You speak like a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstances. — Hamlet
This past August I dreamed that I was in the park where I grew up. “I did everything in that park,” I insisted to my roommate. “Like…. I kissed in that park.” And that was all I could think of, but maybe ‘everything’ is kissing. The park I refer to is Cherokee Park, located in the hip Highlands neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, a neighborhood I did not live in, though I liked to pretend that I did. Many of my childhood best friends lived there, and I spent so much time in their bedrooms, their basements, their front porches that I adopted the zip code, even if I had to drive twenty minutes to get there. During the summers or after school, we would meet and walk up and down the main drag, Bardstown Road, starting at Douglas Loop and wandering for miles toward the cemetery. We could entertain ourselves for an entire day in this fashion, with fifteen dollars in our pockets to buy CDs or ice cream or the nine dollar lunch special at Cafe Mimosa. I learned to put in a tampon at that restaurant, wearing my best friend’s shirt, an egg roll waiting for me at the table.
Louisville is like a dreamland to me, perhaps because I fled it so hastily at 18, wanting to shirk off everything about me that was Southern and suburban. I had worshipped at the altar of New York for my entire life; I never questioned whether I would leave, but I couldn’t have predicted how weird it feels to come back. Sure, I visit my family a few times a year, but the city itself has become a glimmering mirage — my hand falls through the air when I reach out to grab it. Each time I return, more of my teenage landmarks have disappeared: Cafe Mimosa is gone, Highland Coffee vanished, and I no longer know how to preserve these pieces of my former life. I can’t explain to my friends who have always lived in the Northeast what it feels like to run so far away; I left Kentucky to live in the one true love of my life, but I loved Kentucky, too. I love Louisville like my head hitting the pillow after a long day in the sun and I love New York like the moment right before a roller coaster’s first drop, your stomach suspended in mid-air.
When I think about Louisville I think about the intensity of feeling. Maybe that’s simply because I was young there. I remember it in glimpses of bliss and agony, with no in betweens to be found. It was quintessential and teenaged, each action original because it was the first time I had done it. Now, preparing to go home for Christmas, I am easily pulled back into this pattern. It’s eerie how I regress the moment I step over the threshold of my childhood bedroom; suddenly, I want to fight with my mom, curl up on the sofa, and fall asleep to half-hour infomercials playing softly on the TV. Every time I return, I am tempted to write ‘the Louisville piece’, but it would really be the Louisville book. I have been trying and failing for years to parse my teenage years, to create some kind of shrine to this city that shaped me. What stops me is the enormity of the attempt, or how cliche it is, to leave a place and then eulogize it as if people aren’t still there, living their lives. Instead, I would like to sketch a couple of vignettes that still retain their precise lines despite how long ago they occurred. I’ve also avoided mentioning in detail friends with whom I’m still close. I have been accused of being confessional, but I can’t confess for someone else.
I don’t recall having a sense of place as a child, although maybe no secure children do. I lived in a nondescript suburb that really could have existed anywhere in Middle America, and I didn’t think about a ‘there’ except in the abstract definition: my grandparents’ house on Long Island was a ‘there’, and so was my uncle’s apartment in St. Louis, but my house was ‘here’. What I do remember was the very subtle feeling of shame that I associated with being from Kentucky. I was born in 1998 and thus grew up in the early 2000s, as politically contentious a time as any. Perhaps the comedic digs about Kentucky being a state full of shoeless, illiterate hicks embedded in my subconscious like brambles. It’s shockingly common how often the South is used as the butt of a joke even in children’s television series and books. My parents tried to shield me from anything besides public access TV, respectable Blockbuster rentals, and library books, but the messages still stuck. In my young mind, being from the South meant being stupid, conservative, and devoid of culture. Now, I am extremely proud of my Southern upbringing. In 2020 I often went to DSA parties with a boyfriend and got into terrible arguments when some pasty, bearded leftist inevitably proclaimed Southern voters to be a lost cause. The South is one of the most diverse, politically radical, artistically vibrant regions of the country. But at six, I didn’t know that.
Even in my earliest years of school, my assignments betray a proclivity toward escape. There are countless little writing pieces going all the way back to first grade in which I proclaim my intention to move to New York. Back then, I wanted to be an actress. I think I believed that to be the only job which existed in New York City. My mother was born in Queens and grew up in the Northeast; my dad is a Kentucky boy, but he went to college in Boston. They both lived in the city for years until I was born, so I inherited a respect for the lifestyle. My dad would tell me about walking all the way from the Upper East Side to the seaport, how he saved money for law school by working as a mini bar attendant at the Essex House, where he met David Bowie and David Lynch. My mother was a beauty editor at Glamour Magazine, where she received shiny PR packages and partied at the Limelight with her fellow stylish young coworkers. Even before most girls discover Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” it was already too late for me. I was mythologizing for years before I ever visited.
I suppose that’s why, when I think of Louisville, I think of my teen years. The memories that occurred before high school have a pure, unspecified quality about them. All of us camped with our fathers and ran through sprinklers and lost our bathing suit bottoms while jumping off the diving board. These anecdotes have nothing to do with place. If I’m being honest, any essay about my life before age twelve could very well be denoted ‘The Catholic School Essay’ because that’s what was shaping me at the time. It wasn’t until public high school that I was able to get out from under my own thumb and cobble together some attempt at rebellion. My one seasonally-appropriate memory of my childhood in Kentucky happened annually after Christmas mass, at least until I stopped believing in Santa Claus (embarrassingly late). When the service ended, my parents would drive my sisters and me to Napa River Grill for dinner. The rest of my father’s extended family would be waiting for us. I usually ordered the caesar salad, because it came with an intricate parmesan crisp that seemed trendy and cosmopolitan. When the meal was over, I would approach the on-duty Santa impersonator, and he always knew my name. To me, this was irrefutable proof of his veracity. “You’re Alexandra,” he’d say, “And you want Samantha the American Girl Doll, right? Well, I’ll see what I can do. It seems like you’ve been a pretty good girl this year.” Later, when I asked my mother how the Napa River Santa always knew to greet us by our names, she confessed that she or my father called ahead. It’s the kind of casually thoughtful thing that makes the adult version of you weep.
I have written sparingly about Louisville in the fall, how it is a city that really blossoms when it is a crisp 50 degrees. But growing up, it is the summers that I remember the most. Kentucky is a mid-Southern state, but from June to August you may as well be in Florida. It is so sticky, so constantly wet. Leather car seats scald the skin off your thighs the moment you turn off the A/C. Everyone’s cheeks are perpetually flushed like Tennessee Williams characters or Botticelli angels. Southern summers are romantic, the sun clinging to the horizon until well after 9 p.m., fireflies hanging in the air like all the writers say they do. If I made a dream perfume that evoked Kentucky summers it would smell like head-shop-meets-parking-lot — musk and patchouli and something sickly sweet, like gasoline spills or push-pops. It is one long, languid waltz until late September comes and the spaghetti strap sundresses get put back into the closet until May.
I spent my summers being a terrible itinerant employee at customer service jobs, first at Target, then as a barista for a local coffee chain owned by a wealthy white savior type, then as a hostess. When I wasn’t getting written up for taking unauthorized bathroom breaks or pouring sloppy latte art, I was running around the aforementioned Highlands with my equally broke friends. I didn’t have a car, so I got good at begging for rides or taking the bus or making my poor father drop me off on a random median during his lunch break. From noon until 10 p.m. we loitered in strip malls and used bookstores and Thai restaurants with the money we had made at our part-time jobs, which was, undoubtedly, supposed to be going into a savings account. I bought so many impractical statement pieces from the vintage shop Acorn Apparel that I filled up all of the stamps on my loyalty card, and I received a whopping $10 off my next equally impractical purchase. I bought Oasis and Velvet Underground CDs at Better Days, the now-defunct record store staffed by several middle-aged heads who were pretty good-natured about our teenaged taste. For a brief time a novelty popsicle shop opened in the area, and my then-boyfriend would give me and my friends free pops. I really thought I wanted for nothing.
When we had no cash, we would simply hang out in one of the many parks. Tyler Park was smaller and slightly seedier, while Cherokee Park was sprawling and gorgeous, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also did Prospect Park — now blocks from my apartment. My sophomore year boyfriend and I would kiss sitting on the ground behind the public restrooms at Tyler Park, which sounds disgusting, but we were in love! On one occasion he accidentally breathed into my open mouth, and I thought I was going to die based on some misinformation I had halfway scanned on Reddit. I sobbed and relayed the news to him, that I, his first girlfriend and only love, might die at any moment. He started to tear up, too, and we rocked each other back and forth in the dirt. When several minutes passed and I was still breathing, we burst out laughing in genuine relief. In our world, there was no possibility that I had simply gotten a scientific fact wrong or fallen victim to a lie on the internet. For us, I had cheated death. He bought me cherry-dipped ice cream on the way home and it felt like a kiss.
It used to rain a lot in the summer, often stranding us on the street in seemingly endless downpours. We sought shelter in the morose, forever-failing landmark diner Twig and Leaf, ordering fries or milkshakes and sitting for hours, the only customers of the afternoon. Every time I am home for the holidays and drive by, that neon, leaf-shaped sign is still glowing. I am convinced that some mysterious benefactor is keeping the lights on, or maybe it won the coveted ‘historic building’ designation. Once, during one of these unexpected showers, my best guy friend and I huddled under a restaurant awning for a solid ten minutes before bolting a mile back to his house, arriving on the porch soaking wet. I think about this moment often, how at the time it seemed like the most spontaneous thing I could possibly do — to let my hair drip onto the carpet, to allow my cheap eyeliner to run down my face. I still try and harness the feeling when I need to do something uncomfortable.
When I look back on the graveyard of failed Louisville relationships, one that haunts me the most despite its lack of longevity is my friendship with Liz. Liz was my entry pass into the world of cool indifference. She identified within me a desperate, oppressive earnestness that I fear she never fully exorcized from me. When we met I was 14, freshly out of my first romantic relationship, and I was devastated despite the fact that we had only ever exchanged chaste, closed-mouth kisses. Believe it or not, I was a huge tomboy in my early teen years, but I adopted a generically feminine Aeropostale look to please this first boyfriend of mine, who ironically came out as gay just a few years later. Liz saw my unassuming co-ed aesthetic as what it was: a veneer, something to proclaim my desire to fade into the background. As Kafka said, “I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.” I never did it right — the Uggs were off-brand, the bows too old-fashioned, the oxford shoes I occasionally sported too bizarre when paired with leggings and a collegiate sweatshirt. Because I was so lost at the time, hidden beneath so many layers of pretense, I let her tell me exactly what to do. After all, she had cropped hair which she dyed every month, and a pierced nose, and Renaissance fair dresses that she sometimes wore to look like “the queen of the Hobbits.”
She played me the The Dead Milkmen over the CD player in her grandfather’s convertible, and we would scream the lyrics to “Punk Rock Girl” at each other as he drove me home after sleepovers. She also showed me Tyler the Creator’s Goblin, setting the record on her cheap Urban Outfitters suitcase-style turntable. I always found that one upsetting. But the song I associate most with her is “This Charming Man.” The first time we met I was sitting alone in my high school’s courtyard. She approached me and complimented my cheap Forever 21 Victorian-imitation boots, saying, “Those are very Morrissey.” We became fast friends, and she had me wearing oversized, horribly patterned grandpa sweaters over leggings in no time. My mom used to tell me I looked like Jeffrey Dahmer, and I’d insist, “I’m actually going for Johnny Marr.” I remember Liz texting me on Friday evenings: “I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear.” We’d tear through her closet, all the distressed Black Flag t-shirts and peasant dresses, and I’d always end up in her clothes which felt infinitely cooler than mine. I loved the way the control-top part of her nylons peeked past her skirt, her sloppiness so elegant and unaffected while my attempts at looking intentionally ‘undone’ failed miserably.
This was one of those intense girl-friendships which verged on romantic by default, though I suspect it was one-sided. It is the only time in my life I have ever felt so strongly about another woman. When she got a boyfriend I privately sulked, and each time he did her wrong I insisted that they should break up. This was despite the fact that I myself had gotten into a relationship with our mutual friend, one which lasted nearly a year. He never understood our weird dynamic, but he enjoyed being caught in the middle; it was very French New Wave if you squinted. Together we would hop the fence of a church playground after dark, causing innocent trouble. I thought these were the rules of the game. It wasn’t until Liz’s Halloween party that I realized I knew nothing about her besides the calculated bits of intimacy which she chose to share. My boyfriend and I arrived dressed like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, obviously. I was given a brownie, which I truly believed to be just a brownie; I was naive in many ways. When I had a panic attack a couple of hours later, Liz just laughed. Even now, at 25, I cringe at 15 year old me. I was so incensed at the idea that anyone my age could be drinking or smoking or doing anything actually transgressive — I thought hooking up with my boyfriend beneath the stairs of a parking garage was about as scandalous as it could get. I lost my virginity quickly and thoughtlessly, but I sobbed when I learned that Liz was dropping acid. It was all insufferable.
We don’t speak anymore, and our friendship officially ended in a legendary fight. I was afraid she would kill me, and I think she wanted to, but she wasn’t in her right mind. I fight the urge now to martyrize myself or Liz in this situation, but the truth is that I was one of her only close friends who wasn’t an addict. I felt solely responsible for her wellbeing, and I attempted many interventions using information I had found on the internet. I laugh imagining it now — fifteen or sixteen years old, taking Liz into the stairwell during our lunch period and very seriously telling her to stop using coke, as if I knew what doing coke was like. Our falling-out lasted for six months, during which she tried to get me expelled from school. When my then-boyfriend (and her ex — the entanglements!) brought me up in front of her in the middle of their shared chemistry class she said, “Well, tell your girlfriend she’s a cunt.” I hated her with a vitriol reserved only for someone whom you once loved madly. I still wonder about her occasionally, still type her name into Instagram every two years or so; each time I am met with a private account, and I am too cowardly to follow. Once, when I was home for the summer during college, I realized she worked in the same museum that I did. I would watch her from a distance, taking long and convoluted paths to my office to avoid her. Sometimes I think about reaching out, sending a message nearly a decade later; maybe that betrays some kind of guilt. I am guilty, I know, but I’m not sure of what.
It is amazing to me now, at 25, that I was once 16 and circling my suburban neighborhood in a puffy coat, “Australia” by The Shins blaring in my headphones, wishing to be anywhere but there. “You’ll be damned to pining through the window panes / You know you’d trade your life for any ordinary Joe.” I wanted everything to happen to me at once. I believed that I was deeply unusual, despite the overwhelming mass of books and essays and films about disillusioned teenage waifs dreaming of one day moving to the Big City. Now that I am gone, I can finally appreciate it. I needed to be able to see it through a telescope instead of a microscope. Many of the moments I describe above seemed unbearable when they were happening to me. It is easy to look back on them with a fondness that would never have been possible then. Friends have pointed out to me that much of my writing is about nostalgia and memory. I think this is apt. I am not a futurist, I cannot speculate. What I can do is relive the past so often in my head that it becomes akin to a TV show that I have seen too many times.
Maybe this piece seems a bit random. I acknowledge that it’s not all-encompassing, and it’s not coinciding with anything. But I am visiting Kentucky for Christmas, and so I’m thinking about it. I will sleep in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by posters of my previous obsessions, under the velvet comforter I got for my thirteenth birthday. My dad will put a miniature lighted Christmas tree on my desk, and I will doze off to the sound of someone watching the TV downstairs. My sisters and I will fight about what movie to watch as if we are all children again, and my dad will say, “How about Blazing Saddles or Back to the Future?” I am capable of writing in the future tense, though this isn’t speculative, because I know all of it will happen. It is a totally banal observation to suggest that a place can act like a jello mold, that everything inside of it will conform to an existing shape — but that’s what Louisville is like for me now. I love it so much more from a distance, because when I’m there I feel as though I’ve stepped into a snow globe. All of the locations live in my memory with intense precision, to be actually inside of them is like going backstage after a play and seeing all of the actors without makeup or costumes. I’m using too much metaphor, I’m getting syrupy and sentimental. When I write about Louisville, I always do.
achingly beautiful writing as always. i'm back home now too, and truly think only southern girls will understand <3
Beautiful work.