Summer in Review

Sex, heartbreak, and the working life

Creophagy (2012) by Angelica Alzona

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status: hot and bothered

KAI-LIN: likely because it’s late summer, and because i always get hot and bothered around this time of year, i’ve been thinking about sex. summer sex, specifically, and why all roads lead to the bedroom when it’s warm outside.

i live in san francisco, a remarkably sexless city. rishi and i always complain about this. why, we exclaim over dinner, half-joking and half-serious, is nobody fucking??? even the people who are sleeping together here, somehow aren’t. you assume your coworker is having sex with his long-term girlfriend, but you can’t be sure. there’s no charge in the air when you grab lunch with them—it’s so platonic, actually, that you feel like you’re getting food with a pair of midwestern cousins. and that’s the case with everyone you know. situationships are dead. mess is nonexistent. it feels like sex appeal hasn’t been summoned within the walls of a san francisco house party since the 1970s.

there’s something comforting about knowing people around you are getting it on. desire is infectious: if you see two strangers intertwined in one corner of a crowded bar, doesn’t it make you want to slink into the other corner with somebody else? doesn’t it make your skin feel more like skin, don’t you feel a little more dangerous? most importantly, the presence of sex—in a room, at a party, winding like perfume through the streets of a city at night—is an assurance that intimacy at large is still alive: we’re still touching each other; we’re still embarrassing ourselves; there are still things in the world we want badly enough so as to act unabashed and untoward for. before i graduated college, i completely took for granted the fact that at every gathering point on (or near) campus, people were trying with all their might to fuck. i was buoyed off the hormones spilling out of dorm rooms, parking lots, rooftops, coffee shops, classrooms, gyms, the target off 21st street, on and on it went. wherever you walked, whether you liked it or not, raunch was there—a tiny pulse line jumping under every horny kid’s unbuttoned shirt collar.

the last time i had a proper summer fling was in 2022. the actual sex was mediocre, but the chemistry leading up to it wasn’t. we were like, as rishi put it, ‘narcissus and the pond.’ the season unfurled all around us like a damp, warm flower. separated across state lines for four weeks after a whirlwind first date, we contented ourselves with hours-long phone calls, a marvelous nightly torture of extracting helpless confessions out of each other. i remember slipping out onto the balcony of my friend’s high-rise apartment in new york, whispering to him over the dreamy lull of traffic underneath me and feeling like i was going to kill a man if i didn’t put my hands on him soon—but also feeling like the moment i did, summer would end. in a way, that was the real summer sex i had with him: our desires hung in suspension, my field of vision exploding into stars every time i heard his voice. by the time we finally fell into bed, the fling was over. it was august. summer was ending.

what was it about him? nothing, except that i met him when it was 102 degrees outside, and all i could focus on was my body: hot and blustering, skin peeling pink at the shoulders, every raw nerve set on edge by the season, the season of sex. maybe therein lies the diagnosis for san francisco’s sexual dysfunction, too: it never gets hot enough here for any fever to set in. see this city-sized office by the sea, permanently air-conditioned year-round to a frosty and impersonal 67 degrees: the way its downtown bars and restaurants shutter their doors by sunset, having no other evening customers to bank on but employees returning dutifully to their pets and partners; how the very idea of being ‘single in san francisco’ evokes an unanimous groan of sympathy from all, because everyone knows this is the place you go after you’ve had your fun elsewhere.

have i had my fun elsewhere? yes, of course, but libido persists. on sunday afternoons, i sit in bed with a bowl of cherries and read dirty mangas on my phone. in my ac-less apartment, it still gets warm in the middle of the day, so i strip down to my bra and panties and think about calling my girlfriend. egregious porn, private midday fantasies, pangs of longing trilling through my body for ridiculous things, bittersweet things, awkward things—god help me if i’m the last pervert left in san francisco. but even unconsummated, there’s some joy in merely wanting. i daresay wanting is sexier than sex itself. for now, i suppose that’s enough.

status: healing

EBIE: i visited the meiji jingu in japan this summer. i had seen pics of the museum all over instagram, a wooden glass building enshrouded by a dark forest. i had worried there would be a lot of people, but when i got there, it was nearly empty, say a pair of locals who looked like they met at the museum to have a serious conversation. a family with kids who scurried down museum halls.

at the door, i handed the admission fee to the receptionist and asked for an english brochure. she raised her eyebrows, english? sorry, no, no. she tried to put me at ease, and i her. i bowed my head and hobbled over to a wide tv screen playing an introduction video. the subtitles explained that the japanese built this shrine for emperor meiji and empress shoken when they passed away. the emperor modernized the country on the cusp of the 20th century, and people donated 100,000 trees from all over japan to venerate them forever. it’s miraculous, the video said, that trees transformed a former wasteland into a self-regenerating green sanctuary.

i remember thinking how beautiful—the way humans build to cope with loss, how deeply can we love. i walked upstairs to the main exhibit, where black-and-white portraits of the emperor and empress glowed in a dark room guarded by a museum watchman in traditional soldier’s uniform. in the same room stood the emperor’s writing desk, alongside a few well-worn pencils. i squinted at them, searching for the faintest imprint of a finger, some sign of life. you could sense the grief in the air, a stark contrast against the lively, lush green of the surrounding trees peeking through the museum’s floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

weary from that day’s walking, i went to sit on one of the wooden benches facing out, lightly leaning against my arm. i must have only sat there for mere minutes and i was crying, not because i myself felt any particular attachment to the emperor, but because i felt i understood theirs, for as heartbroken i was then, i still believed that love was divine and heavenly and worthy of nothing less than this. i got up and left.

travel size perfumes, leaving voicemails, white tank tops, foreign-language bookstores, lush green parks, baseball games, meet-cutes, cigarette smoke in underground bars.

KL: i’m currently reading the price of salt by patricia highsmith, also known by its republished title carol. i’ve seen the movie and didn’t expect to like the book very much, but have been completely pleasantly surprised. written in dreamy turns of wit and subtle feeling, i imagine this would be a wonderful story to read at christmas time. while we’re talking about sex, this exchange between therese and carol made an impression on me:

“[…] So you want to fall in love? You probably will soon, and if you do, enjoy it, it’s harder later on.”

“To love someone?”

“To fall in love. Or even to have the desire to make love. I think sex flows more sluggishly in all of us than we care to believe, especially men care to believe. The first adventures are usually nothing but a satisfying of curiosity, and after that one keeps repeating the same actions, trying to find—what?”

“What?” Therese asked.

“Is there a word? A friend, a companion, or maybe just a sharer. What good are words? I mean, I think people often try to find through sex, things that are much easier to find in other ways.”

What Carol said about curiosity, she knew was true. “What other ways?” she asked.

Carol gave her a glance. “I think that’s for each person to find out. I wonder if I can get a drink here…”

i also recently read issue #127 of zyzzyva, a local lit mag publishing work from writers in san francisco. this particular passage from hannah kingsley-ma’s ‘working life’, a satirical short story chronicling a weary thirty-something-year-old woman’s efforts to wrangle her team of young professionals at a nondescript office, was so amusing and embarrassingly relevant to me that i copied it word for word into my journal:

Most Fridays at work they brought in catered lunch. The idea was that it would encourage conversation. But we didn’t know what to say to one another. We often discussed our upcoming weekend plans. The twenty-four-year-olds were cagey with the details. They had “a friend in town,” and they were “going to show them around.” It really didn’t matter to me that they got wasted on the weekends, and god forbid, did some Adderall at a club, or a whippet or two to stay loose. They had the metabolism of Olympians, iron organs, titanium clits that had been rubbed in all the wrong ways. They showed up to work on Monday morning looking depleted, but still gave it their all, staying extra late as if to prove a point. I wanted to bang on the desktop computers of all the young women who had discretely puked in the bathroom stall before 10 a.m. and chant: Who! Says! We! Can’t! Have! It! All! I was glad I wasn’t them, and I was envious I wasn’t them.

as i’m coming up on the one-year mark of my first job out of school, i’ve found myself increasingly interested in reading about work. in the price of salt, this early passage preceding therese and carol’s first meeting, at therese’s place of work, a department store, acts as a direct atmospheric foil to the love affair to ensue between the two women:

[Therese] knew what bothered her at the store. […] It was the waste actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from doing what she wanted to do, might have done—and here it was the complicated procedures with money bags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept people even from serving the store as efficiently as they might—the sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it was that life contained, never could find its expression. It reminded her of conversations at tables, on sofas, with people whose words seemed to hover over dead, unstirrable things, who never touched a string that played. […] And the loneliness, augmented by the fact that one saw within the store the same faces day after day, the few faces one might have spoken to and never did, or never could.

EB: i finished a pale view of hills by ishiguro at a small cafe overlooking train tracks in tokyo. my goodreads review: “changed my life.” my personal review (unadulterated thoughts scribbled in my journal in rushed handwriting):

just finished a pale view of hills & i cried and cried. i’m not sure why everything seems to move me these days. it was just so good. the full circle ending. the trains. the rain. motherhood. harbor in nagasaki. happy memories. doing the best we can & living with our failures. i would read this over & over. the fragility of motherhood. the name “niki.” the switch in identifier from mariko to “the child.” how people feel more by observing other peoples’ lives than telling their own story. maybe it’s too hard to face reality head-on that you need to see it through memory, dialogue? the lack of sleep in both the mother and daughter. coffee at 5 am. the mother saying she’s glad niki has friends, glad she’s carving out her own life. the de-prioritization of love (absense of good/healthy male-female romantic relationships). the historical backdrop (bombing of nagasaki, wwii aftermath, trauma of all family dying, suicide)…

if you like ishiguro (he also authored never let me go and the remains of the day), i highly recommend watching to his nobel prize acceptance speech (2017). he said, “it was my wish to re-build my Japan in fiction, to make it safe, so that I could thereafter point to a book and say: ‘yes, there’s my japan, inside there.’” i, laying on my bed in a kyoto hotel at the time listening to this, was so touched by “to make it safe.”

KL: dear ebie, what’s making you feel all grown up? and what’s got you feeling like a teenage girl?

EB: i feel the most grown up when i’m taking ubers alone, phone in hand. as time passes, i’m feeling less of an urge to share my uber ride for someone to follow along — the rides are short and my destinations insignificant, one among many. the backseats of ubers have seen me at my best and worst, hauling a week’s worth of groceries, a glitter clutch, a work laptop. i’m sleep-deprived on the way to the airport at dawn to catch a flight to the west coast, i’m stress-calling my gynecologist to say i’m running late, stuck in traffic. to avoid talking to a possibly creepy driver, i put my earbuds in, check my emails, one’s from no-reply@costco.com, another from work. i look out the window, back down on my phone, and i arrive where i’m supposed to be, again and again.

teenage girlhood exists outside of all of that. didn’t we once arrive together in a friend’s car after driving down i-60, whisper in the back corner of a boba shop while we waited for our moms to pick us up. it’s no wonder that nowadays, i feel most like a girl when im with my friends. the face that gets you through a work day falls away — we’re laughing, sending risky texts and making secret plans. we’re singing girl so confusing in a wine-drunk haze under our living room light. we’re on long, unscheduled facetimes across cities, we’re having a conversation that feels life-changing and silly at once, and i say good night when the sky starts dimming for you.

EB: dear kai-lin, what’s on your fall moodboard? colors? sounds? places?

KL: nothing yet, except a feeling, maybe. some mingling of hopefulness, quietude, and a sense of control touching down on my life again. i do feel like my little world always gets unruly in the summertime. i used to mourn the loss of that freedom every fall, but not this year. what else. the color gray? sweeping, dreamy gray. (it’s foggy this time of year.) the downtown lights by the blue nile. (let’s walk in the cool evening light / wrong or right, be at my side). merine wool. birthday packages. putting my joint out in an oyster shell. good sleep.

EB: jo malone’s english pear & sweet pea, pink cosmos with gin, microwaved cookie dough with vanilla ice cream, dewy cushion foundation, margot lee’s no particular order journal, air-dried baby’s breath flowers in a clear vase — perfect for a coffee table.

KL: facebook marketplace houseplants, lacy black underwear, vintage cigarette cases (repurposed as a lightweight pocket wallet for carrying cash and ID on a night out), these out-of-my-league oxblood paige patent leather flats, and sliced mozzarella on toast with a little olive oil, huckleberry jam & pepper.

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Thanks for reading! Part collaborative writing experiment and part guilty-pleasure digital archive, My Brilliant Friend delivers thoughtful weekly dialogues on love, friendship, and culture to your inbox. You can subscribe below to receive new letters from us directly or visit us at mybrilliantfriend.substack.com.

My Brilliant Friend is co-written by Ebie Bao and Kai-Lin Wei.