new year, old me
this was a long and fucked and beautiful and sad and hard and exciting and big week, i’ll try to do it bit by bit.
when i left you last, i had just been let down gently by a tinder date and was laughing my legs off in the bath with 2 bottles of corona and a litre of patrón. i spent two hours in that bath, splashing around and sending voice notes to my closest compatriots and trying to figure out what to do next.
there was an xmas party that had started 8p.m. the night before, and the reels rolling into the telegram made it clear it wasn’t ending any time soon. i threw together a quick rave kit (hip flask of tequila, swiss army knife, tajin, limes, hand sanitizer, masks, cigarettes (in their little clip-close red case) , 6 lighters, pear-scented anti-perspirant and some cash) and jumped into a cab and had a conversation about socialism with my driver. it was going fine until at one point he said “DID YOU KNOW NOBODY JEWISH WHO WORKED AT THE TWIN TOWERS WENT TO WORK ON NINE ELEVEN” and i had to launch into a tirade explaining that his antisemetic conspiracy theories were absolute horseshit, that the richest people in the world are NOT jewish and that obviously george bush did 9/11. it was sad because until he turned out to be an absolute cunt he seemed like a lovely man.
i got to the party late, they were playing hi-tech to try and scrape people off the walls and back into the middle of the floor. a couple of beautiful people i’ve met before said hello to me for 5 seconds before disappearing behind a veil for the rest of the evening. eventually i found T, who i always find, he’d been working the night before and had come straight from the job to the party and was feeling like he was going to fade out. i sat down in the middle of the “snow”-covered dance floor and made myself a margarita. B text telling me he was on a coach coming back from his hometown and was gonna be home in a couple hours, so T and me went to their place to pick up B and go on to a “house party” which turned out to be a hot couch and 6 men listening to grime. T didn’t want to stay and neither did I, so we hopped in a car and went to one of those clubs that photocopies your passport and takes a deep photo of your face before letting you in and stays open til 6.
it was great in there. there was techno. i even danced a bit. had some nice chats. one guy came up to tell me i looked like the coolest person he’d ever seen, but that he also wanted to let me know that i did not look like a girl and he would never tell me that he thought i looked like a girl. i think this was meant to endear me to him. it did not. when that club closed, i gave the bartender my tajin because she’d taken several tequila shots with me and she followed me on instagram and i will likely never speak to her again. outside i met some nice irish fellas who made me feel at home and deeply misgendered and then they left and i was alone. i found an African man and an Italian man who introduced themselves that way to me, offered me balloons, and we walked through the streets of the city until the sun started to come up. we all agreed to take a train somewhere, and when the doors opened i let them step on and waved them farewell and stepped away.
i had a dinner party to attend. i felt guilty about turning up to Christabel’s house entirely unslept and smelling like rags that had each been soaked overnight in different nut milks, but i’d feel more guilty about not going. i’d made a promise to come, i made no promises about how i’d look or smell. i touched base at home to get more tequila and limes (though i foolishly forgot to pack more tajin, which i would be thoroughly (deservedly) scolded for later by an incredibly sweet girl). i headed to the local sommeliers to ask them the best table bottle to bring for the table when you’ve disappointed somebody. they brought me to the latin american wine section and picked out a bottle i’ve bought for myself about once a week since i moved to this neighbourhood.
i took a train to the dinner party. this part is a little boring but it took me about 3 hours to get there because shortly after every single fan of the game Football got on the train, it was stalled.
it was so hot. children were collapsing
”a little girl has fallen, does anyone have any water?“
at one point the driver seemed to try to start a riot, announcing “We could have been on the move, but some passenger has pulled the red cord in the toilet so now i have to send my man down there.” i begged the people in my section not to turn on each other. eventually the train moved and all the men on the train said “ooraurghhhyyy!!” in that celebratory tone english men save for when a stalled train starts moving or somebody drops a plate (mazel tov) or something happens that they find themselves sincerely grateful for but being unable to express a sincere feeling they make a noise that is somehow a mockery of itself, but there is an understanding sub rosa that it’s real? sorry, i don’t have the eloquence at this time to try to dissect something so nuanced and i’m embarrassed i even tried. hopefully my editor will remove this entire paragraph about the train because while it’s important to me, it doesn’t help the story and it really doesn’t belong here.
when i got out of the train, i hopped in a cab and had a long talk about socialism with my driver.
christabel’s party was wonderful and i was so glad that i went. each person there was beautiful and sweet and funny, and i accidentally talked too much because i was excited to know them, but it was a wonderful time. I gifted Christabel the felt moth hat replacing the one she was wearing when i met her a temporally inexplicable 1 month earlier. it was stolen 2 days after we met.
she gave me a hand stitched Earth 2 themed gift that says “whore of loneliness”, which sits beside me now as i type this having instantly become one of my most cherished possessions. she also gave me a hardback biography of the earlier years of sylvia plath which i’ve been reading in the street under the dim light cast by the stone works facility responsible for repairing the facade of my local church.
… i’m not sure i have what i need in order to write the dinner party like it should be. but in some ways maybe it will work that my energy for writing about the week is running down as the energy for living it did too
- we played the board game therapy, christabel and i shared a piece because we are only one person
- z was calm and collected and won and left
- m and j and s and d were very funny and enjoyable to be around and their energies, everyone’s, wove a wonderful web
- when i mentioned my little tequila kit dani’s eyes lit up and she was like “are you saying you have TAJIN NOW???” and i had to say no, because i’d given it to the bar person, and it’s a mistake i’ll never fully be able to move on from. do you know how many parties i’ve gone to where i’ve excitedly told somebody i have tajin and they’ve said “what is tajin?” and now here is somebody asking for tajin and i can’t deliver. i’ve learnt my lesson and will now be carrying two 10g bottles at all times and a sachet in my notebook
- i wish i had the energy to write this night right but, i can’t nail it right now. it was a lovely evening and a shining light in a dusk foggy week
christabel asked if i’d like to stay over and then watch the matrix tomorrow. when everybody left, i stayed and wrapped all the left-over food in tinfoil and put it in the refrigerator then i brought christabel a glass of water and fetched myself a lime and turned off my phone. christabel, fast asleep, was emitting gentle grendler noises and reached out for my hand and i sat on the sofa beside her holding her paw for 2 hours and feeling the kind of peace a sulphurous rock must feel as is it slowly eroded by the fresh water of a natural spring. when she awoke we retired to her room and spent 12 hours in asexual embrace, then she woke up and threw up and we watched a few episodes of her favourite television programme and i offered her a banana and she said no thank you and i left.
i went home and i contacted a man i didn’t know and spent the two days in a cosmic space adjacent to this one. i don’t know if i slept, i don’t know much other than i sharpened a kitchen knife and drew a line on my arm. on the evening of the 28th, i gained a lot of perspective. i looked at myself from the outside and saw somebody fat, somebody ugly, somebody with no reason to live. i really thought i was going to die that night. and i realized i had nobody that i could call, i’ve isolated myself in such a way that i have no best friend and no friends at all who i do not have at least one wall of jokes or responsibilities or something such that i could call them when i’m not sure i’m going to make it through the night and just talk. so i went into a k-hole for the next 6 hours and when i came out i found i’d sent a text message to Christabel that said “I want to be your best friend.”
***
i looked through the list of new years eve plans i had, and none of them appealed. i text an old and dear friend i used to work with, and asked her what she was doing. she invited me to a party which i was too tired, too lost, too wintered to be attend. i jumped in a cab and had a long and fruitful discussion about socialism with my driver. at the party, i met a beautiful and sweet person who is writing a PhD about the theatre of the late soviet union, and they hugged me and told me “you are gorgeous and i need you to know” and later i laid my sarape table runner down on the grass so that we could lie together without their outfit getting wet. before they left they asked for my instagram. i will probably never see them again.
after that i went to a warehouse rave to see dear P and B and D. it was nice, quite empty, but had a strange dark energy i wasn’t used to. i tried to ignore it. i had a nice chat with P, and I saw dear Ñ again who was so happy to see me and it’s so nice when somebody new seems to like you as much as you like them. when the rave was over i had a nap upstairs and around £2000 of equipment was stolen from my backpack. My OP-1, my OP-Z, my frekvens speaker, my RK-006, my digital camera, and my po-33 K.O.!. i almost feel bad for the thief because the karmic weight of what they have done will crush them. i’ve been looking for a new sound, and i hope that perhaps this massive loss of my only real creative outlet will force it out of me.
i will read this book about Sylvia, i will get new inserts for my notebook, and i will sit with an acoustic guitar and a piano and a pen and try to behave as though a decade was reset but i’m a girl now.
happy new year, darlings.