Really Good, Actually(11)
At home alone I ordered Night Burgers, browsed rental listings, and had nightmares about Jon’s parents telling me I was a bad person before morphing into two girls I’d worked with at an ice-cream store the summer after ninth grade. Most days I felt like a wrung-out old dishcloth, but then out of nowhere a good day would take me by surprise. They were rare, but they happened. I would say I was operating at about 98.9 percent long, bad, lonely days, then once in a while, despite the restless sleep and all-beef diet and nights spent sitting directly in the glow of my phone, I would wake up and feel calm—like things would be okay, even if I didn’t know how.
On these mornings I often became what Amirah had started to call “dangerously reflective,” stretching and putting lemon in hot water (to . . . alkalize . . . it?) and going on tearful, meditative walks. I’d been reading a lot of books I’d seen on stylish women’s Instagrams, propped up in the sun next to a crystal. They were full of long, descriptive sentences and whimsical digressions about old movies I had never heard of. Normally I found these books kind of corny—all that vulnerability, all those florid descriptions of sunlight—but these days I couldn’t get enough of them.
I would open one and put a flower on top of it, then take a picture and imagine changing everything about my personality and core friendship group to allow myself to post that image online. Then I would read something like “You are not broken because someone tried to break you” and think, wow, exactly, despite not having even one single life experience to relate to a statement like that. The books were very much the gateway to the creative efforts that followed, and to several other soft blunders besides.
I had become doggedly committed to “taking my broken heart and turning it into art,” mostly via the medium of collage, an activity these books tacitly encouraged. Suddenly all I wanted was to sit on my floor and cut out images about my feelings, to wear a nightgown that looked like a curtain and know things about attachment styles. To this end, I invited the group chat over for a “solstice celebration,” with promises of some kind of moon ceremony.
wasn’t the solstice last week? wrote Emotional Lauren.
daughter of the witches they failed to burn alert!!! texted Amirah.
oh fuck off, said Emotional Lauren.
bring sage please, I wrote.
When they arrived, they found me rummaging through my spice drawer, pulling out anything green. “Turns out smudging is cultural appropriation,” I said. I had found an article. “Maybe we could use herbs de Provence?” It did not bundle well, so we rolled some of it in a paper towel and set it alight in a bowl on the kitchen table.
I sniffed the air. “Smells like . . .”
“Chicken,” said Clive. “Are we having chicken?”
I shook my head. We were having what we always had: a pile of assorted bits.
“Well,” said Lauren. “Very powerful so far. Are we doing anything else? What does this ceremony involve?”
I hadn’t really looked into it, so I improvised, suggesting we all think of something we wanted to let go of and then spit it into the bowl.
“Oh, I don’t want to—” Amirah started, before Emotional Lauren stopped her. Amirah rolled her eyes and spit into the bowl. Dubious eye contact ricocheted through the group, but god bless them, they all did it. I closed my eyes and imagined all of it—my shame and sadness, a petty fantasy I’d had about one of Jon’s female friends falling off her bike—rising up through my body, ready to be expelled. I worked my tongue around my mouth a few times, building up an amount of spit that seemed like enough, then horked it into the bowl. I opened my eyes and confronted an unholy cocktail of singed rosemary, a rubber band, a smoldering paper towel, and the saliva of five adults.
“Actually,” I said, “I think maybe this is incredibly gross?”
My friends agreed. We doused the fire and cleaned the bowl thoroughly, and Emotional Lauren, the light mystic of the group, read everyone’s tarot cards while Clive assembled and then took pictures of an enormous pile of snacks. Lauren cracked a bottle of Lambrusco and told us about a colleague who was crowdfunding to finance a photography series “reclaiming the human ass,” largely via photos of his own. I left the room to grab some ice, and when I came back Amirah had taken my spot on the couch. Without any other sitting furniture in the room, I curled up at her feet like Janet.
“Just take your nudes in your bedroom like the rest of us!” she screamed, then showed us a particularly impressive one she’d sent Tom the other day, which she worried had been ruined by the presence of a half-empty soup bowl in the background. “I don’t want him to think I paused huffing some broccoli and cheddar to take a sexy picture for him,” she said, although that is exactly what she’d done.
We passed our phones around, sharing our favorite naked self-portraiture, reclaiming our human asses together. We all agreed nudes were getting more complicated as our twenties dwindled. Our poses were getting increasingly contorted as we tried to whittle and protrude the right things, no longer content to stand in front of a mirror and let the flash obscure our faces. It was increasingly appealing to leave the bra on.
“I know what you mean,” said Clive. “The other day this guy asked for a pic, and I wanted to do something kind of artful or coy, but I was feeling crappy about my body and couldn’t make it work, so I gave up and sent full hole.”