turning the page
endings & beginnings
The summer before I went to college, I fell in love with a guy I met at a Neutral Milk Hotel concert. He didn’t love me back, but he liked me enough to let me have sex with him: in my car; by Shepards Brook; and once in the woods near a campsite, where a group of teens who were looking for a private spot to smoke a J came upon us naked and said, “These ni**as fucking!” and we all laughed.
Scenes of summer in New England. The Milford quarries and abandoned mills and the Providence ghost bridge in the rain. Once we trespassed at a lake at night and the cops showed up, yelling at us through megaphones, and after they let us go he told me he was impressed that I hadn’t cried.
It is the most perfect, amber-preserved memory. Still, I have to remind myself how my heart sank when I told him I loved him and he said, “Okay.”
This summer I was preparing to go back to school again, and everything had that same fevered quality, that pressure to relish the sunshine before the dreaded changing of the seasons. I told Will that I couldn’t tell whether I truly loved Denver, or loved it only because I was leaving.
Denver is an ugly city. In the 1970s, developers razed 30 blocks of old buildings to make way for new capital that never came. Parking lots still dominate the downtown landscape. Lacking identity, everything is a little tacky: Instagram-bait murals and carelessly decorated bars. I hated Denver when I moved there mid-pandemic, three years ago. I hated that I had no reason to be there other than that my boyfriend wanted to move, and I said okay. Denver was the dissolution of my independence, and hating it was a revolt.
I guess it’s no coincidence that Denver started growing on me when I met Jenny, February 2022, at a Galentine’s Day hosted by a mutual friend. Another anxious Jew from Massachusetts, she grew up steps from my grandparents’ graves; I raced on her high school track while she practiced piano inside. It’s so rare to meet someone you never get sick of. It was like dating: first a comedy show, then brunch, then an amusement park, and then constant companionship. She got me into bouldering and NA beer and going to the movies even when there’s nothing to see. She got Will into DnD. I got her onto psychedelics. And we got in the habit of working from home together. I’d bike 10 miles to her house, straight down the Cherry Creek bike path and through Wash Park with the view of the mountains, and as I coasted back in the evening, my bike would screech in tune with the cicadas, and everything was all right.
We were at Goodwill on St. Patrick’s Day when I broke the news that I’d be leaving. Jenny didn’t try to hide her disappointment. But I had been thinking of going to grad school for years. As an undergrad, I studied early modern maps of the Americas, and my thesis advisor encouraged me to apply for Latin American Studies MA programs. After four years of writing about politics, and on the cusp of another presidential election, the time was right.
I spent the next six months dreading my departure from a city I once loathed.
Will proposed to me at the breakfast table while I was drinking coffee and staring at my phone. He sat down across from me and said, “You don’t want a big, elaborate proposal, do you?” and I said no, and then he produced the ring.
I knew it was coming. We’ve been together for eight years, but we started talking seriously about marriage this summer, as the date of my departure loomed. Will has a job at an office in Denver. He’s trying to get a new one so he can come out to LA, but until then, we’re living apart for the first time since 2018. Leaving felt like proving to myself that I could exist on my own. Now I wonder why I wanted that proof at all.
I don’t want a wedding. I’ve always wanted to elope. It’s funny. I’ve been listening a lot to Hejira, which is all about a heartbroken Joni Mitchell wandering around the United States and trying to figure out what she’s doing with her life. “Song for Sharon” is fucking insane. It’s winter in New York, and Joni is singing to a childhood friend who has settled down with a family and a farm. Joni glimpses a wedding dress on a storefront mannequin and nearly loses her shit, she wants it so bad. She pays a Roma woman to light a candle for her love luck. And then, halfway through the song, she goes:
A woman I knew just drowned herself
The well was deep and muddy
She was just shaking off futility
Or punishing somebody
My friends were calling up all day yesterday
All emotions and abstractions
It seems we all live so close to that line
And so far from satisfaction
It’s so jarring. The suggestion is, “If I don’t find a man, I might just fucking kill myself.” I know what she means about living close to that line. But I never felt that way because I wanted to be the “pretty lady in the white lace wedding gown.”
The institution of marriage is horrible and patriarchal, and yet I subscribe to it. I’ve read Jia Tolentino’s “I Thee Dread,” and I disagree. I’m keeping my name. I don’t want a show. I just like knowing that the person I want to spend the rest of my life with wants to spend his with me, too.
I haven’t been writing. It’s really bad. I looked through my Substack drafts, and on June 28, I tried to write something:
I have this feeling that nothing is right and, worse, than nothing has ever been right.
The only thing I wrote in July was:
Last night I ate a tomato from the farmer
I’m listening to Alphabet Town and remembering the s
The fear of things not being right causes the not-writing. It’s the same reason I would rather toss my clothes in piles than fold them up and put them away. Folding is never right. There are too many hems to straighten out, too many socks to fold just so, too many garments that don’t lie flat and not enough hangers to hang them.
I’ve got to get over it. Maybe school will help.
There are lots of songs about LA. This one is the best.