Thoughts From Bar Cornelia, A Girl's Apartment,And My Bathroom Floor
A date, a worry, some blood, a love.
I haven’t written anything in two weeks because I wanted to let that last post breathe, and breathe it did.
I’m not sure why, but that post made the rounds. Hundreds of rounds. Hundreds of eyes reading about my internment at JFK and the abominable city that preceded it. Thanks for reading. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for giving a fuck.Â
To address the main feedback I’ve received in short: I will not be killing myself in the foreseeable future. That post was not written to address any single person or persons currently active within my life nor prior, so don’t read into it too much. I’m fine, thanks.Â
The responses and phone calls and text messages of both praise and concern are quite surprising to me, as when I wrote that post, it felt very mild, and like an attempt at articulating what I had felt for some time - the tepid discomfort of human experience, the onslaught of nothingness, and the brazen but necessary moments of relief - and was not, as one reader suggested, a suicide note, though I will say that by virtue of its attempt and failure to accurately express my intended meaning, it falls in line with a lifetime of communicative futility.
Even so, given the responses I’ve received about the themes of my previous post, it warms my heart to know that my failures disguised as prose have tricked you, and I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you that you have been.Â
Words don’t come easy. I’ve never spoken a word and saw it be understood, and not for lack of trying. I’ve always found it extraordinarily difficult to speak, despite the mild success of my bullshit musings and word plays and years of cosplaying as a writer, complete with self-isolation and shy alcoholism. I’ve never believed in myself, but least so in my craft. I’m not skilled at what I do so much as I am willing and desperate to do it. Like a serial killer. Or a horny teenage boy.Â
And before you can turn your head in self-gratifying generosity, I wholeheartedly deny and condemn my generation’s general acceptance and snappy commodification of the idea of ‘imposter syndrome’. It feels like a resignation, a denial of personal responsibility for lying and getting away with it. Maybe some of us are gifted without knowing it, but more likely, most of us are full of shit. Pacing the city for miles imagining for many shameful moments that I am talented or good when I am not, the awards and praise and kisses granted to the scar on my chin won’t undo the lie that is my supposed ability to communicate. I am weighed by the guilt and wariness that comes with years of professional and creative deception, that at any moment my lie will become known and I will be forced to recede in shame and return humbly to the position of barista/dishwasher/cameraseller/drugdealer.Â
Desperate as I’ve always been for them, I’ve never had the words. I’ve never possessed a phrase. Lungs and head and mouth, empty. I’ve never posited my affections or qualms or stake and had them be truly known. I’ve never felt overwhelming dread or grief and, crying in the dark, been able to click into place the combination of syllables that would help me make sense of it all. I’ve never held a girl’s face in my hands in the rain and spoke with words or a face or a kiss, ‘I love you,’ and had her understand the depth of me.Â
What good is it to be if not known? It has always been as though my sentences come in a haze; blurred, filtered, obscured in a fog of hesitance to bear anything too sincere but close to true, like ink on a page soaked in water or the magnetic refusal of a worn-in and failing cassette tape; jumbled and so very near to true but simply not.Â
No language in my lungs, no ink in my pen. In this part of the story I have attempted to explain how I feel, and already I can sense that I’ve fallen short. Year over year, I am alone in language and alone in this room, and alone in this crowd at Bar Cornelia.Â
I took my margarita as well as its straw that was inexplicably twice the size of the glass outside with me to keep me company while I smoked through the ninth cigarette of a pack of menthol Parliaments that I bought out of nervousness rather than addiction.Â
I woke up to vomit that morning - morning, more like afternoon - and I was hoping that my date - a woman whom I had never met in real life but whom I believed I could convince to stand me for a while - wouldn’t be able to taste the red wine and blood that spouted from my lips and into an acetate trash can only hours before, my bile’s acidity carving lesions and fissures into the delicate tissue of my esophagus and spewing the smears of red that it had dug out along the way.Â
I was drinking a lot then. Lots of wine and margaritas and other extravagant, non-alarming drinks that this new writing job’s salary had enabled me to afford. It’s interesting how the type of drink that you’re drinking can hide how dependent you are on it. If I were throwing back spirits neat or beer shot combos, alarms would be raised among my peers, but when you’re sipping a margarita through a tiny straw, even if it’s your sixth or seventh or eighth, people don’t see a burgeoning drinking problem, they see a gentleman having fun. They see class.Â
I hadn’t ever met this girl, and she was a bit younger than me and much prettier than me and was clever in the few exchanges that the dating app had facilitated, and I felt a sense of dread waiting for her, hoping she wouldn’t show up so that I could be freed from the pressure of being a person in front of another person in public. But she did, and, like a dog who has grown a Pavlovian recoiling to the sound of a belt coming off, I know that when she looks at me, I will not be able to look back at her, and when she speaks, I will have to ask another part of me to take over and hear her because the truest and deepest part of me can’t bear it.
I remember once telling a girl that looking at her felt to me like looking into the sun - simply too bright and vivid for me to observe - and I meant it.Â
And she was clever. She made me laugh. I felt excited by this. I like laughing and I like when people are more clever than me, which, you know, is a low bar, but still, it is an enjoyable and frequent occurrence.Â
I’ve been trying to be very honest lately. Honest with everyone and all the time, or at least as often as I can be without being destructive. If someone asks me how I am, I tell them that I am happy or sad or uncomfortable or that my palms are sweaty or that I’m not sure how long I can be at this party or that I feel better now they’ve arrived. This honesty sets a standard in my interactions that this can be candid, and reduces the possibility that I may be so severely misunderstood - or worse yet, misunderstand someone else - that one of the few and valuable relationships I have with another person will be damaged.Â
She asked how I was and I said bad, and she asked if that was her fault and I said no, and I was surprised by this specific and non-delayed reaction. Her first response was guilt and worry, and I understood her better for that. I saw a bit of myself in her, and I felt safer.Â
There’s a very large book I’ve read twice which I discovered only after falling in love with the musical adaptation. The book is called Don Quixote, by Miguel De Cervantes. It is considered the first novel of Western civilization and is a masterpiece. The musical adaptation is called Man of La Mancha, and I highly recommend it.Â
Don Quixote and its adaptation are about a Spanish aristocrat in the 1600’s who reads so many chivalrous novels that he goes insane with disdain for the indignity and cruelty of the real world, that he deludes himself into believing that he is a knight, destined to right the impossible wrong and defend the weak from the wicked, though he mostly mistakes windmills for giants and falls in love with a bartender/prostitute whom he has dubbed a lady of the court, Dulcinea.Â
The Don (not J. Trump) is on a mission to right the wrongs of the world, and in many ways, by virtue of the pursuit, he does. Don see’s the world not for what it is, but for what it could be if only the people of the world agreed on his idyllic vision. He sees beyond what people are and focuses on the very best of what they could be; beyond the flaws, the dirt, the impurity and hatred and mistakes and cruelty.Â
The people who love Don Quixote - his niece, a priest, and others - seeing his idealism and capacity for good - what they perceive as his insanity - burn his library and shut him away. He is punished for being the best that he could be, and wishing the best for those around him.Â
Years ago, a reporter asked me if I’ve ever been loved. I thought of Don Quixote, his ability to see the best in people even when they can’t see it in themselves and even to a fault, and replied, ‘I hope.’Â
Quickly, we began to talk about the best and worst things that have ever happened to us and that we have ever done. I told her about the good I’ve done and the people I’ve hurt. She told me about how in the fifth grade, she saved her younger sister from drowning in a lake, and how a year later, she was molested by a member of her family’s church.
I counted the walls as she told me this. Six all together, adorned with wallpaper that peeled at its seams and obscured by string lights and the beautiful hues that they emanated. I thought about how she has beautiful eyes, and birthmarks, and how her voice could be so soothing and delicate even as she is using it to tell me about something truly wretched.Â
Again, I have been trying to be more honest with myself and with those around me, but some things, many things, are admittedly still withheld. I had nothing to offer her in return - so many things I could have entrusted her with in exchange for the part of herself that she had exposed to me, but nothing came out. No breath or word. No language in my lungs. There was just quiet.Â
She held my hand for a while. Gripped it, really, but I could tell that she was trying not to.Â
Outside, we split a quarter pack of cigarettes. She asked me if she had said too much and I said no. She apologized for freaking me out and tried to assure me that she isn’t crazy, but that we had made rules to be honest at the start of the date and that perhaps she got carried away and she worried that I thought she was damaged or acting bizarrely or that I felt dumped on or inconvenienced. I kissed her, and her waist was small and delicate in my hands. I’m not sure that this was the right thing to do, but it felt like it in that moment. She smelled like a bouquet. Her lips fit mine perfectly. Life is short but it feels like forever.Â
I’d like to assure you now that this is not a romantic story, and that there are no good, infallible characters, and that she and I no longer speak, and I would like to assure you now that that is my fault.Â
Walking to her house - which was much further from Bar Cornelia than she had promised and in much more dreadful a breeze than it had been only a few hours earlier, the Autumn blowing in under my shirt and scraping its nails across the pale, unmuscular skin of my chest - we held hands when we crossed the street and kissed again, twice.Â
‘Wait here,’ she said before venturing up the steps of a corner store in Bedford-Stuyvesant to buy drugs for herself, and I heeded her instruction. I stood and looked up at a starless sky. I watched a train rumble by on elevated tracks, harassing the pedestrians below and the families in apartments that lined its route. Above it, for the first time in my life, I saw a smiling face in the sky; the man on the moon, as I had been told so many times on camping trips and childhood sleepovers, hovered above and before me. Despite my nervous hands and the taste of blood lingering in my gums and throat and lungs, I saw this as a good sign, and I smiled back at him. She returned and we proceeded.
On her couch, drunk at one in the morning and having imbibed certain drugs that she did not pressure me to take with her but that I willingly and wistfully accepted, I saw stars.
‘What sort of music do you like?’ she asked me.
‘I don’t know, whatever.’
‘That isn’t true. You’re a music writer. You’re a snob.’
‘That’s true. I don’t care, though. Whatever you like, I’m sure I will, too.’
She frowned at this, my refusal to be decisive even once. I laid on her couch, looking around the room, though mostly at the ceiling. Her apartment smelled like a library. She put on my favorite Beach House song without knowing it, and the glittering resonance of the track fiddled in my mind, unsettling me but loving and comforting her. She laid on the couch, too, her head resting on the opposing end, her feet propped on my chest. She smoked. I laid, incapacitated, awaiting subversion.
I’ve always been afraid of people who like me. It feels too heavy a burden. An expectation. A sudden responsibility that I can’t maintain. It’s like they adore a person that I am playing, and poorly. I put on an impression of a person who is kind and funny and reasonable, and that person does most of the work and carries the weight of what I understand are necessary relationships, but with every joke and hug and feeling of acceptance, I isolate myself further within myself, and with every person who has ever shown an interest in me, I have felt a crushing fear - a debilitating sense of guilt for deceiving them into believing that I am a person and not sub-humanly detestable.
We laid naked in her bed in the dark of the morning, hearing the remnants of us still playing in the other room, but my head spun. She was warm. She felt closer to me than I expected I’d be able to allow anyone to be that night. She kissed me and again I worried about the metallic taste of myself but she made no comment and did not recoil, and she kissed me again on my lips and on my ear and on my neck and on my collar. She was small in my arms.
‘Nothing has to happen, you know? This is nice.’
‘I know, I’m just happy to be here.’
And I meant that. I was happy to be there, with, very simply, someone. I was just happy to be there, until suddenly, I wasn’t. Suddenly, I was overcome with a sadness and guilt that this girl had exposed herself to me and I had nothing to give back to her. I was overwhelmed by all of the things I’d love to surrender to her but some horrible part of me could not lend even for a moment.
There, in the dark without any clothes and with someone who had given me all that I could have hoped for and in only a few hours, feeling more than ever my inability to reciprocate in even the slightest, I felt like the worst person on earth, and I was. I could give none of myself in return.
‘I’d like for you to spend the night, if that’s okay.’
At some point in my life, I lost the ability to tell someone that I love them, unless I didn’t actually. The deeper my affection, the more difficult I find it to speak the words. With my friends, I can say it and mean it, but it is a camaraderie that risks very little, and which I know will be returned to me. It isn’t a vulnerability so much as a statement, because they don’t depend on me for it. They bet nothing on my answer - no part of themselves, no weight, no hurt or experience - and as valid as those statements are, I bet nothing in return.
‘You don’t talk about yourself much.’
She took my head in her hands and enveloped me in softness and dim light and warmth and the smell of a bouquet on her neck.
‘You know, you can tell me something, too, if you want.’
She was inviting me to participate in humanity, and I wanted to, but somewhere along the way, I lost my willingness to bet myself, whereas that night, she bet everything on me. She was wrong to do so.
Suddenly - perhaps because of the drugs, or the alcohol, or the scraping pain in my lungs, but most likely, because of shame - I began to cry. The tears came in a burst rather than a swell, and within a moment of her proposition, my eyes were wet with humiliation.
I have hurt people in my life, emotionally and physically. Likewise, I have been hurt. I have had black eyes and broken collarbones, a crooked nose and a broken heart. I will join the fray, I will delve into destruction and prove to myself that I am a man, but at the proposition of being known, I cower.
I presume that she felt my tears on her forearm as her hand did the work of running fingers through my undeserving hair, and she took my face in her hands to see, to which the most masculine and shameful part of myself recoiled and ripped myself away. I felt vulnerable, exposed, and somehow tricked. I felt a betrayal that I didn't understand in the moment, but now interpret as guilt that I had made such an error as to allow myself to be myself in front of another person who had generously done the same.
I ripped myself from her and her warmth and generosity, and put on my clothes as quickly as I could. Without a word to her, cruelly, and despite her worried, hurt expressions of affection, I fled.
Walking home, I felt shame, but more so, I was obsessed with detecting the reason for which I could be so stupid as to allow myself to feel and to be seen to feel so much in front of someone. I wanted to detect and kill that part of me. I hated it. I hated it. I hated it.
I fell asleep on the floor of the bathroom in my basement. I woke up to vomit. I slept again. The days went on. I didn’t call her. I couldn’t.
There were six walls, eight booth benches, we were in the fifth. I saw her breath mixing with mine as we gasped for air between shows of affection and I withheld myself. I withheld myself. I withheld myself. All of the detestable, beautiful, insignificant, incomprehensible bits of myself that she and the one before and every other person I have ever known and loved or at least could have would have gladly taken in and known and protected, I withheld.
What good is it to be if not known?
Years ago, a reporter asked me if I’ve ever been loved. I now wonder if I ever could. I think of her, of my family, of those whose faces and ribs I have scarred my knuckles on, of those whose hearts I have tattered, of Don Quixote and his ability to see the best in people even when they can’t or won’t or will never see it in themselves, and I reply, ‘I hope.’Â