itstheinternetofthings

[itstheinternetofthings]

resolutions II

i want to be treated like a pet. rewarded and scolded. i want to be told exactly what to do. i want to live in your lap and purr when you touch me. i want to be praised and adored. tied up and played with. out of control, trusting completely. move my body how you want it. tell me i've been very, very good. tell me i'm all yours. my body is yours, my pussy is yours, my mouth and eyelashes and hands are yours. let me be yours completely, let me be precious to you. if you want it, i will want it.

will i ever feel this way with someone? can i trust anyone enough?

[itstheinternetofthings]

happy new year

Walking around clinton hill on a freezing sunny mid-morning, second of the year, hair wild and dry as cotton candy. Walking past Pratt Institute, past the art kids in their big coats. The student house where the porch is decorated with disco balls, a giant zebra, shards of mirrors, of pink and green glass, a giant tag that reads BLACK STUDENTS MATTER, and it made me feel warm and tender: remember when i lived in a house like that? remember how important it all was, how very fraught and creative and alive?

and so it came to me, after nearly a week of making lists in the sun baked backyard of my parents house and at my brooklyn table next to snowfall, i finally realized what i want out of this year:

i want to feel the magic of being alive again

however that comes, however its possible, however fleeting

like I did when I was young, except without my requisite mental illnesses. Is it possible to feel alive without mental illness?

[itstheinternetofthings]

Lying in a filthy tub, thinking about my life. Do I actually like living in New York or do I just think I like it because i can’t imagine other possibilities? Could I be a person who lives upstate and tends a garden and writes poetry, maybe sings? Why does my hair smell like cigarettes? I don’t smoke anymore. What is this emptiness that follows me? Should I even bother listening to it anymore? The perfume I sampled at the store has stuck to my skin in a sickly sweet way and I can’t get it off. Do I want to keep working in tech? I get no moral gratification but I enjoy the buzz and chaos but what would I learn if I could learn anything? Quilting but am I just saying that because Kate told me she wants to learn to quilt. How to make a movie. How to sew my own clothes. If I could make anything what would I make? I can’t answer that but maybe I can roll it around in my head and the truth will come to me lightening style one morning on the subway. Why does nothing smell right at all?

[itstheinternetofthings]

Lying in a filthy tub, thinking about my life. Was there ever a one that got away? I can’t think of anyone, except for maybe you.

A man in England reads me poetry through WhatsApp voice notes. He wrote a poem for me, a very good one, about the brutality of wanting me.

We met only once, an evening together in a not very interesting part of London. I thought he talked too much about himself. He rolled one cigarette after another. We had G&Ts at several pubs. He seemed to be a drinker. Yet when he wrapped his arms around me I felt very small and safe and so he came back with me to that big soft bed beneath the Victorian bay window, and he held me close all night. There was a relief in saying I am yours, and you are mine, even if it was all pretend. We invent whatever we want each other to be.

I yearn for no one in particular, and yet I yearn and yearn and yearn.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Why are men

Wearing too much cologne

Leaving fake scent on my sheets

Keeping me up late

Texting back delayed

Bragging about their tongues

eating me too hard

Writing poems about me

Without asking a single question

Why are men

Afraid of when I bleed

Snoring through the night

Willing to split the tab

Bad at brushing teeth

Texting back delayed

Never really seeing me

[itstheinternetofthings]

I said i love to suck your cock and he said show me and when my mouth wasn’t wet enough he pulled me up and filled it with his spit

That’s what I think about when I’m bored in class

[itstheinternetofthings]

Sitting in a midtown sweetgreen waiting for my hummus crunch salad which I ordered from a touch screen and the person who makes it is waiting empty eyed for the order to come in and we don’t ever interact except for me to call a plaintive apologetic thank you when I pick it up at the counter though by then she’s already turned away.

Increasingly atomized experiences. Midtown sweetgreen at dinner time in between work and class, dark outside and antiseptically bright within. AI generated music over the speakers and I have a book out but haven’t even tried to read it.

I’m not even hungry. I try to create community but in the end I feel so alive on the internet.

I go to my job where I sell people something that will melt more ice caps and on my way home I listen to music in my individual tiny ear speakers so I don’t have to hear anyone else. It’s neither good nor bad, just strange.

I am afforded my solitude. I am afforded my independence. I am a woman in a hurry in the big city. I am creating myself, the endless great American project. I am eating my hummus crunch made up of vegetables gathered by hand and machine in places I never think about. In this bright non space, sitting on a blonde wood laminate bench, and there is an olive tree growing in a planter on the bench, an actual olive tree, and the other coworkers have come off break so the salad girl is laughing, and really I get too maudlin sometimes. Really it’s all just one big party. It’s all one big party in here.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Lumberjack

A few days before Halloween I am in Toronto with Bea of Poland. I am extremely depressed. She is new to the city and has been invited to a party, and she makes me go with her.

We throw costumes together from a thrift store. I buy a round glass vase and a scrubby blue scarf, which I wrap around my head as a turban. I’m a fortune teller.

As I get dressed I realize the turban is racist and I fling it backwards around my neck. I’m wearing my favorite winter dress - black velvet, puff sleeves, bell skirt, embroidered gold moons and stars. Bea wears an oversized pink suit with sunglasses and draws on a mustache and goes as Miami Vice.

We argue in the Uber and I get nauseous from Toronto stop-and-go traffic. I say I’m staying for one drink and that’s it.

The party is in a basement unit of an old house, and it’s amazingly decorated - entrails hanging from the ceiling, purple lights and strobes and bowls full of goblin fingers. I munch on some snacks and start talking to a handsome man dressed as skunk roadkill. He tells me he’s divorced and I tell him kind of so am I, and I tell him the story.

Then the funny thing happens where I start to sparkle and shine, where I become the funniest person in the room. My depression is hilarious. No one would ever believe it. Bea and I, always magic together, become friends with everyone at the party.

The skunk starts talking to Bea and I watch sparks fly. I decide we wouldn’t have been a good match anyway.

Then the tallest man I’ve ever seen comes over and introduces himself to me.

What are you supposed to be, I ask.

I don’t know, he said. I found this at value village and put on some eyeliner.

I roll my eyes.

Everyone at the party, including the tall man, I learn, went to art school at a place called Guelph. He spells it for me.

The PH makes an F sound, he says.

I know how letters work, I say.

We sit down on the ground, watching people play a game.

So…I was eavesdropping. Your fiance left you two months ago?

Yeah, I say.

Was he insane?

I laugh. I think so, yeah.

Then we are outside and he is kissing me, and I am so small so cute so precious with my face between his giant shovel hands. Then we are sitting on a low wall in the cold air and I climb onto his lap and he tells me I am so, so, so beautiful. He tells me he’d like to suck my toes. He tells me one of his first erotic memories - a girl in grade school wearing sandals in rural Canada, and how he stared and stared at her feet with fascination and fear.

You’re in luck, I tell him. My feet are exquisite.

Back inside Bea is snuggled up on the couch with the Skunk and we all start dancing. My towering paramour is goofy and silly and makes me feel included. To my great surprise I am happy. We stay out until 4am and fall asleep just before dawn.

The next day Bea and I take her dog to the park, deeply hungover. I make a plan to meet the tall man for a drink, because I leave the next morning and I probably won’t see him again and I’d like to do more kissing.

He suggests a bar near Bea’s apartment (chivalrous!). I wear my vintage coral cashmere turtleneck and my new olive green trousers. I get there before him and nurse a beer and wait. The bar is a dive full of DIY Halloween decorations, cash only. I am charmed.

He enters. He is taller than I ever thought possible - 6’8, I would learn, and he looks so different out of costume. Sweet face, brown beard, and the teeth of a man who has lived a very healthy and wholesome life. Most startling are his eyes, bright clear sea glass green.

He’s wearing boring tech guy clothes but they fit him well. It is hard, I learn, to buy clothes for a body so long.

The conversation is easy and fun. We each have two beers, maybe more, and then we go to his SUV to kiss. The car contains a hard hat, work boots, and a Nalgene - tools of the trade, whatever it is he does. We start kissing.

Look, it’s worth saying three things here:

1. I haven’t had sex in a very long time, due to the jilting

2. I stopped taking birth control (no one is hitting it raw anymore) and my hormones are SURGING

3. Even before my breakup, sex had gotten stale (as he let his hygiene go, and started fucking other women, and started to think I was boring)

(Am I qualifying this because I feel shame? About being easy, about being horny, about being starved for touch? I guess so. Something to look at)

All this to say, by the time the Lumberjack (the beard, the size, the Canadian flannel) touches my waist, I lose my mind. My chest flushing, my hips bucking, I fucking NEED him.

But of course, as seems to always happen, that morning I had gotten my period. I am not ready for the level of intimacy required to let someone touch me bleeding, so instead I yearn. I grind my crotch against his knee and enjoy the frustration.

I ask, naked hunger in my voice, if I can suck his cock. He lets me, and he moans. I love it when men moan. Sex without moaning is like food without salt. His cock in my mouth is a fetish object, and I enter the worship space. My favorite sexual state.

We both have to work early in the morning, and eventually pry ourselves off of each other. I say thank you, I needed that. I say I would like to see you again (because I’d like to have sex), and he says maybe he’d come visit New York - he’s never been.

We talk for another month before he comes. We text and send voice notes constantly, mostly about our days and our feelings, quotidian shit.

When he finally arrives in New York I have a migraine. It’s awkward. Who is this man in my house? Why do I have to talk and entertain and look cute?

Then we sit on my bed and start kissing, and suddenly we are alive and sweating, free at last over a month of built up tension to consume each other whole.

His body. How to describe it. The sheer size, for one. He’d sent me some slutty little videos - him naked after a shower, him masturbating to my texts- but it is still a treat. Chest hair and broad shoulders, powerful lean legs that go on for miles- the body of an Olympic god.

He puts his fingers inside of me, working my body like a puppet. I melt around him, gasping and starving, burying my face in his expansive chest.

He sucks my toes while I come, and then he takes me out for dinner at an Italian restaurant.

That night, for the first time in months, a beautiful man sleeps beside me. I feel conflicted and a little sad.

After that, the visit has its ups and downs.

The ups are mostly related to sex, which I am rediscovering with delight and fervor. No longer an insecure 20-something, I am now a grownup woman. I have juicy curves and full throated desires. I am not afraid of pleasure.

When we fuck, he says yes, yes, yes each time I shiver and moan, encouraging me, egging me on.

He gasps come for me baby in a voice choked with tenderness and emotion, and as I come he laughs and calls me a good girl.

He stares at me while I masturbate for him, fully engrossed in me, swelling and rising.

And some of the ups aren’t sexual at all:

Stretching on my living room floor, the breakfast burritos he makes on Sunday morning. Hitting his vape. Ice skating at Rockefeller center with my friends, watching him glide over the ice like a Canadian swan. The way he is so tall- so tall!!- and I feel like a tiny beautiful bunny nestled against him.

And there are the downs. To my irritation, I discover his disappointing humanness.

He complains about the cost of everything and takes pictures of trees and street performers and skyscrapers. On Saturday night he wants to go out dancing while I want to stay in and cry.

I am dismayed to discover that his rambling corny text style carries over into real life. He drones on and on about cement, curbs, railings, stop signs. He says “cwazy” instead of “crazy,” as if trying to be cutesy. I dont want cutesy. I want to be railed by Ice Poseidon.

After he leaves, it lasts a while longer - maybe a few more weeks, before he tells me he needs to stop texting me for his mental health. He knows I can’t give him what he wants - a relationship, a partner, commitment. I cry but I am relieved.

And that’s how I started dating again.

[itstheinternetofthings]

The good thing about SSRIs is I no longer want to get hit by every bus I see

The bad thing is I have nothing to write

I am having a really good time

[itstheinternetofthings]

At my office, view of the Empire State Building, view of water tower and sky. I have many tasks to complete. I am well-dressed and busy. I have many friends and many hobbies. I take pleasure in nothing.

I am thinking about myself as a child, dancing in public, so sure of a world that would protect me. So very loved.

I take pleasure in nothing. I cannot be stimulated enough. I walk and I walk and I walk. Restless at home, sad outside.

Will I feel happy again? When? Stevie Nicks’ ragged voice on silver springs: you will never get away from the sound of the woman who loves you. (Men are fickle and pathetic. Men lie.)

I can’t write anything good about this. My words are trite.

All I can say is that at one point I was a happy dancing girl, and now I am gray as the sky, aging and bitter with nothing beautiful to say.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Since you left I haven't written, haven't had anything to say.

When people ask, I tell them:

It happened like this. I feel sad. I feel angry. Yes, I know it will be okay. Yes, I know it was for the best. I shouldn't be feeling sad or angry, you're right. Thank you for that.

English is a stupid fucking language for anything other than business transactions.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Routines

I am trying o God I am trying

I have woken up early I have journaled three pages I have practiced spanish I have made my bed and done the dishes

I have walked in the park cold and bright and spoken to dogs and spoken to neighbors

I have logged into slack I have peppered emojis I have sent emails I am trying

I have had my ginger shot, my black tea, my honey

When I sit too still and hear the silence of my house I want to die, I want to fucking die. But you can't say I'm not trying.

I invent errands. I go to the gym. I listen to podcasts and I blast trash TV, avoiding that stillness, that silence, that heartbreak.

If the pain could speak, what would it say? my therapist asks me about my headache, or my stomachache, or the stabbing sensation i get in my sternum

gail it wouldn't say anything it would just wail like a ragged fucking animal deep as a well and dry as a bone, without eyes and without mouth

[itstheinternetofthings]

ducks

I am watching The Ultimatum: Queer Love

I am swiping through profiles on feeld, boring looking guys with names like “spanko” and “dom the dom” and I’m lol-ing but also my skin is lifting off my body slightly

I am buying mysterious, small-batch perfume with names like “dauphine” and “lartigue”

I am sucking on a prescription ketamine lozenge

I am having hard conversations every day

Suddenly he needs to have sex with other people and our wedding is in six months. The feeld profiles were my idea but a long time ago, when I was someone different. I feel sad. Like two ducks swimming in a pond and one day one of the ducks decides they can’t live without testing out different waters. He’s out right now, meeting up with someone, sharing experiences without me, and I’m here at my window, typing.

This couple on The Ultimatum is breaking up, but one of them doesn’t know yet, and she’s smiling, thinking they are about to get married. Cruel.

Every day I am waking up early and writing three pages, first thing, before looking at my phone or having tea. The pages are bad, the writing is illegible, but I guess at least I’m writing something.

The summer is hot and wet and green, and I am changing in ways I won’t understand until it’s all already over.

[itstheinternetofthings]

My friend works at a bar in the west village that is known for first dates. I went to visit her tonight, as I sometimes do when it is slow on a Monday/Tuesday, and soon the place was full of explicit early dates, hinge drinks, or meetups with an old friend above which there has always hovered a question mark.

While it is slow she reads pieces of my astrological chart. Leonine in my relationships and angry about my childhood. Yes, I say. Bingo.

We order sushi for delivery; she chopsticks a piece or two in between mixing Negronis. Privately i wonder why Negronis are so popular, being, as they are, nasty.

I complement a man on his vintage corduroy pants, and then immediately worry it sounds like I’m hitting on him, especially when he looks up at me with intense dark eyes and says “they are early 20th century French work pants." I am relieved, later, when a dough-faced woman in a sharp white puffer arrives and greets him for their First Date.

(An observation that here in New York there are of course the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen in real life, but there are also mostly a lot of regular looking women like me who get by on wit, confidence, force, and cool clothing.)

The bar is small and dark and intimate. Counters of porous stone, mirrors behind the artisanal spirits, soft shadows and candlelight. Romantic and anonymous. I think if I were dating I would meet someone there for the first time. I remember the humiliation and delight of first dates, the rage of the heterosexual power imbalance, running into the thick and sticky wall of my own self-loathing. Fucking to prove my superiority, wearing the mask of my bright girlhood. Quenching the thirst of my abnegation bent over the bed, white knuckling the bedsheets. Sex for power rather than pleasure, sex to affirm that I was trash - both. Even the nicest guys on first dates reflected back to me my ugliness.

My friend tells me about her threesome last night, how it was boring until someone brought coke, and how the young person they were fucking was so young -25 - how could they not be submissive. They let us fist them, she said. We dommed them all night.

After two hours or so I leave, take the long way back to the train through the icy sleepy streets of the village, wrapped in my lime shearling coat. Looking into living rooms, listening to hot chip, freezing. Stopping in the Japanese grocery for daifuku mochi, and thinking that this was the antidote, the necessary dose- a long walk in inclement weather, an empty Tuesday night in a neighborhood with winding streets and new faces, and to once more become a solitary and social ravenous creature, alive and shivering.

[itstheinternetofthings]

Turnstile GLOW ON

This is the best fucking album I can’t get enough of it I blast out my ear drums at the gym my body soldered to a machine looking down at Amsterdam and 76th I want to move as fast as I can until my heart is exploding confetti I want to stand on a stage in front of hundreds of people and scream I go FAST I am ANGRY I am unable to control my own impending doom and the unsurvivability of everything I love the fire orange of autumn and the soft grass of spring the power of my muscles in the river the birds in the ramble eating from feeders the scent of my husband rising in the morning the monsoons blooming over the desert the songs I sing with my parents and the water I drink with abandon all of it will die and die and die before it should and I am running as fast as I can on this machine I am screaming with my throat with my body with my bones

[itstheinternetofthings]

Nick said he’s going to build me a real blog so maybe I can stop posting in secret like this, the group joke of my secret tumblr sad girl poetry posted only for the eyes of someone from a long lost era, but Nick has been busy rearranging his brain chemistry and marveling at the wonder of stretching, cuddling, birdsong, and crossword puzzles. At times I am even annoyed by it, his born-again unbridled enthusiasm for life, but I am still in the prison of crippling anxiety, the same one I’ve always been in, unaided by Prozac or lexapro, furtively inhaling ketamine and mixing kratom lattes in search of some kind of relief from being bent over in the kitchen crying at the thought of being so acutely perceived

Incredible what a curmudgeon I am after all, incredible that what I’ve resisted for so long - medication, psychiatric assistance - is now seeming more and more like a good idea. Will I lose my humor, will I bound like a labrador into life? Tongue flopping tail wagging, no fear just cringey sincere enthusiasm and desire to love?

Will I lose my ability to crumble into music, to cry on the train? Or will it simply, as I’ve been told, open a door, the choice to walk through still belonging to me?

Anyway. I’m heading into the office, wearing the scarf I made myself. It is the most beautiful scarf in the world. Last night we spontaneously went to an experimental theater on the east side and saw the immortal jellyfish girl, a Norwegian puppet show about the end of the world. Probably there are profound things I could say about it but mostly what I think of is how mesmerizing the puppets were- not creepy clacking marionettes but something otherworldly and mysterious, like a dream come to life. The electric glowing jellyfish girl sleeping in her tank. The slender disembodied head, it’s graceful roving disembodied arm, reaching out to murder with a single elegant flick of the wrist.

It felt good to get out and see art, I suppose it is one of the best reasons to live in this complicated city. I should do it more. I felt calm after, satiated. I made a pasta dish and we watched the show about the geisha chef and slept deeply, so deeply.

[itstheinternetofthings]

the moon comes home once a year

I love January. It is cold and there is nothing happening. I am knitting a very large scarf and listening to podcasts. Today for example I learned that there was a communist dictator in Romania not too long ago. He was shot in the back of the head the year before I was born. He forced a pro-natality policy on the people that led to a generation’s worth of babies being born unwanted or abandoned. I know so little about the world.

I am going on long frigid walks under bare trees revealing sky and building and moon. I am spending long moments watching my cats. I am starting to plan my wedding - pinning dresses to a board, dreaming about autumns and gold rings and veils. I am exercising: a dance class today; boxing last week. My muscles are sore and good.

On Friday Anya came over and we worked from my living room - me tip-tapping my little emails for my little corporate job while she annotated Italo Calvino for illustration and applied to artists residencies. Around 5 Caitlin came over, sweeping in like a sea witch in velvet and bright purple lipstick, wild black hair fanning her shoulders like kelp. She had never been to my house before and I found I was charmed by her precise diction and raucous laugh. It is good to have new New York friends, these art school astrologers.

We were gathering for a full moon ritual. At the appointed time we went deep into Central Park, dark except for street lamps and the moon hiding behind clouds. I brought us to Ladies Pavilion, the blue wrought-iron gazebo next to the Loch where this year I will be married. At Caitlin’s instruction we gathered leaves and twigs and dried baby’s breath from the ground and built a nest under the gazebo. It was beautiful, breathtaking even, in the darkness. My heart was racing - maybe from too much nicotine? - and I tried to breathe slow and steady.

Caitlin tore a paper in thirds and handed us each a piece. There was only one sharpie so we took turns writing our wishes with our phone flashlights. Then we placed the papers in the nest and burned them.

When we looked up, the moon was out from behind the clouds, bright and piercing. Happy birthday moon, we said. Thank you moon, we love you moon. It was exuberant and holy. We talked about our wishes, looking out over the lake, the city blurring in the water’s reflection.

Back at my house we met up with Tina and ordered Vanessa’s Dumplings. Even Anya ate something. We talked for a long time, alcohol and ketamine, feeling subdued and thoughtful. Anya made a fire using torn up things from the recycling as kindling. We talked about sex frankly. We talked about our fears and our sadnesses. It felt good to be honest. It felt good to be trusted. It felt good to be vulnerable, and receive vulnerability in return.

Now it is tonight and I have made shakshuka for dinner. There is a cat on my lap and I am getting sleepy. Things keep going wrong but it doesn’t matter. I am creatively bereft and often depressed. And yet recently I feel a happiness that is not quite delirious but not far from it either. As though this is the life I always wanted for myself. 

I want to make writing a practice again.