Hipster Love Stories: Tina and Jared

Manhattan Avenue lived in perpetual spring, selling fake flowers year-round in violent shades of neon.  Hot pink, tangerine, cobalt.  Valentine’s Day cards and candies sat propped in windows.  “50% Off” the signs read.  Tina scoffed, wondering why anyone spent money on that garbage to begin with – preconceived affection, a consumerist vision of what love is supposed to be, corporations making money on something that didn’t exist.  “Love,” Tina mused.  “Bullshit.”

Tina walked in the cold, hoping the fresh air would cure her bad humor.  She had been bitter and angry for the better part of two weeks, cooped up in her apartment thinking of Jared the boy who told her he loved her and then took it away like a cruel magic trick.  Before today, it had been too cold even to venture outside and take a distracting walk.  And so Tina just let her malaise brew.

People waited outside Five Leaves for brunch, the sun glaring off of their Ray Bans and shiny, unwashed hair.  Tina didn’t understand people who waited in line for brunch.  In her opinion, nothing was worth the wait.  Eggs were just eggs – you could get decent enough ones down the street at Eleanor’s.  And aside from that, Tina was quite capable of just cooking eggs at home.

Love and brunch were probably similar in that way.  All of these people willing to wait for forty-five minutes while hunger ate away at their bellies likely thought that Five Leaves was the be all end all.  These people were steadfast in their love for its coffee, its granola, its pancakes, whatever.  The truth was, you could get good food anywhere in New York, at any hour of the day.  Five leaves was just another restaurant.  There were six hundred more within a half-mile radius.

The same went for love.  Love had this way of making you think you needed one specific person.  That this person was “It.”  No one could make you feel like this person or laugh like this person.  This, of course, was a lie.  In a world filled with millions of people, thousands of whom Tina walked past on a daily basis, there had to be more than one person in this world for each person.  But, in the throws of blinding, brain-numbing love, that’s how Tina had felt about Jared.  Now he was gone.  But it was okay – Tina knew that in three months she would feel the same way about someone else.  Anyone could service these fuzzy love needs if we convinced ourselves enough.  It was all just projection, anyway.

Tina walked past laughing friends and judged them all – less because they were waiting in line for brunch and more because she had fallen into a miserable little hole that she was trying to claw her way out of.  None of this was about them; it was all about Jared.

I’m falling in love with you…

Bullshit.

What made Tina the most angry was she didn’t believe him to begin with.  In the back of her cynical little brain – the one that she had cultivated over the course of her twenty-five years here on this earth – she knew he would take it back.  They always took it back.  “I’m falling in love with you,” he said to her, and she said nothing at first because she knew what a person risked when they responded to statements such as this.  She gave him nothing and he said he didn’t mind and for a week, Tina managed to feel in control of her feelings.  Next time she knew just to leave it at that.  There, on the corner of Bedford and Lorimer, Tina vowed never to tell another boy that she loved them.

The park was filled with people with children and people walking dogs.  Obligations.  Tina was happy her only obligation was to herself.  She didn’t need anyone or want anyone.  The thought of a child or a dog or a boyfriend for that matter filled her with the overwhelming sense of self-sacrifice.  Tina took a seat on a bench next to another woman, sitting alone and sunning her painfully white face.

Tina watched planes pass in the distance, moving at a pace that belied its true speed.  They came in rows, one after another after another, at three-minute intervals – huge pieces of metal casually traveling behind one another at four hundred miles per hour.  Tina wanted to be in one of those planes, coming and going, preferably to someplace warm.  Miami, South Africa, Melbourne.  After Jared told her he didn’t love her anymore, she booked a flight to Spain but then cancelled it after looking up the weather.  She’d rather just be depressed in her apartment at no extra cost, then be holed up in some hotel in Barcelona with a day rate in euros.

A couple walked past, holding hands.  Tina cringed.  There should be a moratorium on public displays of affection, if only to maintain her sanity.   She wondered if she would ever hold Jared’s hand again.  Probably not.  Still, she wondered.  If he came back, there would be no reason to put stock in him, aside from her own foolishness.  “Hurt me,” she would say, tying herself down to the tracks and feeling the rope burn at her wrists.

Fucking boys.

Tina was done with them.  All of them.  There was something refreshing about her current frame of mind.  Her brain was unclouded by love.  The excessive happiness she had felt over the last few months had numbed her to the outside world.  Between December and January, all Tina thought about was Jared, which, she imagined, had likely retarded her brain.  Now, she saw the world again with fresh eyes.  Cynical and bitter, but fresh nonetheless.

Payoff

Ten degrees has made all the difference.  I lock my house with a silver key, not wearing gloves and not needing to.  I walk down my street with its barren trees, listening to the provincial sound of my boots against the concrete.  In a few months they will sit abandoned in the back of my closet, banished in favor of less sturdy things, strapier and feminine.

Spring is a smell: wet pavement and trees about to fulfill promises.  It’s the sound of skateboards traveling over buckled concrete, attached to boys in baggy jeans, shirts rippling away from their backs.  Bicycles carry pretty girls with their long hair and heavy coats; their giggles come and go like a fire siren, loud and blaring and then immediately gone.  Cars pass with their windows down.  Rap music.  Pop music.  The man in the burgundy Subaru is back, screaming show tunes out his window while he makes circles around Bedford Avenue.

I check the branches overhead, looking for telltale green buds to confirm my hope that we have reached a clearing in the weather.  Just two hours ago I was planning my escape to Nicaragua or Mexico – any place that only required a duffle bag filled with shorts and sunblock.  But I can’t leave the city now, not after putting up with two months of garbage.  This is the pay off, today and on.

The park is covered with developing grass, remarkable amounts of green poking through intensely saturated dirt.  Prickly brown pods litter the ground beneath trees I don’t know the names of.  Oak, maybe.  The pods sit on the dirt and wait to be swallowed whole or decomposed.  We used to crush these underfoot as children, making them explode into a fibrous mess.  “Itching powder,” we called it, and would jam it down the backs of our enemies in fits of nasty laughter.

Provoked birds fly overhead in an intense flapping of wings, the sound of rustling taffeta or falling stacks of paper, traveling together on an unseen path, riding currents I cannot feel.

Old Polish men congregate around green benches, talking in their voices that sound like tapes being played in reverse, warbled and hugging to consonants.  Baseball bats connect with white leather balls with that dense aluminum ping.  Sickly pale faces crane their necks towards the sun, praying for their greenish translucence to be alleviated.  Lovers walk down sidewalks holding hands, coming up for air.

 

HLS: Sammy and Carl

Sammy was alone and she was dancing half-naked in front of a full-length mirror they had purchased together.  It was technically his because he bought it with his money.  She bought the television.  He bought the grey couch and the kitchen table. The mattress was the one he had at his old apartment, the apartment with the rusty sink and the refrigerator that never seemed to get cold enough to keep the vegetables fresh for more than two days.

It was six in the evening in the center of winter and it was miserably dark outside, the sky just this impossibly depressing, inky thing and not the source of joy it was during the summers full of evening heat and possibility.

Department of Eagles played loudly from some corner of the living room, filling her hallway with “No One Does It Like You.”

But I tried so hard.

I tried so hard.

I tried so hard.

It was and had been on loop for the better part of thirty-seven minutes.  She danced what she intended to be an attempt at ballet even though she had never been properly trained.  When Sammy was a child she took classes but quit after being scolded for dancing to “Under the Sea” with her fist closed tightly around a pink rhinestone.  It had fallen off of her ballet slipper and she had placed it on the floor next to her until she saw the girl with the brown hair eyeing it suspiciously.  When it was Sammy’s turn to spin around the room to the voice of a singing lobster, she did it while protecting that stupid plastic thing and she cried when the teacher told her she couldn’t do that and she might break her hand if she fell.  She wasn’t in trouble but she felt like she was and she sobbed deeply and her chest heaved within her leotard and she was thankful when she got chickenpox the next week.  She never went to ballet class again.

Sammy was alone in the apartment for the first time in months.  Carl was away on some work trip, probably flirting with foreign girls and feeling the invigorating power of lust.  People needed that, Sammy knew.  It made you feel worthwhile.  It affirmed things that you should have already known without the validation of a person who wanted to kiss you, have sex with you, date you.  None of that mattered.  At the end of the day, all you were left with was you.  They had been together for years and still all Sammy had was herself.

No one does it like you.

No one does it like you.

The song had started again and Sammy watched her arms move with an unknowing grace.  She looked at a face that was older now but oddly more beautiful.  She leaned and stretched and her toes bent in limited, unqualified ways.  She was alone and she breathed and she danced alone.

It had been too long and she had been consumed by this – by them, by this house, by the expectations people placed on the chronological order of monogamy.  She wanted disorder.  She wanted chaos and groping, grasping, desperate love all over again.  The frantic hands filled with newness.  It had died living in this house because of the control.  The rent that was due every thirty days and the bills that they split in half.

She was tired of him and she was tired of the her that she had become as a result.  She was tired of not wearing that dress he didn’t like and not wearing her retainer to bed at night and negotiating what concerts were worth spending the money on.  She was sick of listening to his music even though it was good – even though it was better than her music, which had was now a three-year-old archive of her single life, back when she dutifully searched for music that moved her personally.  His soundtrack had become her soundtrack and these songs were doomed to be only memories of him.  But she would always have this memory – this moment of temporary levity, like that part of the day where the sun burns off the marine layer, that particular moment when light supersedes fog.  She would remember a moment that she had not lived in some time, dancing freely to a song that was hers because he hadn’t beaten her to it.

It was winter and she danced and Sammy felt the love melting away like the snow in their backyard – full and abundant and alarmingly pure at first and dissolving over the course of its short life, layer by layer, unnoticed until the sad brown earth revealed itself in muddy rough patches.

Hipster Love Stories: Gina in a Corner

Gina stood against the wall of the apartment, debating whether or not she should drink, pretending to listen to the girl next to her ramble the inane musings of a ridiculous human.  The conversation veered into I Know This Celebrity, Do You? territory and Gina was about to excuse herself to drown her agony in a bottle of Jack Daniels or cheap red wine or rubbing alcohol.  Fucking anything.  In a way, Gina felt bad for her, like she would feel badly for a three-legged dog hobbling down the street.  The girl was missing some integral pieces of her brain and had about as much substance as the surface of a dirty window.  And not even a really dirty window – a window with water stains and a very light film of dust.

“How did I get cornered here of all places…with her?” Gina thought to herself, looking around the room in desperation for other people she knew, people she liked, people that could talk about things deeper than pedicures and trips to European beaches in private planes.  Gina was not a girl’s girl by any stretch of the imagination; she found their humor to be dull and witless, their conversation to be reserved and withholding.  Girls allowed themselves to be emotional concubines, reigning in their personalities for fear that they might push people away.  Gina, however, didn’t care about pushing people away.  If they liked her, they liked her.  If they didn’t they could go fuck themselves.

To make things worse, the girl spoke with an uncalled for volume, projecting statements such as, “He didn’t even offer to pay for my dinner,” at an audible pitch that easily reached a ten-foot radius.  Gina was horrified at the prospect she might be judged by association with the logical deduction that anyone who listened to bullshit like this cared about bullshit like this.  Gold-digger Dee and Gold-digger dumb, standing in the corner.

Gina wondered how men even put up with girls like this and Gina used the word “men” in her head because that was the client base for girls like this – pretty girls with perfectly curled hair and long eyelashes and breasts that pushed forward out of tight dresses.  They were the prizes for men who had endured decades of rejection from girls exactly like this.  Rich guys were the nerds who were lucky enough to be saved from the horrors of narcissism and vanity and any other fleeting time suck that kept you from doing real things with your life.  Instead of fucking hot babes through their twenties, they were building Fortune 500 companies and writing computer software.

What drove Gina even crazier was that these men, these intensely smart and creative and ambitious men, were keen on settling for idiots with mouths full of drivel.  It was though they just wanted to come home from a hard day of work and not have to engage any further with the world.  Girls like this would never challenge them intellectually and maybe that was the point.  They were two steps above the anatomically correct dolls you could buy at the Hustler store on Sunset Boulevard.  Barely.

The girl kept talking and Gina felt her brain flicker on and off like a broken TV, the kind with the knobs that reminded her of old microwaves with windup timers.  She had started telling Gina about her audition that day and how the casting director told her she shouldn’t wear heels to commercial castings because she was already too tall as it was and isn’t it hard to be tall and beautiful sometimes and people just don’t understand and she was tired of being ostracized for her looks and sometimes she just wished she was a little less attractive.  Gina felt like she was back in Professor Waxon’s Conversations of the West class, her cheek propped up on an open palm and nodding off to sleep and jerking awake and nodding off to sleep and jerking awake again.  Gina was going to offer to break a bottle over her head to alleviate the burden of her perfection, but she was nervous she wouldn’t be able to deliver the joke without sincerity.

Gina thought about these girls and their boyfriends and wondered if they found such vacuous chatter charming.  She imagined this girl in the arms of some rich man with a nice apartment, laying together in his king sized bed with white sheets cleaned by the bi-weekly maid, petting her hair while she talked about how depressed she was Celine didn’t have the pants she wanted in her size.  According to Cosmo and Elle and every other stupid woman’s magazine touting the benefits of icing your fat cells and giving advice on how to make the perfect roasted chicken, they – women as a species – were supposed to care about things like this.  Pants and aging and animal prints and firm asses and the attention of a man.  It was a wonder why there hadn’t been a woman president yet; for hundreds of years we were too consumed with achieving the perfect hair and churning butter.

Not all women were like this girl; Gina knew that.  But she knew a depressing amount of them that were.  Her smart friends – the most quick and educated and charming of the bunch – were, and had always been, single.  Their kind was an acquired taste, one that required an appreciation for depth and complexity.  They were beautifully layered women, women who felt the world in ways that other people could not express.  They knew things about themselves that made them difficult, an awareness that brought pain and suffering along with the things that made them fascinating.

Gina thought they could be best compared to gourmet delicacies: oysters, truffles, caviar.  They were polarizing items – things you would either travel to the ends of the world for, paying a premium for their scarcity, or things that left a taste in your mouth for days, an intense flavor that you cared not to ever try again.  She thought about the truffle oil French fries at the beautifully lit café down the street from her house and how its scent filled the room in a most potent way.  She had friends who refused to dine there on account of that aroma; they would prefer to eat in a less perfumed environment.  She looked at the girl next to her, whose lips were still moving to no real consequence.  She was a French fry – the most beautiful, most boring, tasteless French fry in the universe, one served plain with a bottle of Heinz Ketchup and nothing more – and all of the boys in the room were staring at her.

Hipster Love Stories: Cole and Jo

An amber light filled a living room covered in expensive rugs and nicely dressed twenty-somethings, the progeny of rich parents living in Los Angeles.  Directors, writers, entertainment people.  They were appropriately pretentious, having grown up in entitled and creative environments where they were encouraged to do whatever they wanted with their lives because they were free to.  The proverbial trust fund kids.  They would all succeed and they knew it.

She was standing in the corner, the lights from the impoverished New York below shining through the large glass window behind her.  One arm draped across her thin body, supporting the other arm holding a champagne glass filled with red wine.  She looked classic in a way that reminded him of Paris, though he hadn’t been yet: the hem of her skirt grazed the bottoms of her knees; the sheer silk draped over her bony shoulders, her silken hair trailing down her narrow back.

Cole stood in the kitchen, releasing the cap from the top of a beer when she looked his direction while continuing to talk to the boy next to her, who was four-inches shorter than her and loved her just as much as Cole was beginning to.  She nodded her head in an approving, masculine way and tipped her glass his direction.  A smile accidentally crossed his lips and he turned away, digging his hands into a bowl full of almonds in the vain hope that it would distract him enough from having felt stupid.

“Hey, dude.  How the fuck have you been?”

Cole looked up at the face of Sven, his American friend with the very un-American name.  He looked foreign, but when he opened his mouth he was pure Texas, a drawl where an abrasive Germanic tongue should have been.  His parents weren’t even European.  They were like, sixth generation American or something and the name was irritating.  Cole wished he would just change it.

“Good, man.  Just, you know, working.”

“You going anywhere for New Year’s?” Sven asked.  This group was one that traveled often and everywhere.  Vacations were meant to be spent in far away places.  They had all been traveling since they were infants, staying in country homes in the south of France and taking ski trips to the Swiss Alps.  Cole knew forty-year-olds who had seen less of the world than these kids.

“Naw, man.  Sticking around this year.”

“Bummer.  We’ve got an extra room in this cabin upstate if you want.  We’re staying local this time.  Should be nice.”

Cole wasn’t listening to Sven speak; he was watching the girl with the skirt and the hair and the see-through blouse walk towards the kitchen and he felt his heart stop in a stupid way that he would never tell anyone about.

“Hey, Sven,” she said, the words pouring out of her mouth in the most perfect way.

Cole took a swig of his beer, casually looking out at the party while they exchanged their heys and how are yous.  He turned when he felt a hand on the space above his elbow.  “I’m Jo,” she said, extending the hand she had touched him with into a graceful handshake.  “Cole,” he said, hoping that she couldn’t see how much he liked her already.  Infatuation was a dangerous substance, an unstable compound begging for destruction.

He spent the rest of the party standing next to her, talking about movies they had seen at the IFC and how they had grown up less than two miles away from each other in the Pacific Palisades.  Cole was trying to reign in his liking of her – an immediate reaction to the way she laughed and how she mispronounced words.  He felt an intensity of feeling for her that he had to hold back like the gnashing teeth of a rabid dog.  He wanted to buy them tickets to Paris – the place he still hadn’t been – where they could walk in the cold and fall in love and fill their mouths with kisses and macaroons.  Crazy people thought these things, he told himself, and he said nothing.

Hipster Love Stories: Gillian and Seth

He met her at a dinner party where they served only vegetarian courses.  It was supposed to be vegan but people complained.  When the quinoa with pomegranate seeds, roasted cubes of butternut squash, and crumbled feta came out, Seth looked across the table at Gillian, a then-stranger, and directed (accidentally) a look of disgust her way, which she (purposefully) reciprocated.

Later they would discuss growing up in corn-fed, Middle America households where the bread was always white and the meat was always red.  They were both true blue, dyed-in-the-wool Americans that had somehow managed to escape.  Here they were now, a thousand miles and a world away from home, sitting down to a civilized dinner in a modern loft they would never admit to anyone but each other about feeling uncomfortable in.  This was and would always be the glue that kept them together.

Having accepted the fact that he wouldn’t be eating tonight, Seth downed glass after glass of expensive Chardonnay, a choice he regretted then because he found it grotesquely effeminate and one he would regret later on account of the wretched, godforsaken hangover he woke up with the next day.  He yearned, pined, prayed for a beer all night.  Something light and wheaty.  That’s how he liked his beer.  It was a prayer that would go unanswered until some three hours later, half slumped over in the badly lit dining area of a place everyone knew as Lonely Pizza, sitting across from Gillian as they both devoured countless slices of greasy, sausage-covered pizza, less so because they were famished (the excessive drinking that had occurred before the food-run had managed to dull most of their senses) than in rebellion of the last six hours.

The hosts of the dinner party were mutual friends of Gillian’s and Seth’s.  They were in their mid-thirties, collected mid-century furniture (the real deal), and had been married for nearly three years.  Seth had known the husband since the days they would scrape each other off the filthy bathroom floors of New York bars.  Gillian knew the wife during quite a similar stage, though most men would never admit to marrying a woman capable of such behavior.  “DJs and BJs.”  That was their inside joke.  They had shirts made.  They were those girls.

Their friends had changed drastically since that time, morphing into Responsible Humans, moving away from the party and into DUMBO, where the streets were covered in level cobblestone and nannies pushing someone else’s baby.  Gillian and Seth – in their own thoughts, respectively – wondered if they had changed.  Both still lived in the same apartment they had for the last countless years.  Gillian was still a bartender and Seth was still in A & R at a suffering record label.  They sat at the sleek twelve-person table eating off of unchipped dishware, drinking out of glasses with thin stems, wondering if this was what they were supposed to want: a two-bedroom loft with refinished hardwood floors and clean paint, a bathroom that never ran out of toilet paper or its constant supply of fig-scented soap pumped out of fancy glass jars.  They were the same and they didn’t know it yet.  The knowing came later.

Gillian had excused herself from the train wreck bore of a man sitting next to her hell bent on engaging her in a conversation about his collection of Italian motorcycles and walked into the bathroom.  It was a lovely bathroom with a big mirror reflecting everything about Gillian that didn’t fit in here.  Everything was orderly and the counter wasn’t wet; each person who had used the bathroom must have wiped the counter down after they used it, which Gillian found collectively odd.  She washed her hands – that’s when she saw the fig soap.  She remembered getting the same one as a gift once and when she had gone through all of it she refilled the glass with a cheaper version of the same scent by a different maker.  It wasn’t the same by any means; the cheaper stuff dried out her hands and left her stinking of potpourri.

She told him that later, Seth, that is, over her second piece of pizza.  He laughed and told her that his mother always kept three bars of soap in the guest bathroom, next to an ugly floral towel and miniature porcelain cows.  It was a dangerous thing, boys telling stories, because it endeared the listener to them.  Stories were how people fell in love.  They laughed and they were drunk and they kissed later, somewhere in between the parked cars outside Gillian’s apartment filled with broken furniture and wool blankets from back home, both feeling temporarily safe living in the thought that they had possibly found their matching piece.

Hipster Love Stories: Julie

She wandered the aisles of a Japanese supermarket, trying to stay warm while she waited for a text that was slow in coming.  Julie pretended to assess the quality of shizo leaves and chilled eggplant.  She stared into the opaque eyeballs of a school of sardines trapped in a plastic bag with red and white lettering, swimming nowhere fast at all.

Twenty minutes had gone by without a text beyond a vague statement of where he was.  “I’m at so-and-so’s house in such-and-such a place,” she read, wondering if he was being purposefully obtuse or just accidentally clueless.  She had once dated a boy whom she panicked over too often, wondering why he didn’t call on certain days or what he meant in some of his text messages.  Later, after her blinding infatuation had tempered and the fog had cleared, Julie realized he was just an idiot, truly a depressingly dumb person that reminded her of an aging Golden Retriever.  But this boy wasn’t an idiot; this boy seemed oddly intelligent, which meant whatever games he was playing with her, if he were playing games at all, had a deeper meaning.  Or not.  It was possible he was an idiot, too, and she hadn’t admitted it to herself yet.  Julie recognized how she had the ability to build someone up in her head, mining for signs of potential like panning for gold.  The rivers were often fruitless; she was an admittedly terrible miner.

“Fuck this,” Julie said, putting down the same can of coconut water she had picked up ten minutes ago and pulling her wool gloves back on.  Her phone had been sitting silent in her pocket for the last ten minutes and it was getting late.  She’d rather be back at home, taking a warm shower and getting into bed with a good book.  These were habits that she enjoyed, though she secretly feared they would bring her to the brink of being alone forever.  One day, in the not so distant future, she would be a thirty-year-old with a stack full of books and a good vocabulary, buying her friends wedding gifts and hosting baby showers without the expectation of the favor ever being returned.

She ignored the annoyed stares from the checkout clerks as she opened the door onto 3^rd Avenue.  “Fuck you and your shizo leaves,” she thought, “Fuck you and boys and Tokyo and these fucking sub-zero temperatures.”  Winters were a quiet, depressing time for those who lived alone.  If Julie were a bird she would fly south for the winter, even though Miami was a tasteless place that gave her visual ulcers.  “Too many naked people.  Too many fucking naked people,” she grumbled in her head while the wind weaseled its way through the buttons of her pea coat.  Recently, even the sight of Julie’s own naked body disturbed her; it hadn’t seen sun in the last three months and she felt as though she were vanishing before her very eyes.  Her bleached hair and her bleached eyebrows and her bleached teeth, it was all blending into itself, saved only by lips that were always pink and a pair of steely gray eyes.

As she neared the L Train, she felt a promising buzz against her left hip.  Her phone.  Eagerly, she reached into her pocket, stymied by the obnoxious size of her winter gloves.  She stood in the middle of the sidewalk, removing her left glove and holding it with her teeth while grabbing her iPhone with a freezing white hand.

Missed call.

Mom.

Doubly annoyed, Julie crammed the phone back into her pocket.  When she spoke to her mom again she would tell her she wasn’t allowed to call at night anymore; she couldn’t stand further disappointments such as these.  They were embarrassing and if someone she knew had been standing next to her, they would have seen how her eyes had lit up and her face twisted into a satisfied smile, and then watched as it fell away as quickly as it had appeared.  Being a twenty-six year old hopeful girl was not dissimilar from a bi-polar, manic psychopath.

Julie walked down into the subway dungeon that was no warmer than the frozen streets above and waited impatiently for her hot shower and her good book and her stupid, comfortable, lonely little life.  She would call AT&T and cancel her service in the morning; no one called her anymore anyway.

HLS: Olivia

Olivia’s wrists ached under the weight of a five-pound apple pie, a treat her mother had taught her to make when she was still small and could be taught things.  She wished her parents had pushed her harder during those malleable years – force-feeding her Spanish and French lessons, throwing her in front of a piano or a guitar or anything that she could use to channel her occasional malaise.  Instead she had turned twenty-five and was just another useless, ignorant American, speaking English and going to concerts, not performing in them, making pies for holiday parties she didn’t really want to go to anyway.

As an adult she had found herself more reluctant in the acquisition of new knowledge.  Knowing too much made her feel small and insignificant; the more she knew about one singular topic, more subtopics would spring up around them like relentless weeds begging to be pulled, though when those were pulled new ones just grew up in their place.  Knowledge was an infinite void.  Stella never felt satisfied because there could be no satisfaction in the infinite.

Olivia should have taken a car.  Her pack was heavy with two bottles of wine and a festive homemade trail mix of dried cherries and pistachios, less obvious shades of the holiday season.  Instead, she was left to awkwardly negotiate the pie in her hands with the subway turnstile, onto a platform filled with the only other idiots in New York City willing to endure a similar hassle.

The voice of the robotic subway announcer – a sexless woman always telling Olivia when her Manhattan bound train was arriving – echoed around the filthy tiled halls, absorbed into nothing and no one the same way her apartment did.

She had been in her place five months already and hadn’t bothered to invest in any furniture save for a mattress, two forks, and a knife.  She had nested before, inspired by a boy and the concept of home.  She knew what it was like to spend weekends at flea markets, finding trinkets that accurately expressed her personality in brass and porcelain.  “I’m like this,” the chandelier in her dining room proudly stated, shining down over the faces of her beautiful friends in a beautiful kaleidoscope of light.  That time was beautiful.  Their apartment was beautiful.  They were beautiful and then they were over.

Olivia found an apartment far enough away from that place so she never had to walk past it.  He didn’t live there anymore but she couldn’t be bothered reliving times that had already passed.  There was no point in looking back; life was about charging relentlessly forward.  Forward and away.  Inventing new parts of yourself so you could forget about the old.

Her new place was not as beautiful as the last, in part because she couldn’t afford what they had been able to afford as a couple, but also because she just didn’t care.  It was a newer building, without crown molding or high ceilings.  Her neighbors were twenty-somethings who dressed like people who didn’t understand aesthetics. It felt a bit like a prefabricated cave with that fake wooden flooring that gave underfoot.  An apartment was just an apartment.  It lacked all of the things that Olivia had always associated with home and that was precisely the point; if it was perfect, if she made it perfect, she would get attached, and when the day came that she had to leave it, it would be that much more difficult.

When she moved, she vowed not to repeat the mistakes of her past.  Everything was temporary and everyone was transient.  Everything about New York City was a constant reminder of that fact: the internationals who came and went, the weather that changed by the hour, the constant flood of new things that indicated a forcing out of the old.  She knew all of this and she spent her time and money accordingly: sparsely and with a hesitant hand.

Hipster Love Stories: Leigh

Liking someone was a time-consuming business, Leigh thought, and she wondered if she had better things to do with her time than debate the invisible merits of another person who, in the end, would probably break her heart anyway.  She should be reading books, seeing plays, taking trips up north to the Niagara Falls or going back to school to get her graduate degree.  All of this was possible in the time it took for her to “research” love conquests she wasn’t allowed to be the conqueror of.  That was the problem: girls had to wait.  Girls had to sit on the sidelines batting their eyelashes and making witty jokes if they were even capable of witty jokes until someone, anyone, responded to them.  Things hadn’t changed much since middle school, when she sat in a thick plastic chair pushed up against the wall, waiting for a boy to come up and ask her to dance.  She just wanted to be on the dance floor.  She wanted to be spinning in circles and throwing her hands in the air and kissing who she wanted to kiss without asking.  She didn’t want to wait.

Leigh had decided that the only way to get something close to what she wanted was to be available to multiple men at the same time and not really care about any of them.  She liked to think that she had divided her heart up into little indestructible pieces and those pieces were analogous to some stupid proverbial eggs in that stupid proverbial basket.  Only then was it was possible to give little bits of her heart to multiple people and come out of this whole love thing alive.  You couldn’t give your heart to just one person; that was completely insane, like flying a kamikaze plane into enemy territory.

As a teenager she had seen movies filled with hardened characters giving callous speeches about the correlation between how much you love to how much you hurt.  Give less; hurt less.  Give none; hurt none.  These were lessons delivered during intent drags off of cigarettes, some actor looking off into the distance with a pained gaze that indicated they weren’t completely convinced in their own theories of self-preservation.  Managing feelings was like trying to catch angry bumblebees with your bare hands, she had learned that as she got older.  Theories about such things were useless; feelings had a life all their own.

She used to think these cinematic musings were stupid and insular, the dogma of bitter adults who just needed to toughen up and love some more, but she was thirteen and the closest she had come to getting her heart broken was when Jake told her he wanted to see Melanie instead; they weren’t even really dating, or maybe they were, Leigh couldn’t remember.  She had liked Jake for the better part of sixth grade – she had started listening to The Misfits for him, had learned how to skateboard and even attempted to learn guitar.  Leigh was devastated.  For three weeks, she avoided her friends at lunchtime and ignored all invitations to go see a movie at the local mall.  On the weekends, she sat in her room, listening to Third Eye Blind allude to songs about suicide and staring at last year’s yearbook.  And then, like a bear out of hibernation, she was magically over it.  That’s when she fell in love with Aaron.

As a young girl, Leigh gave her whole heart to everyone, all of the time.  It seemed she should recover from the tragedies of youth much more quickly then, like how skin heals itself more quickly in our younger years than in our aging ones.  Her heart was like that.  The bad habit of being over-exposed and too generous with her feelings followed her into her early twenties until she had lost most of her heart and had to take a few years off to regenerate her spirit and rebuild the desire to love anyone, including herself.  During that period she felt like the ravaged wood in “The Giving Tree,” a book she had loved as a child, but as an adult she found it to be a rather dark tale about irredeemable selfishness.

Leigh had dated enough to know that girls were best served behaving like boys when it came to dating.  Boys had a more grab-bag approach to falling in love.  They always seemed to have a rotation of girls that they liked enough for different reasons (nice apartment, smelled good, a pretty face, long legs) and eventually, one stuck, for reasons Leigh wasn’t even sure a boy was capable of articulating.  Lucky was the chosen girl, surely, but for every person victorious, there were a bevy of losers in the War of Love.

Leigh knew that if she wanted to make it through her twenties without hating men, she had to adopt these tactics, which was excruciatingly difficult for a girl to do.  She had to force herself to not care.  This went hand-in-hand with the theory that women could not have sex without placing some emotional significance on the act.  Men could just fuck.  Women could fuck, too, but there was always something more to it.  Even her friends who were the biggest sluts, the ones who screwed up to five guys in the same week, even though they had all of these options and backup plans for saving their hearts from ruination, even THEN, the sex always meant something.  And when the boys and the sex disappeared, that meant something, too.

She understood why boys did the things they did.  Women were beautiful.  Men could be handsome and interesting, but women were like collectable things.  If Leigh were a man she would conquer as many women as she could.  It was almost like having billions of dollars and buying property in Shanghai and Paris and Rio, not because you love those places so much as it is just because you can and because those places are the places that they are.  So while sitting at a dinner party with all of your rich friends you can say, “Oh, why yes, I do have a house in Shanghai…and in Paris…and Rio…among other places.”  And then you would take a tasteful sip of your champagne and congratulate yourself on your life and your ability to own pieces of the world.  This was how men thought, Leigh believed, and she understood that.

jennyblovespublictransportation

I don’t what possesses the MTA to grant advertisers the right to plaster their visual fury on the walls of my subways, but I hope it’s a lucrative venture.  Someone better be profiting from the raping of my eyeballs, because it sure as hell isn’t me.  Between full-size posters of open-heart surgery and macro shots of black lung, by the time I get from Point A to Point B, I am ready to gouge my eyes out.

Strangely enough, the most terrifying posters are usually the ones annotated in Spanish.  I don’t know if it’s just that I am unable to give the grotesque photographs context, thereby nullifying their visual potency or what, but the few times I have really wanted to wretch, this has been the case.

The other day I had the pleasure of sitting across from a poster featuring the pulverized face of a man, sporting some gnarly gash on his forehead and a mélange of attractive bruises.  He looked like he’d either fallen off of a building or been subjected to a three-day gangbang.

I go to the first line, attempting to pull some of my rudimentary knowledge of Spanish out of the recesses of my high school brain.  “Dos tragos antes te hubieres marchado.”  Nope.  I got nothing.  There’s no mention of el bano or el gato; if you ever need to talk about restrooms or cats, I’m your girl.  Thankfully, I am able to work more easily with the second line: “Beber en exceso es peligroso.”  I sound the letters out in a moronic hooked-on-phonics pace in my head that would have put the tenth grade version of me to shame.  Drinking in excess is dangerous…I get that much, but what the hell was this guy supposed to be drinking?  Forty shots of Absinthe?  Fifteen flaming margaritas?

I think the real story here isn’t that Senior Boozehound knocked back two too many beers, but that he started his morning off with a fifth of tequila, chased that with a trip to Las Vegas, accidentally smoked a mysterious white powder, smacked a stripper’s ass in the champagne room and got thrown in jail for any one of the subsequent idiotic things he did over the course of that night.  Because that, mi amigo, would be truly peligroso.