in the quiet dead (fragments from winter mostly on devastation)
dear god
Your neighbor smokes a long, skinny cigarette on the stoop of your building. You squeeze past, breathing in the ashy air, suddenly unafraid that you did not complete your homework. You sight translate through class, fluently.
My ex boss takes God’s cup and swigs, no permission. “I fucking hate fake things.”
But sometimes I am certain I could love you again. I see your stupid pictures, your stupid politics that you’ll stupid post and I think above all you might be trying to be good or maybe even that you are good and I just forgot how to keep seeing it. But then I remember how I was always Spacegirl to you, and you were [X], and if we were those scientists who had found the answer to some great mystery I’d be cheering for you as you found some way to reach out your hand and put it in your pocket.
The video “Bella Hadid Breaks Down 15 Looks From 2015 to Now | Life In Looks | Vogue” consists of the titular: the model is at the table. The model flips through the picture book of herself, discussing. It is simple in appearance, the model wears a Jean Paul Gaultier rose top (now only available as its mesh counterpart) and her almost cherry-brown hair is blown out with the ends flipped. She is stoic, but cheerful–both statuesque and photogenic in a uniquely human way. Her smile is plastered yet somehow wholly genuine.
I watched this video every morning during the first month of 2025 as I straightened my hair, mouthing the words with her, every pause, every inflection.
Hi Vogue this is BellaHadid and I’m going to take you through my life
in looks so far.
I love subverting expectations. See, you thought the joke would be over two punch lines ago. You thought I’d give God the vodka because I’m the writer and I can do that and I am not still afraid of going to hell as if I haven’t secured my spot already in thousands of disgustingly and deliberately poignant ways.
Working through Phedre. Working through Phedre since the beginning of the semester. Working through Phedre for months. It’s March. You hope you finish scene one soon.
You are going to fail every New Year’s resolution. You are going to fail other people’s New Year’s resolutions. You are going to text each other that this is the year that Friday nights become quiet and tame and you are going to assume that everyone knows–because you know–that all of you are lying, and then when you all show back up in your college town, it will be proven so quickly it’s almost lewd.
I love bartending. Having something to tend to. I love walking into every room of my apartment and asking the different groups of people that file in “Do you need anything? What can I get you?” and making myself busy. It’s like my secret entrance into a world I only wistfully know my way around–to know the party’s location is to be a member of the inside joke, be in on the secret of the week. To host the party, though, is to know the party. Intimately. Invisibly. I love knowing what is happening in every room without strings to one, hearing every conversation, skipping repeat songs on the cue. I love being a silent observer.
I dyed my hair back to brown upon going back to school. I was blonde for two years. I say my decision hinged on my spending: I paid eleven hundred dollars last year to be blonde, I tell people earnestly. That is more than I spent on everything other than rent.
I don’t want to tell my mom that I spent every penny I made over the summer on alcohol but I know eventually I’m going to have to. Rent is coming and I don’t know if I’ll make it despite the fact that I picked up four shifts last week. There is no undoing while I still am doing nearly every night–I had almost two thousand dollars in my savings and now I don’t. I turned twenty-one and let myself hang loose.
I don’t want to write about addiction. I don’t want to write about dependency. I don’t want to write about queerness. I’ve been wondering, really, if I’m either of them. My father says in the car “I miss when you wrote fiction. You used to show me your fiction, it was always so good.”
You walk in–because even though there is a code to the building, the door doesn’t fully shut, so you can–and the walls are bright green. The day I moved in I called it Ghostbusters green. I think I was a little off, but that’s still the Pantone-name in my mind. Every time I enter, I consider who must have painted the building, who in the world thought Ghostbusters green would look beautiful in a windowless hallway. I rent from a slumlord and the building is all college students. There aren’t an adequately legal number of fire escapes. Sometimes I think she must be trying to mess with us all.
Did you know that in 1971, when the first non-theoretical black hole was found, there were no recorded words of the scientists immediately upon discovering it? Maybe they were too awestruck. Cygnus X-1, the first discovered black hole, was one of the greatest secrets of the universe and for a very small moment Paul Murdin and Louise Webster were the only people who knew of its reality–just two people in a room on a New Mexico missile range.
Your homework yesterday evening was Hippolytus’ speech. Your homework this evening is Hippolytus’ speech. You have never had French homework in your life.
And I’m really tired and I’ve been drunk and drinking since morning and it’s morning again. I have enough alcohol in my room for a party. I love to have fun. I lay still in the center as it celebrates.
Last year I was a [REDACTED]. I didn’t actually write the word there. I wrote [REDACTED], brackets and all, because I am ashamed. I always joke that I’ll write about it someday, put it in the memoir, but I probably won’t. Because it was scary. [REDACTED] is the one of the scariest things a person can do. And I am ashamed.
Sometimes the people I would [REDACTED] for still call me, ignoring the fact that they've moved to new cities, begging. I remind them that they’re the ones who left, and they’re gone, and I’m not. And I’m not.
The point is, I wanted to marry you someday and you didn’t, and I pretended to be okay with that. I wanted to marry you someday and you didn’t and then eventually, I didn’t either. All I’m really saying is that now that it’s over, now that we’re searching again for something that isn’t each other, I hope you find it, reach out your hand, and put it in your pocket.
—
FOOTNOTE
Yknow the drill. Fragment dump. The good stuff I wrote from the shit stuff I wrote. I’m not sad anymore (necessary disclaimer). Blah blah blah.
Winter was brutal, honestly, in a lot of ways. I’ve written a lot about it and I don’t know if I’ll ever share most of it (though I’m aware that eventually at least a few of the pieces will end up on this page.) I’m glad it’s over, but it’s also served as a kind of stark reminder that everything actually will stay the same, no matter if it’s warm or cold outside. Change starts with me. That’s a hard lesson to learn, which is probably why I haven’t fully cognized it—awareness and cognition are not the same. Thanks Kant.
Monthly post coming soon for April. I love you all and hope you’re well.
xx- R