Posted on Wednesday, 02/26/25.

I can see almost all of Raleigh from its center. It’s built like an old Roman city: a modest grid, bilaterally symmetric, a wide central road starting at the capitol and running until some other neoclassical building. The center for justice is tall and brutal, made of tinted concrete with a huge dulled brass seal above the entrance. In the downtown people wear proper suits and pencil skirts. In the mornings I end up at the same cafe, where the two economic strata of the city mix. Two men discuss something about selling industrial chemicals. Two other men, who I stand behind in line, discover that their youngest children have recently gotten married within a week of each other, then that their oldest children are having their first grandchildren within a few months of each other. They learn that their fathers are 85 and 86, are ‘doing okay’, though both of them are a little quiet about it, like that it’s been hard. The snotty coastal part of me is made to feel better by the middle-American order of their mutual lives—that they both wear checked shirts and nondescript glasses. This feeling is against the recent bad feelings, including the pale loneliness, which of course they’ve both solved better than I have. They’re each stacked almost four generational layers high, which must put them up and above the dark water.

On the plane I watched ‘Chungking Express’ and then ‘I Saw the TV Glow’. CE can feel mean-spirited or unserious if you are not happy before watching it: I guess I have now seen it three times. IStTG, which I had not seen, was written by someone too close in age to me, too involved with early 2000s cliches, and so its motivating fears resonated very simply against my own, and this made me hyperventilate on the plane. I worry, a lot, that if I think too hard about how I have lived the past five or so years, that if I really see how much I have prevented myself, that it will be too awful and I will break apart—but never looking at this is the best way to continue doing this, etc. I also have bad fears that I don’t remember things as they were. The movie is pretty much about this, in the sense that it is not so good about being about things other than an extended metaphor, and all this is delivered almost entirely with flat affect, and also I was stuck on a plane while watching it. Phoebe Bridgers appears, in-person, in a band in the movie.

I took the bus downtown this morning rather than an Uber; it cost ten to fifteen times less. Most of the bus passengers knew each other and talked idly for the twenty-five or so minutes it took. Mornings here are almost frosty while the days warm to near 70, which spooks me. I mentioned the downtown is small—over half a million people live here, but mostly out in the suburbs where the roads don’t have curbs. Many of the plants are dead now but I can see the spidery remains of vines that blanket and strangle most of the large trees. Some of the skyscrapers at the edge of downtown are abandoned, which I have not seen before.

A few days ago I thought maybe I should write a post about how awful my last time with Sophie was—like that maybe I hadn’t gotten it across, and so that under the apparently honest intent of communicating my experiences I could actually vent frustration. But the story contains almost nothing. There are basically only two elements. I must have some fear about vomiting, maybe more generally about becoming acutely ill, so beyond the awfulness of the food poisoning I was also worried about dehydration, or ulcers, or somehow sepsis, which I said nothing about. Having to take a bus while severely ill is also awful, which I know because I’ve had to do it before, and this was made sort of more awful because Sophie made it pretty clear that staying longer wasn’t an option explicitly because they had a date to get to, like, before the warmth I’d left on the sheets was gone, etc. I have to imagine I think this is funny, a little, now, maybe, given the distance. I was also ‘fine’ in the moment because everything in me then had turned toward physical experience, close-in on my nausea and stomach cramps and headache. I guess this means the awfulness lives in the middle distance, or in only whenever I actively scrutinize the past, like I said above. From most viewpoints my relationship with Sophie is awful and has long been devoid of spontaneous, nice things—it’s like what Gwyn said, which is why I wrote it, ‘that otherwise I would have had nothing,’ which is awful. I also, I think, know that awful relationships can be malleable and provide most of the nutrients for life, like hydrothermal vents—or sort of like that ‘awful’ could be just an ungenerous term for ‘storied’ or ‘complex.’ But occasionally I get little insights into how most close people know each-other and realize I’ve basically been accepting things that are much more difficult than they need to be. This makes my sad about my current situation, sure, but also the alternative situations that might have transpired if I’d been less meek about it all. It really was an awful visit—like so bad that its arc feels so obviously and maliciously plotted so that someone reading about it would feel that the author’d been a little too on-the-nose. And bad in that I don’t even think I brought any enjoyment, either, like that it wasn’t only a zero-sum thing but a purely negatively-valued Nash-style game. I have to restrain myself here from saying the things I’ve done to make the visits awful, too. There are many. I have made Sophie feel bad and used, too, because I seek pleasure and meaning, too. But this isn’t about that; it’s mostly about meanness, like Gwyn says. About like how that summer and the previous one each had many awful basic interactions with people who had once been close to me, and by whom now I’ve sort of been put on ice until their life is awful enough that I am useful again. And that everyone I know seems to be sort of doing this, like that some grand conspiracy about atheistic hedonism were true. It’s like we are all deep-sea creatures straining nutrient-poor water for biomass to keep from literally starving—like that our eyes have evolved away because it’s been generationally dark down here. But this is about scarceness of data. It’s about being on the cusp of thirty. It’s probably about America and probably about endorphins and not understanding loss. As in, ‘this kind of thought is too big and too ungenerous.’ And that mostly just those few days were sad, and I think about them too much, and I probably should have just said that then.

I am still in the cafe here, though not on the day that I overhead the men talking. I bought a man standing outside the cafe a sandwich because he asked for one. I am not attending the first talk of the day because I have already heard the same talk half a year ago in Cambridge. Occasionally Ellen will text me about work within the museum world in NYC, which sounds full of people who style themselves very carefully, and events attended by people whom other people know, and about which I am envious, usually, because she is given the chance to coolly reject various poseur tendencies of the people around her. I text with Eri, too, who experiences something of the same, living in Bushwick and making large amounts of money, allowing for a rare di-lemma where both the tech elite and Bushwickian trust-funders can be carefully known and distanced from where it feels good to do so. I sent Eri my story, too, which they’ve read but haven’t said anything about, which reinforces that it might be a sort of annoying story written mean-spiritedly, which is fine, I decide, because otherwise I would have written nothing. My brother called a week or so ago, discussing first thoughts about moving somewhere other than Spain, if the correct job appeared, about which I felt a sort of reactive sadness. I spent Sunday night in Minneapolis with my mom, having found an otherwise useless flight with a seventeen hour layover there. My sister calls occasionally, too, to discuss the time she spends hand-transcribing documents from archives in Cairo, as well as her own thoughts about her immediate future, when she might graduate, her long-term relationship, and so on. My mother spent most of the end of the evening when I was there discussing her and David’s plan to move soon, if they ever find a house in the right area, so that they could pool equity and no longer have a mortgage; she hopes that one among our siblings will settle somewhere closer someday. This, the briefness of my layover there, the length of my flight, and the scraped-clean winter I’ve been having in Tokyo, make me feel like the project of my life for the past five years has been silly. As in, if I had to point toward what I’ve been working for all this time I would be sheepish and confused; like that while locally my life works fine and my actions are charitable and patient, the global structure is prolix and cruel and a little bit my fault in many key loci.