Week 6
This week I was in the middle of dinner with someone I really care about when I got on a call with my agent and almost started crying while I vented about workload because I’ve been so stressed and overwhelmed. I’m not sure why every week I feel the need to start newsletters about how much work I’m doing because ultimately talking about being busy is the most dull boring ass topic in the world. Everyone’s fucking busy and everyone’s fucking overwhelmed and I just need to shut up and do the work and sell a book and operate my day job and sleep more and try my best to be there for the people I love.
Anyway, let me move on to the delight: There are four apartments here in NYC that feel like home though they are not apartments I live in. They are apartments of dear friends and lovers, where many nights I have been nourished by conversation and fire escape cigarettes and home-cooked food and movie nights—by love. This week I got to visit all four, for birthday parties and sleepovers and dinners and get-togethers. I just feel very grateful for these precarious senses of home (these apartments are not permanent because we rent, we move out after leases and rent hikes. Or we move on and we leave.) And I’m grateful they invite me over. I’m grateful they let me stay.
One of these apartments held a dinner party, a full spread of everything made or brought by friends, from mapo tofu to Kam Hing sponge cakes to a fat blunt. Halfway through, my friend A and I stepped onto the fire escape for a quiet moment, to sit on the window ledge and share a cigarette. We chatted about community and work and citizenship and green cards. A and I had been talking about how to love when you’re living in a country that deems you an alien, and he gestured behind us, where the dinner party had mostly gravitated to sitting cross-legged on the ground chatting. “Look at what we built,” he said. “We built this. Look at this home.”
Three good friends came to one of these apartments late one night, spontaneously, for no reason other than hilariously miscommunicated planning. We laid on the floor and they let me paint their nails green and pink.
Watched the brilliant Black Dynamite on a cozy Thursday evening in one of these apartments; it is the best movie I’ve ever seen in my stupid silly life (the outfits; the dialogue; the action; the vibes!) It reminded me of just how fun movies can be, and also led me to this playlist which I have not been able to stop dancing to.
Stole (borrowed?) Bliss Montage by Ling Ma from one of these apartments; swallowed it in a day; texted friends begging them for their thoughts and for them to read it; I love books passed around and talked about among friends for no reason other than its own brilliance.
Arriving to my beautiful friend J’s birthday party with a rainbow cake; leaving the party with three new books. The ideal way to show up and depart.
Matching Spongebob meme shirts with my friend D at our friend S’s cozy meme-themed birthday dinner.
I caught up with my friend G over a meal for the first time in months. She lives on the Upper West Side, I live in Brooklyn, we joke that it’s a long distance relationship. We’re also quite different people in a lot of ways, especially as we enter and grow further into adulthood. But G is one of my oldest friends. We’ve made a lot of memories from high school until now. We’ve been friends for over a decade, weathering joys and depressions. We don’t always hang out, but we’re there for each other, and when we do meet, it’s like all that time we’ve known each other in the past flourishes into the conversation of the present. To bring us back to the original theme of this newsletter: it’s been lovely to stay alive, together. I love her and her heart a lot.
My friend A randomly texted me out of nowhere “I love you” “That’s all” as if she didn’t know that was going to definitely make it into the newsletter.
Thanks friends! I love you! That’s all!
If you haven’t preordered Chlorine yet, you can now directly through Yu & Me Books for a signed copy!! www.yuandmebooks.com/preorder/p/chlorine Support the much-loved local Chinatown bookstore AND get Chlorine signed?? What an incredible deal ;)
And Chlorine is one of Audible’s favorite debuts of the season:
In this cutting, deliciously disturbing debut, Jade Song crafts a work that melds body horror with that desperate yearning for transformation and freedom. Their writing style is atmospheric and visceral as they unfold the story of Ren, a competitive swimmer burdened by expectations, who seeks a metamorphosis of a different kind. As feverish as it is dazzling, radiant as it is twisted, Song’s storytelling is a thing of magic.