Hi, hello Loners,
Over the summer I finalized a dream of learning to swim. I can’t float on my back yet. I have this dream where I can float on my back and watch the sky in a big bright blue ocean. I’ll look like all the kids I envied a lifetime over. You look so carefree. You seem so cool. I could be carefree. I wish I was cool.
I swim the length of the pool. I go back and forth without any grace. I alternate between doggy and froggy and panic and finish strong with a gasp and a yip. I always thought if I made it here I’d be a corpse but here’s to hoping one day I’ll find the trust and suspension of fear to get to see the sky blurred without my glasses and smile. The sun’s in my face. It’s so warm.
Years ago I rode my bike and listen to my adopted dad’s old iPod. It had the entire catalog of The Beatles and it was 30 minutes to and from the beach. I bought Patti Smith’s Just Kids from a discount bookseller on the boardwalk and gathered saltwater taffy and diet coke before taking to the beach. I make my daily stop to talk to the goth girl who worked at the Record and Tapes. She is sweet to me. I say plainly “I’ve got no friends here.”
In high school some jerk made a list of who was hot and who was not and I didn’t even make the list. I overheard someone mentioning the way my pubes curled between gym classes and I made it a mission never to be in a swim suit within a tristate of a millennial I knew. I told myself that I hate the sun, sand, and water. It turns out that I crave sun, I love the grind of sand on my feet and I love water.
That summer I spent so much time alone that I began to ask myself what was true of my fears and what true of my wants. I worked at a place that sold discount swimsuits one summer and I bought one. I kept it in my backpack. It was a renaissance. I survived the plague of my youth and my sistine chapel is a sudden swell of irreverence. A brief moment when I imagine that way was behind me stays there and I can only look ahead.
When Patti meets Mapplethorpe I’ve stopped sitting on the boardwalk and I’ve figured out a system to pack a mat and extra things to bike to the beach after my shift. I could catch sunset and read and listen to the Beatles. It’s all I had and suddenly it’s what I craved. I liked the earlier years. I liked when they sounded young and dumb; the 70s scared me. I felt bad for what they’d done to get there. I guess I like their older stuff now— the pity I felt then is just regret now.
This summer is unlike most times in my life. I spend little time online. I stop eating meat. I ride my bike for miles through country land, on high ways with a fearlessness I couldn’t recreate now. I’ve got Patti Smith in my backpack and she’s in love with her best friend. I change into that swim suit and finish her book one day I get cut early. I biked hard to the beach and tried to beat all the townies. I remember that I’d changed into my bathing suit before I left work. I got to the beach and craved the salt and sting to cool down. There was a gentle evening wind.
I doubted that I could go into the ocean. I can’t swim. Patti doubts if Mapplethorpe can really love her the way she wants. I ran into the ocean alone. I thought about how I could die but then I always do. It was just a comforting thought, a motif even, and so I let it go. My heart ached for Patti but then I recalled my first kiss with Morgan. We sat in a bed with some kids from Churchill after a night out of hookah. We were dizzy. Morgan and I kissed and then he kissed the boy and I turned my head and there was a hand on my face. Dragging my body from the ocean I stumbled back to my glasses. I ate saltwater taffy and sipped my tepid diet coke.
Watch this live performance of Bjork in Langholtskirkja in Reykjavík on August 26, 2008 with me. I love the fuschia and the sequins. I love trying to say “Bjork in Langholtskirkja in Reykjavík.” Bjork says “I crawl into the unknown. I’m going hunting for mysteries.”
What joys have you found and savored since we last spoke? Send me your joy, if you’re generous. I could use something to keep me afloat these days. There’s a helium shortage and empathy is inflated— my soul is deflating and there’s a premium on being my brother’s keeper.
Of joy:
At the start of October I proposed a Patti Smith cover band and I got a chance to sit and hang out with my friends Z, Toni, and Davey. I often start our sessions asking if I was a worm if I could be in the band. I whisper into the mic “is the earth still a safe space for worms?” “the worm in me sees the worm in you, namaste.” I feel so lost that for a moment it’s nice to belong somewhere once a week. Davey joined the band recently and it makes me smile to see it all come together. There’s a pit of doubt in my stomach. I can’t shake that I can’t smile when things are wrong, upside-down. Like a superstition about pavement and my mother’s back— I feel afraid of leaning forward when things are hectic. I can barely breathe and why do we do that? Why do we assume the worst like it’s a lucky charm?
It’s a time in my life where I don’t know who I am anymore. I never did. Things seem to fit and then they don’t.
Z.’s one of those dudes that’s going to rock forever. It’s been a weird time in my life and by weird I mean it’s been sad and also it’s been all right. I don’t feel okay in my skin and it feels loose like I’ll finally locate the tab and unzip it. It’s been sweet to have a stupid project. A project that trivializes this constant feeling that I have that I’m not gonna make it or that I fucked up with the adulthood thing or the sting of daily vocational rejections or embracing the stark embarrassments and humiliations that I relive. It’s nice to make music or to sing or say a poem to a friend on the phone. I know. I gotta find a job. I gotta figure out how I’ll afford the body that breaks and swells. For now I just can only focus on how I’ve always wanted to sing in a band and that it gives me purpose.
It gives me joy. It makes me smile so much and I don’t want that to end. Is that okay?Things I ate unemployed: I made this hand torn cabbage recipe and it cost me $3 dollars and I sat in the early morning light and ate it for breakfast. It was one of the few moments recently I didn’t read off my phone or watch something. I just chewed and swallowed and cleaned up.
Recently I heard a beloved friend’s voice for the first time in months. I forgot that I used to be privy to hearing it every day and now it’s a voice I hear sometimes. That’s life for me. Things are so close, within my grasp and then it’s on the floor, spilled and I’m left to ponder, reminisce and weep belatedly. I’m an idiot.
I baked two cakes. One for Lilah and one for Caitlin. They’re beautiful. I get to sing happy birthday and celebrate life.
Epilogue
July 25th, 2022
I come to you briefly. I had a lovely day yesterday. The days before it were days before but yesterday was so nice. I went to bed so full that it was hard to sleep—not food but feelings that overwhelmed, so Pisces rising—and I awoke to see dawn shake the sky up reluctantly like undoing a 1,000 piece puzzle.
Pink, gold streams of light and tufts of cloud began to separate big chunks of azure, turquoise. I looked at the date and I knew it well. It’s Amelia’s Earhart’s birthday.
I’ve known her birthday my whole life. A book from the library and specials on PBS alerted me of her story and she was my absolute favorite person. One of my earliest memories includes calling a radio station today and requesting they play a song to acknowledge Amelia, her birthday.
A man chuckled on the line and asked me how old and I told him that I was five years old but I’d be six in December. My mom told me my birthday was close to Jesus and Santa Claus’s. I wished desperately that it was closer to Amelia. I wanted an Icarus birthday, I wanted to be born in the sun. I’m just a Persephone phoning home, missing her mother by minutes and leaving a voicemail that says: I’m doing my best. Making the most. I can’t wait to see you in Spring. A man came down here singing a beautiful song and saying he lost his wife. Saying that she tasted of fresh cut flowers. I wanted them to be together, oh, I tried, and I said don’t look back, please, don’t look back at the shroud that covers all who come this way.
The man seemed amazed that a little girl from Anacostia would request such a thing but obliged me. Why Amelia? Why was she my hero? I wrote in one of my first childhood essay that I liked her because she could fly a plane, because she went somewhere and I want to be a person that goes somewhere. In a book I read she was brave but she was damned and she was lost.
The song he played was so sad and sweet. I wish I knew what it was but I remember that day— my mom was home and she’d indulged me by looking up the radio’s phone number. She danced with me in the kitchen. I was crying. I kept mumbling “does he know she’s lost? she got lost, she got lost.”
My mom kept saying, there’s no need to cry. It was rare that my mom was home. She wasn’t at rehab in this memory and her clothes are ironed and her hair is up. She towers over me at 5’4. She also likes planes even though they scared her but she took me to Air & Space Museum and watched me from the cockpit.
I kept crying and crying that afternoon.
I couldn’t believe I heard myself on the radio.
I couldn’t believe someone listened to me.
These days I feel lost. I don’t know what’s next.
What song would you request for someone lost?
Turn it up. I hope I can hear it.
Godspeed loners,
Kx
alone in my room is an occasional newsletter written by a ficus that wishes it was a peony. there’s loads of fucked up shit going on, and throw your dollars where you can, but also wrap your arms around your loved ones and say how tight it is to love them in this hell space. be the smile you’d want to see on the day you’ve got a loose grip and don’t know if you can hang on. cheers.