. I would like to look at both their bones, I thought to myself, knowing full well that I was too weak to dig around. I clung to my misery because it was the most tangible thing I had. That, and my phone, which I held onto with an equal possessiveness.
It felt like there was no way to be both real and alive.
But as I stepped out of my apartment, I was reminded that the sky was in fact real. And so was the sun. And the things they grew together were real as well, only I scarcely got to see them through the cracks in the pavement. Perhaps I ought to be thankful for the fact that there were now more, cracks and pavements alike.
The homeless outside my apartment sporadically mushroomed in fresh ways every time I walked down the street, growing within the petri dish of public space. In the summer the tents multiplied, in the winter they contracted. It was hot and a couple was fighting about what couples fight about (his unkempt self, his messy lodge, his wandering eye). It seemed as though none of us were immune from natural law. I think the stench meant that the city was in decay. And that it was alive.
In the absence of a functioning AC, I was desperate for another cool, dark room in which I could rot. Two intersections down, an old man (who leaned towards the perverted rather than pitiful end of the spectrum) played movies in the basement of a townhouse he was fortunate enough to inherit but not maintain.
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On my way there, I walked past a crystal shop with a trite name (one that could belong to any business really). The outside was colorful but sleek and minimal, not unlike the weed stores and vape stores and shroom stores that were spawning in the neighborhood. Inside, it was animated but inorganic. The light was white and bright and antiseptic, so were the employees.
Single crystals and gemstones sat in display cases and a diagrammatic tapestry of its properties hung on the wall, stuffed with the sort of prescriptive affirmations that always felt condescending to me. At least snake oil salesmen had the decency to come up with a narrative—these stones were epistemologically bare. It was honestly impressive how they’d managed to cleanse them of any mysticism they may have once held. There was no dirty, musky incense burning, the kind they fashioned strategically to invoke whatever watered-down form of spirituality happened to be in vogue.
No, the crystal had successfully completed its transfiguration into a product. Nothing was sacred and nothing was crude. I missed white women with dreads.
I looked at their successors shopping in the store: smiling so wide their bleached teeth were on display, a sea of seamless blonde balayage careening with each step. I thought smugly of how stupid they must be. And how they all must’ve been on sedatives.
I wondered if they had a crystal that could fix my AC, or my sleep. For a moment, a gust of hope carried me towards the store.
But I had to cling to my belief that I was better than that, even if it was not necessarily the truth. The truth was that I was jealous. And resentful. And indignant.
I thought of how easy it would be to pick up one of those shiny stones and smash it against the window, walk out of the store and go about my day like it had never even happened. Sometimes, the city felt so distant that tearing it apart seemed like the only way to get inside.
I tried not to dwell on the painfully beautiful homogeneity of the stone and glass on concrete: all pure light flecked with orange and amber and plum, soles crunching on the shards like fresh fall leaves, like crevice confetti that had developed a vengeance.
If only the docile disposition of the depressive was a part of my prognosis.
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The old man’s front yard was cluttered with fuzzy political slogans, cigarette butts and the programme for the week; a surrealist film from the 30s was set to screen in fifteen. I was in luck—he had taste. I thought there was an old-fashioned kindness to inviting strangers into your home, even if a single ticket cost more than the multiplex.
I walked right in through the open front door, a brazen display of both trust and bravery on a busy intersection. His home smelled like cat food and reminded me of why single men didn’t live long. He had all his bones on display; boasting an impressive array of memorabilia that littered the torn wallpaper, the chipped wood and the cracked ceiling that I surveyed while I waited by the door.
It did not take him long to arrive and fire into anecdotes about the tchotchkes and enemies he’d cultivated over the years, stirring with the verve of a much younger man. This was perfectly fine by me, for he was the type of guy who spoke only to listen to himself talk. I was a mere spectator in this pre-show, and I preferred it vastly to the gaudy commercials and template trailers I would have to suffer through in the multiplex.
He was admirable in the way that relics often are. There was some awe to how he was still standing, while the rest of us crumbled or distilled. Around him, the condo creep had begun. I would not be surprised if that stubborn old man was the only thing left on the block— resisting what he deemed to be evil even as it destroyed him. Maybe that was what I would start telling myself, that my own decay too was a form of autoimmunity. We both took warmly to this self-afflicted antagonism.
I had my pick of seats (business was not exactly booming) and settled into a wooden stool in the dark, dingy room.
Any farce of interest would be wasted on him, and I was glad to be rid of any guilt to feign it as he was snoring as soon the wide angle nestled onto the muslin. Oozing straight from the muslin was a slashed sclera, which bubbled into sea foam, which congealed into a bursting yoke. It was the type of movie one could easily project their own psychic tensions onto and I, for one, did not appreciate this. At least not right now.
I was no Amélie but I did feel like the unnamed protagonist in this film—a voyeur in her own reality, watching everything unfold from her apartment window, relishing in a sadistic pleasure she would never admit to.
We were condemned to a life of spectatorship.
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A blast of cool air greeted me at my condo’s double doors. I sighed in relief; I’d sleep as restlessly as ever. But sometimes, when I least expected it, my consciousness would surprise me with a soft, tender dream. I’d wake up smiling, blushing even, desperate to cling onto its uncertainty rather than rabidly hunt to dispel it.
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The sun had set but there was a faint glow emanating over the city from street lights, shadow box stores and distant skyscrapers that now seemed less imposing and more mislaid. The streetcars that usually paced down the length were lined up and halted, still blinkering synchronously as we used their open double doors as a passageway.
Later, I learned that someone had jammed the switch that lit the livewire. How easy, I thought, to tame a wild thing when you know how it moves.
I took the streetcar’s functioning so lightly, writing it off daily as a fact of life rather than a feat of engineering, that seeing it collapse felt like a myth being undone in real-time
Up ahead, it seemed as though a riot had broken out. There were bright flags and timid slogans— the kind that could belong to any movement, really.
I was walking down the streets I always walked down, but there was a purpose to my gait and command to my step that I faintly recognized as ownership. I didn’t know the people around me but there was a sense of oneness; we were breathing the same dusty air, marching in the same direction, together… in whatever.
There was no pavement, no street— just where we were walking and where we were not, anarchy like the mall on christmas eve. Maybe I should’ve felt small in that big crowd but my god, I was nucleic.
I had the unshakable feeling that this could be something great, brimming with the sort of hopeful naiveté that’s snatched away from you at thirteen or fourteen or wherever you got your first real lick of disappointment.
It took me some time to notice that we were armed, with stone and brick and other jagged rocks. I was sweaty and my bones ached in a way that made them impossible to ignore. And my heart was sounding off like a gong in my chest (loud and amateurish), filled with an urgency to kiss someone (long and hard) until it made me deaf.
The premature clock tower on my block sounded off– it must’ve been 9:48 PM or 10:48 PM if I had to guess. On cue, the stones took flight, launching towards and crashing into the walls of the storefronts, the filament of the streetlights, taking no enemies on their path to the skyscrapers. The glass tinkled and fluttered, like a distant wind chime on a stormy evening. Destruction, I noted, had never sounded so effervescent.
I suppose this was one way to take back the night, and it was as beautiful as I had imagined. It was the most alive I had felt in months and I never wanted to wake up.
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Thank you to and for making me a better writer <3
the images do a lot, they’re a great add
thank you for being a beautiful writer!