Wednesday morning finds me with a side ponytail. Not my own, but that of my CorePower instructor, Mackenzie (her name is not Mackenzie, but it would be if I had a choice.) She wears it on the equator of her head, angled at just about 5:00 PM if her nose was noon. It’s subtle, as side ponytails go (at thirteen I wore mine directly above my left ear), but its presence is not. She seems preoccupied by it all class long, twitching her head with our every pulse and squat and hammer curl, always trying to bring her happy-hour side pony to rest on her right shoulder. Like a fox head on the collar of a fur coat.
This is one in a long list of familiar signposts in every 7:00 AM Yoga Sculpt that I've attended. I know it’s time for curtsy lunges when the Monday girl, Vivian (again, not her name, but should be) cues ”Pour Some Sugar On Me.” I know which parts of the wall-to-wall mirror ripple in a way that gives me weird dysmorphia about my upper thighs. I know that my favorite teacher, an Eastern European man named Stanislav (his real name obviously) is always going to forget to take off his headset so we can hear him gossiping at the front desk while we wipe down our mats.
I can only know these habits because I’ve been going to CorePower habitually. Addictively. It’s a side effect of my plantar fasciitis, or at least of plantar fasciitis coupled with my particular disposition — my aversion to relaxation and need for furious, competitive sweat and regular confirmation that I’m doing a good job to survive. Like Tinkerbell if her outlet had been high intensity interval training instead of mischief and being sexy. The heel pain keeping me from daily, compulsory runs around Prospect Park, I turn to neon lights and glute bridges.
The condition seeped into every cranny of my life like sea water in a sailboat, pooling at my lowest points. It was chronic even in its absence, made manifest not in a constant ache but in my knowledge that it lingered in wait — that it would ache again. It infected every waking hour, coloring everything I did. Stretching routines at my desk, in bed, on the living room floor. A hundred dollars for a physical therapist to tell me I had some of the tightest calves she’d ever seen (brag) Chinatown massages, special braces, a CorePower membership and a visit to Fleet Feet where a 22-year-old named Anna diagnosed me with wide ball girth and sold me new Sauconies. We sang “Best Song Ever” together when it came on.
I tend towards this level of obsession. I always have. My life a tapestry of so many overlapping love affairs — with Grease and oatmeal. Harry Potter and One Direction and boys and running. But for every time I’m head over heels or blissfully knees-deep in YouTube choreography tutorials for “Greased Lightning,” there is an equal and opposite chronic affliction. Being alive is replete with them and their impact is just as dominant, just as jarring no matter how many times we contract them. Plantar fasciitis. A side ponytail that won’t cooperate. Heartbreak. A bad haircut. Things that I can’t quash or quell or naturally absorb and that, though held within me, feel separate. Realizations of illness or evil, like a tumor or a horcrux, metastasizing in everything I do: “I am going to the store and I have bangs.” “I am brushing my teeth and he ruined my life.”
But for my limp or the layers no Dyson could correct, no chronic affliction is worse than having an iPhone. Just like you, I’m growing to violently hate it. I hate that I use it to get on the subway. I hate that I use it to get a date. I hate that I use it for recipes and grocery lists and finding out if I should be paying this much for tahini. I hate that I don’t go anywhere without it, this little box in which I keep part of my brain.
I read somewhere (on my phone) that the reason elephants have such good memories is because they have to remember the locations of so many watering holes scattered across the Sahara to survive. If my life depended on it, I’d remember Lucy’s apartment number and how to get to Sunny’s bar. How much more intentional would I be about what’s important to me if I didn’t take for granted that I held it in my right hand?
On a Tuesday morning I turned off my location settings before getting out of bed. I’d made “Find My Friends” a habit, delighting in seeing all their initials tattooed across the country (and sometimes Europe for those on vacation or finding themselves or both). But I woke up struck all at once with the fact that those dots weren’t where my friends were, they’re where my friends’ phones were. I felt deflated at my conflation of the two.
There didn’t used to be a word for “he stopped calling.” “Ghosting” is a modern construct, born from our constant availability. With no less than seven direct lines perennially open, a lack of communication is a conscious choice. We used to have the luxury of assuming he was away from his landline, couldn’t write a letter if we hadn’t heard from him. Now I can see that he was active on Instagram when he wasn’t responding to my text. I should not know this. I should not know that I am faster than him, either, but we still follow each other on Strava. This does help, though.
My friend and the guy she’s seeing are in a fight. She tells me all about it while we’re waiting in line for a zine launch at a natural wine bar. They want different things, and they decided not to talk for a little while, she says. They didn’t make plans that weekend, they hadn’t texted for days. They’d effectively broken up, “but he keeps DMing me eBay links.”
After reading my last letter, Harry sent me a copy of You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh. I take it to Fort Greene Park on Mother’s Day morning and read it lying on my stomach in the grass, the sun burning the soles of my feet. In the first six pages he insists that I’ll be happy. He uses a lot of exclamation points, so I believe him. The key is presence, he says. Dogged presence. “Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.” I breath in and try to know it. At the same time a baby with a bubble gun gives his dad what his mom calls “a bubble shower,” the bubbles floating to my towel, popping on my feet and in my hair. I take this as proof positive.
I am trying to invest my attention much more intentionally in what’s in front of me, bubble showers notwithstanding. I worry that otherwise we’ll end up with some form of the same experience that everyone else is having, diluted and pre-packaged for us. All “oh yeah, I saw that video too.” Things bloom the more I will them to, revealing the vibrant colors and complex geometry of their makeup. Like germs under a microscope.
Now it’s warmer I walk to the park after dinner, opting first for the benches (provided there is someone beautiful and interesting, preferably a boy, sitting there watching tennis alone) or for the grass in his absence. But he or something like him is always there. I take notes about them in the journal or in the margins of my book if I forget my journal at home.
This week I sit with:
A petite brunette. Slight, but strong, with his ankles crossed to reveal white Nike socks peeking just below the hem of his sweatpants. He has a tote bag to his right, the side further from me, from which he pulls (1) a block of cheddar (2) a family-size tub of Daisy cottage cheese (3) a plastic sleeve of four store-bought plain bagels and (4) a butter knife. He brings the bagel bag and cottage cheese, both open, to rest on his lap, leaving the cheddar cheese, also open, on the bench beside him. I watch in awe from the corner of my eye as he rips off a bite-size bagel section, places a slice of cheese on top, dips both in the open tub and eats. He repeats this pattern until he has finished two and a half bagels.
A lanky brunette with a silver watch. He is reading a book called Dead Friends. His right leg is crossed over his left and when he moves I can feel the slats of the bench ripple under me. He has a tote bag from Daunt Books but also a blue wool sweater inside out over his shoulder and a navy baseball cap so sun-faded and sweater it’s turned to pium. Is this level of detail an invasion of privacy? He turns the page. His shoes are black leather Sambas with green stripes and he wears thin chocolate brown ribbed socks that appear to be a silk blend. He holds a red pen in his mouth, annotating at turns. His fingernails are cut almost to the quick, He checks his email on his phone, sighs, and gets up to leave. He does not look as good from behind.
Two friends from college, a boy and a girl. They are debating loudly the best time of year to go to Barcelona until the girl professes it’s really not worth going at all and that she’d rather go to Porto anyway. He calls her a bitch and they laugh and laugh. They leave to get sushi.
I see all this and write it down and feel really delighted by what I’ve taken for granted. Lucy’s apartment is 4F and my mind feels more my own. My location is off, but You Are Here. My foot won’t hurt forever.
Pony Recommends:
1. I went and saw Sinners at Village East two weeks ago and absolutely flat-out loved it. But for one little scene in the beginning where you can tell they’re being like “can you believe you’re looking at two Michael B. Jordans at once!!!” I thought it was perfect. It’s constructed in two distinct acts, the first focused on character development and world-building and the second focused on vampires and having fun (me, not the two Michael B. Jordans who are decidedly having spoiler alert an awful time) and at no point did they feel disjointed. The guts of the second were amplified so much by the “I love ya and I missed ya” of the first. It is the first movie I’ve ever gone to see alone and it was so awesome. That is going to be my new thing. Y’all are all trying to convince me over and over that eating by yourself is the best thing ever and blah blah blah but I hate it. This, though, I will get behind.
2. After you go see Sinners you have to listen to this episode of Switched on Pop and the movie’s wonders will unfold before you anew!! Eeeee! It’s all about the throughlines between Irish folk and the blues and how both genres were born for resilience and about how genres themselves are a form of meaningless segregation.
3. We just launched our summer collection at Loeffler Randall, the brand at which I live and work. I got my fourth pair of our Landon flats in my personal order and these I think are my favorite ones yet. They are butter yellow leather with silver studs and I’ve worn them four times a week since I opened the box.
4. Michael McGregor has a new show running at Yoshii Gallery on Madison Avenue, He has a completely singular style, his palette is joyful and his subject matter is modern and witty and he draws everything on high-end hotel stationery, constructing an image of the artist as a rich, eccentric bachelor who just has to color a Snoopy Rolex on the pad by his bed before rushing down to the bar. I went with my friend
on her recommendation, and like every single one of her recommendations it did not disappoint.
5. I am 65% of the way through This Is Happiness by Niall Williams and it is already one of my favorite books I’ve read or will read this year. It’s a retrospective written from the point of view of an man reflecting on the summer that his small Irish town installed electricity. Its premise is necessarily small and contained, effectively magnifying the gravity of the interpersonal conflict, the love and loss and leaving at the alter, in contrast. Every other page features a description that is so creative and evocative it makes my jaw drop: “pale, water-coloured children,” “the air had the slender, quickened and hopeful spirit that is in the word April.” This is a passage wherein Noel, Noe for short, writes about what it felt like at seventeen, falling in love for the first time (!!!):
What if we did glute bridges under the neon lights 👉👈
I too have been told I have the tightest calves a massage therapist has ever seen