Animalistic Feeling

Sunday

The crescent moon hangs high in the sky over Hollywood. At two, Tom parks the car in front of a fire hydrant on my street. We go inside and I feed the cats and then we take all of our clothes off and get into my big white bed and eat Erewhon tortilla chips with organic guacamole and pico de gallo for dinner off of a wooden tray while a playlist I made four summers ago loops on the TV. “What More Can I Say” by The Notations, “Me Myself and Dollar Hell” by Mild High Club, “Seahorse” by King Krule, “Young Lady” by Kid Cudi, etc. We eat in silence for the most part. Sometimes talking. I tell him I want to write for two hours while he sleeps but he convinces me not to. And then we start to have sex but it’s so hot in my bedroom and we’re sweating a lot and after a while of pushing our bodies together he says I need to take a break. And so we lie there in the dark under the ceiling fan, heavy breathing, and the mood is a little bit fragile and my writing is weighing on me and so I get out of bed and zip his hoodie up over my naked body and take my laptop and headphones and say I just need like, two hours and he doesn’t say anything. I sit in the dark kitchen nook and plug my headphones in and put “Gardena’s Finest” on a loop and open my laptop and look at the words I collected all week and start to cry without really knowing why.

Quiet morning, strange mood. Tom’s alarm rings out at nine and we get ready to leave the house in silence. On the 405, he puts “Lifestyle” on for me and I kiss his cheek and he smiles really big and says you know, I’m actually in a great mood, it’s just that you are being quiet and when you are being quiet it makes me want to be quiet too. He drops himself off in the alley and kisses me goodbye and I switch over to the driver’s seat and take his car back to his apartment and walk the dog and then sit at his desk with the intention to write, write, write. But there are all of these leftover, sealed Juul pods lying around and unsmoked joints too and it’s hard to concentrate. I am all alone with my new sobriety for the first time and it doesn’t feel so good. It’s my desire versus my willpower. I keep picking up the Juul and bringing it to my lips and then putting it down without inhaling. Then picking up a joint and bringing it to my lips and then putting it down without lighting. I play this game for an hour until I start to feel insane and call Tom and say should we not just like, finish our supply and then go sober from there? And he says don’t be weak and I say you don’t get it, this is like, way easier for you than it is for me and he says fine, you finish the supply and in the meantime I will be winning. We hang up and I pout in his desk chair and think don’t be weak, don’t be weak and then lift the Juul to my lips again and inhale. The destruction feels quick and light. Like nothing.

I leave Tom’s apartment for work ten minutes later than I should. I clock in on time from my phone on the 405 to avoid any further trouble with Amy and show up late in a little black dress and kitten heels. The day is slow, a little bit painful. Nothing much happens. I spill champagne on a dog. I look at my phone in the courtyard. I sigh. I fix my eyeliner in the kitchen, staring into my distorted reflection through the microwave. I take my lunch break at five. I drive up Wilshire to Erewhon in the early evening sunshine and buy two bottles of heavenly greens, one for Tom and one for me, and a plastic clamshell box of Asian spicy tofu to share. Which we do, later, alone in the break room. The evening wraps precisely seven minutes earlier than standard and I feel disproportionately grateful. Tom and I steal a bottle of cheap champagne from the break room fridge and take it home with us. His idea, obviously.

In the car, we argue about each other’s bad moods. I blame his bad mood on his sobriety. He blames my bad mood on his sobriety too. All of the words we say feel sharp and pointless, arguing just to argue. We sit in his apartment not looking at each other until he says I’m going to walk the dog, do you want to come and when I don’t say anything he looks at me coldly and repeats do you? And I say do you think it might be nice to have like, five minutes outside by yourself? And he says doesn’t make a difference and I narrow my eyes and say well, if it doesn’t make a difference, go alone. And he goes. I open up my laptop and stare at the screen in a fugue state until he comes back.

And later that night, he pours two glasses of champagne. We clink and I take a little sip and then watch him toss back the entirety of his glass, pour another, toss back the entirety of that glass too and then pour a third. I start to worry. We work for something like an hour. He mixes a song and I edit my diary. And then he spins the chair around to look at me and he’s got his beautiful face contorted into something drunk and confrontational and I say what and he comes over and rips my dress off of me and fucks me like he hates me, twice. Right before he is about to come for the second time I say you’re so mad at me and he pulls out and comes on my face. I sit naked on the black leather couch and take the champagne bottle and drink what’s left and feel debased.

Monday

I don’t publish last week’s diaries to the blog till two a.m., and when I do, I feel less relief than I would have had I pressed publish before midnight. I shut my laptop and look at Tom and say done and he says done? And I say done and he puts a joint in his mouth and I widen my eyes and watch him break his twenty-four hours of sobriety and think the destruction feels quick and light.

We wake at nine. Tom’s bedroom is humid and the blackout curtains are drawn. We have sex while one million alarms go off and then Tom gets up to open up the windows and run the shower while I take the dog downstairs for a walk. I’m wearing silver flip flops and Tom’s hoodie over my little Brandy Melville dress, which is coated in dog hair and stained with cum.

I drop Tom off in the alley and then drive up Wilshire to Chevron and fill my tank for sixty-nine dollars and feel terrible about it. So terrible that I drive up Wilshire to 11th and spend like, seven more dollars on six shots of espresso over ice.

I spend exactly an hour alone in the bungalow and during that hour I vacuum everywhere, change the litter, kiss the cats, smoke two joints back to back, take out the trash, bathe, exfoliate, shave, moisturize, swallow my vitamins for the first time since who knows when and get dressed.

I fix my appearance while driving across Los Angeles. Gua sha on Cahuenga. Concealer on the 101. Hair oil on the 405. Eyeliner on the 10 by the Cloverfield exit, where the traffic stalls. Rosewater spray on Lincoln. I park in the dark underground lot and look at myself in the rearview mirror and think fine. I am wearing a cheap dress and expensive shoes and my hair looks fine and my skin looks fine and I am still bleeding, but only a little. I take the elevator up and the day passes fine. Everybody is nice to me. One of the photographers, this middle aged guy, looks me up and down in my little dress and asks me if I’d like to model for him sometime. I reply I can’t, you know I’m shy. The new girl tells me about her cosplay habit. Ted and Leon argue. Leon wins. The new girl learns that it is important to be on Leon’s good side.
I sit with my knees up in the break room, biding time. I download spreadsheets. I look at spreadsheets. I type things into spreadsheets. At five, for lunch, I drive up Wilshire to the Starbucks I like and drink a four shot hot americano with a quarter inch of cream.

Work wraps up painlessly. Tom peels us out of the parking garage in my car so fast that the tires squeal. We smoke a joint on the way to his apartment and then smoke another inside. So much for asceticism. We talk about money and world domination and drink shots of fermented sour cherry liquor and then, just as we are getting ready to pack up and drive to Hollywood, his friend calls and he picks up and starts speaking loudly in a language I don’t understand. So I leash the dog and take him and my big bag downstairs out into the cold and find Tom’s neighbor sitting on the curb with some guy I’ve never seen before. They are smoking spliffs in the moonlight and I get stuck doing small talk with them while waiting for Tom to appear and end up basically performing a stand up routine for the two of them, this pair of sixty-something year old Rastafarians, about my day. They cackle at everything I say and hit each other on the shoulder and it feels nice and then finally Tom appears, still on the phone, and I say thank you and goodnight to my audience. We listen to Empire Of The Sun songs on the 405 and I get a nostalgic stomachache.

It’s eleven o’clock and I am sitting across from Tom at The Melt. I am still in the clothes I wore to work and we are sitting at the same table we sat at when we came here together that one time, forever ago. Forever ago, also known as like, February. I was wearing slacks that night, I think, and a v-neck sweater with no bra and it was cold and I was feeling uncomfortable. Tonight I am not feeling uncomfortable. Or maybe I am, but in newer and more unusual ways. We eat the same things we ate in February, too. I have a cheeseburger with no modifications and he has this very fat and strange burger with a fried egg and a portobello mushroom stuffed inside. We share garlic parmesan fries and sweet potato fries and he drinks Coke just like he did in February and I drink lime la croix. I eat a third of my burger and think about how last time I had a Diet Coke and wonder why I chose lime la croix instead tonight, why I chose to split the reenactment and then think who cares, nobody cares. We don’t leave till midnight.

Tuesday

We drive up Sunset past an enormous and very gorgeous billboard of Rihanna for Dior to this plaza with a great view of La Cienega by the 1 Hotel. Tom leads me out onto the edge of the concrete in the cold. I wear his sweater over my short dress and it’s almost romantic but not romantic exactly because we are not alone. There’s this homeless guy wearing a hospital mask and a hat too big for his tiny head standing like, three hundred feet away from us, and he has this big speaker and he’s playing music really loud. He appears to be pretending or maybe hallucinating that he is performing a DJ set for all of La Cienega. The guy is clearly high and screaming along with feeling to a random assortment of songs and Tom and I smoke a joint and cry laughing. The guy is dancing all crazy and every time the dancing gets too fervent the dog gets upset and starts barking and the guy gets a little nervous and slows the dancing down. But then within a few minutes of dancing more cautiously, he inevitably loses himself in his own music and starts dancing really crazy again and the dog doesn’t like it and the cycle repeats, repeats, repeats. Tom talks at me for a long while about money and success and I am so cold that I can’t concentrate. My legs are covered in goosebumps and the conversation is making me a little bored, he’s saying stuff I’ve heard him say one hundred times before, and eventually I get so miserable that I can’t help myself. I just stand up and start walking toward the car while he’s in the middle of a sentence. He says do you want to leave and I say yes, I’m so cold and he says and you just stood up? And I say I’m sorry, that was like, so rude of me and he doesn’t say anything and maybe he is mad at me.

He drives Hollywood Boulevard back to the bungalow really fast and we don’t talk at all and he’s playing rap music at a really high volume and I feel nervous but then he parks the car on my street and puts his hands on me and starts talking about nice things.

One o’clock in the afternoon. Wake up. Morning sex. Call my mother from bed. Ask her about her trip to DC and about my uncle and about how she’s feeling, generally. She tells me she just freshly collapsed into her bed post-airport. She has the sliding glass doors open in her bedroom and I can hear the exhaustion in her voice. She said that her trip went well and that she met several senators and that my uncle’s new house is gorgeous, green with brick and big white columns. She says that at night, the lights are all warm and incandescent. She keeps yawning into the phone and when she asks me if I’m alone I say no and she tells me to call her back when I am so that she can find out what the hell is going on. She says that she wants to come to LA for her birthday in June but can’t promise me anything because her life is always changing. We say love you and miss you and bye and then hang up and Tom lights a joint and we lie around looking at our phones in my dark bedroom.

We fall asleep like that sometime around two and don’t wake up again until eight. Slovenly, romantic. The dog growls at Bunny and Bunny growls back. We have sex and get into the shower together and he sits on the edge of the porcelain while I shave my legs. I go into the closet and look at all of the clothing piled up on the floor and sigh and ask Tom what I should wear and he comes in and sighs too and then says pants or skirt and flips a coin. Pants. Jeans or otherwise? Jeans. And then I put on a Brandy Melville sweater and kitten heels and put my wallet and keys and phone and weed and vape and lighter into my bag. His car has two parking tickets tucked under the windshield when we get outside.

I sit across from Tom at a big table in a dark empty corner on the patio of Aroma Cafe. There’s a chill in the air and “Die For You” by The Weeknd is playing too loud and there’s hookah smoke blowing all over and I don’t feel so well. We order chicken tenders off of the kid’s menu and greek salad and bread and roast chicken and mashed potatoes and I drink two cappuccinos even though it’s nine p.m. The greek salad comes with this unappetizing mountain of shredded cheese and none of the plated food looks right in the low blue light.

Just before midnight the moon is a thin crescent, hung up above my street between a palm tree and The Roosevelt sign. There’s this warm wind blowing in through the open window while Tom and I sit at the kitchen nook talking about summer. Summer. Things we want to do this summer. Drive to San Francisco. Drive to Palm Springs. Drive to Vegas and then Zion. Fly somewhere far away for my birthday. Sell my car and buy something cheap and gorgeous and vintage and unreliable, maybe. Make money. Make music. Swim in the ocean. Get tans that last through winter. Drink heavenly greens and go to El Matador once a week. Stay codependent. Do everything together. Eat well. Drink well. Live fast. Write stories.

Wednesday

It’s two in the morning again and we are in our underwear in my dark bedroom again and Tom is working on his laptop again and I am reading something about Garden of Allah on Internet Archive and getting sleepy. I need to be awake in four hours. On the freeway in five. At my desk in six. Four, five, six. Feel nothing when I think about these numbers. These numbers mean nothing to me. Something to count and pass. Want to smoke a joint and fall asleep on Tom’s chest and let them pass.

I sleep dreamlessly for two or three hours and wake up at six a.m. to “This Charming Man” in my LA Apparel running shorts and white bra feeling psychedelic from sleep deprivation. We have sex and then he tells me that he didn’t sleep all night, that I turned my back to him and started breathing heavy and he put his headphones on and kept going, all night, until my alarm rang out and I turned back to him. He says I miss you so much when you sleep, you always turn to the window, away from me completely, and it’s like you disappear but then in the morning you open your eyes and come right back to me.

The abandoned car wash on Beverly Glen next to that big church looks so beautiful in the morning light.

I work from eight to four. The new girl calls out and Amy says I don’t like this, I don’t like this. Joe comes to my desk with two pieces of news. First he tells me that Tom cornered him last weekend and told him to give me space. Then he tells me that he quits. I drink three black coffees and feel euphoric in my exhaustion. I complete every task. I work fast. On lunch, I walk to Target in my kitten heels and buy a tin of honey roasted almonds and a black tank top. I eat eleven almonds and then throw away the tin.

Tom picks me up in the alley at four. He tells me that he had a meeting at nine and then slept all day. I tell him about Joe quitting after that little chat they had and at first his mood is all serious but then we laugh and drive up Wilshire to Erewhon and order cowboy brew and cococcino at the tonic bar and then gather an assortment of foods for lunch. Mulligatawny soup, French bread, dried mango, an organic chocolate chip cookie the size of Tom’s big palm and spicy tofu. We want to make it back to Hollywood eventually but traffic is clogged up and it’ll take an hour if we go now, so we drive to his apartment instead and spend about fifteen minutes sitting still at that fucked up light on Barrington.

We make it back upstairs to his apartment and he draws the blackout curtains and sets our food on the bed. I want to nap and feel sick of being trapped in my pinstriped slacks but when I ask Tom if I can borrow a pair of briefs to sleep in, he hesitates and thinks for a minute and then says wouldn’t that be strange, you wearing my underwear, men’s underwear? And I ask him what could possibly be strange about that and he can’t answer and I don’t push it, just lie down in my pinstriped slacks and consider the fragility of his masculinity. I take a bite of tofu and then push everything away and close my eyes and experience, for the first time in a long time, an extreme and undeniable yearning to be all alone. I do not know what to do with this yearning and I am sure this yearning will go away soon, dissipate, get replaced by a different yearning, one of the yearnings that comes as a side effect of my codependent tendencies. But in this moment, my yearning to be all alone feels like the truth, like a ray of sunlight piercing through a blanket of clouds.

Thursday