The New Pornography

the coffee table in brooklyn

despite it all, i’m thankful.

i’m skipping a lot of small talk. a lot of my recent thoughts have ended with “despite the pandemic,” “despite the plummet of my rising social trajectory,” “despite fearing for the health of my loved ones,” etc.

i’ve spent some time looking back through all sorts of my archives — old photos, group chats, notes, documents, videos. i’ve lingered the most on the exhibitions of intimacy, snapshots of travel, and endless laughter.

realizing i won’t find similar experiences anytime soon is the worst thing someone like me could hear. not having a single definite thing to look forward to wholly goes against my programming. my energy used to travel into a channel of anticipation — now it’s slowed to a halt. this feels like being stuck like no other way. it elicits an itchiness for not knowing what not to know. it brings the stationary energy to boil inside into a buzzing anxiety that reminds me i’ve never been proud of things i’ve done, and now’s not the time to start.

the prospect of celebration might be the single thing that has kept me functioning. this has been the one force of my being that i am slowly learning how critically it has served me. the reliability of it as an MO is hardly sound, though i haven’t questioned it much. i’m now having lot of trouble being without it.

everyone is bereft of something right now. i’m not sure it’s as much of a fear of missing something, but more like the lack of those somethings being within reach. i think this is where lust originates. we only can lust over things out of our reach — things that beckon with desirability. things that threaten to make our knees buckle. it’s not that we can’t get enough of it, but really we can’t get any of it at all right now.

i remember i began this year at the lowest point i’ve been in a long time. i took that energy and decided to go on a bender in new york city with people i’ve never met for the weekend before i started classes again. visiting new york for the first time in years in the heart of winter — it’s hard not to make it out to be magic. and it will always remain magic. i spent a lot of time talking way too loudly and taking too many photos and staring at very bright lights. i spent hours very late lost in manhattan with a dead phone and no direction, somehow managing to get back to brooklyn hours later before sunrise. the new people and places and sights and sounds are etched into my mind as best as they can be. that kind of energy is addictive. i latched on. when we all came back to boston we continued the same behavior just about every weekend. i feel like i was dropped into the lives of strangers — it’s rare to get the chance to feel like a wallflower, and it’s even rarer to feel like you’ve known the people you’ve just met for your whole life. starting every thursday was a new, different bender, with different people and places and things. parties and beverages and exchanged sweet nothings and stimulation and so much laughter. you can’t quantify the value here. the experiences and the intimacies were too rich to price. i spent most of the wintertime feeling warm.

and then, it all got dark. very quickly. bridges broke aggressively, experiences were tainted violently. everything good just stopped. the magic i manifested in my mind that tessellated the people around me crumbled. that’s how i can articulate it best right now. it didn’t find me well and it still does not. truthfully, in the span of a few months i aged countless lifetimes and became a grade-A degenerate.

then march came. i started my spring break on a red-eye to spain, diving right into the at-the-time meek virus outbreak in europe. the opportunity to escape america with two of my greatest friends cannot be matched. we drank in barcelona for a day. we lived in a chalet in the swiss mountains and failed at boiling our hot tub and ate chocolate for dinner and sledded the alps and simply drove. we thrived in lisbon, absorbing the heavy sunlight and having the best food, coffee, and desserts we’ve had as of late. i’ll never forget that second night in portugal when i got woken up to buy a plane ticket back home because of trump’s travel ban. the abruptness of the moment made me think back vividly to that last day we had in lisbon: having legendary pastries for breakfast, chasing peacocks in a public garden, drinking a lot of sangria for lunch, making six restaurant stops to taste the best food and wine and learn about it all, and walk hours back home watching the sun set. i remember not having my phone that day and getting the late news that the rest of school was canceled. everything was pure bliss and pure chaos. i have a lot of reason to believe that i could not have had a better day to end freedom and begin apocalyptic shutdown. the reality was that just a few hours later, we experienced real panic and real bankruptcy in our race to escape europe and get home in time. it was really all for no reason (i could write an entire report on trump’s factless hate-mongering tactics) but you just have to laugh. getting on a plane a few hours later to a small portuguese island to stay in the smallest airport i have ever seen and eat at a knock-off dunkin donuts with 3 different locations in said airport — those were some of the most crazed yet treasured moments i can remember. or maybe it’s just trauma.

what left is there to say?

now i’m looking back at these moments as sensual experiences. i’ve seen more life earlier this year than i ever have seen in my lifetime. i have got to be able to just laugh. i need to appreciate how i went off the rails at the beginning and how it all ended. and how there are so many motifs i cannot escape: the crazed and dazed feelings; the ends to good times being more abrupt than their beginnings; all the times being disconnected from the outside. this has to be plotted on a graph somehow.

i believe everything follows a wavelength. every chapter has troughs, peaks, crests. i started the year in the deepest trough i’ve known. and with time i’ve seen beautiful, climaxical peaks, with awfully weird and chest-suspending periods of denouement as crests in between. everything ebbs and flows.

i didn’t mean to go this much into detail describing early 2020. but i think that explains how much i’m lusting over these moments, eagerly going deeper into my memories to remember what it felt like to be spontaneous, to wake up in a new place, to be drunk with strangers. i hope it’s as arousing to read as it is to write.

i’m in love with what i had, i think.

i want to learn how to lust for things right in front of me. i want to normalize being attracted to the greatness right here, right now. but even without a worldwide pause, this is near impossible. my definition of fun has always been in the chase. the idea of the prospect is what makes things exciting. to be excited for something that already is… that’s a level of enlightenment i’m afraid i’ll never find. i think in ideas, memories, concepts too far to be tangible. this is how i lust. and now, with being bereft of all of the things that make me happily function, i’m having wet dreams about taking over the world with my friends.

there should be a way to have both. you shouldn’t have to sacrifice being excited about things far away to be able to enjoy the present. i can preach this endlessly without ever getting the formula down, but believe that i’m working at it. in the meantime, being a memory hoarder is keeping me alive.

of course, someday i will write about it all in detail. but how can i tell the story of everything?

i finished my junior year of college. i’ve been working on a lot of different pieces of writing. i’ve been playing a lot of dumb games. i watch PBS and the CBS evening news with a different kind of tea every night. i am the angriest i’ve ever been. even if i try to be bored i don’t know how. my activities always take up the space of their container, like a liquid. i know this is the worst environment possible for me. but at least i’m always lusting over something.