#1: Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?
Crying about your ex, Russian literature, and being colleagues.
A brief introduction
Hi! This is going to be a biweekly newsletter. We talk plenty in the rest of this email, so let’s leave it at that. Just trust us.
Love,
Ebie and Kelly
On loving a city like you love another person
The night before my flight to New York, I cried about my ex for the first time in months. I missed how he made me feel, like how sometimes in the middle of the night, he’d sleepily roll over and hug me, his hand on my waist. In some ways, New York is the opposite, a bottomless type of love I’ve craved for years. At each visit, I grow more accustomed to its danger — strangers on the street screaming at anyone who’d listen, imminent alerts for bitter snowstorms, slippery steps down obscure subway stations... Still, I dream of its glamour — women in polished long coats and black scarves, groomed dogs on Park Avenue, ‘appointment only’ antique furniture stores with silk green doors, sleepy doormen in empty high-rises. How could my love for him compare to this? How could his?
This winter, I arrive during that weird time after the holidays. When the party’s over, and Christmas lights still line the streets, it’s an awfully lonely city — everyone going somewhere, no one really paying attention to the other. How could something be so scary and freeing at the same time? For a week, I listen to Cornelia Street on Cornelia Street, read till dark on my friend’s fire escape, stumble into a Hyatt thinking it’s the Grand Central, people-watch under the Rockefeller tree, wander through old art at The Met, stop even when the walk sign turns on because look at that moon! isn’t it pretty!, and write about how a city before its first snowfall is like holding in a breath for too long.
It snows the morning I leave — coating the city with a beautiful, untainted white. I realize it’s not possible to relate a love that’s gone to a perennial one. They’re just different. They have to be, right?
On winter cures for childhood melancholy
I’m starting to feel 21. That’s just insane to me, because for the last decade, I’ve never not been an 11-year-old girl crying in her room. People told me it would get better, but nobody believes that until it actually does. These days, I’ll be brewing myself a pot of tea, or calling my dad, or sitting in the backseat of a car belonging to a person I love—and I’ll get so sad, the way you do when life is turning out like you never thought it would, and you can’t crawl back through the years and present this vision of the future to the version of yourself who needed it the most.
I spent the end of the year with my dad in Boston, where he lives alone in this beautiful townhouse. Before I visited for the first time in 2015, jumpy and resentful, he bought matching furniture for my bedroom—everything dark wood—and I noticed the curtains and my bedsheets were the same shade of purple. He probably asked himself, What color does a teenage girl like? And just rolled with it. I left that bedroom no more than maybe six times my whole stay.
“You used to be very qin* with me,” he said, a week later on an otherwise silent car ride back to the airport. Used to.
“When I was, like, eleven,” I snapped, genuinely angry. I regret saying that now.
We are both very internal people, so Christmas this year passed quietly. I scribbled things by the fireplace and my dad left his office exactly three times—once to say hi to me in the morning, once to go on our afternoon run, and once to cook dinner together. Later, when I showed him my paperback of Anna Karenina in the living room, he nodded seriously. Then he began, as if plucking a forgotten thought out from thin air, “You know, there is a grave sense of tragedy that, for me, has always surrounded the Russians...”
And there it was, that knobby sadness welling up in me again. As it turns out, it takes everything and nothing to make me so happy.
*A word I can’t really translate. Qin (亲) is a closeness, or an act of paying attention as love. Not unlike someone making sure to match your curtains with your bedsheets.
Moments lately
What we’re listening to
Here’s the playlist. (Updates biweekly!)
E: “Nineteen” is an unhinged teenage anthem. Which is eerily fitting since it feels like I’ve been nineteen forever, while all my friends are ordering drinks with their real ID for the first time.
Also, I recently found this Spotify playlist that curates Indie covers of popular songs based on your algorithm. Mine includes a cool version of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
K: “Bad Girls” reminds me of my best friend from high school, this Maddy-Perez-esque figure of terror. Nobody frustrated me or made me laugh the way she did. I was very breakable at sixteen and her sense of humor, her unconditional acceptance of all my shit, kept me together. But of course, she was just as tender and vulnerable the whole time. Also, it’s her birthday today! Happy 21st, Ri.
What we’re reading
K: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I technically finished it over winter break, but I have to talk about this:
“Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.”
“Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?” Isn’t that the question. Most of my life happens in my head. I was last pick in gym class, I dread giving hugs or shaking hands, and my ex-boyfriend didn’t appreciate the way I couldn’t have sex without laughing. Really, it comes down to a discomfort with, and, yeah, despising of my body. I just don’t know how to operate this machinery. I thought maybe it was insecurity, but recontextualizing this deep-rooted dissatisfaction with my physicality through the lens of queerness has shaken up all my quiet beliefs about myself.
Like, why am I so afraid to move? Do I think touching somebody will hurt me, or invoke an inexplicable rage? And why can I never stop feeling observed—this sensation exceeds Atwood’s male gaze, and instead assumes a hybridized, Orwellian-Scarlet-Letter affect. It has to do with shame, is what I’m trying to say. Shame to exist in this body, and use it to do the things I want to. That, and I’m really bad at kickball.
E: Tiny Love Stories by Daniel Jones and Miya Lee (Modern Love in NYT). Here’s one that made me uncontrollably tear up —
The Folly of Date Night
Date night! Tonight we are free! No bottoms to wipe or mouths to feed; it’s just you and me. “We should go out,” I say. “Run naked in the rain, make love on a train or something.” But we don’t. Instead, we look at pictures of the children on our phones until we fall asleep.
— Emily-Jane Clark
I probably shouldn’t have gulped down the whole book (175 tiny love stories) in two days because now I’m left with all this messy residue of pain and loss and joy and love. If you happen to pick it up, I recommend reading one (1) a day. I just couldn’t stop myself.
Haley Nahman’s “What I’m telling myself” is a very good, soul-nurturing slow read. I’m trying to base less of my personality on Instagram in 2022, so, in the spirit of less public perception, here’s a quote from me to me:
This is the internet: It feels real until you back away, and then it feels kind of like nothing. And yet the identity split—real, ideal; private, public—that occurs when you emotionally invest in its social landscape leaves an indelible mark.
What we’re watching
E: Season 3 of Gossip Girl... who’s surprised. Every Fall, I start the series all over again. It comforts me more than any new show can.
(Spoiler) I just got to the part where Nate and Serena start dating, and I couldn’t be happier.
K: Euphoria, obviously. I think Sam Levinson is a genius. And my favorite character is Jules.
How we’re living
K: I’m finally sleeping! It’s a miracle. I wrap up my dinner by 8, settle into bed around 10, and turn off the lights before midnight. I’ve also invested in a laptop stand. I feel so good.
E: Doing this 7 min pilates vid every morning after not working out for 2 months. :’) Getting my first paycheck, learning how to budget, and trying not to puke at all these adult words entering our collective vocabulary. Oh also, K and I are colleagues now...
a newsletter of beautiful writing i didnt know i needed. you guys are brilliant <3