Part II: Considerations on Context
On internet love, my winter as a wife, several homecomings and coming home
Joan Didion says a single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.
Maggie — who I met in 2018 when we were editors on the college newspaper — held me in the bathroom of the French wine bar in June when the lights blacked out and my tears turned to cackles on the night I cried so hard, saliva churned like syrup in my throat. Pressing a wet water glass to my brow bone, I let the manager call me baby, swung my purse over a stool and did self soothing as I counted the individual pores on my glass’ lemon wedge. Fated to make the most of a night gone sour, I filmed Maggie as she pranced behind the bar, threw her head back laughing and mixed him a margarita. All I could think of was you and I between stories of his travels, the restaurant’s lore, of his parents, and his wish for children if the right woman ever came along. We ripped Capris in two’s and then Hestias, the Mevius apple menthols from Japan and Moroccan cigarettes smuggled from his last trip home as storefront chains clanged and the neighborhood contracted, a cacophony of closing hymns surrounding us. I thought I’d never get to sleep that night, but I passed out on her green couch, my head buzzing from the drags I’d taken, the single glass of red unfinished, and our lingering conversation.
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“I don’t know how I’ll get through this,” I tell Maggie over steak in the hours prior.
I cover my eyes because I know I’m about to cry and I do that thing where I pinch the bridge of my nose like I’m suddenly in the throes of a migraine or a nosebleed, but this time my head is down, instead of back and I’m 20 years older than I was when I once bled crimson into my aunt’s lap on Christmas Eve. Pretending to consider the evening’s plans, I feel equally small whimpering into the peppercorn sauce — the potential of darting across town to KGB, now dead for me. I take my phone out to draft a series of tweets I’ll never send.
“i am in my naked dress and the night is ruined for me.”
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I used to believe that if the right circumstances presented themselves and a man was nice enough and sharp enough, sufficiently attractive and the timing was right, that I could come to like him and that in doing the dance — regularly scheduled dates, equal exchanges of flirting, banter that’s just ball-busting enough and stimulating, yet still endearing, sex and the talking after, sips from the same coffee in the morning — I’d be something of a hopeless woman not to fall in love under these circumstances. In past relationships, I contemplated all of the usual factors — timing and maturity, mutual respectability, stability, trust, unspoken understanding. People dedicate their whole lives trying to understand the secret to lasting love. And still, even as the discourse churns, everyone mostly speaks in vapid, empty platitudes. “Fall in love with yourself first,” "the right person won’t make you question anything,” “in your life, there are three great loves,” and other pithy things. In an act of self-preservation, I began to romanticize the ideals of a slow build, a safer kind of love, the kind no one really ever craves, but one I’m told supposedly grows with time — the love that typically follows heartache, the Aiden and Carrie variety, the one women are often encouraged to quietly settle for. Naturally, this is not the kind of love that happened to me.
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“This is the e-girl. / Electronic girl. / Erica, My e-wife Erica. / You don’t want a boyfriend. / I’m in love with you. / My wife. / She’s going to move here. / My Silly. Little. Wife. / Erica. Erica. Erica.”
I wonder if we would’ve burned out sooner had circumstances been different. Are we only as interesting as our proximity to impermanence? I think about the night you and I met, dressed like parodies of ourselves, me in my turtleneck mini dress and you in your Carhartt jacket, the way you swept me off the ground on a quiet Lower East Side street and how I would’ve stayed that way, just floating, as long as you’d let me.
“You don’t want a situationship. / I don’t know what’s ironic and what’s real anymore. / I’ve never met someone so confusing.”
I wonder if the part of your heart that still carries me is me, or the imagined version of me whose media tab you scrolled in the weeks prior. I hate to linger on the inner workings of e-girlism. One might rightly imagine I’ve grown tired of discussing my internet persona. For better or for worse, I am on there, “ce n'est pas erica” — my thoughts, my face, my feelings — a conscious decision I often joke I unconsciously choose everyday. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder, would I be harder to forget if I didn’t come with all of this, or perhaps, easier to tolerate without it?
“My ex-wife. / My e-wife. / Cookie. / I love my wiiiiiife. / This is Erica. / Sweet Pea E. / Girlfriend? No, I live in Chicago. / I’m Erica. / This is my friend Erica. / Do you want to meet my father? / Erica friend Erica this is —”
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“What if we meet and instantly fall in love?”
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Maggie is stretching on the floor after too many carbonated drinks and our shared crème brûlée which I only picked the sugary top off of. The naked dress is sprawled like a dead body across my suitcase. Mascara crusts in half-moons and sink-like craters under my eyes. It’s 2 a.m. and I’m curled under a fleece blanket in June.
“I guess I’m not like that,” she tells me, now stretching into something resembling downward dog. “I just don’t get it. Isn’t love enough?”
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In late November I received a direct message from a man with a private Instagram whose profile picture of him ripping a dart somehow spoke to me. Separating him just enough from the sea of faceless incels, admirers, autists and freaks in my DM requests, I accepted his message, but skeptically. He told me my aesthetic was impeccable (unoriginal) and I said thank you, to which he responded, asking me where I bought all of the “little plates” on my food Instagram. We spoke briefly, our correspondence quickly revealing I had not in fact resided in his current city of New York, but in Chicago, our mutual hometown. I thought little to nothing of these early exchanges, but struggled to ignore obvious commonalities between us.
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In December I baked hundreds of cookies, coped with an unforeseen job rejection and began talking heavily to the impeccable aesthetic man. Equally charmed by the idea I’d built of him in my head, we fell hard into constant banter, threw around words like husband and wife and spoke in senseless absolutes.
“All I could do during those days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.”
“My tiny online Italian wife,” he tweeted before we met.
“My slavic internet bf,” I teased, thoughtlessly.
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We’re holding hands across the table in the corner of the Friedman’s speakeasy on New Year’s Day when weeks of internet correspondence become reality. I’m wearing the ushanka that I don’t know I will lose two trips later and he’s wearing cowboy boots unironically. We are kissing in the street. We are cooking steak in beef tallow. I tweet from the brown leather couch in his bedroom, “Sometimes life is a movie and the movie takes place in Brooklyn.”
I’m carrying my white laundry basket to the drier downstairs in January, unloading socks and small sleep shorts, clothing from the week I’d spent with you. I text you the “Little Green Apples” song and we count the number of days until I’m back in New York. I keep feeling like a large part of this isn’t real. Jim Harrison writes, “We are isolated stockbrokers of life’s essences and it is always 1929.”
In February I wrote in my notes app: “I am listening to ‘Vicino a te’ as I walk through Greenpoint with date cake in my purse, reach-outs to former colleagues in my sent box, and the knowledge that we’ll cook dinner later and somehow that is enough.”
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It’s 1 a.m. in the kitchen and I’m spreading lemon curd on my lavender linzers. We’d just spent over a week together in New York. I wait for you to text, but you don’t. Resigned to not look like I care too much, I stave off urges to text you little things I’d grown so accustomed to sharing. Two people who just methodically planned two months worth of dates, now in an unspoken stand-off — juvenile, I think, my Porta Pros leaking Tennis’s “Matrimony II.”
“Baby we've been orbiting / Each other helplessly / I guess that I blacked out / But remembered to move my mouth.”
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I apply to journalism jobs and begin to seriously picture my life again in the new, old city that swallows me whole, but always welcomes me home. In the absence of constant communication, I begin to blame myself for the uncertainty of our union. Weeks pass and I feel like a twisted rag hanging dry on your bathroom sink. I wonder why you introduced me to all of your friends, to your extended family, why the idea of home in Chicago suddenly feels impossible, why neither of us work to book our next flight. I send you cookies for Valentine's Day and you respond, touched, but immaturely, only a meme in my DMs, but on a holiday I never cared for much anyway. I begin feigning warmth when I speak of you and grow tired of feening for your affection. It feels comically evil, from my perspective, to have watched you show love to me and then take it away.
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Tormented by confusion, I resort to making good men collateral damage in our defunct love affair. A box with perfume and a Didion book arrives for me from Paris in the spring. I am barefoot in a downtown apartment reading Cormac McCarthy. I begin living an entirely different life, separate from you and mindlessly date on autopilot. I become an oracle of sorts to the women in my orbit, sharing stories I struggle to parcel through, cloaking my hopelessness in tales of unsustained chaos. There’s so much I want to tell you, but only empty exchanges stand between us. My reactive behavior throughout this period scares me. I consider that maybe it's me who’s the problem and that you know that too, but I also know that you know that you put me here and that feels indelibly worse. I refuse to resign you to a category of bad actors though; I know that you’d be a good boyfriend, you just don’t want to be one to me.
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This period prompts me to think about all of the things I’ve taken an interest in for men over the years — Rothko and Japanese woodblock art, Beau Travail, David Lynch, Marxism, the Chemex and Houellbecq, and how this time around, none of the things you showed me ever really felt like bullshit. I was never particularly interested in the outdoors, hunting or the inner workings of fraternity culture, but it all felt so ardent and genuine coming from you, and so painstakingly reciprocal from me. I tell myself that maybe that’s what love actually is — not simply to love another’s things, but to watch them love those things and to fall deeper in love with them as a result. I still don’t really know if you like any of my things.
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I tell people we are over in March but we’re curled up on your couch watching “The English Patient” on a weekend I ate in Dimes alone and nearly cried my entire stay through. No more New York trips, I lie to myself in April. At times I wish I’d never made a public spectacle of it all — a mysterious man in Brooklyn, my fake husband, our pseudo union, the subsequent divorce and all that was to follow.
“C’mon Erica, ‘my husband, my husband.’ I knew that wasn’t real.”
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Smoke and bodies spill out of your apartment as night gives way to the early morning. You’re hosting a party in May and the music is loud. You hold the fort down as I mingle and smoke cigarettes in wet heat.
“He’s always going to do what he wants,” she says. “And I think you should try doing that too.”
My eyes black out and my vision turns to television snow in your bedroom. I ordered the With Jéan top just for this night. You cooked me breakfast in the morning, the dough of a cookie we’re making chills in the fridge, your head in my lap, my soap from the last trip still in your shower. I refuse to believe this isn’t real for you. At times, I suspect we’re in love.
“You know…try and date other people.”
--
We’re reading separate books on the same leather couch in your bedroom as the rain verberates on the ant-ridden windowpane. The weather is miserable, nonstop wet and soppy with no signs of potential relief. I change out of my restrictive skirt, sewn one size too small and into your waterproof clothes as we laugh at the size difference and I take long strides, sashaying across the room in your swishy rain pants. It’s around you especially, that I crave the comfort I imagine men might feel in the day-to-day; twinges of envy and attraction decorate my thoughts. I consider how freeing it must feel to be you and how you’d probably struggle to fully understand this if I ever vocalized it. I once told you that in being a woman, it’s often easier to play to a different set of strengths — ones that sometimes lie in weakness and you said you understood, but that you didn’t get it. Truthfully, I don’t even know how much of this I believe in. It’s possible I just wanted to argue, always considering the various ways I might look under your eyes.
Atwood famously writes, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
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That same day we eat for two hours which feels like two days on a night it becomes clear to me that we grow closer the more casual we remain. You tell me you like my teeth and you say things like “live in my house,” and “next time” and “in Chicago.” For the camera and for my Twitter and for the better part of me that gets on airplanes every month, we are “husband and wife.” You are the only one I want to let into my apartment at 8 a.m. with no makeup on, the only man I want to sit on the shower floor with for an hour, to take pictures and self-refer as the “elite couple breeding to save mankind,” but as well as I know that you know, we’re not a real couple at all.
“She said to focus on myself, to date other people.”
“She’s just jealous because we’re exciting.”
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It’s hot at the farm-to-table restaurant in May as we banter affectionately on my bathroom breaks. I text you that I want to fly in sooner and I think increasingly about leaving Chicago for good. I try equating the warmth I feel with you to the way I think about New York — how maybe it’s the center of the world for me because I haven’t seen enough of the world — that it’s possible you’re just the guy I think I want because I simply haven’t allowed myself to meet anyone better. I know this doesn’t exactly hold up though — I’ve dated and I’ve loved, but it hasn’t ever been quite like this.
In May I wrote: “I fell in love with you in the aisles of the little Indian store where I first bought dried flowers for my baking and on my bed on the night we ate frozen cake in January, in the hot pot restaurant and in the absences also.”
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It’s June when I'm scrolling screenshots I receive of your Hinge as I do the mental gymnastics to remind myself we’re not dating. I clean my apartment, which I know you know is not as nice as yours, but I bake sourdough and I make an itinerary for us and I try like it’s January again in the event that something changes, but I project as someone entirely dimmer. I feel like a plugged in iPhone with a defunct charger tailing me — the kind that’s constantly vibrating until you set it to a certain position and it charges slowly, but never to 100%.
I struggle to form sentences around you this entire trip and find myself running out of ways to play nice. I keep thinking about how the best version of me is one you’ll never fully see because you never actually called this what it really was and now sadness undergirds everything we do together. I drink double shots of espresso to stay awake during the day because I can’t sleep at night thinking about all of the women you could meet — ones who work in finance, who summer in the Hamptons, who don’t let Sylvia Plath rot their brain. Once riddled with inside jokes spoken in a language only we knew, our conversations suffer and an uncontainable resentment bellows within me. For the first time, I consider it’s possible that I’m making you miserable too.
“You should date someone simpler,” I write in a text I never send.
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I put on a dress and bake a rhubarb cake to mingle with your family on your last visit to Chicago. I don’t even know why I came. Everything I do feels like part of a larger quest for answers I’ll likely never get and a deeper confirmation that you don’t actually like me. We walk beautiful blocks, arm in arm in the afternoon heat as I tell you I'm thinking about moving to New York this August, rendering brief scenes of all that could be.
I think about how many times I imagined us riding the subway before we met. I pictured you sitting and me standing over you, lithe-like and wide-eyed, leaning against the pole because I listened to TV Girl’s “Jump the Turnstile” so many times in December. Reality says we didn't ride on very many trains and I can’t quite remember all of them anyway, except that I know I was constantly doing senseless tradwife bits and you were always laughing. It was freezing in Brooklyn on the day both of my contacts blurred and you were my eyes on the way to L'Appartement 4F.
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“Maybe he’d post me on his Instagram if I died,” I draft tweet.
You’re flipping chicken on the grill as I’m stressing over my father’s lateness.
“You’re here with your man and we’re having a nice night, I don’t know what’s wrong,” you say casually, but agitated.
My man, I think, laughing to myself. We’re more of a joke to me than the viral ones I write to an audience of 30K strangers. I can see you’re being earnest though, and I am once again forced to reckon with the possibility that maybe it’s me who’s ruining a good thing. It’s difficult to ever stay too mad at you.
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These days I think increasingly about what it means to be loved. I think about the woman I was when we met — the indomitable spirit that once governed me, peppy and confident, open to the possibility of anything, unabashed, sprite-like and full of hope. And then of course, the woman I was the last time I saw you — slight and crying over your sink, desperate to fast forward a hurt so terrible and imminent, regretful that I'd ever even answered you. At times I want to wipe away my entire online presence, or possibly just the mere traces of it that led us to each other. I remember standing on the boulevard in June, engorged with anger, my sadness guttural, gruesomely imagining a scene in which I’d throw up a new and entirely different version of myself to escape these feelings.
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“I slip into insecurities so regressive that they almost feel sophisticated,” I wrote in June. “I feel present nowhere, forfeiting opportunities to be happy as I watch you remain virtually unscathed. I know I am oversimplifying, but I can’t help but think about how it will always be me, the dumb woman who couldn’t get over a love everyone knew wasn’t right for her and how for you, who gets a pat on the back for bagging an e-girl for a season, life looks virtually the same. I’m not who I was when I first asked you to make me poached pears if we were to meet and I actually liked you. So much once depended upon that — whether or not I would really come to want you. It feels selfish to consider that maybe I liked you better when I had power and you were just some guy. These days, all I do is spend time falsely hoping you will somehow choose me; an indescribable dread blanketing everything I try so hard to keep beautiful. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never come home to myself.”
Joan Didion says a single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.
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Maggie and I hobbled to Agata & Valentina for a croissant, peach and cheese the morning after. On that Tuesday I went frolicking, saw a New York apartment, drank wine with Maddie and Grant, ate two meatballs from Parm, and went to Brooklyn to say goodbye.
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Ostensibly, the greatest problem in all of this is that I know I wouldn't have changed any of it. So many days with you looked like heaven to me. In December I wrote: “To hurt and to hurt again — these are the perils of a heart constrained by the potential of newness.” I’ve stopped wondering whether any growth has happened within me and started to accept that perhaps — open-hearted and unwashed — this is just me.
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I played out several scenarios of us meeting in August as the plane ascended out of New York, swaying like a Metro North train, but traveling toward a higher atmosphere. You said you’d wonder what I was doing every day. I wrote that I wondered if I would have crying eyes all of July.
“I think about how I frustrate you just by virtue of being myself and I have nowhere to go with this feeling anymore,” I wrote, snot decorating my arm sleeve, my notebook propped on “Blood Meridian.”
When Joan Didion wrote the aforementioned quote about the world being empty, she was talking about her dead husband. I’ve been interpreting her writing’s messages to fuel my own miseries for longer than I can remember. I like to think that she and I are similar and that sometimes, we both get it wrong.
“Isn’t it so strange,” I wrote, “that in all of the times I went to New York for you, I failed to consider that I could’ve been living there, this entire time, for me?”
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“Erica, from you I will need both of these forms filled out. I will need you to run a credit check, I need your bank information, the security deposit, and then the first month’s rent.”
“Wow,” I wrote last week, “It is time to pack so many things.”
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Beautiful text. Very relatable.
As someone working on the works of Michel Houellebecq for my dissertation, I definitely felt something that he writes with beauty: making incredibly strong and powerful love scenes in the extreme banality of life.
Your text made my eye wet a few times upon reading. Thank you
we are two twee hoes, united in grief. this was beautiful; i feel like i am holding my heart in my hands again after reading it. no more flying to new york for men.