Autumn is upon us. I had trouble sleeping for a few weeks in August because I was overcaffeinated from green tea. I agonized over, then purchased an expensive memory foam pillow on a consumerist quest for better neck support. Taylor Swift announced a new album during a thirteenth anniversary. I watched the skies above the bay break open and rain on for a full Sunday afternoon. I contemplated what it meant to spend a year in one place, and interrogated my impulse to upgrade all the little touches that make a habitat closer to home.
The leaves hardly change in San Francisco, but the people do. Ever-changing; something different every time anyone looks a little closer. They turnover and uncover new pieces of themselves to expose to the autumn air. At parties last fall, I’d ask what keeps you up at night? into the din of the room, an attempted shortcut into the inner psyche. Here are the things that keep me up at night.
in the middle of the night
Another fall, another Taylor Swift album to spin cycles over. This time, she’s singing songs about thirteen sleepless nights in her life.
Nights have a familiar constancy for me. I’ve produced so much of my best and worst work in between the hours of 10pm and midnight. I’ve paid the price with dark under-eye circles and mismanaged sleep hygiene. I wrote my college supplements about all-nighters. The prompt asked for a quote that paralleled a catalyzing experience in our lives. I supplied this one: “It was one of those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at hand, but the night who had blocked the way.” Perfect tiredness, an idea I’ve been in love with since the very beginning. As the state of being I suppose I’ve always been striving toward.
If nights could talk, I think they would lower their voice to a whisper, kneel at our bedside and ask us what we really want; and if that thing keeping us up is truly as important as it seems. Or maybe they would scream over the expansive void of sad empty towns because that feels like the right thing to let loose of when the lights go dark. Or perhaps, nights don’t feel like talking and just want someone to listen to them for once. It’s easier to have ears in every conversation when the world quiets to a dull hum: listen closely, and it’s the sound of heartfelt confessions in lamplight and half-lucid dreams before we slip into a deeper slumber and the bargains we make with ourselves for a new day. Gentle went the night.
staring out at the midnight sea
The nights are best for rabbit holes. For fixations. For hyperfixations. For things you can’t stop thinking about even though you’re pretty sure everyone else has moved on. Things that nobody should care about anymore, but still seizes you in the nocturnal hours.
- This mashup of Perfect and Style perpetuates the mythic Harry Styles/Taylor Swift romance of late 2013. This short-lived fling endures in the pop cultural memory because these two songs, ostensibly written about one another, are so intoxicatingly right for each other when overlaid. It’s a tease of what was, and a window into what could have been.
- The marriage between Leighton Meester and Adam Brody as two very normal people who started a family, but who also both happened to star in the two greatest cultural institutions known to the modern millennia. It’s the uncanny crossover of Gossip Girl and The OC that primetime melodrama could not script any better. In some stroke of fate, Blair Waldorf and Seth Cohen ended up together in the extended Josh Schwartz universe.
- Kiera Knightley’s unexpected talent as an indie singer-songwriter in the 2014 film Begin Again. Sometimes I marvel at how good this soundtrack is, and how Keira’s whisper-soft singing voice works beautifully for the genre: are we all lost stars trying to light up the dark? In another life, if she weren’t so overburdened by being typecast in period dramas, she could reign as an indie sad girl.
- The illustratification of romance novels—the phenomenon of vectorized characters set against vibrant color palettes—that plagues bestseller displays in book stores across the nation. Judge a book by its cover, or in this case, judge it by its exceedingly palatable mass-market appeal. Cartoonish figures beneath handdrawn typefaces intended to mollify any public embarrassment that comes from reading the romance genre out and about. It’s somewhat fitting that the mass-market breakout The Hating Game was the one to bring about the cartoon revolution in female oriented-publishing: because if only unserious readers deign to sport a romance novel on their morning commutes, then these brightly colored packages ease the transition between young adult and new adult. The millennial aesthetic came for our bookshelves too.
- It has been ten long years since The Hunger Games made its film debut. One of these days, I’ll write about how this was an inflection point in my appreciation for arts & culture. All millennial pretension has a deeply-rooted origin story—when the constitutions of their known world suddenly and violently explodes—this was mine. But I don’t think about that; I think about the very fact that Isabelle Fuhrman and Alexander Ludwig from The Hunger Games are somehow still best friends. I think about how other middle schoolers in 2012 are also fully-formed adults now, but still embody the same bank of references from this cultural canon. How everything we touch/create/believe now has trace-elements of this movie I watched one weekend in March, many years ago.
- The Twilight soundtrack is so much better than it has any right to be. That’s it, that’s the reckoning we all need to do with our internalized Twilight hatred.
- I could hear my heart beating.
i want your midnights
One of the most romantic notions is legibility. Meaning readable, to the point of comprehension. The ability to string together incomplete inputs and form a conclusion at the end of it.
Making yourself legible to someone. It’s this thoroughly entrancing exchange of knowing yourself, and knowing that another person can know you too. Not just the stated facts (birthday, hometown, favorite color), but the little nuances and contours of what it means to be you. People are so legible; they’re never legible enough. Reading people. Letting someone else hold your gaze (mind, heart, the bits of your soul left in your expression). This is the most delicate practice of vulnerability and trust: shed the weary pretense and barbed wires, and simply let yourself be known. Less reading you like a book, and more finishing each other’s quotes from the source material. Paying attention, nurturing intuition.
Nights reveal all. Strips us bare of the light, noise, and warmth that obscure us in the daylight. The clocks strikes twelve and we’re still the same people waiting for this waking moment to roll over and bleed into the next. Wondering who we’ll be when our eyes open again. We’re lulled under the spell of sleep beneath a soft down comforter; we’re mumbling in half-delirium about the moments that broke us; we’re sitting in an empty park as the sprinklers turn on for the night shift. The midnight hour sees us (even when no one else can) and lures out our hidden depths in shadow. Makes us legible.
/
then ask yourself: does it ever drive you crazy; just how fast the night changes? (🌃)
stay tuned for
This season is for autumn leaves falling into place and:
- mulled wine and spiced treats
- fake leaf garlands
- terracotta decor accents
- puff pastry, fig jam, soft cheese
- jars of local honey
- shorter fiction, economical imagination
- appropriate sleep schedules
- long walks, comfy shoes
- escapist readings by scented candlelight
tuning into:
- I started watching tv again. I’d watched shows sporadically throughout the year, but I definitively ran out of cultural currency to spend to answer questions like “what have you been doing recently?” I finished the first seasons of Partner Track, The Bear, and have made it halfway through the second season of Industry. This is the patchwork genre of workplace dramas: disillusioned career professionals living their worst lives at their best place of work.
- A recent frenzy of shopping for sales taught me that paying for quality clothing items is (not surprisingly) a worthwhile investment. Getting durable wears out of the same item is the elusive payoff, especially when my closet has an accumulation of pieces destined for the retirement home. Fast fashion is slow fashion when we take our time with each piece we do own: welcomed in as recurring characters in the fabric of our lives.
- I’m the broken record who always says I’ll write more than I actually do in the dim, warm creative hearth of my apartment in the late evenings. This coming year, I think I want to do more of that writing out in the open. What’s the worst that could happen—perception?