No preface, just an all-consuming eagerness to read and watch television once again. Languid afternoons in a room, settled in quiet interiority.
- i’ve been to the year 2014: i built myself in the image of this year
- words of worship: wordship, or i read a really good thing
- screaming crying throwing up: you had to have been there
💌
i’ve been to the year 2014
i built myself in the image of this year
Since July, I have been spiraling inward. I found myself reacquainted with an old book series I had given little thought for the past eight years. It resurfaced from the recesses of my attention after the algorithms decided they knew me better than I could deign to know myself. A series of TikToks from the BookTok corner of the internet emerged with raving reviews for books I had loved once, in what almost felt like another life. Isn’t it funny: for all my affections and affinities in the present, the predictive power of modern computing, came to the same conclusion as my past once did. How clearly they saw me for who I am; how silly it was of me to feign ignorance.
In their origin story, the main characters first meet each other when they are fourteen / fifteen. The first book starts when they’re twenty-three going on twenty-four. I was fifteen when, at 2am in early November, I first began reading in the fortunate light of happenstance. I’m the same age now, as I rediscover these familiar figures eight years removed. After having forgotten about their existence for so long, simply living life alongside rather than with it, the resurgence is axis-shifting. I could feel time moving but when I looked back, it didn’t look like I’d moved much at all. The unprecedented circularness of it all feels like the mockery of dramatic irony that I find more unsettling than I do comforting. Uncanny.
I do love these books, these characters, and their story; and I may love them more now than I ever did before. I see so much of myself in these characters, that I can no longer recall who came first. I question if I was always this way, or if I unknowingly drew myself closer to an image of who I’d become later. A younger me, reading and finding resonance; an older me, wondering if I was just the adolescent clay, sculpted. I had no claims to divination as a teenager, but in my young adulthood, I cannot help but feel the undercurrents of a prophetic motion. Fate or coincidence, or just the intertwining of stories and souls until they find each other again.
The other oddity is how these books have blown up on BookTok in the few years since. No longer an obscure thing swept away in a tiny pocket of online culture. Nostalgic curiosity got to the best of me when I was reintroduced, and I’ve since spent days upon weeks upon months now re-reading. Reading as if it were all brand new. I have faded memories of those original years, printed on vellum, that I see-through them all now. I’ve ached to relive frayed ends of my recollection (this one scene; that character moment; those emotional beats), like smeared fingerprints in the windowpanes of my memory, yet I can only recover so many of the online artifacts that lead me back. It reminds me that the internet was a different landscape back then and these old haunts have fallen into disrepair. Time moves, places decay.
I’m, in so many ways, diametrically different from who I was then; but in so many other immeasurable ways, I’m preserved in the amber of my interests, values, and intuition. It’s the tang of reminiscence.
words of worship
wordship, or i read a really good thing
In a half-delirious spell, I was reading earlier this weekend and read the first good thing I’ve read in a long while. A complete accident that I stumbled upon it on a midnight scroll through my out-of-network Twitter recommendations. I woke up the next morning and kept thinking about it: on the bus, while fixing myself lunch, before I set my alarms for the following day. In this modern day mire, I excavated a gem, a rarity.
I can’t find the words to describe it, this piercing and unconstrained overwhelm that tears out when the writing just hits. Semantics and syntax that resonate at a neural, arterial frequency. Electric; galvanizing. Shaken from a reluctant stupor: startling clarity and searing awareness. This is how good it can be. Sometimes it’s because the ideas within finally tame an inner monologue that felt without an end; to reveal newfound truths alight fuzzy synaptic connections. Other times, it’s simply that the prose is shockingly stunning. Standing in the grand majesty of not realizing, until that very moment, that words could do such a thing; speak into being, what was once only vague feeling.
The highest compliment that can be paid to a piece of writing is the style: sumptuous prose. Prose can be many, many things, yet sumptuous is an endangered exception. Writing that is at once indulgent and luxurious, without being cloying or affected, and certainly never clinical or derivative. The sentences need not be long, only commanding and convicted of their existence. Good art begs, borrows, and steals. Sumptuous prose nearly begs to be stolen, a rhythm of borrowed familiars redressed to read wholly original. I can only dream, half-hope, my words may one day withstand compliments of the sort. That I can write something deserving of the encomium. A reputation for sumptuous prose.
It’s like staring up at the firmament, skies and souls suddenly made legible. It’s the way one of my favorite online writers described Dry the River, a band moulded in the shape of The National in the English highlands (here, they play “bible belt” on a boat in the canals of Amsterdam)—like loving a place of worship when you walk inside even if you don’t believe in any type of god. Worshipping the contours of the written language as they reveal themselves in prose-form. The divine right to these words as an intimacy. Not quite religion, but something akin to transcendence.
screaming crying throwing up
you had to have been there
This is one of those things where you had to have been there to know what it really means. If you were a preteen girl once, you get pretty close.
In these moments, you just want to be there, wherever and what everyone is talking about. Cyberspace exacerbates this effect. My most treasured milestones in life have been swept up in the current of culture, of keeping up with a zeitgeist. Drawn to the flame of fanatic chatter and critical praise. It’s an approximation of extended community, the obsessive hivemind of wanting to be part of something greater. Some riptide of feeling that cuts through. It’s a visceralness. Raw and full-bodied.
These are among the few things that can provoke an all-consuming reaction out of me. To know what it is like is to be part of it; hindsight will say there is no other way in this communion. They say screaming crying throwing up like it’s a joke. Yet it’s a violent thing to feel beyond, obsess outside of oneself.
I’m convinced time is a flat circle. There are moments in the cultural consciousness that flicker awake, stirred from the reverie of a long nap. Time flattened when Dylan O’Brien starred in Taylor Swift’s All Too Well short-film last autumn. It compacted when Promising Young Woman thought to cast Adam Brody and Chris Lowell and Max Greenfield as the everyday men of nightmares. It razed down to nothing when the internet periphery found itself in the throes of obsession with Matt Smith again (and to think, I’d rolled my eyes when they first broke news of the prequel).
Before, I would have called it weaponized casting or revivalist mania. But it is simply nostalgia broken into the bone of being. We’re all the same, we’ve always loved the same things; we may never change.
this october month
- watching: if i disappear for the next month or so, it’s because i gave into the collective impulses of my digital feeds and started watching house of the dragon. it will be the lack of self-preservation that’s caught up to me; and it’ll hurt like hell.
- baking: pumpkin cookies coming to a social event near you soon.
- listened: lorde, mitski, bleachers, lucy dacus. all on one saturday.