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hehhh1 · 2 years ago

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i’m going to turn this into a real blog post. this is a photo of my buddy max and myself. max came into my life the second-to-last monday of january. he had moved to austin the preceding friday, and knew no on here. preceding his move, he’d lived in washington, d.c. his entire life — always going to the same school (that caters to early childhood through 12th grade). we met while he was shadowing at my school, pretty early on. we hung out that day after school with a few of my friends for hours and hours and became close very quickly. the second day of shadowing we hung out again, though alone this time. we stayed together until late at night and we kissed at departure. max started attending school with me the next day. we continued to spend time together after and during school the entire week. that friday we planned a sleepover with two of my close friends. instead of hanging out with my friends, we lost our virginities to each other and had sex. it was a bit weird with my friends. the next day, after waking up, we continued to spend time together. we hung out with another friend from school. that night we went and smoked salvia at a park with some friends of mine from another school. this was the first time we had issues. he started to get really flirty with another boy there, and was telling me about how attractive he found him. obviously, this made me very uncomfortable and upset. he started having certain days where he’d seem to despise me. he wouldn’t want to talk to me, he wouldn’t even look at me. they were unexplained and very difficult to deal with.we continued with a similar dynamic for about a month. hanging out every second we could, having sex, not being fully conscious of each other’s feelings. after spending every day of spring break together, i guess i decided that i didn’t want to have any relationship with him. i shut him out of my life. i took away his friends. i put him into a state of exile. we continued in separation for two weeks. after these two weeks we talked about things and came to resolution. that night he said some kind of disrespectful things to some of my friends while i wasn’t around (i’m not sure how disrespectful they really were, i’m very sensitive). we got into a fight over it, but ended up just having sex. we sort of stopped seeing each other mutually and formed dislike for each other but remained on good terms until a week before school ended. we seemingly confronted each other on things we’d said behind each other’s backs, and we got into a huge fight. in the end he admitted fault. i’m not sure what i did.

a few days later, we went on a walk together and he gave me a formal apology. i didn’t really tell him anything back, but i told him i loved him. the rest of the week we talked a lot and were really close. that weekend we attended a post-graduation party at a friend’s house. he ended up sleeping over at my house. we slept in my room two friends, a couple — us in one bed, them on another. we sort of cuddled, i think it was inspired by being around an actual couple. after kissing (for the first time in over a month), we excused ourselves and went outside. we sat on my front porch, watching the present lightning storm. we kissed in the rain. i carried him out into the street and held him in my arms and kissed him. we continued to jack off onto each other inside my mom’s car. it was really great actually. throughout our entire relationship (which was never an official relationship) his mother had been going through many issues. he lived here alone with his mother. they had already been evicted from their first apartment due to their lack of money, and he was living with a friend from school instead of with her at a farm she had been adopted onto east of our city. his living situation wasn’t ideal, and it was in no way stable. his resources were limited. he left to go back to d.c. last thursday, to stay with a friend there and possibly to live with his father for the first time in his life. he may return in the fall and live with the same person he lived with before, or he may stay in d.c.. i think he is the first boy i’ve ever loved, and maybe the person i’ve been most connected to ever. i may never get to see him again. this story is no where near as complete as it could be, these have been ridiculously eventful months. i’m not sure if anyone will even read to the end, but i really felt the need to chronicle our story

me and a boy

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hehhh1 · 2 years ago

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Letter to Michal

Less than sad, rather, I feel afraid. Most of me can accept our relationship changing. I will admit, part of me became jealous and scared, perpetually, after you cheated; it is impossible not to relieve that trauma at any point I feel disconnected. I will have much work to do there—it's something that plagues me practically constantly, that I'm being lied to and, ultimately, that I am not cared about. I'm afraid my feeling of anxiety regarding that won't dissipate and I'll be unable to talk or spend time with you. And, now, it feels that pushing through those feelings is something else in which I am alone. But, for multiple reasons, it is something I must do. I feel immense pressure to handle them as they would jeopardize my ability to be friends with our collective friends—my only current social outlet and support system in London, not something I can afford to lose—more importantly, they would jeopardize our relationship as friends. I believe I have similar feelings about us as a couple, or, at least, I have had them. The main difference is clearly how each of us deals with this feeling. You have left me with scars that I am terrified may stay with me permanently in future relationships, in the way I am able to connect with my loved ones. While your capacity to act selfishly surely means we can't be together, you truly give me the impression you, somewhere inside yourself, blame it on me, that you would be less selfish with someone else. Maybe this is true, and, if so, may be the most painful, cruel thing you could have for me. You haven't given me the impression that you need to work on yourself, to work through the parts of you that allowed you to mistreat me. Instead, I feel you believe these are actions that I have somehow led you to, either by me not being something (hot, energetic, funny—some collection of traits) enough for you to treat with care or somehow by the way I treat you. Either way, it greatly hurts me when you use rhetoric that centers me as a reason to, first, act selfishly and, second, end our romantic relationship rather than your own personal inability to sustain it, regardless of how I behave, regardless of my innate features. Like you, I have thought we should break up many times. I haven't brought it up for a few reasons; change is scary and you're the only home I know anymore; I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, that you would be kinder to me in better circumstances (which, clearly, leads me to be nicer to you—an odd phenomenon where I try to counteract your attitude, something incredibly painful, tiring, and maybe naive, but I try to feel is honorable and shows empathy and love even in a hard scenario); and, finally, I enjoy most of the life we live together (not in terms of our relationship here, rather, the lifestyle, convenience, comfort). I'm so scared of the future now. If Karis plans a trip, will she find a place I can come to too? If I invite people to come over (I'm stressing myself out even talking about finding a flat hypothetically), will they, and will they feel awkward? Will you continue to invite me wherever you go? It's a good feeling to always feel welcome, and I'm afraid you will no longer welcome me. I'm so afraid our friends will all opt for you, or not realize they may now have to separately invite me to the park, pub, or party. I don't see how this can not also lead to me losing others in my life, and I don't feel I can, or deserve to, lose more than I already have. All of this weighs so heavy on my mind. I'm scared my bipolar will flare up and I'll go into an episode I have to go through alone. The same songs that helped me before in depression are now making me cry and everything feels upside down so much that I'm dizzy. I really can't live up to my other commitments right now.

I'm so scared and I feel the same as such a small child if my family had all left me. I don't know which direction to go; I don't have a destination without a home and every route I could take looks wrong. I'm so scared and I'm so sad and I don't know what to do but I also know inaction will hurt me—with my thesis, job search, flat search, etc. I feel the walls closing in on me with nowhere to run and no one has even noticed I'm gone.

I wanted to write things I like about you, write the things I think are positive and I love about you. I can't do that right now, I've gone into too dark a place. You will have to take this as my statement that, ultimately I do love and care about you as my best friend.

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hehhh1 · 2 years ago

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“Everybody knows, everybody goes”

Magnolia Cafe, at the corner of Lake Austin Boulevard and Veterans Drive in Austin, Texas, was not only an iconic place but an iconic environment. It was a true diner—inexpensive, greasy, and fast-paced, often catering to truckers, police officers, and other laborers with early-morning and late-night shifts. It was also one of the city’s few 24-hour establishments, with what some might call an “Austin-twist”: it served comfort food, such as oversized pancakes and tuna melts, with half-liter plastic cups of water alongside Tex Mex dishes. Its specialty was “Mag Mud,” a mix of canary yellow queso, black beans, avocado, and pico de gallo.

In Texas’ capital, where the population has expanded ten-fold since the 1950s, Magnolia has been a constant since its debut as “Omelettry West” in 1979. Its survival for more than forty years alone granted it legendary status; in a city quickly gentrifying as a product of its tech sector boom, a business lifetime of more than a decade is an impressive feat. At the crux of the MoPac Expressway (posthumously named after the Missouri Pacific Railroad) and Lady Bird Lake (posthumously named after Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife, the architect of many public beautification projects), Magnolia acted as a common joint between the youthful central Austin, affluent west Austin, and bohemian south Austin. Convenient for the college scene, the local aristocracy and the hippies alike.

The homely two-winged 1960s ranch-style structure was welcoming. Unpretentious and familiar in the landscape of one-story monuments to outdated Texan architecture, and nestled in its ample parking lot with space for diesel pickup trucks, luxury imported sedans, and police cruisers. Two dining rooms were connected only by a kitchen; patrons in the east wing had to walk outside to access the overcrowded, single-stall toilets in the west wing. The near-constant wait created a social scene out of the front patio, its primary attraction being a gazebo-covered picnic table, carved with graffiti and cigarette burns. The booths were wrapped with a selection of flamingo, Hawaiian, and insect-themed laminates and the windows were filled with red neon signs alerting the public, “Sorry, we’re open.” From the ceiling hung what I imagine is a life-sized construction of a pterodactyl skeleton.

The clientele had no discernible makeup. You were equally likely to run into 16-year-old fraternity-stars-to-be, elderly Texan ranchers, and punks recovering after the shows taking place minutes away downtown. The staff withstood the test of time while constantly shifting; they were always young, always exuberant, and always off-kilter from the social norm. Their eternally gracious and sociable attitude created what was Austin’s most ubiquitous favorite eatery, encapsulated in its slogan: “Everybody knows, everybody goes.”

Despite its iconic stature, this location of Magnolia closed in April 2020 due to financial challenges brought on by the COVID pandemic. Magnolia’s permanent shuttering was, for me, quite possibly the most hard-hitting news of the pandemic. Any long-term Austin resident becomes accustomed and resilient to frequent closures of important establishments, but rarely is it the ones that are so widely valued. Often, there is no satisfying explanation for the demise of local enterprises; the immense disconnect between the city’s long-standing residents and recent transplants means there is no consensus around which historical aspects of Austin are valuable or worth retaining. More often than not, the ultimate decisions are decided or informed by the newer occupants: the nouveau riche of the newly-created Apple, Facebook, and Google offices, those who have more use for a Tesla dealership or a rooftop bar or a luxury condominium complex than they do for a mere diner, regardless of its status as the most foundational site of my—and so many others’—teen years. Developers know this, and that sealed Magnolia’s fate.

I had gone to Magnolia since early childhood, as long as I could remember. It was one of the few restaurants accessible from my house without taking a highway, a feature that gave it an added sense of comfort. However, the inauguration of Magnolia as a true staple in my life was April 11 2014, during the spring break of my junior year of high school. Max, my whirlwind first love-turned first heartbreak-turned-romantically-ambiguous-but definitively-close-friend, was visiting town from D.C., and after a failed attempt to have sex on painkillers and ecstasy, we departed home in a dark hour of the night to meet up with another common friend, Gillian. We met at Magnolia, of course, our only midnight option in a town only beginning its process of rapid urbanization.

Before ordering, Gillian and I were deadlocked in one of our regular and inane arguments over whether or not we happened to have the same physician’s assistant. Both descriptively similar women named Beverly working somewhere in north Austin, I insisted they must have been the same person. As Gillian opened her mouth, surely to vehemently disagree, Josephine strolled to our table to take our orders. She stood tall above our booth with a slender frame, either to be described as gaunt or modelesque. Her thinned skin and eye bags suggested prolonged fatigue and years of smoking, but her demeanor, even in the middle of the night, was effortlessly jaunty and candid. She had an air of inherent familiarity and candor, so I demanded she act as a tie-breaker for this debate.

“Beverly is definitely a period name,” Josephine said, “like in the 1960s everyone was naming their kids Chandelier and Cadillac.” I quickly learned that Josephine always spoke the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It was a repulsive quality to some, but attractive to others. I was instantly entranced. She had myriad unique tattoos, she had explicit photos that a drummer of one of the country’s foremost rock bands had recently sent her (a former flame from her high school days in California), and she afforded her rent and alcohol on 30 hours per week, exclusively after 9 PM and before 9 AM. She turned Magnolia from a home away from home into my home away from home. That night, nearly at sunrise, she scribbled her name and her schedule down on my receipt, both as a memento and as a way for me to plan my weekends around her.

From then on, I did. My friends and I desperately sought the independence to drink gas station Chardonnay and smoke menthol cigarettes that we were denied inside of the comfort of our parents’ homes, and the locations for our nightly escapades were severely limited. Coffee shops closed, parks had curfews, but Magnolia was always open. So every weekend, we went to seek consolation and counsel from Josephine and the other insomniacs at the diner. Josephine acted as a confessional, a diary, and a mentor to me. While she always listened to and advised me, she shared the gritty details of her life as well with little filter.

Her idiosyncrasies led us, as callous teenagers, to joke that Josephine seemed like she was on meth, though none of us yet knew that she’d actually gotten the monkey off her back and was only taking a cocktail of mood stabilizers and (legal) amphetamines. She brought forth the life experience of a one-time UCLA student turned routine patient at various Los Angeles and New York City addiction treatment centers. Despite her years of substance abuse, she had a youthful face which fit her 24-year-old body—though she attributed this to the Botox she received via facial injection, the only FDA approved single-serving treatment for her migraine headaches.

At the time, the waitstaff at Magnolia knew more about me than anyone else. Whether with friends or alone, I would sit for hours. The hosts knew me and where to seat me, the waiters knew me and which predicaments to pick back up on each time I arrived, and the managers resented me for the amount of time their staff dedicated to talking to me. In the beginning, if Josephine was working, my meals were free. Over time, the rest of the staff caught on that I was not a paying customer—something I had never asked for, but made me feel infinitely adored. I came elated, depressed, or (more often than not) heartbroken.

I had supportive parents, a psychiatrist, and a therapist, but Magnolia Cafe was the support network that gave me what I knew I was missing. Josephine became the shoulder to cry on, the guru to snap us out of a bad trip, and the muse to inspire us to face our fears in pursuing the boys we all wanted, and who variably wanted us too, but were too afraid to confront such desires.

Magnolia was nearly always the final destination. A place I could go to at the end of a night of drinking—and knew I could stay until the sun rose. A place to celebrate: the first time I kissed my crush of many years at my 16th birthday party, my acceptance into college hundreds of miles away, my high school graduation. A place to grieve: when said love interest chose to date a juvenile girl over me, my final departure from my life with my parents and friends of many years and to said college so many hundreds of miles away, and the seemingly common but dramatic dissolutions of the friendships built throughout high school and childhood at large. Part of what made this diner so unique was that these experiences were not. It was the destination, oasis, and secondary home of so many with such soul-consuming but transient problems as mine.

By the time Magnolia capsized, Josephine had jumped ship. When I arrived home in the summer of 2016 after my first year of college, as with every other break from school, I immediately went to Magnolia as a homecoming celebration. That evening, Josephine sat in the booth with me to make an admission. She spoke softly, completely uncharacteristically, so as not to reveal her words to her coworkers or manager. She informed me that she was pregnant after taking a gender-ambiguous model’s virginity in the West Texan desert. Pregnancy in and of itself had not been uncommon for her. What varied this time is that she had decided to keep it; not “keep it” in that she was sure she would carry it to term, but that she felt she had taken enough drugs, enough morning-after pills, and had enough abortions that she would roll the dice. She told me she would wait—it felt probable she would miscarry, and, if not, she would have a child. She was ready for either option.

Once her daughter was born later that year, Josephine progressively cut her hours to naught. Truthfully, Josephine’s—and Magnolia’s—influence on my life began to wane almost simultaneously with my entrance into my 20s. As Josephine shed her debaucherous lifestyle in favor of motherhood, I discovered a powerful ability to compartmentalize more and share less. Magnolia retained its status as an integral meeting point for my increasingly infrequent trips back to Austin, as the importance of my childhood home itself faded as well. Nevertheless, to have the diner there, even for a biannual sojourn, brought me immense comfort and nostalgia. I’m familiar with her whereabouts due to social media, but I know that her role in my life, just as Magnolia’s, can never be reinstated—or replaced.

Since hearing of Magnolia’s permanent closure during the early stages of the 2020 pandemic, I still do not know exactly what I’ve lost. When upscale condominiums are inevitably constructed in its place, at the crux of Central, West and South Austin, will they sit on the ashes of my adolescence? I am torn between that prediction, and one far more devout; the destruction of a place so beloved to me, holding both my joys and my traumas, will serve to emancipate me from my past, to allow me to grow, knowing these memories have transcended in some sense, as if this eatery had been a journal I had written in to mitigate my lowest points and memorialize my highest.

I fear the latter is a paradox, for as we watch the endless expansion of the divide between rich and poor in our cities, metropolitan sprawl engulfs those fundamental establishments to what we view as home —a phenomenon grieved not just in the U.S., but globally, and greatly abetted by pandemic—an ability to view the places lost as still a part of us is eclipsed by the sentiment that, instead, they are casualties of war. Although it may sound bleak, as a universal truth, virtually everything we know is ephemeral. Either everything we know and love will cease to exist, or we will ourselves; in the meantime, our minds are flooding with memories and sentiments—and ultimately, it’s not the physical places or people that stay with us, but the sentiments themselves.

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