notes from may: I'M IN ECSTASY

I find writing hard when life starts to pick up. I know that isn’t a special thought or a new sentiment, but I think in terms of my life, it’s worth acknowledging because it’s definitely an important sign. When things start to lean toward the overwhelmingly positive, it’s hard for me to take a moment to pause. When what’s sat in front of me becomes stranger and better than the thought I could have had about it in my head after walking away, I find that my fingers become shy, and even a little scared, to try to do the wonderful things justice. May proved itself to be very sweet and very weird. I was running from a deadline, getting caught in the rain, and shaking my pockets for money to no avail, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I ended my nights the same, staring at my ceiling in my bedroom in Bushwick, alone, with an arm extended off the edge of my bed, wishing that I could grab the day by its sleeve, and ask for one last look before it slips out my door and becomes forever distorted, but a little bit kinder, as a memory.

All that’s to say— I think I’m in love with my life again. I think I’m in love with myself again. It took me a moment to get here, but I’m snapping together. It feels different when I put my shoes on. I’m back in sync. Nothing is that deep, nothing is that serious, but everything is incredibly special.

I don’t think I’m the only person feeling like this, my friends are starting to feel it too. When I run into them on the street, we gossip and end up running, screaming, unable to contain ourselves about how good everything feels. Maybe it’s because we’re all finding some type of grip on our personhood, or maybe it’s something stupid like the planets, or the weather. I don’t know. It’s sweet.

Here are my notes from May:

• I do believe that my life will end in a bike-related accident. Not sure if I will be riding a bike, or if I will be hit by one, but the things I feel when I see a row of docked Citi Bikes are too strong just to mark off as fear alone. It’s a premonition. When I see a bike, it makes my bones hurt. I can picture my body crunching on impact too clearly, all smushy like a pumpkin from those videos, the Oregon Zoo used to post of their elephants around Halloween. Occasionally, someone will ask me if I wanna ride a Citi Bike with them, and I always decline. I don’t wanna die any time soon.

• I seem to be the only person in the world who seems to remember that Paul McCartney released an album in 2012 called Kisses On The Bottom. I remember seeing it displayed in a Starbucks up near the cash register—back when they used to sell CDs—and being horrified and a little sad. I was thirteen years old, and recall this being one of the first times I felt railing-reaching, second-hand embarrassment. To this day, I still wonder which yes-man in Paul’s life at the time gave him such an enthusiastic response that he decided Kisses On The Bottom was a name fit for a body of work.

• Tried to get into a Met Gala afterparty with my friend Ivy, but ended up standing in the rain for a few hours instead. I closed out the night at a dive bar, cold and soaked, wearing a dress I thrifted back in college that can only be generously described as transparent lingerie inspired by the movie Showgirls (1995).

• I can’t help but stare into the phone of whoever is sitting next to me on the subway. I feel like I'm missing out on so much life if I’m not peering over someone’s shoulder. True fans of the human existence *peer*. I sat next to a man the other day on the M that was texting someone whose contact was in his phone as “Martha The REAL Shitter”.

• Obsessed with describing myself as a “big feeler”.

• Finally found the correct charger for my vibrator after prison-rationing the last 30 minutes of battery it had left for roughly three months. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to walk into Babeland and let them help me. It’s not that I was embarrassed, it might actually be the opposite, I think a small part of me enjoyed walking around holding so much freaky-cum-monster energy inside of me on a regular day. Though I’m more private than I let on, I don’t really harbor a lot of secrets; I like to tell people things, and though I did share this information at a few inopportune moments, it still felt like something wild between me and me.

• Explaining who Baby New Year is (x) to someone who doesn’t know who Baby New Year is, is actually one of the hardest things a person can do. He’s a holiday adjacent character, but he isn’t major like Santa Claus, or as important as an angel, and he ranks right below the Easter Bunny. I find it odd that he seems like he’s fallen by the wayside. It’s awkward trying to regurgitate his lore to others, especially when someone’s really not getting it or is extremely unfamiliar with him. ..what do you mean he is a giant naked baby that wears a top hat?

• Adding “minivans with sliding doors” right next to umbrellas on the list of things I’m not energetically aligned with.

• Got stoned and walked around the neighborhood from midnight to 2am listening to the new Yung Lean album (x). It’s pretty good. I thought about how all my fantasies have mostly been completed or ruined, and now I’m in this nice state of flux. I circled the block trying to think of some new ones, stopped to watch the light of a police car reflect off of a tree for a little too long, and came up blank.

• I yelled at the mime who was hired to work my roommate Taryn’s birthday. I thought it was very rude that he refused to break character to help sing “Happy Birthday” when the cake came out. Like, I understand that his job is to be silent, but I think everyone, mime or not, should drop everything to celebrate Taryn in song when called for. I was in his ear like, “USE YOUR REAL VOICE”, “PLEASE START SINGING THE SONG NOW”. I understand that this might seem rude or mean to the mime, but he was propositioned for a threesome immediately after, so I think he’s fine.

• Ask yourself, “am I bold or do I struggle with self-awareness?”.

• I had the pleasure of guesting on my friend Tess’ (x) podcast Narrative. We talked about the internet, my ongoing online odyssey, aliens, and literally everything else. I feel like I come across as more myself here than I have on podcasts in the past. Give it a spin for me?

• When I tell people my writing mainly focuses on myself, they almost always ask me if I also write fiction. I have no interest in writing fiction. I would only write fiction if I were writing something so painfully true that I had to change a few details and a couple of names. I like the story that is in front of me. The character that I play is my favorite character, and I find her life to be challenging, but extremely compelling. I understand it’s self-centered to only create in shapes of myself, but I don’t care.

• My therapist asked me to compile a list of information I’m comfortable sharing with newer people. I told her that sometimes I tend to freeze up and say too little or too much, or get stuck in a loop of telling the same awful stories that make me regret opening my mouth completely.

• It’s understandably tough for me to accept being happy. I think anyone who has struggled with mania in the past probably understands the point I’m at right now. Is this TRUE happiness? I’ve been running checks to see if this is all too good to be true, but I think this is true happiness, I don’t feel the urge to shoplift, I dont feel a God complex coming on, and I was just described as ‘even keeled’ the other day by a friend.

• I’ve started going on walks again. Sometimes, I wake up and go to the Williamsburg Bridge, walking back and forth until I feel I’ve overstayed my welcome. When I lived in Los Angeles, I used to walk miles. I lived there without a car and mostly relied on my feet, the kindness of friends, and Bird scooters to get me where I needed to go. I stopped walking when I moved to New York, I’m still drawing conclusions as to why, but I’m happy to see my habit return. I purchased a selfie stick earlier this month to bring with me on my walks as a silly ploy to solidify their return. I’m a selfish-sucker when it comes to self-documentation, so of course I’ll go outside if I can use my new toy for exploitation.

• A Starbucks croissant is a true culinary achievement, it may be one of the only neutral foods that exist.

• I’ve become obsessed with a man I found on Instagram Reels who has an account called “some1sdiary_” (x) where he chronicles the wavering state of his emotions about his recent breakup with his girlfriend, whom he often cites as a ‘classic girly-girl’ type. I’m addicted to his process, and I think about him when I’m not on my phone. This man is creating new emotions I’ve never seen before, and I struggle to assign adjectives to his feelings when trying to describe his account in passing. Sometimes he is angry, other times he’s smiling, but pissed. Again, words don’t do him justice. He is perfect.

some1sdiary_

A post shared by @some1sdiary_

• I found out that the ocean is six miles deep this month. I didn’t receive this information well and fact-checked it multiple times. I always felt like the ocean had to be at least a thousand miles deep because it’s the ocean— it’s the marker of emotional depth.

• I think a lot of life is about what Angel Olsen sings about in “Spring” (x). A lot of music has attempted to speak about the romantic relationship we all have with the passage of time, but I don’t think anyone else has nailed it in such simple terms. I take so much pleasure in experiencing a moment that calls for a “Spring” re-listen, and I feel lucky that they’re happening more frequently. I cry every time. There is so much life around me—a few of my friends are having babies, and others are still struggling to land on their feet, and I just feel so happy being there as a witness.

• Had to explain that I was biracial to my sweet white female barista after she got very confused as to how I tanned so quickly after the sun started coming out. She asked, “Did you go on vacation quickly?”.

• I think lime juice on my hands is my favorite smell.

• I wake up every morning in horror because my bedroom floor looks like war. I don’t know if it’s good to feel self-disgust so early in the morning, but I don’t think I can solve this problem until I have a bigger room. My room is so tiny that sometimes wearing a sweater or coat inside of it seems like an excessive use of the space—I think that’s the tricky thing about New York, we’re all just always dreaming about space. I’m always on the tip of my toes, looking into other people’s windows and trying to assess their situation. Corny, but I have an aspirational folder on my computer that contains a single image of a small apartment with lots of storage space. Maybe I could downsize everything to fix the floor situation, but I truly don’t have a lot to begin with.

• My roommates and I have taken to yelling ‘I’M IN ESCTASY’ whenever something exciting happens to one of us. It’s an important thing to declare to moments of excitement to a room of people, and it might be even more important to claim ecstasy when it comes to you.

• Guilty of picking up FaceTimes while I’m in the shower and trying to carry on the conversation while I’m wet and also naked. I’ll pick up any phone call at any time. I’ve been suffering from time-sensitive whiplash since I missed a FaceTime in 2012 when my friend ran into one of the guys from Workaholics (x) at LAX baggage claim, and had him on the phone very enthusiastically (allegedly), waiting to say hello.

• The other night at a party, I ran into a girl I had been avoiding for almost two years now. I clocked her right when I arrived, but was nervous to break the tension. She grabbed me and brought me into a big hug, after we shared a laugh that dissolved whatever nonsense we felt towards each other. I think it’s really beautiful how most women are desperate to forgive each other, and I also think it’s funny how we get caught up in the dramatics of hate only to see another beautiful face looking back into ours, thinking, “I felt all of this towards another angel??”. We exchanged numbers and took a photo that I looked absolutely awful in, but it doesn’t matter, my heart is resting different now.

• I never allowed myself to test the reflexes of my own physical beauty until recently. I barred myself from it, and honestly didn’t even know I was north of hideous until roughly two years ago. In my past relationships, I’ve struggled secretly to take my partners seriously because, in the back of my mind, I believed if someone found my looks to have any type of value, they must have a deeply flawed relationship with good taste. I always felt like I had to cling to humor or clothing as a means to orbit as an object of desire—I’ve never been one to bat my eyelashes or even try to. But this month, something clicked into place. I’m finally allowing the world to treat me like a pretty girl. I feel a new type of confidence, something that I’ve been living without or maybe only felt in pin-prick doses throughout my existence.

• I end this month standing on a toilet at a bar called Acme at a boy named Adam’s birthday party. I was with Ivy, my friend Sam, and Taryn. I was being a complete menace, ended up crawling on a couch, flashing my underwear by accident, and running into two of my spit sisters. It feels really good to have allotted time to be stupid, and truly, it’s something that I think I should focus more on. It’s important to have moments where you feel like a dumb whore, especially if you’re like me and have trouble learning to loosen the leash. I think the months to come might be all-timers, I’m breathing out my tired stoicism and doing pure magic freebase. I can’t believe I lost sight of how much charm there is out there for me to make a meal of. I guess I’m in ecstasy.

DECLARE ECSTASY IMMEDIATELY!!!! xoxoxo

☆ Mackenzie ⋆｡°✩