In Which We Ignore Most Of The Sorrows

Living For Love Alone

by LUCY MORRIS

At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity in discovering the pleasures of those who live for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also.

– Swann’s Way

I have forgotten many things already, but I do remember this: to be in love in New York felt like an homage to the city itself, a kind of tribute paid to your surroundings. Shoulder rested on someone else’s on the end seats of the R train, hands entwined on the Coney Island boardwalk — these gestures were a kind of offering, the love for where you lived manifested in your love for the person beside you.

I was often in love in New York. The first time it happened it was springtime and the trees were blooming a bubblegum pink and I had a new polka dot dress to wear. I was headed to Russia the following fall, which meant nothing really mattered, nothing beyond the mornings my boyfriend awoke me with croissants and whispers, or the afternoons he read aloud to me in the small park adjacent to Union Square, not the main event but the little refuge beside it. 

Most of what I remember of this period is that I was young: so young that the coffee I drank was more cream than espresso, so young that when the strawberries I bought turned out to be rotten I was too shy to return them myself. I was so young that boyfriends were really boys and I sat with friends debating the terminology of sex like it mattered and staying up all night was an achievement, not a drag. All of these pieces, the late nights and arguments and bodega coffee and moldy berries, were then tinged by the fact of being in love, heightened by it to a terrifying degree: a dawn was not just a dawn, a berry not just a berry.

There were other things, too, in the years that followed that were not limited to their appearances, objects and occurrences with whole lives beyond what they seemed.

A certain lace dress I owned was not just a lace dress — it was a symbol of something I thought could be conveyed by what I wore, because I was too shy to convey it in speech, a trait that I believe to be not uncommon among the young.

“You could crash at my place tonight,” I offered up to a guy with the same glasses as me one night over fries on First Avenue, and it was just one line, but it was also an entire story.

photo by Blake Fitch

There were keyrings and subway lines and paperback volumes from the Strand dollar bins, a gold necklace and Metrocards and Film Forum ticket stubs, and none of it was what it seemed. How could it be? I was then someone who could offer up with no shame, no embarrassment, no doubt: “I’m in love,” exclamation point implicit in its declaration. I can probably pinpoint the moment when I stopped being someone who could say that with enthusiasm, who came to feel the sentiment belonged to a younger, past self, but what would be the point?

One important March, the boss in the all Russian office where I worked gave me a red rose for International Women’s Day. I thanked him, “Spasibo bolshoye,” and carried it in my hands most of the way home. I thought about taking it all the way but ended up throwing it away into a bin at Atlantic Avenue, because the relationship with the bubblegum tree boyfriend I was going home to was disintegrating at a speed that was somehow both unbelievably fast and startlingly slow, and it seemed impolitic to show up with a rose from someone else, even a boss. I want to say that when I threw that rose out I knew it was over, unfixable, but that knowledge is of the kind that can only be applied in hindsight.

When you are twenty-two and shy and not particularly empowered there are not very many transgressive things you can do, but saying goodbye to someone who loves you is one of them. The first time I did that may have marked, in a meek kind of way, the first real adult thing I did — certainly it was more adult than the job, the moving in together, any of that illusory adultness that sounded good when you informed people of it but didn’t require much courage because it was not altogether unexpected.

It is hard to trace lines from theres to heres, hard not to get caught up in detours along the way––the minor romances, geographical diversions — but it is almost certainly true that if I had not thrown out that rose, thrown in the towel, I would not be where I am now. Wherever exactly that may be.

Lying in bed, swollen with Sunday night sadness, I think of when I instructed an old boyfriend to meet me at Tile Bar very late on a Sunday at the end of summer when all other possibilities and excuses had been exhausted. I wore a teal dress of the kind that could pass as casual but which I had in fact purchased expressly for the occasion, gone on that heatwave day to Forever 21 and emerged with the yellow bag, certain convoluted intentions.

I think of intentions a lot lately, and all the years I thought I had none when I very much had ones I was merely afraid to voice, and I think in equal part of the years I thought I had many that were really empty intentions, vague hopes of the kind of person I wanted to be with no course of action behind them.

That night at the bar we fed the jukebox all our ones and the old boyfriend gave away two cigarettes and late, near close, we went around the corner to the ATM. In my memory we were holding hands, swinging the V of our attached arms back and forth, taking up all of empty Second Avenue. Back at my apartment I offered him the only beer in my fridge, a leftover party Sam Adams, but the beer wasn’t the point; that was never the point.

But goal posts move, meanings change. It was not actually the end of summer, it was early in July, the fifth or sixth maybe, but it was near the end of what would be my summer, in the time I had left in New York. The beer was not the point at the time, but later it was very much the point. I recall then wanting that old boyfriend to miss me when I wasn’t around, but later I would just come to settle for him talking to me.

For a while after that I was afflicted with bad dreams, by the memory of a pale stretch of neck I used to know, by a stinging silence that seemed to spread in the darkness. I was trying to put an end to my preservationist instincts, the desire to record, but the details I refused to write down merely migrated to my dreams: the exact nature of someone’s stubble, the precise route of a walk once taken, the setting and wording of a conversation once had.

photo by Blake Fitch

I note the time I’ve been apart from that pale stretch of neck, all the habits I’ve picked up and broken since then, the people I’ve met and lost, the books I’ve creased open with pleasure and shut with annoyance. I generally have very little understanding of what day it is. Instead, the unit of time by which I measure everything is the duration of people’s absences. Nothing more and nothing less.

When my brother announced his intention to get married I stopped speaking to him for four months, despite the fact that I adore his fiancé and love him in the way that you love siblings, painfully, more than anyone else on earth. But intertwined with the love I feel for my brother, for everyone, is the knowledge that they may not always be there, and that knowledge is so intolerable that I have come to loathe the love attached to it. The berries were as much about loss as about love, the arguments too, the ticket stubs, the Sam Adams, all the rest.

For a while when I was twenty-two and twenty-three — far too young for the fear I felt — I would tell my mother I was scared of dying alone and she would say, “We all die alone.” I did not find this comforting at the time but now I very much do.

Everything I describe comes to me now only in detail, not sentiment. Things I once lived now seem dangerously remote from my reality. I check sometimes to see if that first boyfriend is married. I am not married and I no longer live in New York and the springtime conviction in love has been superseded by rolled-eye allusions to limerence, which is coincidentally a kind of cynicism it turns out men seem to favor, although not necessarily the right kind of men.

I used to believe that the markers of adulthood were checks to the IRS and taking the garbage out, that all the other manifestations of maturity that my friends bemoaned their lack of were basically bullshit. I now think there are no markers at all, just slow evolutions, quiet forfeitures of what you once felt sure.

This spring I lie awake a lot and think about love, in the context of some remarks I’m to give at a wedding, and on certain nights when I can’t sleep love comes to seem an inseparable sentiment from doom and on others it seems so soaring in its expanse that there is nothing to say about it all, and all the Tolstoy and Proust and Pushkin I’ve read on the subject mere attempts as futile as this one.

All I can think to mention at the wedding are the meals eaten at my friends’ table, the nights they took me in and cooked me greens, showed me in their small gestures to each other how to untangle love from loss. One evening I watched them feed their sick dog medicine together and I sat humble before them on the couch, awed by their coordinated movements. Later, I gathered my things and went home, to a bed that is different from the one I sleep in now, to thoughts so separate from the ones I harbor today that I can hardly believe they are of the same mind. When I say that goal posts move and meanings change, probably what I mean is that we all do too, inevitably, without any say in the matter at all. This change is its own kind of loss. It is also its own kind of marvel.

As it happens, I am headed once again to Russia, for the first time in five years. But I have learned by now that you cannot discount meaning just by announcing that you plan to do so. In the end, all of it adds up anyhow.

Lucy Morris is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer and translator living in Iowa City. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the inverse of pleasure.

Photos by Blake Fitch.

photo by Blake Fitch

In Which We Are Besieged By The Past

by Will George

The Inverse of Pleasure

by LUCY MORRIS

DEAR C,

It’s that time of year again, when I’m besieged by the broad past. I call it memory season and when it arrives I might remember in sudden, dense flashes being in the kitchen with my mother fifteen years ago or a hallway in a university building in the city where I grew up. I might remember with startling specificity the dates of minor events or the songs that were playing at a certain party. The scenes and settings — which overtake me in the aisles of the grocery store, in the middle of a run, at any moment they don’t belong — are not necessarily charming or dismaying or loaded at all, they are just there, but their accumulation feels intermittently unbearable. One drink helps it abate but two brings it back in full force.

I picture a barstool with a crosshatch tear in its leather that sat conspicuously empty beside mine one night. I recall a cold bench on Fifth Avenue in February. I think of beds with sheets that did not lie flat, of couches that couldn’t comfortably seat two, of high-rise windows with paper birds on them to confuse real birds away. I feel an abstract pang for each of these surfaces, for how I once knew them — felt the icy bars of the bench, saw the light penetrate the dirty windows — and never will again.

I think next, in a layered flash, of a large scar on a left bicep and the smell of cigarettes that were the cheapest you could buy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in the year 2007, and a note with a stick figure rendering and my name in brown Crayola letters. You wouldn’t know by looking at it but the note represents proof that I once knew and later lost someone who loved me so much he’d reach over and scratch my itches for me, softly pull apart the knots in my hair. The scar and the cigarettes were his, too, and I had hoped to forget them forever along with the rest but, as it turns out, I did not.

The pangs are not as random as they first seem, either. They are, after all, not really for the pebbled leather surface of the barstool, the black pigeon cutouts on the windows. They are for the mood I was in when I sat at that bar (a little bit in love, a little bit confused: that condition of being twenty-two), for the moments when I stood by those windows (feeling, as a teenager, an unfamiliar magnetic sensation it would take years to name). But you know all this, of course: you were beside me on that winter bench, shooting me messages of comfort while I sat at that solitary bar stool.

I used to think I wrote to remember, but lately I have been finding that I write to forget. When you isolate an event on paper, commit its details to the page, you are free to release it from your consciousness, let the record of a time exist somewhere outside yourself. I write these lines in the hope not of commemoration, but of erasure. I write them to you in the hope that memory season will end.

LOVE,

L

by Will George

DEAR C,

Once, when I was very young, I felt things acutely, physically. Disappointment would strike me below my ribcage; the effect of great beauty would hit me somewhere behind my knees. My cheeks were often red with thrill, my hands clammy with excitement. Anything could set it off: I remember with great acuity the sensations triggered by someone I saw on the city bus one afternoon.

But sometimes, for spans of several months, things would go dark. The space below my ribcage was still, my knees straight and immobile. My cheeks would stay pale, my palms would dry out until they flaked, papery. It had happened to many in my family, even to those generations now confined to thin sepia prints in leather albums. The photos could be categorized this way: there were the ones who had successfully killed themselves and then the ones who had tried, in ways that were not always so direct as to spare everyone around them. There was a time when it was difficult not to wonder which one I would be. 

by Will George

But then for years, things would not go dark; they would stay light, and I slowly stopped identifying as someone who had felt any darkness at all, I left it off the emotional resume presented to people who endeavored to love me. It had been something that had happened to me but was not a part of me. That past had belonged to some other, smaller person, a person with a different height, weight, haircut, glasses prescription — it wasn’t me. I never wrote about it because it would be dishonest to write about an experience that I did not fully identify with myself.

It has been so long since I was afflicted by it that I almost forgot what the dark is like. It feels different now then it did when I was very young. It used to be that when I felt the inverse of pleasure, it was not without its own joy, because to feel so intensely — to feel anything intensely — is one of the chief pleasures of being human.  Even a desire not to be alive, as I sometimes had then, seemed an acknowledgment of how very good life could sometimes be, a foolish way of saying: if I can’t have it as it should be, I don’t want it at all.

Now it washes over me in a blank way that is devoid of pleasure. It is hard to see solutions. I remember calling you from Russia five years ago, when I last felt this way, asking permission to extricate myself from what had seemed to bring it all on (it was a fear, then, of giant falling icicles, speeding cars, of, at its core, not being happy again), and in telling me that I could I knew that I would not need to. I write in the hope that the same will happen now, that in asking—broadly, anyone—for permission to escape (the ceaseless snow, the sense that, unlike everyone around me, I was not divined for this), it will turn out that I do not need it.

LOVE,

L

by Will George

DEAR C,

I’ve been riding through the middle of America a lot lately, trying to find a spot that works. I am calmest on a bus, irate driver on the loudspeaker, a book on my lap, snacks at my feet. I keep my polka dot backpack half-packed; the bus company website is always open on my browser. 

I think of what I would do if I weren’t here. I could go live in Los Angeles with my grandmother, help her out, hang out by the pool where the studio execs swim, hope that the proximity to their success renews the incorrigible belief I once had that I, too, would achieve something. I could move to St. Petersburg, get an apartment in the city center, jog along the Fontanka, come to inhabit, again, the language that was my favored one for so long. Or I’ll go to Beijing, live on your floor, make you coffee in the morning before you wake up. The alternatives are appealing but they remain abstract, hard to access, the here-to-there route unclear.

by Will George

Back here in the startling present, signs of spring are nowhere to be found but the sun seems to shine differently on the days it decides to shine at all and I am remembering the sense of prophecy that springtime brings, some glimpse into a panoramic future in which things look doable, or already done. When I, for instance, tie on my roller skates at the Rec Center here on a Saturday night, what I feel is not necessarily the fun of the moment—the whoosh of a cross section of town skating by me, the bass-heavy boombox playing three-year-old top forty hits, the thrilling uncertainty in my knees as they slide forward—but instead how good this will all seem years from now, when the town is behind me, the top forty tracks forgotten, my knees creakier than they already are. This future-perfect mentality is not a great way to live, but it is better than past-imperfect, and it is the way I know.

There’s a moment, at the end of a bus ride, when people start packing up. The bus slows, easing through residential streets, and the rummaging begins: bags are pulled from under seats or overhead compartments, purses and pockets checked and rechecked for wallets and phones, coats zipped, scarves tied in place, and people move to stand in the aisles, hands drumming impatiently on the tops of the seats. There is, in the aisles of the bus, a thick kind of impatience. I knot my scarf, hoist my backpack with the rest of them, but I stay put in my seat until the last possible moment, until I have to go. I wasn’t always like this — I used to be known for the expedience with which I could flee anything — but sometime lately I have come to fear the final paragraphs of chapters, closings of books, ends of ends. I write these last lines, too, in a kind of fear — a fear of what will happen if I do, but equally a fear of what will happen if I don’t.

LOVE,

L

Lucy Morris is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer and translator living in Iowa City. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about living alone and losing the excitement.

"The Pattern Has Changed" - Samantha Crain (mp3)

"Somewhere All The Time" - Samantha Crain (mp3)

by Will George

In Which We Lose The Excitement Over Its Possibility

Last Try

by LUCY MORRIS

It is well below zero in Iowa City today. It’s long johns and duck boots until April, a fur hat around the house, four layers of clothing to go jogging. The fake chenille gloves I bought on St. Marks Place long ago do not cut it here; I curl my fingers into fists inside of them, bury them in my pockets. It is difficult to recall a time when I ate something that had not first sat in the oven for an hour.

I was born into a Midwestern winter and for a long time believed that the packs of gritty perma-snow in the city where I made my arrival meant something fundamental about who I was. I thought of it this way: how can a person who sees no green for the first six months of their life function in the same way as someone who does? I have long attributed my closeness with Californians to this fundamental difference, to that foreign palm tree perspective they can provide.

I had forgotten, in my years away, this particular brand of winter. In a cold such as this, your life shrinks to bare minimums, to the fewest trips out, the shortest routes possible. Some days the confines of my life seem impossibly small, treadmills and Word docs, a grid of five streets, books and bedtimes. I no longer have a solid recollection of what it feels like to be heartbroken or high or any of the extremes that once seemed so ordinary, so central a part of my own landscape. This is a remoteness from reality that I had not imagined I could naturally achieve. But, if I am to be honest, I think I probably always wanted to.

In weather like this, any reason to get glum will do, but my main one lately is that not long ago, someone I loved stopped talking to me because of something I wrote. These are the occupational hazards of the trade: carpal tunnel and being disowned. In the scheme of things, these are minor damages. Still, every day on my careful walk up icy Washington Street I spend fifteen or twenty minutes thinking about how to undo what I’ve done. I vow to make this person mix tapes every month for a year or hunt the Haunted Bookshop for books they’d love, mail them on with quiet inscriptions meant to make things right. I will do anything but I will not say sorry because in my life I have tended to regret the apologies I did issue more than the ones I did not.

I used to think I’d rather be a good writer than a good person, but to think I’ll never see this person’s sideways smile at my door again, never open up another midday email from them, hurts like a hangnail tugged at daily. I can’t explain it except to say that this is a person who once called me St. Lucy of Iowa City, who would put $5 in the jukebox and let me choose all the songs. I was often bereft after seeing them but now in their absence I ascribe that to the fact of their departure, not of their presence. In case you haven’t guessed by now, eulogizing is the conversational mode of the season around here.

Lately, a number of people have been talking to me about the nature of love, about hovering under the covers with someone all winter, or about holding out for somebody better, or about getting married. I still know how to play my part in these conversations, but the ideas and scenes described to me seem remote, unrealistic, and not even particularly desirable. Whether this is a winter condition or a permanent condition is hard to say. I sleep with my cell phone and a volume of Proust on the pillow next to me and on not all but most days, this strikes me as more than enough company.

But there is a person I say goodnight to on the phone before bed and I can sometimes feel as the tender words fall out of my mouth the ultimate damage they will do, even though they contain nothing but truth. It would be incorrect to say I have forgotten how to love but somewhere along the way I lost the excitement over its possibility. A friend says to me sometimes, wistfully, charmingly, “I just want to fall in love,” and I am surprised to discover that I don’t want to, not at all.

To think I may have found a way to exist without love makes me feel superhuman and also like someone who is totally and completely doomed, for whom there is no hope at all. When I say that there is no cold like Iowa cold, probably what I mean is not just the temperature.

I remember once feeling very sure of what I wanted but lately that certainty has been wavering so much that I wonder if it too was a fantasy, like the one in which I’m always pleased and never once waver when the temperature rises above seventy. I look out my window at the trees, branches like vertebrae against the gray sky, and consider never writing another word, never striving for my madeleine line. It’s not that I thought I would write one of those, but if I had been sure that I would not, little could have compelled me to sit down at my desk every day.

I want to tell the person who no longer speaks to me that I wrote about them because I wanted not to lose them and felt that I inevitably was going to. I understand the irony that it was the act of doing so that was precisely how I managed to lose them. I remember the belt and knit hat they were wearing last time they said goodbye, although I did not know then that it would be the last time, or maybe I did and that’s why I committed it to memory.

I was being insincere about the madeleines. I continue to write, even when I understand it best not to — and this is one such case — so that I will remember the black knit of that beanie, the brown leather of that belt.

Someone in class the other day said that nostalgia is memory as an aesthetic object. One winter a couple years ago I found someone willing to drive me across America. We broke down in the town of Las Vegas, New Mexico on the shortest day of the year. The sky was an inexplicable violet. I think of this when I reach for the optimism of longer days, of some small relief at the sun not having quite disappeared before my walk home.

I recall a time when my fantasies were more interesting, more ambitious than this, but now the main object of them is summer: windows thrown open, socks discarded, stumbling home in a sundress at dawn. That I have in my current apartment an air conditioner that requires closed windows and no longer possess the constitution to stay out all night are realities that do not intrude upon these imagined scenes. Fantasies are hope as an aesthetic object. 

Lucy Morris is the contributing editor to This Recording. She is a writer and translator living in Iowa City. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about living alone.

"Prodigal" - The Ember Days (mp3)

"Face in the Dark" - The Ember Days (mp3)