(This year shall be known as the year all of my exes started to look like middle aged adults. No, seriously.)
A couple of years ago today I was laying on a floor spinning out my chakras into somewhere in the ether. Atop the blanket covering half of me, a woman laid a few cards that corresponded to crystals, placing some crystals on the blanket, and telling me that the energy was exploding outwards in my life right then and I should just follow it through the period of change to see where it went.
Should you think this was what she said to everyone, she moved next door and bluntly told that woman that she should “quit [her] job.”
I had flown into the city with relatively little planning. I didn’t call my friend who lived a couple of hours away and tell her, she probably got divorced later that year and I’m probably a bad friend. I just wanted to experience the city, this place that I’d thought about for a long time, without any kind of influence. I didn’t want to spend part of the trip caught in transit to make the connection to see anyone, I didn’t want to go see things someone else thought I should see.
I’m definitely a bad friend.
I’m also a bit grimy. I took transit from the airport, a thing that’s clearly not done there. Instead of catching the connection I walked about twenty minutes carrying my bag and sweating just enough to feel more than glowing on arrival.
In the end I had the trip that you’d think you would have if you read too many beat novels. One where you meet people and you have a moment, or a conversation, and it’s everything and then it’s done.
There was the German girl I split a bottle of malt with, walking along the road trading swigs, who later would suddenly grind up on me in a deep hip hop club and ask me to go to the beach with her alone. I was at least ten years older than her and while not interested in that way for a number of reasons I was really happy to live in a time where this is a thing that happens, where a lady can see another lady in a bar and not care about just going for it.
The eighteen year old who’d gone to find his absent father, a father who coincidentally lived a few blocks away from where I’d been living all these years. Walking under the night sky, hearing how he’d gone to find someone halfway around the world; even though he’d tried to put a shine on it, it had broken his still soft heart. He’d spent all his money and was on his way home in these last days of his trip, I bought him a falafel from a truck and told him that someday he’d pass it on to someone just like himself, that people had been too kind to me at his age so it was my turn, when he tried to give me what he had left in his pockets.
That Puerto Rican whose parents had voted against most of their interests, who explained that they were single issue voters who loved being Catholic and hated abortion enough to always vote for whoever was most likely to restrict access to the procedure. You had beautiful hair and terrible radar for romantic interest.
And then there was the Scandanavian, we were about the same age with the same number of miles. The one who told me to come back to an island in Indonesia that I’d been to years before and hadn’t loved so much, his second home. A conversation about alternative communities and choices, exactly what I needed to hear from someone else trying to figure it all out. I saw you get married suddenly in sneakers this year and it seemed pretty perfect.
The Mexican guy who was always a bit too dignified for this space, in town to complete a civic duty, whose online comments I’d google translate for months later to try and follow the political situation you articulated so eloquently. You made me feel like a hooligan, I don’t begrudge you for this at all.
Australians. The friend who kept slagging his friend, talking about his friend’s failures on Tinder and his unimpressive job, who I drunkenly told off because you don’t know who anyone’s type is and a good friend doesn’t talk about what a failure his friend his at getting laid. I’m glad I told you off and I hope your friend found someone new to hang out with because his biggest liability I could see was you.
And that Brazilian who assumed we were close to the same age and I was also Brazilian, who was wearing the same shoes as me. My parallel life alter ego.
To the recently divorced dad with kids our age, who worked at a local restaurant, who was trying to be positive and put it all back together but who was a bleeding wound of feelings that needed someone to talk to: I hope you found your way out of that place, to a rental, to some older people and some sanity.
(To the photographer whose baggage tags I read and name googled: I’m sorry for being nosy but not sorry for figuring out who you were and why you were carrying those hardcases. I’m sorry I didn’t just figure out how to speak to you like a normal person.)
And finally, to the kid who harvested crystals, whose mom had been part of the real scene here a generation back, with Teva sandals and a beautiful ukelele.
Kid, I hope wherever you are, you haven’t changed one bit.
I’m drinking merlot rose and have just finished a bacon blue cheese burger that was a homage to perhaps the most memorable burger I’ve eaten in my life (more than once) in Hanoi, Vietnam.
(What, is anyone surprised that the Vietnamese – whose street food is often a multi-step complex process involving high level cooking techniques – make better North American style food than the North Americans?)
I decided to make the burger while in the grocery store. I had picked up a bottle of inexpensive rose (it’s a public holiday), and was craving a blue cheese burger but wasn’t sure the local burger restaurant would deliver exactly what I wanted. And I wanted to drink my rose while I was eating the burger and the shop had both very fresh rolls and decent blue cheese. In the shop, I also bought a limited edition lemon Kitkat (did you know that Kitkat is the only chocolate bar Aldi couldn’t reverse engineer and replicate? The wafers are too complicated, apparently). They also happened to have a respectable Samyang noodle selection and it’s been a solid year since having any spicy Samyang noodles so I was feeling Very Pleased with this whole shopping trip.
*
I don’t know what it says about anything but my diet (and fridge) look very different from what I grew up with.
To my recollection, grocery shopping happened monthly – with a maximum top up every two weeks. Staples were shelf stable or freezable: Campbell’s soup tins, processed cheese slices, taco kits, tinned pasta sauce, creamed corn, frozen peas. I have no particular childhood memories of bread; a lot involving 4L buckets of ice cream. Cookies were something that came in rows in a package.
I assume that afternoons spent playing in the garden at the farm eating barely washed fruits and vegetable, warm from the sun, explain fending off scurvy and rickets.
Leaving, in my late teens, I wanted to try everything, as fast as possible.
I remember the first time I ate sushi – simple rolls sold once a week at my university bookstore, that I assume were made by a Japanese student making extra cash because it came on a single platter each week and there was nowhere else in the city to regularly get it, for $1 per piece. I learned how to make curry in a spice market where a man mixed a masala for me as I stood there and he explained to me the order in which you should cook the ingredients. I quickly found hummus, falafel, shwarma, and the luxury of baba ganoush. A kind restaurant owner taught me that truly good fresh pasta is enough with just a bit of fresh garlic and good olive oil. Eventually, I made friends who would lead me to the food they grew up with and I found myself stalking dim sum cart ladies (not literally, I mean, unless they have really fresh egg tarts), considering the merits of cooking pretty much everything over different types of fire, and eating raw minced beef on a roll with mustard somewhere in a desert.
There is still an eternity left of beautiful new food. I only learned about mangosteens in the last year, and it turns out I have a major affinity for durian after all.
Now my kitchen is a perpetual state of confused and happy. I have some leftover cabbage in my fridge and I can’t decide if I should ferment it or make some cheaters okanomiyaki (good luck finding the bonito flakes here, if you have them get in touch). I have a type of traditional cured salted fish that smells vaguely like fish food, but tastes like heaven, currently served in some Michelin starred restaurants here and in France (I like it thinly sliced and on heavily buttered toast); I was awkwardly excited to find it in a little general store one weekend. Condiments range from something Portugese-African, to a type of sweet hot pepper I’ve only seen here bottled by a little old lady along a highway, to German mustard and fish sauce and miso and pickled everything.
In some ways, I’m really grateful for how everything has ended up. Spending a lot of time on a farm as a kid (I have early memories of killing chickens, throwing bales and herding cattle, in case anyone wants to check rural credentials) connected me to where food comes from and probably made me less afraid to try new things. Life wasn’t meant to be served on faux-sterile styrofoam trays. Growing up in an age before the internet, and before real food globalization, made everything arguably more vivid later. If you start with a number of varieties of processed cheese, although processed cheese is a technically fascinating food, everything that follows is a kind of small ecstasy.
Sitting, making coffee in the trusty french press, waiting to hear if the deal is done.
*
Not a lot of people have been to this apartment in four years. It was acquired through hot luck, google-fu and math.
The math part being that, aside from the deposit, it was as much to pay the mortgage as it was to rent (and it came with new perks like in-suite laundry and a dishwasher, which everyone should live without for awhile just to truly appreciate these marvels). The deposit was a solid chunk but nothing exceptional, an amount that could be recovered from if the market swan dived.
Google-fu because the listing was garbage. Figuring out the building led to figuring out what pictures were likely not shown and that it was actually a little beauty. It’s amazing what wrongly sized furniture, a bad feature wall and some ugly marketing can do to obscure potential.
Hot luck is the main one. A series of events, timing. In a few weeks going from not even thinking about buying to making offers. The right place at the right time.
*
One time, I owned a beautiful stained glass enclosed balcony with views of the port and the old city and the mountains, big enough to spend long summer nights on.
The apartment was a refuge from the grey days and the world, all clean bright design and comforting features. A deep tub, a gas range, ample closets and cupboards. Over time, furniture found its way in – from alleys and roadsides, other expats going home, a man who sold diamonds and retired hotel furniture, a couple making salvaged wood and metal benches. Everything now looks like it was put together, somehow it all finally matches, and now it’s time to go.
The neighborhood was an instant fit; the blend of high and low, the ultra modern alongside the very old, the weird and the welcoming. In a city that never made sense, these blocks did. Leaving it is like leaving a close friend you know you won’t keep in touch with. In these last few weeks, all the old haunts call out for one more visit, as though that last time could capture the exact way things taste and feel, smell and sound.
*
People have become mercenary about square footage in this city. This place is a good spot. Please enjoy it and take care of it.
On the street, passing by, is it? This is about to get Alanis Morisette 1995.
It’s easy to put a lot of the pieces together. She’s still around, years later. Did she know, then, who the clothes in the closet belonged to? Did she know anything? Since me, it seems, only her. Almost satisfying.
They’re not married, not engaged, she puts up a picture of a faux rock, makes a joke. In that way, you know. The picture stream is: disposable beverage cups, gym selfies, a Vegas trip or two, some generic warm holidays (but not so many, and nothing too exotic). Collects stuffed animals. Posts average plates of food, variable lighting, enthusiastic captions. Makes fun of his outdated wardrobe, comments he hardly cooks.
This is what’s so strange.
He always cooked for me, sometimes we’d cook together. Have dinner parties for friends. He was particular about his clothes and holidays, expensive taste.
She’s not much like me.
Everything is as it should be, nothing seems dark, nothing seems private. No wit, no mess. She gave up her career, or what seems like a career, to muddle along out here in a hard stream that doesn’t seem to be paying off. The ultimate supporter.
All this time, I had imagined this fabulous life after me. Someone perfect, more challenging, funnier. Someone with her life together, who could carry the conversation at the party that much better. They’d spend holidays on the ski hills and at expensive island resorts. He’d buy her romantic gifts and cards, the kind I can’t remember getting, make time to visit her. They would live somewhere amazing, a perfect house, this remarkable life. Effortlessly successful and happy. Everything we never were but should have been on paper.
And there wasn’t much regret, because it went on too long and was often so tepid (why are all the memories this white noise fuzz? Where there should be bright flashes?), but don’t you wonder if sometimes his mind wanders all the way back through those years, to the last wild thing, the crazy one.
It’s 2005.
Returning from the USA, I finally join Facebook, maybe to see the pictures my friends are posting. In a school of about 20,000 there are less than 100 in my university network. You need a North American university email to join at this point, I think. Imagine.
I tell my roommate about this thing, Facebook.
“That sounds dumb,” he says.
A significant amount of time not studying, so pretty much all the time, is spent reading blogs. It’s 2005 and I’m reading posts on Gawker about The Misshapes and whatever else they want to write about. I think they directed me to Tracie Egan’s then anon One D at a Time. It’s a strange land, with sprinklings of celebrity before the Kardashians. I read a lot of Gawker at this point, so much that I become convinced everyone is reading it, and that eventually I will need to go to New York.
“You know, like Gawker” I say to a classmate.
“What’s Gawker?” he says.
I explain, sort of. Something.
“Why would anyone care about that?” he says.
It’s 2016 and today is the day that one of those things indirectly destroys the other.
Underthecurrent 