Intermission with duvet and sports drink

People as a vice.

I don’t feel like continuing the Friend Grief Plotline right now, so consider this an intermission.

I’m recovering from a weird illness that I’m pretty sure was one of those COVID infections that never produces a positive test. At one point, I bought myself some butter pecan ice cream, and it straight up tasted like grass. The scent of freshly-mowed grass on my tongue. And it wasn’t bad. It was just not ice cream. That’s never happened to me before.

Anyway, I’m better now, listening to “Duvet” by Bôa (yes, the Serial Experiments Lain song) and slurping down the sandy bottom of a glass of Liquid IV as I write this. And I’m thinking about people as a vice, about where the line is between opening up to someone out of genuine interest and opening up to them out of some perverse, almost exhibitionist, tendency. Wanting the dopamine hit that comes from revealing one of your secrets for the first time, for the twentieth time. That alive-feeling of a new connection, those first few weeks where you experience your day-to-day through another person’s eyes and suddenly it’s new and full of possibility to you again.

I think sometimes what I assume is my curiosity about others is actually my own curiosity about myself. I get close to someone new because it’s a chance to recontextualize myself. Explain myself better, or differently, getting closer each time to some ultimate identity, the figure taking shape as I chisel away at the slab using another person’s hands, or teeth. There are other ways to do it, I know that. But I don’t know it. I only know staying up late telling strangers the same story I’ve told a million times. That paranoid flush in the moments when they haven’t responded yet and I’ve just tried out some new material.

I used to be a very sheltered kid—then I went away to college and went fucking crazy.

My family is very Italian but we aren’t one of those Big Italian Families. I only have one first cousin and she’s ten years younger than me.

I’ve been playing the piano since I was seven but I’m not as good as I should be because when I hit age thirteen I stopped wanting to learn other people’s songs.

For a year, I lived in Pittsburgh, and it was fucking terrible. I went through a bad breakup and essentially left town in disgrace.

Got mono so bad. Tonsillitis. Almost hospital stay. Black and green.

I always think I have cancer. You should have seen how bad it was when I was dating this guy who had actually had cancer in high school. I felt like such an ass.

Did you hear about the time I got really sick with COVID and my ice cream tasted like grass?

Do you know I once talked on the phone to Daryl Sabara?

Of course, it’s not all just navel-gazing. Not every person is a mirror, and I don’t think any person has managed to be just that and nothing more. I’m trying to be better about it. To be a little more intentional about the people to whom I give myself, the things I divulge. I want people to get to know me out of their own curiosity, on a reasonable timeline, on their own terms. It works, mostly. It feels less slimy, a little easier.

Still, I can’t help but feel a little guilty about the conversations we have, their secret utility. How I’m always trying to figure out what’s true by running my mouth. How I can’t control it sometimes. How much better it feels to get that last shot in the arm in than to ask another human being about their day. Or better yet, to wait until the thing I want to tell you is something you actually want to know.

You were sick last week, how was that?

How long have you been playing the piano?

Have you ever talked to a Z-list celebrity on the phone?