february newsletter

ginza girls.

friends are weekend affairs but the girls are forever.

off their 9-6, they snag the last table full of goretex techies and discount armani suited salarymen at happy hour izakaya, skewers and highballs, talking highly of the cute boys they all saw at the boutiques today.

i got his number!

he asked for mine!

this one looked at me like i was love.

she worked at prada. the one with the gelled hair pulled back worked at issey. that one in full comme worked at dsm. the one by the window seat, in full row, worked at the chanel counter. they never wanted real jobs. and like jobs, they never wanted real love. it never made sense to be too serious about life. because once they started to think too seriously, the pimples came. the migraines too.

everyone always wants to talk about being present, but never how they want to present themselves.

afterwards, they went to the one jazz bar they knew where the bartender was too weak not to give them free drinks. cosmos and martinis. this was it, the rest of their life. cheap eats, cheaper drinks, and when they were drunk enough, they would go to mitsuki, to dance in heels, to prove their testament to the present, and shazam a disco song that would get them out of bed the next morning, and if they ended up at some boy’s apartment, from the dancefloor, from behind the dj booth, then they would send pics to the line group chat of the boys’ bathrooms, how they tidied themselves, aesop essentials or two-in-ones?, laugh, judge, feel better about the day if the hangover was too much.

days of dionysus, dopamine-chasers. girlhood was forever.

love for february. is it too obvious? too much?

though i find in most literature

love saves.

i scoff at this, sometimes. but deep down, when i roll over in my super single, i want this. need this. feed off of it. it’s why i run to books. why i live in movies.

this month’s playlist is, well, all about love.

my heart has always been worn on my sleeve. mostly because i have nothing to lose. there isn’t much to me, i don’t think, when smallness overwhelms me. you ever look up at the ceiling from your bed and see it expand until it becomes the whole universe?

in funny weather, olivia laing covers david hockney:

“..looking is a source of joy. asked a few years ago about the place of love in his life, he answered: “i love my work. and i think the work has love, actually .. iI love life. i write it at the end of letters - ‘love life, david hockney’”

love life,

i don’t know why, but it’s the comma after love life that kneads warmth into me.

so much of life i’ve not loved or it hasn’t loved me. life is a hard thing to love when it’s still so feral in my years. you can’t tame it. you can’t teach it anything. it moves like time, on its own accord.

you can only move with it. so that’s what this is. taking a breath of life.

around this time last year, i finished a breath of life by clarice lispector. it opened another mouth i didn’t know i had. not for speaking, but to breathe in, breathe out, to make mark on the world in little running rashes all over. i think i did. and i want to do it again. to shadow a read from last year. it’s with my entire heart that i gifted it to sophie from bibliosophie. and my heart foams at the mouth, at delicious aftertaste, whenever she tells me it’s her favorite.

"instead of saying "my world,” i say audaciously: the world depends on me. because if i don't exist, the universe ceases within me. could it be that abstraction begins after death? i, reduced to a word? but what word represents me? i know one thing: i am not my name. my name belongs to those who call me. it is an eternal beginning permanently interrupted by my awareness of beginning."

i’m a constant romantic about everything. all my friends know this. complain about it. and i think it’s bleeding through on screen, through the vlogs and such. i’m not sure if this is a bad thing. it has gotten me into trouble. but it has also found me in the best people, the best places, the best places in people and i couldn’t have asked for better ways to go about life, romantically. i’m jean d’arc about it!

"when I say I love you, i am loving me in you."

ginza girls is perhaps a piece that’ll be expanded in the future, but it was a piece inspired by a group of girls whom i met one night by way of mutuals. i can’t stop thinking of girlhood. even after sandy liang. even after shu shu tong. even post-priscilla. there’s so much love there. you have to owe it to sofia in creating a sensitivity to the aesthetics of girlhood that is still widely overlooked.

in moodboard hunting for these girls, i could not find anything best suited to describe their synergy. the way they laughed leaving the izakaya, holding each other, holding their laughter from drenching the streets with their je ne sais quoi. there’s a violence to this liberty. and perhaps violence is the wrong word.

but to live violently.

violent living.

violence is strength, beyond passion, and it’s this energy that i mean when they live.

with power. without remorse. with everything they’ve got.

so i looked back as everyone has been enjoying hunger games fanfare. i went back to a high school favorite of mine, battle royale. looked to this violence. girls slashing boys. girls standing up for themselves. in blunt beauty. with everything they’ve got.

i’m laxed for love. loose boxers. morning walks. listening to birds and leaves. taking my time. letting time take me. violence-forward in my je ne sais quoi. in my nonchalance. perhaps this is how i get to be whole-heartedly myself. perhaps this is how i get to go on loving myself a little bit better.

love life,

n

*never forget! my novella is available for purchase here.