#24: sad girl sad city

explaining my instagram username

lost in translation (2003)

prologue

friday night in tokyo — we’re waiting for the elevator at an unassuming office building when a man steps out in a standard japanese work uniform: disheveled button-down, black slacks. he doesn’t give the cluster of us a second glance. i’m in a wrinkled floral tube top, someone’s in a beret and jorts, another’s in fuzzy pink boots. when we ask the one in boots why he’s in tokyo, he lowers his thin sunglasses and reply with one word: “creative.” he doesn’t come up with us. instead, we watch him ride his bike off to another club down the street as the elevator closes, and it feels like a wong kar-wai film.

upstairs, at the seventh-floor bar, i’m leaning against the counter, lightly swaying to japanese house music, yuzu gin in hand. i resist the urge to bat away the cigarette smoke rising to my hair. through the sliver of window behind the DJ, i see a gray residential building on the opposite side of street, its pockets of blurry light.

a guy slides next to me then. he says he’s a painter from seoul. we talk for a bit, interrupted by strings of people he knows, the music’s ebb and flow. at one point, we exchange social media and he asks me why my instagram handle is @sadgirlsadcity. i’m never sure how to answer the question in a way that doesn’t alarm people. i’m actually doing okay, i would sometimes reassure them. it’s just a literary genre i like.

“well, you’re an artist… aren’t you sad?” i ask this time, with unrecognizable candor. i eye his tattoos, dark blue ink strokes splattered across his arm.

he takes a long sip of red wine. “yeah,” he says. “life’s fucking depressing.”

—

my instagram username has been sadgirlsadcity for a few years now. i created it at a time when i discovered my holy trinity of writers — sally rooney, marlowe granados, and ottessa moshfegh — because i felt an emotional tie to their characters. there’s a certain allure to twenty-something women writing in first person, enveloping us into their multiverse of sadness. every character is unlikeable, every character is me. their books hold romantic and poetic, albeit controversial, plotlines. with the backdrop of a major metropolitan city, girl runs to the guy she’s having an affair with and cries on the train home. girl goes down to the same bodega for a year and has diet coke and xanax for breakfast. girl ruminates and gleans big life metaphors from observing the silence in a conversation, the emptiness of a hotel bar, the line to a party.

kai-lin and i once joked that when we’re going through it, her life mirrors an ottessa moshfegh novel — she would lock herself in a rent-controlled room in new york to be happy again — whereas i’m more sally rooney, finding myself in messy and inexplicable situations, entangled in ideas of love.

for the past week, i wander aimlessly in japan, collecting cities like lucky charms, after DC, new york, san francisco, hong kong, beijing. i think about how times square to new york is shibuya crossing to tokyo. but if new york sadness is generally obscured by a facade of optimism where dreams are made of, tokyo sadness is laid bare at nightfall. in front of a 7/11, irin tells me about the shibuya meltdown, a phenomenon where japanese people pass out from fatigue and/or drunkenness in shibuya. there are photos of people heads-down on subway platform gaps, inside bowls of ramen, on top of their identical briefcases.

in the lonely city, olivia laing writes, “you can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.” she argues that cities make one realize that loneliness exists outside physical solitude, that feeling lonely is feeling an absence of connection, intimacy, desired closeness. see cameron awkward-rich’s meditations in an emergency. see how sadness spirals outward, multiplies, bounces from person to person in a crowded train.

“I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.”

there’s something special about being sad in a city, though, that makes it more bearable. i remember when i first moved to new york, i felt the world expand beyond my sadness. a high concentration of diverse, interesting people in a neighborhood is as stimulating as it is distracting. the girl in my year of rest and relaxation shares intimacy with the egyptians at her corner bodega (they tell her she has crusted toothpaste on her chin). in happy hour, isa and gala saunter around the city with little money, connecting with strangers on the street. isa writes in her august 31st entry: “i walked south for many blocks with an alertness that felt new … people would accidentally catch my eye and maybe smile or say, ‘good evening!’” i, too, once strolled down soho in my bright pink hair, and everything felt okay again when this girl ran up to me and gave me a bitmoji sticker of a pink-haired girl holding a thumbs up. “it’s you!” she said.

i’m aware these are short-term intimacies. it’s one thing to be comfortable with being alone, another to never get close enough to someone to fully witness their sadness and let them witness yours. as much as the landscape of cities mirror your inner world, they also act as a shield from it. being in the proximity of people means you can go days and months on end without having to actually talk to them in a deep way.

the tragedy of cities is that when you do find a connection that feels real, there is often an inevitable goodbye. people in new york love talking about its transitory nature. in the movie lost in translation (2003), charlotte meets bob at tokyo’s park hyatt bar, both feeling lost, both striving for something. celine and jesse in before sunrise (1995) meet in a similar manner on a train to vienna. they fall into each other for 24 hours before going their separate ways. reality (bob is married; jesse’s life is an ocean away) hits, and their love cannot stay afloat in a way that does their respective life paths justice.

in all this, i’m noticing a lack of long-term, healthy relationships in the lives of my female literary role models. whatever. ottessa moshfegh once said this about literature — “we need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. how else will we understand ourselves?”

—

epilogue

if it’s any solace, dear reader, i do encounter love and happiness in cities, of course. at the end of conversations with friends, frances is on the phone with a distant lover and she writes, “it was dark then, and everything was gathered around points of light; shop windows, faces flushed with cold, a row of taxis idling along the curb.”

isn’t that the beauty of cities — to gather around points of light, to find your people in a crowd of people? out of everyone, i choose you. you who share my dreams, my struggles, my happiness. together, we find warm places despite the rain drizzling outside, places among entwined subway lines, under the oppressive concrete of office buildings. we share familiar glances across the dinner table, our bodies sink deeper into the already worn-out cushions at cafes, our elbows touch under a shared umbrella as we walk home, our apartments only blocks away from each other.

i end my trip in kyoto, the oldest city in japan. lanterns in gion hang low to light your path through alleyways, and you can’t help but notice people’s shoes lined-up in front of teahouses and ryokans, some more than a thousand years old. unlike tokyo, this city is serene and devoid of neon restaurant signs, yet still, signs of life at every corner. i think about how our spot by victoria harbor in hong kong is like the kamo river in kyoto, where groups of two and three and four sit cross-legged under the moon, their conversations woven into the night, sharing a longing to understand the human condition.