november

how romantic

I love brownstones with blue-painted doors. I love orange leaves and natural orange wine. I love being so alone in a crowd of people. I love my old east side apartment that overlooked a restaurant patio. I could sit on my fire escape and watch women on first dates and cooing couples cup each other’s cheeks and spoon feed sushi rolls with wooden chopsticks.

I love to play gun games at the Chinatown arcade like I’m not a leftist. I shoot glass bottles and cans like they’re real, like it’s fun. Then I take a cab across the Williamsburg and see the skyline and remember the reason I’m alive, the Empire State all resplendent and shining over the bridge like a body. So many yellow window squares. 

I love my dad who likes to text me pictures of pages from Atomic Habits. The author writes things like “the greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom” and “professionals stick to a schedule, amateurs let life get in the way.” The sentences make sense but then you read them in your head over and over and they start to sound like an accent or another language. I always let life get in the way.

It’s getting dark outside so early, my face now shadowed and secretive at five in the afternoon. I suck on cinnamon sticks and do calisthenics to keep myself clandestine and cloth-bound until morning. When cars with loud music pass by my home the walls wilt and shake and for a few seconds I’m in an earthquake. I have to walk around and touch surfaces to feel sturdy again. Here is what’s helping as of late. 

1. If you are in Brooklyn, stop at Mary’s Coffee Shop on Dekalb Avenue for breakfast. 

2. Read my essay in Vogue about slow running.  

3. Go to Bedford Galleries for beautiful, gently used furniture, glassware, trinkets. 

4. Read my NYLON piece on beauty obsession in contemporary fiction. 

5. Caroline’s Donuts on Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn is sweet and delicious. 

6. I loved this essay on Edith Wharton’s home by Alissa Bennett. 

7. I’m rewatching PEN15, a perfect show. 

8. Finally read The Girls by Emma Cline. 

9. Interviewed Jackie Wang for AnOther Mag.