the warmest part of the winter
what i've been reading, watching, and doing as my cheeks flush red with cold
Lately the desire to Gone Girl myself has been almost impossible to suppress. I don’t want to disappear permanently. Rather, I’d like to abandon everyone and everything in my life with no notice, fuck off to France for a few months, then be treated very sweetly like a fragile mental patient when I finally return because everyone is just too relieved to hold me accountable. Anyways, it’s March. And I’m celebrating the second anniversary of something terrible happening, because anniversaries are ceaseless. I thought this year I would feel different, but March crept up and I was pierced straight through the heart. I have already written too much about this event, and I will probably continue to do so, but not here. This month I ran — not as far as Rosamund Pike, but to the end of Long Island to be with my grandparents for a few days until the anniversary passes. My roommate drove me up here past long stretches of grey nothing, and my grandparents insisted that he leave with seltzer and a snack. Now I am writing from the house where I’ve spent several weeks each summer since I was a baby.
Perhaps this is obvious, but places and dates carry a weight. March and April, despite their associations with the beginning of spring, have always felt very heavy to me. Many of the most traumatic moments of my life occurred in the spring. It’s a real shame, because I love wearing thin dresses that are perfect for March high noon but beget goosebumps on my legs by March 10 p.m. Now that I’ve emerged blinking into 60 degree days and birds chirping outside of my window, I reflect back on my winter months and find that I spent most of that time waiting. I waited in both an abstract and concrete sense, for sensations, for trains, for admissions, for those buried feelings to resurface. I think about Jeff Buckley moan-singing, “I’ll wait for you, and I’ll burn,” as the perfect summary of my recent moments. So here is a list of all of the things that consumed me while I was killing time.
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