honking into the void
I have a new favourite thing, and that is this: Vic is out snorkeling and I wait on shore. Every few minutes he looks up and I'm watching him and we wave at each other, and I can tell by the curve and volume of his wave that he is elated, even while his face is hidden behind that goofy mask.
"I've wasted 36 years of my life not snorkeling," he says, when he finally comes back to me.
It's hard at first, perverse, trying to breathe through a plastic tube, all your breath and power winnowed down to that one spot. It's claustrophobic, so you get panicky and start gulping for air and then try to breathe through your nose which makes your ears plug up and then all of you is suctioned inside this plastic death trap and the water feels crushing and oh oh oh, up you go. I taught V to snorkel, by which I mean I taught him to be okay with not being able to breathe. It's not hard to do, once you train yourself to stop trying so hard to survive it. V frets and chokes and gets salt in his eyes and is all, "I don't know about this," but he eventually relaxes and then the world below comes up to meet him and now I'm the one waiting, training my eyes on his tiny plastic hose, he's out too far and I'm standing up, waving him towards me.
So we make a rule that when one of us is out there we'll look up every few minutes and wave to the one on the shore, and if that shore-person isn't looking up, if we're reading or have our eyes closed against the sun it means we're not worried. On shore, I'm always looking. Under the water, he's meeting impossibly graceful sea turtles and tiny bullying eels and then, miraculously, an octopus. When he comes back to me that time he can barely speak.
Here, in Boston, it's the same rhythm, only worse, much worse, because I'm not waiting on a beach in Kauai, I'm waiting in an unfamiliar apartment, sitting on an inflatable mattress because our furniture hasn't arrived, shushing the cat because he's not supposed to be here, and maybe I'm not either. "My nerves can't handle this!" I keep thinking, almost quivering from the anxiety of another person honking at me, someone else yelling back. A couple nights ago two guys went round and round in some infinity loop of Bostonian fury - "Fuck YOU!" "No, FUCK YOU!" "DOUBLE FUCK YOU!" - and that's what I remember about living here all those years ago, the perpetual state of entitlement and outrage everyone seems to feel for seemingly no reason at all. I'm sure I'll get my hard shell back soon enough (in New York, I once made my mother cry by sending back her congealed baked eggs - "We don't send food back," she hissed at me, horrified, and I was like, "MOM GET OVER IT I'M A NEW YORKER NOW GAWD") but for now I'm staying put, studying these empty new rooms, perched on the window of the bedroom where I can see the street, waiting for Vic to round the corner and come back to me.
radically consuming
- I finished Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent last month and haven't been able to get into a book since. There's a mystery and a giant snake but mostly just a lot of beautiful exhales of sentences that remind you there can be one perfect way to say something, sometimes. Also recommend: her essay on illness and art.
- I steamed through Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Crashing (on Netflix) over a few sleepless nights during the course of the move. It's (thankfully) not nearly as dark as Fleabag, but equally hilarious.
- Our Zayn released a new song with Sia and while the video is v silly, he's looking v pretty (I'm increasingly convinced he's the only man/boy able to rock a nose ring with something akin to elegance) and the song has a vaguely Fifty Shades chorus that I'm sure will run through my brain for a few weeks.
- I wrote this thing on communal mirrors in dressing rooms and it went a different way than I thought it would, and turned out to be very fun to write. (I still haven't bought that dress.)