Hey Loners,
Happy New Year, loners.
Loners — I’ve been all over the place. I’ve missed you. As always - I love your emails.
International Sad Players Anthem - I know, I know but that UGK track has gotten me through some dark times. Also Andre 3000 remains one of my greatest influences and if you’ve never listened to him discuss his art process/ introversion/anxiety with Rick Rubin— you should. Recently revisited it when I was in a position of writing songs and he says “You want to sound like people you love and you won’t” - I felt that. It’s an old piece about my winter blues & constant fight against depression & can be found up on a new local pub called Bruiser Mag. Submit if you’re interested.
Recently wrote lyrics for the first time and got to front a band. It was one of the more rigorous things I’ve done. There’s not many recordings of me that exist because of gender and body dysphoria. Somehow I’ve done some hundred shows and never had too much audio or video taken. I think I regret it now on days I can’t remember where or who I’ve been. I want to exist - I forget that in the battle of the self. I remembered that every so often I go and find this video of my dead friend that exists on their old youtube channel and it’s how I’ll never forget their voice.
I really loved this live recording from the student-run NYU radio station of the band Feeble Little Horses. Did you know my first major in college was radio engineering? I love college radio.
The letter(s) ahead includes references to violence / death. They flop between November, 2022 and now.
Have you told your friends and family you love them? Tell someone they matter - it counts right now. Check in on those you love / want to love. Don’t let the coffee date you’ve always wanted to go on become the biggest regret.
A march for life comes to town and I find each news broadcast documenting it interrupted by a shooting, a suicide, a tank, a disappearance. It’s been a season of loss and remembering losing. I open this google doc to write to you and call it “loser, baby.” It’s 3am on a Thursday morning and I’m making dumplings. Well— I finished making them just a bit ago and I’m sitting in front of a bowl of dashi broth filled with greens and dumplings. My feet are cold and I want to give you some. It was on my schedule to make dumplings this week— it’s lunar new year and I don’t have a car right now. I can’t get all the good-good that the tristate has to offer so I just make them myself.
Yesterday I awoke in G.’s house and I climbed stairs to wake them up. I lay in bed with them engulfed by radiation of their body. So warm, I curl into them and welcome the hand that rests on my spine and the mouth to my forehead. It was nice. I wish I could always remember how nice it is to hold friends and to be held. I take the train home and I think about if I’ll sleep tonight.
Watch steam weep from the dumplings. I think they’ll likely taste more like pierogies - it’s too cold in my apartment and the wheat should’ve rested longer. Dumpling dough is kinda rough when you bring it together. I haven’t made dumplings in a while. It’s something I like to share and it’s an act of meditation, of love. I like to tire myself out by making 50, 100, 300 in a night until I see the face of Christ in the wrapper.
The thing about when I make bread I know I’m actually trying to pray but I forgot how to clasp my hands and say the words. I want something to do with my hands. I’ve chewed and tugged and torn at the skin on each nail. I feel this cringe now after years of atheism for calling out. I feel like I’m calling an ex and I’m desperate. I’m down bad. It’s easier to have digits intertwine between wheat, salt, water and say I’m hungry instead of admitting what I really need. Bread is at the core of humanity, hell, at its humanity is sacred and ancestral. I make each dumpling hoping for peace. I am praying for the safety of all my friends. I want to pray for each victim in Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay but I remind myself I’m just making dumplings. I am hoping for a real new year.
At the end of November I’m on the beltway and there’s the fire department and the sirens of accompanying vehicles. I know it seems inevitable and almost expectant. There’s a cruelty that replaced compassion after it fatigued and everyday I see it more and more. A man is on the concrete and there’s a wound in his chest. Check the crime beat twitter later that night to confirm what I hoped I didn’t see but the moment I locked my door— I find it harder to reopen.
Try to recall who I know here, who is close. I call Luke and he’s sleepy but I say can you come over. I don’t want to be alone because just this morning I saw that person alive and now — that’s how it works, right? You are here. I can’t get the body out of my head. I wished my vision was worst. I miss RL and when they lived close and I’ve got a stigmatism in my left eye and it doesn’t seem enough when I can see the body in my head. I get about 20 hours of sleep a week again.
Took a job nannying in a town over and it helps because I need the money so it is easier to open the front door but it’s not easy to leave when I come home. When I get home I’m covered in a toddler’s blood and I’ve got a moon shaped bite on my chest and my whole day is hard to explain but I feel soiled. I unpack my art supplies, games and my planner. I prep dinner. I’ve tried running to dull the ache. I’ve tried boxing feel empowered again but my brain is melting and my body hurts. I’m in therapy but we just talk about how it’s okay to feel sad about losing your job and how my body is covered in hives. I’m anxious and I have to use the emergency xanax to calm down on a night when I can’t discern fireworks from gunshots.
Wake to a text:
Ian texts me a week later and asks if I want to sing in a band. I say yes because I want something to disrupt this life that settles in with its misery business. My anxiety is something flesh eating but I try my best. We write songs in a short amount of time and it reminds me of being on an episode of MTV’s Made where I get to learn how to be a rockstar. I’m used to writing poems but I write a song about my friends, about how hell is here and how I want love to save me. I want it to save us.
The world seems to be crumbling and I want to believe that things can change - I need it to.
I turned 33. I have a good weekend. I have a bad weekend. I cry a lot. I watch a skate premiere and see friends. I eat food and throw it up and I eat food and break into hives and I eat food and I feel my head hurt but I am happy to share food with others. I am sitting and hugging Z. and the only food I’ve enjoyed all weekend was a vegan burger at RB.
Ness tells me to come over and she’ll do my makeup before the show. I feel like I grew up feral and I never understood pack dynamics but I wanted to. I’m laughing and cackling with Ness as she smooths something on my face and it’s so nice. She says I have pretty eyes and she gives me a big yes before I leave. On the night of my birthday Sarah dies or she is in the process of dying. The next day I find out from a phone call and I’m in the shower. I fall to my knees.
In the shower— I curled up and was ugly sobbing thinking about all the people I loved crying too. I saw Z’s face smiling bright talking about his future child just last night and knew that right now it must be contorted and confused. I think of the day I first saw Sarah and not knowing she was someone so loved by people I would come to love and hold dearly.
Last year this time my Grandmother died and I spend a long time sitting in my grandpa’s living room touching every book to see if I could feel her hands. I find a book from her youth— it’s in Japanese and she brought it for my dad. His name is written in the flap. It’s her handwriting. This book is older than me.
Death is a bummer and bodies fail and perish. I know that and yet to save from the ache of the mortal reminder— I want to foolishly believe we can live forever. It’s not canon but I have written it into my Bible. Sarah’s death hit me supernova. She was bright and wise and talented. She made me want to sing. She made me want to be cool. She made me wish I looked good in fuchsia, chartreuse, hot orange.
I want to say goodbye to Sarah. She lived by a principal, she was a fucking revolution. The last time I saw her properly was at the Halloween cover show. My last sight of her was dancing to the B-52s cover band with Mark. She clapped me on the back— her hand used to command thunder but it now was just soft touch. She said “fuck yeah,” as we descended the steps covered in sweat having just finished our Patti Smith set. I was eager for her feedback.
I couldn’t believe I was in a band— a real band — with Z. She and Z. were iconic to me. Mallwalker, Egg Man. It was amazing to me I’d become someone that Z’d work with and that he called a friend. I got to experience the inner halls of this beautiful musical intimacy. Of people I looked to and thought about when I thought of performing - Sarah was included.
No one did “Gloria” like Sarah— maybe Patti herself but I’d argue it. What a gift that I get to live somewhere so creative— what a gift I got to be so inspired by this scene. After Sarah died— I read someone say something shitty about the scene and I wanted to fight them. I want to scream in their face that they’d never seen Sarah dance at Windup.
Recalled some years earlier seeing Sarah dance at Lithuanian Hall, her neon clothes and jangles clanging. I recall the thick honey rasp of her voice and the crackle of her laughter that rattled and infected. She was tall and her limbs flailed joyfully and if you were lucky, you’d get struck by a dancing fist.
I scroll through her instagram. Chronically ill in the digital age means that the bandwidth of the net is another life where you’re doing your best. There’s this archive of her outfits, of her wins against each plague. It weighs on me that she is gone and that there’s this archive never to be updated again.
Come back, Sarah.
What will you wear tomorrow?
Godspeed loners,
Kx
alone in my room is a sometimes newsletter written by a ficus that wishes it was a peony.