cobblestone

failing the bechdel test irl

Even though all my girlfriends are brilliant, storied women with respected careers and worldly interests, we can't seem to talk about anything other than relationships. And even though I am in Lisbon, a city designed to charm me with its sun and sweets and European sensibilities, I can't seem to feel much besides sullen about the loss of you.

Outside the door of my Airbnb, there's a section of cobblestone that I've nearly slipped on thrice. If I were with someone, I would acknowledge each instance with a giggle. But since I am alone, I barely emote when it happens — just involuntarily part my lips in surprise. This is similar to what life is like in your absence. I still feel everything, I just don't have reason to express it.

I've been meeting lots of new people, just like I wanted. I like many of them, which pleases me.¹ The new people supply me with new adjectives to describe myself: vibrant, encyclopedic, attuned. I try them on, despite how gaudy they sound. It helps a bit, knowing that I’m still capable of reinvention.

My friend K tells me that I'm "obsessed with living a progressive, rational, theoretically consistent lifestyle" and that my attempt to do so has “completely destabilized and destroyed” me. K is being mean for effect. I receive the specificity of his diagnosis as a sign of care. He’s really been listening to me. He respects me enough to be hurtful.

In a cobalt blue café marketed toward the brunch crowd, I eat Turkish eggs and read photographer Dina Litovsky’s reflection on collecting images for New York Magazine’s cultural commentary on the "West Village Girl." These lines stand out to me: "She is not performing complexity, and in a culture thriving on micro-analysis and virtue signaling, that can read as naive. But it’s a choice.”

I switch to my novel. In My Year of Meats, a small, foul-breathed Japanese man is crying into the bosom of an African-American mother figure. She holds him tightly, like a loved one, despite how foreign he seems. He is moved and weeps. She is moved by his ability to be moved. I think I am searching for a definitive release like that.

I hunt for one in the afternoon, paying €50 to listen to a curly-haired woman croon over a gelatinous, crunching beat. I drink cacao and eat date balls — foods for the rich and psychotic — and cry hot tears in seated lotus. The social container demands that we hug each other, and I oblige happily.

I consider what it means to lose and reinvent you. Or maybe the reverse: to reinvent and lose you. I picture new people giving you new adjectives. I picture a new person giving you a family. I stop picturing things.

Sometimes, in fitful moments upon waking, I say your name out loud the way one might address God. I say it the way an infant might call for their parent, or like a person might vocalize a sudden, high-conviction realization.

There's a plea couched in the way it tumbles out of my mouth. I say it hoping you will show up to deliver me from this discomfort. I say it before I'm smart enough to know better.

1. But this has always been my problem: liking everyone.