June: Give Yourself a Gift
In making an effort to think and speak less negatively about myself, I'm using my June newsletter (which is now late, I know) as an opportunity to look back on moments of Junes past. Here are some snapshots.
2015
"I go through all this before you wake up / So I can be happier to be safe up here with you"
June in New York has a specific shade, an electric-forest green. It's the color the trees turn right before they explode into their full summer glory. Trees in New York thrive on a summer month full of thick, burgeoning thunderstorms and the accompanying barometric whiplash, and June is nothing if not dramatic.
One night in June finds me on a date in Williamsburg. We get slushies from Turkey's Nest, which we drink in McCarren. I ride him on piggyback as he runs up and down the sidewalk - the one time I might've lost my wallet in New York, had it not been for some gracious person watching our drunk antics. I repair my relationship with Dummy by Portishead in someone else's home.
I wake up in a guest bed of the place my date was house-sitting. I put my black skirt back on and walk the long walk down Metropolitan Ave to the G train, right at dawn. I remember listening to "Sunrise" by Childish Gambino and thinking about Lowell who had died a month prior.
All summer, panic keeps me up until 2am, 3am, watching Orange is the New Black. I sit around in a gallery in Chinatown as an intern once a week. I work as an RA for high-schoolers in Pratt's pre-college program. I listen to records. I rock in Caiti's rocking chair, on Bree's rug. I stay single. I take the subway every goddamn where I please.
I see the Björk show at the MoMA. The exhibition was critically panned because it looked like a Planet Hollywood display, but I loved seeing all of her ephemera. The exhibition featured an installation for the "Black Lake" music video, a room with a thousand speakers and two videos. I watch Björk crawl out of an obsidian Icelandic cave, head high, stomping away from the camera through the grass, and I think about life and death and rebirth.
2017
"And I feel so much depends on the weather / So is it raining in your bedroom?"
In June of 2017 I am 22. I'm working full-time at Milk Bar. I experience gastritis for the first time, after eating a cheesesteak at Chelsea Papaya at midnight after a long shift. A long on-again off-again fling goes up in flames.
I meet someone for our first date on the same day I start my internship at ICP as a Teaching Assistant. I wear a black shirt and black skinny jeans, in June. We sit in Bryant Park and talk about music and guitars, and he touches my hands. We wonder if it'll rain. I go to ICP for the second time ever (the first being my interview) and the whole time I am buzzing, buzzing. I get caught in a downpour on the way home.
I drag myself up and down Brooklyn to find a new place since my sublet was ending. It felt like I was always wet with rain. I dodge a bullet on a nightmare rental in Carroll Gardens. I bike to a place on Hart St in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I see the apartment, empty, clean, and when the broker opens my bathroom door to show a bathtub, I basically hand him my money right then and there. My new backyard is covered in Japanese knotweed, taking "lush" to another level. When I hack away all the weeds months later, my next door neighbor comments on how nice it is to see the ground again. It mirrors a statement on one of my many coffee mugs - "flying is the second greatest achievement known to man - landing is the first!"
2019
I am 24. I have my first real industry job, working for a commercial photographer. I spend a lot of time walking the four long blocks to and from the studios at Pier59, and I get caught in the rain more often than I'd like to admit.
The first day of June finds me biking to Prospect Park with Caiti, to sit in the grass and read. I've brought The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer, a fictionalized telling of the life of Lee Miller, who you should know about. I don't end up reading much, then.
In the park, I tell Caiti what my partner of the past two years had done the night before. I split up with him within a week. It is not ceremonious and I cry a lot. The next day I wear a long skirt that looks like a Persian rug to a rooftop gig Seth is playing. I drink too much free wine and the next day I feel beyond miserable.
Still, I put things back together. I start writing poems again. I cry on the long slats of the hardwood floor in the photographer's studio, the most beautiful office I'll ever have. I begin to perfect the lonely late night walkabout. A Gemini explodes into my life. I visit home for Father's Day, and we see Maureen's twins who are celebrating their first birthday, and I start to worry about my mom's health.
2020
I am 25. Covid has gripped New York for three months. My ex and I visit his mom in Connecticut, our first time leaving the city since March. The color of non-city foliage feels like it's smacking me in the face on the Metro North ride. To speak to barometric whiplash, on our first night sleeping outside of New York, it went down to 50 degrees. I have a vivid dream in which I am the protagonist of the novel I've just started - the novel I am now trying to finish.
I think about this dream frequently. John Baldessari's three rules for creating art include "you have to be possessed, which cannot be willed." That month I felt possessed to write, mostly. I also felt possessed to drink alone, read books, and piece together what a life after (during?) Covid could look like. June saw me determined to make writing my life, somehow, some way. You could say I am doing that now.
I keep collecting unemployment. I take a part-time job for a lighting company. I don't flourish professionally but I save money. I play Breath of the Wild and eat a lot of takeout. I take the bus in a face mask. I listen to Mer Des Noms on the balcony and watch a storm roll in, getting ready to write. I get up every day. That is the achievement.
2022
I am 27. I am living in a small apartment in Bushwick with central AC. I have healed from Covid at the beginning of June. I want this to be my gayest Pride month yet. I see Donna who cut all my hair off the summer before, and she re-shapes the cut to be more shag and less mullet. "Break My Soul" is released on the day of the summer solstice. I quietly change my pronouns to she/they on Instagram.
In February of this year I bought tickets to see Japanese Breakfast and Belle & Sebastian at Wolf Trap in June. The show date is my parents' wedding anniversary and my nephew's eighteenth birthday. In a rented car, I floor it to Maryland and drop my bag in the home of a past love. I am in Hyattsville, my mother's hometown, for the better part of three days. We're going to the show at Wolf Trap together, and the passage of time and the tension makes us into magnets. While trying not to fall in love with my once-love-now-ex, I visit other friends from Silver Spring and DC.
On my last full day in town, I have lunch with Allison in Capitol Hill en route to the National Gallery, and we talk about her upcoming wedding over some great salads. The whole trip, I am thinking, there is life outside of New York, there is room for me to have a life outside of Brooklyn. These thoughts are swimming in my head when I open my work email to find that there was a shooting a block away from my office in New York.
As luck would have it, all of the galleries I wanted to visit are under construction. I remember feeling cheated, like I had come all this way for this, and it hadn't panned out.
I head to White Oak to see my aunt Kris and her family for the first time in years. I eat sushi with her family, and I meet Sara, my cousin's daughter. Kris and I sit out back until the sherbet pink sunset sinks into the night. We talk about my mom and my grandmother, who died in 2021. My uncle pokes his head onto the porch to say he's leaving for game night. All night, Kris is telling me to use the money my grandmother left me to "give myself a gift."
I have thought about this phrase, this request, if you want to call it that, at least weekly since she said it a year ago. It's less about the inheritance, and more about the fact that I have spent a lot of my twenties in some kind of upheaval. I lost my mom, Covid hit, I spent a year and a half bouncing around New York. I had settled, kind of, but I still wasn't happy. Think about what you really want, she told me. I thought about Sligo Creek Parkway in the middle of June, when the canopies catch the thick and humid swaths of light and drape them across the footpaths. That night I photograph the stars in my hometown.
The next day I drive to Richmond. Caroline takes me out to Little Nickel on the other side of the river and I start spitballing ideas for a move. After Caroline tells me to hurry up and move to be closer to her, for the millionth time, I ask her to start looking for an apartment.
"Do you actually want me to look?" she says, calling my bluff. "Yeah," I say. She found a place for me within two weeks.
The next afternoon I drive from Richmond to Atlantic City to visit Rachel. Her boyfriend Jared takes us on hyped-up scooters down the boardwalk after dark. Rachel and I have brunch for hours the next morning, and then I drive up the Garden State Parkway to go home to Brooklyn.
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I'm good at living this way, in fits and starts. Lately I've felt like I'm living out of my tote bag or backpack, between my work, my home, and the home of someone I love. I'm good at long drives. I'm less good at parking. I'm good at running the tank all the way down to empty, and less good at filling it up again. I'm still no good at goodbyes.
But I am getting better at taking care of myself. I allowed myself to not write for a few days. I bought a new pair of shoes for work, even though I don't like my job. I went to a yoga class called "Deep Stretch and Recovery." I learned that what my aunt asked me to do was to consider what all of my loved ones have been telling me: take care of yourself, but most of all, be kind to yourself. As a good friend told me recently, take it easy, dude, but take it.
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