I go to Anthropologie and look at all their cards but this time I hate them all. they all feel shallow, and lacking in sexuality. I picture painting her a card or writing her one that was searingly sincere, something bizarre.
happy 30th birthday, — !! you are still so young and sexy!! you will always be beautiful because you have loved
for many years I didn’t admit that she was cool. all the years of 14 and 16 and 17, 18, the dreaded 19, the lukewarm 20, the stale joke 21, the sweet 22, the dreaded 23, the lukewarm 24.
25, feels like, 20? 26.
I love 27.
29, 30.
i’m not talking about a real older sister. i’m talking about elizabeth grant.
a gift set of wooden cheese knives feels lavish and inappropriate, some of them are beautiful but a lot of them are crap, and they’re bolted into the package so no one cherry picks. they’re so expensive. I hate their candlesticks but they seemed like something she would like, but we’re not friends like that in the slightest but I hated the cards. later, she scolds me for hitting her car in the parking lot even though I left a note.
I buy my xxs bra and leave but at the checkout, they ask if I’m in their rewards program and they all, workers and customers alike, glance over like it’s kind of bummy that I’m not. what’s crazy about this is I did walk from Royal Street also because why would I pay to park to go into Anthropologie, that’s insane. I paid for it differently though, because it goes through the most touristy homeless-ridden shitbag cheap liquor smoke shop t-shirt shop parts of New Orleans.
it’s Sunday but I don’t want to go to church, with the balding men and their sad wives, when everyone in this café is young, hot, and vibrant. patience has found its grasp on me. as an adult, my interests have developed, waned, and evolved. As a child, I had only obsessions. then one day, while they were still alive in my hands, I would suddenly realize that it was over and drop them cold.
I used to view my ideas and dreams passively through an impenetrable cinema screen. the maw of my anxiety chewed them and I knew I could never execute them perfectly. the greats didn’t do it perfectly, but they got close, so try. Growing numb to criticism is a cold thrill.
when I go out to eat or want something to buy what I’m looking for is the feeling that someone cares for me. many products available are designed to simulate this feeling. I can mix cayenne and cinnamon into juice at home. I’ve been putting cayenne and olive oil, mixed in my palm, on the lips as a beauty treatment. at the healing center, a shop sells rainwater, holy water, oils, and icons. the woman says she carries only one pheromone oil but it is not labeled as such and I buy it; it smells wonderful.
my coworkers don’t laugh at my jokes. I worry it reveals where I am mentally, then lie in the backseat of my car in the baking sun for about fifteen minutes. my camera roll is so strange, I was so depressed for so long that for the first time, it is changing. it’s so hard to explain. my pictures were pretty bleak, with emotional attachments to a picture of a drink, or a foot walking. less of that, now.
a beautiful girl named Hadley working at the kava bar offers her hand to shake. gorgeous name. almond milk and half and half she said. The bar reminds me of an opium den, in the sense that no one is sober but everyone is mild-mannered. quite frankly, I’d rather waste away in an opium den than face the music.
I don’t have a good reason for any of this. buying vintage clothes, sunglasses and creams, perfume and little leather bags, ayurvedic medicine, and vegan food. Tipping the wait staff on top of all this like I don’t understand money, completely missing the point in a way that would make me burst into tears if the wrong person confronted me about it. I used to be so good, what happened? I erase the beginning of a draft of a painfully drawn-out letter of affection,
i offer you the version yet deserved, before the other girls picked the beads off my dress and let her teeth on you.
and write a to-do list instead.