Romance
I like Sally Rooney because I’m basic, but I recently read an essay about queerness in her books—rather, the way her books allude to characters being queer, but the relationships are all male/female and pretty traditional, so the queerness feels like a pose. I enjoyed the essay while also feeling like it stomped on my foot, the exact place my foot is hurting:
Imagine a book where, after Alice, despondent, tells Felix that Eileen cares about her but “it’s not the same”—after Eileen sobs to Simon that “she doesn’t love me … with Alice I’ve ruined everything”—after they appear to each other, atop and at the foot of the stairs, “each like a dim mirror of the other”—imagine a book where, after Eileen says, “I just want everything to be like it was … and for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different,” they do not go off to move in with a boyfriend and write another novel, or get pregnant and marry their childhood love. Where this moving-in-with, this refusal to turn off or aside from the expected road, does not constitute growing up.
I liked the book fine, but when I got to the end I did feel slapped. There’s this thing where life seems to be organized around a very specific version of romance and family, yet if you’re upset at not getting those things (or not being suited for those things) people treat you like you have a bad attitude.
For years, I believed I’d overcome all my college angst about not being “normal” and not having a “normal” future. I believed it really had been a bad attitude, that I just had to be whatever I wanted and enjoy it. But suddenly, the inevitability of the correct, bio, nuclear, mono family looms. I’m carrying it around like a rat king. I feel bad about it in so many tied up ways that I can’t even look at or think about one piece at once. It just starts pulling on everything and every piece starts hurting, even the ones I thought I had put aside.
I start this blog at the beginning of some cross-country travels and adventures, which I’m hoping will cheer me up, or at least help me remember some previous version of myself that thought about anything other than how old and childless I am.
One good thing is whenever I walk anywhere, I always walk along this block full of weird plants, highway, chain-link fences, broken glass:
I got up my courage to try a new restaurant, a sushi place at 24th and Florida, Sake Bomb. From the outside it always looked so busy and fancy that I was afraid to go in. But it was pleasant on the inside, and I even felt cool reading by myself while I ate off those stone slab plates. Salmon skin roll, avocado and cucumber roll, big old Sapporo in a handled glass. The waiter was super attentive and would run over to the table just to arrange the beer bottle and water pitcher more symmetrically behind my plates of food.
Seated next to me was an articulate girl explaining her food allergies to the waiter with the help of a little card, and then explaining everything else about herself to her companions for the rest of the meal. I kept sneaking glances at her and being shocked she was very young, maybe only nineteen.
I liked walking home, a little buzzed, everything standing out surreally:
Maybe if I live through the hump of my 30s and get to a point where I’m inarguably middle-aged, I can get over the whole crisis about aging. Maybe I just can’t handle both at once.