summer drip
Hi, friends. It’s been a while! I’ve been settling into my new role as deputy features editor at Insider, where we’ve published such sizzling reads as Melkorka Licea’s Glossier exposé, Kate Taylor’s Eleven Madison Park reporting, and Julia Black’s scoop about Elon Musk’s secret twins. Yes, you must subscribe to read these stories, and yes, I will happily take time out of my day to talk to you about why good journalism is worth paying for. But I digress.
I’ve missed writing for fun, and now that things have taken on a more regular rhythm at work, I’m going to restart this newsletter with a few changes. You’ll notice a new name (Real Feel), a new format (miniature essays with some recommendations), a new publishing schedule (whenever I feel like it), and a shiny new logo that I hope to unveil soon. As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated. Get ready to feel something.
I know it’s summer because there are eddies of cat hair in the corners of my apartment. It’s hot, the cat is hot, and every time I pet her a new cloud breaks loose and floats away to be discovered days later by the vacuum.
I know it’s summer because nothing is drying. The dishes sit heavy and humid on the mat. The bath towel hangs limp for days. My skin feels covered in a thin film, like I’ve just gotten out of the water at the beach.
This is my favorite season. I am miserable. Something has ended, and everything drips with it.
On Thursday night I saw American Ballet Theatre perform Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. I chose the show with Gillian Murphy, who has been with ABT since 1996, and whom I’ve idolized since about age 12. Now I am 29 and she is 43 and she is pretending to be a 13-year-old girl falling in love with a 16-year-old boy after one good party and one hot balcony kiss.
She is fantastic at it. Murphy’s Juliet is sweet, shy, goofy, elated, entirely willing to surrender the entirety of herself. Juliet’s choreography is full of flinging — she careens into penchés, sprints into various corners of the stage, is pitched into the air with her legs akimbo. In scenes with Romeo she’s especially unrestrained, her gauzy little skirts floating around her as she falls into his arms. But of course, her arabesque is still perfect.
This is what makes Juliet such a fascinating role. Ballerinas are in total control; years of training have made them hyper-aware of every inch of their bodies. Juliet is about surrender: to her new love, to her budding sexuality, to her own desire to defy her parents. Murphy’s job is to hold in her body everything she’s learned in 43 years, to work with it, and at times to fight against it in order to communicate the hapless embrace of something foolish, beautiful, and new. Watching her walk this line filled me with a sweetness I’d forgotten was there. Sure, the character of Juliet is a hormonal mess who marries a guy she barely knows and later kills herself for him. But Murphy’s Juliet adds a layer: she is a grown woman with a lifetime’s worth of experience able to capture that earnestness afresh. She knows the story, knows the flaws, but she respects the feeling in the character enough to embody her anew each time.
Watching Romeo and Juliet unfold is about watching a cycle complete itself. We know what’s going to happen, but we sit there anyway, willing to live through it again and again as the question — was it worth it? — hangs over our heads. And each time we watch, depending on our own lifetime’s worth of experiences, our answer might be different.
Lately I feel stuck in my own cycle, a wagon wheel turning slowly in muck.
I am standing on a street corner waiting for my friend Jenni to pick me up. It’s hot, so hot, I have chosen a shade patch, but sweat still soaks into my backpack and the plastic handles of the bag I’m holding still mold into my wet palm leaving a red impression. We are going to the beach. I am wearing the Birkenstocks I bought in 2015 to support my aching shins while I was working as a restaurant host, and a bikini I bought in 2019 after a breakup with an angel-faced model that blew the top off my heart.
Standing there, wrapped in my past, the despair sinks in. Once again I’ve gone on a bikini shopping tear after a breakup that’s stripped me to my studs. Once again I’ve poured time, energy, and devotion into the wrong person. Once again I am self-medicating with friends and the gay beach, hoping to find some shred of joy there to cling to like a cat on a raft. I have pulled a Juliet, I am caught up in the cycle, I’ve stabbed myself and fallen dead across my own mistakes. I don’t know whether it was worth it.
We go to the beach: me and my wonderful friends and the memory of the person who isn’t there with me shimmering in the movement of the tide, sinking in at golden hour when everyone else snuggles close, exhausted and happy.
A friend of my ex’s texted me that she “learned a lot from watching you love (as I’m sure so many have),” and she is so well-meaning and kind, but I still want to scream that my life is not an object lesson — that there are only so many times I can open a vein and be bled dry before I’m fresh out of juice, and I wish someone had talked me out of it instead of standing by to watch.
Right now I can’t imagine breathing in without effort, the thick air and the cat hair and my own misery threatening to choke me each time. I can’t imagine play-acting 13 at 43, pretending the weight in my bones doesn’t exist, pretending to fling myself into the blind hope of something new. But if Gillian Murphy can do it, it is doable. And if watching her brought out a sweetness in me, then watching me — a distant, future me — might inspire a sweetness in someone else who hasn’t bothered to talk me out of it.
Until then, I will seethe and drip and watch the cat hair pile up. This time it wasn’t worth it. But even now I can’t surrender the teenage hope that one day it might be.
Catch a feel
Theory of Knowledge by Jess Zimmerman, Catapult
Scenes from an Open Marriage by Jean Garnett, The Paris Review
green like brand new, green like I don’t know better by Helena Fitzgerald, Griefbacon
Nobel Endeavors, The Fence