While I’m scrolling on TikTok, I often become surrounded by this feeling of unease. My For You Page will narrow in on something so specific that it will make me almost nauseous. Recently, I came across a video of one of my old friends from college that I haven’t spoken to in a while. I did not follow them on the app and had denied TikTok access to my contacts long ago.
As the video starts, they say, I’m going to be ranking some of my old college outfits. The first picture pops up on the screen, and it’s a picture with me. I am staring at my own body. We are standing next to each other, at a denim-on-denim party. We are both head to toe in denim, posing. We look extremely nineteen.
The experience shocked me, more than I expected, to be absentmindedly scrolling through my phone, and then suddenly being confronted by a picture of myself. My For You Page delivered the ultimate personalization. It got so close to me that it became me. The rest of the video consisted of pictures of parties I had attended, pictures in my old dorm room. I was asked to view myself and my life as I would any other kind of content.
Some days, I enjoy the ease TikTok seems to be able to show me videos catered to my interest. But when it can find my image and send it back to me, is when I begin to get this feeling, as if I’m being not only observed but also understood. But who, exactly, is looking at me? And how do they know me so well?
*
I like to think of myself as a discerning and rational person. But I often find myself almost instinctively looking to the media on my phone to answer questions about myself, watching YouTube tarot readers, TikTok astrologers, or Instagram therapists with clipboards in hand, ready to diagnose. If this video found you it’s meant for you and if you do these three things you might have ADHD and these are the five signs you might secretly be queer. I’ve heard friends and influencers say that TikTok knew they were gay before they did, or that TikTok knew they were autistic before they got diagnosed.
This phenomenon has a name: Algorithmic Conspirituality. In the research paper “In FYP We Trust: The Divine Force of Algorithmic Conspirituality.” They say that the term “captures occasions when people find personal, often revelatory connections to content algorithmically recommended to them on social media and explain these connections as a kind of algorithmically mediated cosmic intervention.”
This is evident in how we describe the content that the algorithm prescribes us. Often people will talk about how they are on ‘gay TikTok,’ ‘NYC TikTok,’ ‘ADHD TikTok.’ These different ‘sides’ of TikTok are often spoken about as if there is some sort of pride in the sorting that the algorithm has done. As if the algorithm has not just sorted content to show you, but is in fact also, sorting you as a person into an important and defined category.
*
It’s obvious now that these algorithms have material effects on the course of people’s lives and beliefs. When I’m walking down the street in New York, I can see it. Everyone has let their algorithm dress them. I know what TikTok that girl copied her outfit from. The tall boots, boxer shorts, slick back bun, hoop earrings. Last year it was Urban Outfitters, corset top, Addias Sambas. Next year, it will provide us with a different uniform. There is almost a religious aspect to this, the way the algorithm provides us with rules to live by, a frame with which to shape our life. Instead of looking to religion to learn how to eat, talk, dress, we can now gaze into our phones.
*
My first ever memory is being four years old and at church. I was sitting on a rug with a group of other small children. I was handed a bible and asked to read a passage.
The problem was, of course, that I was a toddler and I did not know how to read. I think I had just freshly learned the alphabet. I looked down at the words in front of me, God’s word, and I could not make sense of them.
That imprint of God has always stayed with me. That there was something sort of inaccessible or intangible about God. That God’s power was in some way wrapped up in the fact that I did not understand him totally.
When I stopped believing in God as a teenager, I tried to fill the religion-shaped hole for a long time. But I think the internet was the only thing that came close to filling that void for me. It gives me that same feeling; the feeling that I’m in the presence of something greater than myself, something that knows information I don’t. It’s not just that the mathematics behind the algorithms are beyond my comprehension. Misunderstanding can often feel mythical, if you frame it correctly.
An interaction with the internet can often parallel an interaction with the sublime; it mimics the experience of being alone without feeling alone. It mimics the feeling of being understood by something distinctly unhuman.
*
This belief that the algorithm is guiding us towards our true selves and our futures is, of course, not without consequences. Most glaring when looking at the history of algorithms pushing people towards various forms of alt-right radicalization.
In episode 145 of the podcast “Reply All,” New York Times Tech Columnist Kevin Roose discusses something called “The Gangnam Style problem.” When YouTube first launched the ‘recommended videos’ feature it was designed to lead users towards more popular content. “The Gangnam Style problem” was the observation that if you watched enough recommended videos, you would always end up at the Gangnam Style music video because it was the most popular video at the time, no matter where you started. You begin your YouTube journey watching videos of watching Drag Race recaps or cats knocking glasses off tables or Monster Truck Rallies, but eventually, there you would land, watching the Gangnam Style music video again and again.
YoutTube realized that this wasn’t the best method for maintaining user watch time. Roose said, “In 2015, YouTube makes another huge change to their algorithm. They’re trying to fix the Gangnam Style problem. And they do that by tweaking the algorithm in a whole bunch of different ways. So now, the algorithm starts recommending videos to people that they’ve never heard of, often, videos more niche than what they’re watching.”
One of the consequences of this algorithm change was that it moved people to the fringes. If someone started out watching a video that was mildly conspiratorial, the next video would be even more so. A user could start out watching a video explaining a conspiracy theory about the moon landing, and end up watching a video about Q Anon or Sandy Hook denial. Roose said, “this is how previously obscure conspiracy theorists, racists, etcetera suddenly started getting a ton of new traffic from YouTube.”
*
Even if it isn’t as something as pointedly horrific as alt-right radicalization, the algorithm is still guiding you towards parting with two crucial things: your time and your money. With TikTok shop, Amazon affiliate links, influencer brand deals, scrolling through your phone can feel like walking through one long advertisement. I’ve found myself convinced that I absolutely need a new item, until pausing for a moment and realizing it would be utterly useless, that it is nothing more than a piece of plastic.
And even if you have lost nothing other than your attention, you have lost something precious.
*
I was talking to my friend over a drink when I asked her what her screen time had been that day. Mine had just surpassed six hours, and I was feeling embarrassed over my excessiveness. And I wanted to know if this kind of excessiveness was normal. My friend scrolled into her phone and responded casually and frankly, twenty-four hours.
A full twenty-four hours? I repeated back to her. We both laughed. She realized that she had just misread the number. That had been her total for the week.
Even though it was just a mistake, I couldn’t stop thinking about the exchange. I thought it pointed to something, that perhaps it could be possible to believe, even if for a second, that we could literally spend a full day on our phone.
*
I was born in 1997, I remember when the internet made a sound, when you could not be on the internet and talk on the phone at the same time. But perhaps most importantly, the internet of my childhood stayed in one place. There was the family computer that stayed in the basement, and when you wanted to log on, you had to descend down the stairs and visit it, like a friend.
And the internet also seemed to have an end. Even as a teen on Tumblr, I remember scrolling to the bottom of my dashboard. And sure you could refresh, but you could also, reach the bottom, a bottom.
As I have grown into an adult, the internet has grown into an endless and ever-present entity. I could scroll on TikTok, seemingly, for the rest of my life if I wanted to. I could live my whole existence simply looking, absorbing what my phone has to offer. The internet has become a confusing mix of both smaller and larger, in that it now could fit in your hand while also containing a kind of infinity.
The progression is slow, incremental. And now we are left, sliding into our pockets–something larger than ourselves.
Nora Rose Tomas is a queer writer and poet based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from Columbia University. You can follow her on Instagram @dr_sappho.
For my friends (and neighbors) in Iowa: Ben, Anya, Hope, Laura, Echo, Sarah, Jennifer, Abby, Keenan, Nils, Dallin, Derick, Tyler, Brittney, Allana, and Becca, with love and gratitude
“Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.” —Marilynne Robinson, Home
“There were several roads near by, but it did not take her long to find the one paved with yellow bricks. Within a short time she was walking briskly toward the Emerald City, her silver shoes tinkling merrily on the hard, yellow road-bed. The sun shone bright and the birds sang sweetly, and Dorothy did not feel nearly so bad as you might think a little girl would who had been suddenly whisked away from her own country and set down in the midst of a strange land.” —L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
I’ve never been to Iowa before, and yet something about the place feels like home as soon as I set foot outside the air-conditioned Cedar Rapids Airport and a hot wave of humid Midwestern August air slams into me. The feeling is simultaneously comforting and unsettling, as déjà vus usually are.
At first, I attribute the sensation to exhaustion from the long journey and a sign of oncoming jetlag, but before I get a chance to fully unpack it, Ben pulls up and picks me up. The feeling persists during our drive into Iowa City, rushing in through the open windows together with the hot air and swirling around the car. We’re headed to Ben’s apartment—I’m taking over his lease and will be living there for the next two years. In just a few days, he’ll be off to Bulgaria on a Fulbright, and staying at my place in Sofia. We make a joke about how we’re swapping lives. But it’s no joke.
Ben parks in front of 725 East College Street and, as we unload my suitcases from the car, I look up and down the tree-lined Midwestern street—rows of houses on both sides, freshly mowed front lawns in front of them, wide paved sidewalks between the lawns and the street—and it finally hits me. It’s not a déjà vu—it’s a déjà vécu. Nineteen years ago, probably almost to the day, having just arrived from Bulgaria, I was unloading my suitcases on a tree-lined Midwestern street just like this one, but in St. Paul, Minnesota, only a couple of hundred miles north of here. It was the first time I was setting foot in the US, as a bright-eyed eighteen-year-old about to start college.
Now, almost two decades later, I’m back in the Midwest and about to start school again. This time around, the school in question is actually an MFA program, I’m probably a little less bright-eyed and certainly a lot less terrified.
Before the semester starts, I’m invited to a welcome event by a lake on the edge of Iowa City. Laura, a new friend from my program, picks me up, so we can drive over together. For a brief second, when she puts the venue’s address into Google Maps, I think I’m hallucinating, but then realize the name of the boulevard we’re after is McCollister, and not Macalester, which is the name of the college I went to in St. Paul. After we arrive, as we make our way over to the venue’s main building, I look up and see, flying overhead, an enormous flock of what Laura tells me are white pelicans, on their way from Minnesota to Mexico. The image of the birds, migrating from their summer home to their winter one, imprints on my mind, and the strangely comforting thought of them flying south in the fall, then back north in the spring, year after year, stays with me for a long time afterward.
Back when I was an undergraduate student, so much about my life in the US seemed new and strange that I very much felt like I was living in a foreign country. Now that I’ve come back, many of those very same things feel cozy and familiar. Most of them are so ordinary, they hardly seem worth mentioning: the shape of light switches and the way they feel between my fingers when I turn them on and off, for instance, or the smell of laundry after it comes out of the dryer, the ringing signal when I make a phone call, the screech and slam of the screen door to the back porch, the taste of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup on weekends, the wide open late-summer skies at sunset, or the distant sound of freight trains in the middle of the night.
These sights, sounds, smells, and sensations continue to accumulate over the following days and weeks, and they keep adding to my feeling of having returned to a familiar place. A couple of months after my arrival, I’m walking by the golden-domed Old Capitol building in the middle of campus, which is just a few minutes away from my apartment, when a newly installed sign of enormous yellow letters stops me in my tracks. It says HOMECOMING. Although I know it’s referring to an American university tradition featuring marching bands, parades, and football games that I feel no connection to, I can’t help but think that in some way, the sign is also for me, that in some inadvertent way it is also commemorating my own sense of having come home.
But besides the comfort brought on by my daily encounters with familiar tastes, noises, scents, and sights, there is also something else, something much more profound, that makes Iowa City feel like home. Back when I was a college student at Macalester, my daily existence was carried out almost entirely in English, which at the time still felt like a relatively new, still foreign language I’d only learned recently. During those four years of college, I would often spend weeks, and sometimes even months, without writing, reading, or even uttering anything in Bulgarian, except for the very occasional, very quick—because they were so expensive—phone calls with my parents and the only slightly more frequent, homesick-ridden emails with family and friends, written in Bulgarian but with Latin letters (Mnogo mi lipsvate!). Cyrillic keyboards used to be impossibly difficult to install.
This time around, however, Bulgarian is very much an integral part of the fabric of my daily life in Iowa. To some extent, because I now can—and do—make free unlimited phone calls to family and exchange regular instant messages with friends back in Sofia. But more importantly it’s because, as a student in the Translation Workshop, I’m constantly engaging with the Bulgarian language, reading it closely, thinking about, exploring and discussing its intricacies, working on bringing it into English. By this point, nearly two decades later, my relationship to English, my so-called “target language,” has also evolved significantly—it’s worked its way up to an equal, though not quite symmetrical, footing with my Bulgarian, and it often takes precedence in my thoughts, reveries, and reflexes. Switching between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets has become as effortless and instantaneous as pressing the Globe key on the keyboard, both literally and metaphorically. It gradually dawns on me that it’s precisely this dual existence, this daily practice of living actively and fully in both languages, regardless of my physical location on the actual globe, that feels like home.
Perhaps as a bizarre but natural extension of all this, I also discover it’s possible to feel at home and homesick¹ at the same time. The realization strikes me during the spring of my first year in Iowa City, while I’m browsing around Artifacts, one of my favorite shops in town. Although its selection of antiques is enviably diverse, ranging from an undated porcelain statuette of Saint Christopher made in Italy to Moroccan rugs from the ’70s and everything in between, I’m nevertheless taken aback when I stumble upon a framed print of Sofia’s most recognizable landmark—the golden-domed Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. A fifteen-minute walk from my apartment, it looms large and squat in the very center of Sofia, where the roads are paved in the yellow cobblestones, which have become another major symbol of the city, although in the print they appear covered in snow.
The print is the kind of predictable, ubiquitous souvenir sold in every tourist shop around Sofia and the sort of kitschy artwork I’d immediately, and snobbishly, dismiss if I encountered it back in Bulgaria. But here—in a musty, cluttered shop 5,340 miles, an ocean, and a continent and a half away—it’s all I can do to not immediately buy it and hang it over the writing desk in my Iowa apartment. Twenty-five dollars for a piece of home seems like a steal.
A similarly irrational feeling arises in me a couple of months later, as I board the plane at Cedar Rapids Airport to fly back to Sofia for the summer. I feel as though I’m leaving home and—paradoxically, at the very same time—heading home. It makes me think of the pelicans I saw in the fall—they’ve probably just made their way from Mexico back to Minnesota, without, I imagine, much concern about which of the two places is their “real” home. As if I need to be hit over the head even harder, my neighbor Anya has given me a book to read on the long series of flights and layovers connecting America’s Midwest to Europe’s East: it’s a novel by Marilynne Robinson, who taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for 25 years, until just a couple of years ago. The book is called Home. By the time I reach Sofia, I’ve devoured it.
The fictional Iowa town of Gilead in the novel has nothing in common with the real-life Bulgarian capital of Sofia, just as I hardly have anything in common with the character of Glory who “returns home with a broken heart and a turbulent past.” And yet, something about the description of her (and her siblings’) homecoming resonates with how I’ve previously felt (and, as it turns out, will feel) about going back to Sofia: “The town seemed different to her, now that she had returned there to live. She was thoroughly used to Gilead as the subject and scene of nostalgic memory. How all the brothers and sisters [ . . .] had loved to come home, and how ready they always were to leave again. How dear the old place and the old stories were to them, and how far abroad they had scattered. The past was a very fine thing, in its place. But her returning now, to stay, as her father said, had turned memory portentous. To have it overrun its bounds this way and become present and possibly future, too—they all knew this was a thing to be regretted.”
At that point, though, there is nothing for me to regret—not yet, anyway, since I’m only returning to Sofia for the summer and considerations like those described by Robinson are either behind me, or, as I will eventually discover, ahead of me.
But the home-themed leitmotif also extends into my sojourn, as temporary as it may be. My arrival in Sofia coincides with the official launch of a project I’ve been involved with from a distance, entailing the installation around the city of a dozen or so benches shaped like the Cyrillic letters that don’t have typographic equivalents in the Latin alphabet. Each bench is accompanied by a poem that in some way relates to its corresponding letter, and over the past few months in Iowa, I’ve been working on translating some of the poems into English. It’s an endeavor that seems doomed to fail by its very essence—since the very thing at the center of each poem doesn’t even exist in the receiving language—but that doesn’t mean I haven’t given it the proverbial old college try. Some of the resulting translations are, in my opinion at least, rather successful; others, admittedly less so.
One of the poems, by Krassimira Djissova, is originally called “Дом,” which is pronounced almost like “dome” and literally means “home”—and so “Home” is how I decide to render the title in English. I’m satisfied with my decision until I see the bench that goes with the poem in person, on a side path right by the famous yellow cobblestones, and the deficiency of my translation becomes quite apparent. In contrast to the H of “Home,” which doesn’t resemble a house by any stretch of the imagination², the letter Д, especially when four-dimensional and made of wood, looks like a miniature house with a slanted roof.
In retrospect, it occurs to me that a possible solution may have been to come up with an English title that contains the same root as the Bulgarian word дом (and, not incidentally, the English “dome”), which is obviously borrowed from domus, the Latin word meaning “house,” “home,” or “native place.” So—to the guaranteed outrage of some conservative readers—a better choice, conceptually if not semantically, may have been to translate the poem’s title as “Domicile,” or some other related English word containing the domus root (“domestic,” “domain,” and even “condominium” come to mind). This approach would have had a couple of advantages. Firstly, although typographically different, the Cyrillic Д and the Latin D share the same sound—already a small feat. A second, less obvious but just as important, consideration is that the letter D, like its Cyrillic “equivalent,” has a shape that could also be likened to a dome, albeit a sideways one, or—with a bit of imagination—even to the kind of home we all dwell in for up to nine months before coming out into the world.
The letters D and Д are, in theory at least, as incongruous and mutually illegible as the cities of Iowa City and Sofia. But in practice, I feel equally (though not identically) at home in both cities, just as I’m able to read both letters with equal confidence and employ both languages to which they belong with equal (un)ease. And yet, as I see it, the Bulgarian letter has a significant advantage over its Latin doppelgänger. While D resembles a sideways dome or the “roof” of the womb we can never return to, the letter Д—thanks to the two descenders that extend below its roof-like top part—looks like a house that can walk. Also known as “feet,” these descenders seem like the perfect embodiment of (the possibility for) mobility, which has become an essential element in how I’ve come to understand, define, and experience the concept of home over the years: as something fundamentally movable; something that can travel, relocate, be at two places at once; something I can leave and then return to; something that even when fixed in a single place contains fragments of other places.³
Eventually, my program in Iowa ends, and I do return to Sofia and its very own yellow cobblestones (which, rather tellingly, turn out to have actually come from elsewhere⁴).
Just a few months later, though, I get the chance to go back to Iowa City for Thanksgiving. I see old friends, visit old haunts (including a long browse at Artifacts), even get to do laundry and ride around town on a bike that my friend Abby has lent me—and at first, it all feels like another homecoming.
But on my second or third night in town, on my way to Laura’s house for dinner, I bike past my old place on 725 East College Street. There’s something uncanny—unheimlich, or literally “‘un-homely,” as they say in German—about seeing the lights in the windows of my old apartment are on, though I’m no longer living there. I realize that the place—the apartment, but also the town, and by extension even the Midwest and the US as a whole—is no longer a home, and I’ve now reverted to being a guest. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
On my desk back in Sofia, where I’m now sitting and writing this, I keep a snow globe with an Iowa tornado. It’s the kind of kitschy souvenir I’d usually snobbishly dismiss, but this one has great sentimental value. It’s a gift from my friend Becca who gave it to me as a keepsake to remind me of the time we got evacuated from a bar in downtown Iowa City because of an approaching tornado. Inside the snow globe’s sphere is a house swept up in a tornado, and whenever I look at it, it always makes me think of Dorothy of Oz. As a child and a young adult, the idea of having my home swept up and finding myself “set in the midst of a strange land” used to seem terrifying. Over the years, however, it has grown not just significantly less scary, but even, and increasingly so, quite appealing. Unlike Dorothy, for whom “there’s no place like home,” I’ve come to discover that there can be, have been, and probably will be a few places that to me do feel very much like home(s). And just so I don’t forget this, next to the snow globe on my desk I keep a paperweight that also has a globe in it, but that one depicts the world.
¹ The word “homesickness” is a calque of the German Heimweh (from Heim, meaning “home,” and Weh, meaning “woe” or pain”), which is usually used in the phrase “krank von [meaning, “sick with”] Heimweh.” The word for the phenomenon in Bulgarian—носталгия (nostálgiya)—is borrowed from the compound coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer who combined the Greek words νόστος (nóstos), meaning “homecoming” (which— unsurprisingly—was used by Homer in The Odyssey) and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning “sorrow” or “despair.” (Interestingly, the meaning of the related adjective νόστιμος (nóstimos) evolved, so that in modern Greek, it signifies “tasty,” “delicious,” or “cute.”)
² What the letter H does resemble is a ladder, and—if anyone cares to notice—it acts as quite a nice visual for the poem’s opening line, which in my translation reads: “The staircase to the last floor ends in mid-air.”
³ Coincidentally, one of the most intriguing characters in Slavic folklore, the crone known as Baba Yaga, lives in a house on legs (chicken legs, to be more specific). A BBC article about an anthology of stories dedicated to her (“Baba Yaga: The greatest ‘wicked witch’ of all?”) highlights the character’s duality and moral ambiguity, describing her “sometimes as an almost-heroine, sometimes as a villain.” One of the contributors to the anthology, the author Yi Izzy Yu, sees Baba Yaga as a proto-feminist icon that “challenges conceptual categories at every turn. Even her home is both house and chicken, making her, yes, housebound in a sense, but not in any way ‘tied down.’” Needless to say, I can relate.
⁴ Although the yellow cobblestones have become one of Sofia’s most recognizable symbols, they were in fact—and rather tellingly!—cast in Budapest, then imported to Bulgaria and installed over the capital’s central boulevards at the beginning of the 20th century.
Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator, bilingual nonfiction writer, and amateur photographer. Her collection of travel essays, Thingseeker: 44 (Un)Usual Objects from Near and Far was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in Bulgarian and English-language publications, including Asymptote, Words Without Borders, and European Literature Network. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. Currently based in Sofia, she practices and occasionally teaches translation, writes a column on fascinating etymologies for the Bulgarian independent media Toest, and is at work on a collection of essays and photographs, titled Here & Elsewhere, about travelling, translation, and belonging.
A. I dedicate this book to you, 1. friends and family members 2. wrenched into the aftermath 3. of yet another of my romantic-relationships’ 4. calamities, 5. catastrophes, 6. crap outs, 7. pass outs, 8. cave ins, 9. folds, 10. woes, 11. waterloos, 12. wrecks, 13. smashups, 14. discomfitures, 15. distresses, 16. holy messes, 17. disintegrations, 18. and ruins. 19. Your shoulders dampen with my tears, 20. tire as they support my undoing. 21. Your heads ache after you press cell phones a. (for much too long) b. to your ears as I weep. B. You, my dedicated. My 1. faithful, 2. constant, 3. steadfast, 4. dutiful, 5. devoted, 6. true-blue, 7. altruistic, 8. and not deterred. C. You, whose lives I disrupt 1. like a wasp dive-bombing 2. your family barbeques. D. I dedicate this book to you 1. who cannot understand why 2. anyone would not love 3. me forever.
II. Preface
A. I glance over my shoulder B. at three divorces. 1. Shabby now, 2. they drag from my heels and trail 3. tattered retrospection. 4. Admitting so many failed marriages 5. as I date (at 72, the word 6. works only in italics), 7. my fists clench 8. beneath restaurant tables a. (my steady breathing b. well-practiced), 9. as I listen to men confess 10. their own three a. or four b. or five marital flops. D. Nevertheless, I’ve lived 1. alone, unattached, most of my past 2. eighteen years 3. and done just fine, E. thank you. F. Still, no wedded relationships, 1. or any relationships, have lasted longer 2. than seventeen years—(husband #2)— 3. a short time in relation to the span 4. of any adulthood. a. Some people find they feel b. altogether happy c. when living on their own. 5. But, I do not. G. Nights I’m kept awake 1. the cosmos blinks 2. bright outside the bedroom window, my bedside 3. music-shuffle insists 4. “The Summer Knows,” 5. Earl Klugh’s seducing, 6. solo, jazz guitar, 7. and my torment 8. pulsates through my head. 9. Sometimes, I’m sadly clumsy and topple 10. over divots, because, 11. whenever it wants, loneliness decides 12. to tee up, take a few swings. a. (Increasingly hazardous b. as osteoporosis plunders c. my bones.) H. Damp days insist 1. I spill to someone a. (to no one) 3. thirsty for my minutiae—Shit! 4. The dog peed inside. 5. Again! And, 6. Can you believe 7. I bought pomegranates? 8. We both know I can’t 9. de-seed them. I. Empty, I thirst 1. for someone else’s trivia— 2. The car’s breaks 3. still squeak. And, My daughter 4. needs me to repair 5. her TV. Can you believe she 6. thinks I can fix TV’s? 7. Balancing supply and demand 8. somehow stabilizing. J. Where I love you 1. doesn’t live 2. out loud, silence lays 3. lonely siege. K. I want to find someone 1. with whom to grow 2. old(er). With whom to share 3. my life. L. The problem is, at times M. it has seemed possible.
III. Epigraph
A. “Across the room B. the 2020 presidential election results C. blared from the TV. Then D. his voice shattered E. her attention. 1. ‘You’re not interested in me anymore?’ she finally asked. a. ‘You’ve been acting like you love me? b. And not said a word? c. And, it’s been happening for weeks?’ 2. He nodded. Then he disappeared 3. out the front door. That’s 4. how she remembers 5. it, anyway. F. She fed him the words. 1. Then he left 2. letting her believe 3. they were his. G. And so, 1. that’s exactly 2. what she did believe.” —The Bad-Breakup Book
IV. Table of Contents
A. As it turns out, B. I was premature C. believing I had what D. it takes to write the contents E. and, therefore, F. the Table of Contents. G. How could I H. clarify, I. reconcile, J. unzip, K. tackle, L. bring off, M. cut off, N. knock off, O. rule, L. wrangle, M. bully, N. steer, O. incorporate, P. dominate, Q. embody, R. embrace, S. elucidate, T. cope with, U. and/or crack? V. To do it justice would unveil W. the essence, 1. of the making 2. and the breaking of love. Z. Completion of the contents of chapters AA. might become possible 1. in a month, 2. Or a year. 3. Or two.
V. Acknowledgements
A. I acknowledge this (partial) book B. would not have been possible C. were it not for the child 1. lurking inside my lover’s 2. adult body, D. my obvious lack 1. of forgiveness 2. for this final flaw, E. and my inability 1. to forgive 2. his capacity a. for fooling me. G. He (must have) eclipsed his disagreement 1. about my (who knows?) 2. with prolonged kisses 3. delivered at my bedside, laced 4. with first-morning coffee 5. since my stomach can’t suffer caffeine, H. and cloaked 1. his shock 2. of my (will-forever-be-unknown) 3. with his gentle hand behind my head, a. drawing my mouth b. to his, letting our tongues and then c. hands wander, I. and obscured 1. his regret of my (fill-in-the-blank) 2. with his bare feet a. seeking mine under covers, b. cuddling my toes c. with his until sleep came d. between us J. He must have masked 1. his disappointment 2. of my (he’d-never-tell) with what he did say— a. you’re gorgeous, I can’t get enough b. of you, c. your writing is brilliant, d. we will grow e. old(er) together. K. And, his boredom L. with my (whatever), 1. concealed with some fine fucking M. I attest to this project 1. (not) prevailing 2. owing to my lover’s desire 3. to share his life (before and) throughout 4. the initial 5. eleven months of the pandemic 6. while discovering, learning, 7. realizing and recognizing, together. 8. While also negotiating, a. sanitizing, sanitizing, sanitizing, b. and entertaining (each other)— i. indoor badminton, ii. dining-table tennis, iii. hearts, cribbage, iv. Streaming (binging) TV— thrillers, sitcoms, standup, and jazz. v. Inventing Italian nicknames— vi. (Alessia Ravioli Geltini). vii. Buying inflatable kayaks, viii. kayaking, ix. fucking, x. baking bagels (from scratch), xi. laughing, xii. jigsawing xiii. more fucking, xiv. and lots more laughing. c. I recognize the (unlikely) completion d. of this wanna-be book e. is due to my lover (the bastard), Giovani, f. walking out during A World-Wide Pandemic, g. leaving me with no (naked) h. face-to-face, as well as no physical i. contact with Every j. Single Person k. In The World. N. Were it not for 1. my necessity to be right, 2. my indiscreet, unhappy glances, 3. my depressions, 4. my mania, 5. my anxiety, 6. my constant writing, 7. my conviction that talking 8. is always the cure 9. adding to my necessity for winning debates) O. I acknowledge the bones P. of the Bad-Breakup Book would not exist 1. without my fractured compassion 2. and obvious animosity. 3. Also, my lover’s itty- bitty heart, 4. its pumping a pretense 5. for promise.
VI. Afterword
A. This book came B. to (not fully) be as the result of C. the assignment from my teacher (Richard Froude), D. to use Renee Gladman’s essay, E. “The Order of Time,” (Journal #110, 2020, e-flux), F. as inspiration. I was taken by Gladman’s G. thread where she mentions waiting for afterwords H. written by authors I. for their already-published books J. while also meandering K. through personal perplexities— 1. how the cosmos embodies 2. the past, the “lockdown mind” 3. and the challenge of helping people find what 4. they’re looking for. L. Gladman (even) contemplates 1. “…how a lockdown mind 2. would find 3. love.” 4. (My universe lightyears 5. from relating.) M. And addressing another 1. Black Lives Matter insight— 2. an incalculable change— 3. white people 4. pulling out “crusty books” 5. by black authors 6. to recommend to other 7. white people, the unimaginable 15. dismantling of the Minneapolis police 16. and more black 17. and brown 18. bodies lying dead. 19. She sees the impossibility of reflecting 20. on now. N. My fragile frame bearing 1. world-wide pandemic, 2. I strained against crusty 3. shame 4. my bones cracking 5. against hard truths within our racism— 6. rancid and systemic. O. Yet, I sat 1. with my singular 2. suffering. 1. My something 2. particular. 3. Something 4. Renee Gladman would 5. not contemplate 6. in an essay (I don’t 7. think), still, 10. mine (sadly) 11. universal, 12. while acutely 13. (I-felt-in- 14. my-bones), 15. puny. P. But, I considered my Q. barefaced tragedy, and, R. afterward resolved— 1. afterwords 2. are 3. inescapable. S. I, too, had been living 1. in the aftermath, 2. aftershock, 3. after-effects, 4. residuum, 5. repercussion, 6. backwash, 7. backlash, 8. impact, 9. ramification, 10. residual, 11. hangover, 12. flak, 13. fallout, 14. blow off, 15. consequence 16. can of worms. T. All things considered 1. (or not), my 2. skeleton holds, 3. and heart 4. breaks 5. and 6. breaks again.
VII. Epilogue
A. And now. B. Now, C. I wonder 1. if these pages are too, 2. too absurd? D. Now E. I want to know, 1. how long will it take 2. before I find it bearable 3. to write this 4. heartbreak? F. And now, G. I can’t stand not knowing H. if I will grow I. old, 1. not alone, 2. but old (brittle) 3. without-a-partner. J. Because I’m now 72 K. which leaves ten years L. (fifteen with facetious optimism) M. to share 1. time and space with 2. someone intimately. N. And now, 1. I will phone 2. my kind-hearted a. friends b. and family.1
1 To meet with in person 1. preferably outdoors, or, 2. if a part of my family or 3. close-knit group, and 4. all vaccinated, in someone’s 5. home.
Wedding #1. White dress and veil. Foreign faces filling a synagogue chapel— my father’s guests. Nineteen, neoteric, unseasoned. Escaping, I sparkle. Thirty months of memories packed into cardboard boxes, we still like each other. (Had we confused liking with loving?) We hold each other. Our cheeks wet.
his words whirl a mask holds my happy face in place can’t feel its slick plastic as it slinks by
* I wasn’t alone.
* my man and I shared much in common.
* My man and I pursued fresh fun.
* I laughed.
* I was loved.
* I loved.
* I was left.
Recognizing The Fucker Giovanni
Positive affirmations (at times, lies) hang around my house.
An imprint. A branding. Residual memories cling— Ghosts of reflections.
I grew up and live in Denver, CO and am a 73-year-old, retired public school teacher who began writing at 55. My rhino-thick skin has been an advantage in both pursuits. I write nonfiction to share my truths about living as an old(er) woman, and my work can be found in Iron Horse Literary Review, Broad Street Magazine, Superstition Review, Nashville Review, and others. I published my memoir, Reckless Steps Toward Sanity (University of New Mexico Press), at age 67 and find myself hoping my daughter never writes her own. I can be found at judithsaragelt.com
Entering my neighbor Evelyn’s home when she beckoned me in to play with her daughter felt like running into the crest of a wave. Maybe it was even more imposing, since the knickknacks and trinkets that flooded her house were not permeable like water, and they were piled so high over my small body that there was no clear path inside. The house reeked of oil paint. No windows were ever cracked. Hand-stretched canvases leaned against the counters and unfired clay sculptures were mounted in the corners of every room. Eggs dripped off the counters like the melting clocks in Dali’s, “The Persistence of Memory.” Gold busts of dignified-looking men were perched on top of garbage bags that swarmed with flies. Rotting fruit was arranged in meticulous, but long-forgotten still lives.
When I arrived, Evelyn would scream up the stairs without looking in my direction, “Your friend’s here!” In the time it took her daughter Nova to materialize, I would gorge myself on the scene in front of me. There were flowers from Evelyn’s wild garden that had dried up and died in handmade mosaic vases, brown petals scattered on the floor like broken acrylic nails. Magazines and junk mail heaped on the counters mingled with spoiled food in beautiful ceramic dishware. Teddy bears in sailor suits, Santa beards, and doctor’s scrubs clung to a crooked shelf on the wall. The baby dolls had missing limbs that Evelyn had plucked off for her mixed media sculptures, their eyelashes as delicate as the legs on the centipedes Nova and I collected from under the rocks in her backyard. Old cameras possessed film that spilled out like dragons’ tongues, lolling in tight curls that made me want to twist them around my fingers. Outside were large pieces of wood that Evelyn’s husband, who spent most of his time in the garage rehabbing old cars, would occasionally drill or hammer. This would always set off their mean little Jack Russell Terrier barking for hours.
If Nova failed to appear fast enough after I arrived, Evelyn would scream up the stairs a second time. “I said your friend’s here, you stupid bitch! Get down here and get your ass outside!” I wondered if Evelyn knew her dark nipples could be seen through her silk robe, which had become, by this point, its own kind of Jackson Pollock: a painter I wouldn’t become aware of until I was in college earning a degree in art. Sometimes my eyes settled on the little flecks of pigment in her hair, which was auburn and falling out of its butterfly clip. Despite my uneasiness in her presence, I wanted to be introduced to every iteration of her. If she was a Warhol painting, I wanted to know every individual box, every color, every version of who she once was.
When Nova finally rushed out of her room, she clutched the handrail until both sets of knuckles were white, and tried her best not to slide down the avalanche of objects on the staircase. Then, she carried me on her back out the door where we played horses. The trash littering the yard made the perfect hurdles—the dirt-caked tires, old Christmas trees—and I gripped onto her long, dark braid for reins. I played both jockey and judge, digging my calves and heels into her ribs as we soared. In rural Michigan, we didn’t have what my college friends in New York City would call “culture,” but we had imagination.
In elementary school art class, we studied the color wheel and contour lines and Vincent van Gogh, which is perhaps where I got the idea that mental illness is a prerequisite of being a successful artist. Never mind that van Gogh only sold a few paintings in his lifetime—that detail was lost on me as a child—and sometimes I wonder now how much poverty had to do with the nature of both his and Evelyn’s suffering. At twenty-five, I would be diagnosed with the same mental disorder as Van Gogh, but I couldn’t know that as I sat in art class trying to emulate his post-impressionistic style in my sunflowers and starry nights. I clutched my left ear in horror when I heard what he had done, but part of me understood the act, even then. After class, I brought my paintings to the fence between our yards when I saw Evelyn out gardening and asked for an honest critique. She told me the colors were dignified, but I needed to be braver in my brushstrokes. I gnawed on that word, agonizing over what it would mean to let a brushstroke communicate bravery.
*
When I was in middle school, Evelyn had a stroke that left her half-paralyzed. Word spread through the neighborhood like a chain of dominoes. My mother’s eyes grew large with concern when she received the phone call from the neighbor on the other side of Evelyn’s house; she barely spoke after the initial greeting. “Who is it?” I begged. A finger to her lips. “Is everything okay?” I asked again. A threatening look.
A ramp went up when she was in the hospital. Evelyn’s husband made it out of scrap wood. In her absence, a giant dumpster came to collect Evelyn’s treasures. Weeks passed, and when Evelyn returned, her ethereal mother moved in to care for her fulltime. On the rare occasion we crossed paths, Nova and I barely acknowledged each other. The four-year difference between us seemed much wider once she entered high school, but our separation was exacerbated by the fact I caught her peeking through her bedroom window into my bathroom one night as I was preparing to shower. I had been naked. My breasts, at twelve, were small as the green-husked, black walnuts Nova and I used to grip in our palms like fastpitch softballs to launch into the street under the tires of passing cars just to hear the pop. My hip bones jutted out—the result of an eating disorder to cope with my own family dysfunction—and my pubic hair was just emerging. When I sketched nude models with charcoal and red conte in college, I imagined an environment in which I felt safe enough in my body to drop my robe and let strangers translate me into two-dimensionality. What must those models have been thinking, I wondered: Italian noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo, the presumed muse for da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa?” Vermeer’s mysterious subject in “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” who may have been Sibyl, a prophetess in Ancient Greece, or a Biblical figure, or a nameless Dutch model whose identity will never be truly uncovered. Were they aware of their own beauty, their subtle sensuality? Did they trust the artist fully to capture their likeness with the tools they had at the time, or was likeness not what they were after? How I longed to know where their minds wandered during all those hours sitting for their portraits, and where their gazes fixed. On an object? On a thought?
I was never willingly the subject, but a woman had once knocked on the door of my childhood home and told my mother she could see directly through into my bedroom and suggested we get thicker curtains. Later, when I got my first apartment as an adult, I had a Peeping Tom within a few months of moving in. “Caught him staring up through your bedroom blinds last night,” my next-door neighbor had told me, and, when I had gone to investigate, I found forty cigarette butts dropped there in a halo.
In high school, I spent a lot of time readying my art to apply for college scholarships and peeking through the curtains out the window at Evelyn, who had leashed the Jack Russell Terrier to her wheelchair and screamed, “You little piece of shit!” at the dog when she pulled her off course. I also thought about Nova a lot. How she hadn’t darted her head back when she saw that I caught her staring at me. How it seemed like she wanted me to know she was looking. “That girl had absolutely nothing and she always still made something out of it,” my mother used to say of her. By then, she was barely around, and we were used to talking about Nova as though she existed in a different era. Memories of us swinging from my mother’s clothing line like the Olympic gymnasts we watched on her shoebox television set were getting fuzzier, as were the ones of us hiding for hours in the ice cream truck her father was supposedly fixing up to sell. We used to touch each other sometimes, as children do, hands perpetually in each other’s dirty hair, or massaging each other’s backs. Once, as an adult, I performed a Google search on repressed memories. There was something fluttering in my brain about being alone in that ice cream truck with Nova, and it was like a moth trapped against a window. I remembered cold steel against my back. Nova’s chapped lips in the dark as her gaze locked with mine. I remembered the freckles on her nose and cheeks. The beads of sweat on her temples that looked like tiny snow globes and the dirt caked under her fingernails. But the rest of my memory was as patchy as the grass we trampled daily in her backyard. Had we kissed? Had we done more than kiss? I closed the Google search when something startled me and never reopened it.
*
For one semester in college, I worked as an unpaid intern for artists in New York City in exchange for university credit. I lived in a Chelsea townhouse with twenty other aspiring artists. My roommate, Imani, was a lanky dancer, and our room was so small we couldn’t sit comfortably with our backs against the wall and stretch our feet to the other side. Neither of us particularly cared. I came to New York with, as Joan Didion wrote, the “youthful conviction that nothing like this… all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, had ever happened to anyone before.” I had a new prescription for Xanax to cope with my panic attacks, largely exacerbated by my mother’s reaction to my coming out as gay. “You’ll be spit on, fired, assaulted,” she said. “No man will ever want you after this.”
One of my primary duties in New York was cleaning out a recently deceased artist’s studio and being part of the team to ship her work to museums all over the country. I was often criticized for my teenage naiveté or the way I was handling the art—“far too rough, you’ll create a crease in the paper!” I felt the spirit of the dead artist in every object I touched, and not just the art: the vintage kitchen supplies like the tongs and whisk dangling above her sink, the elevator buttons, the lock on the metal cage in her basement that housed an archive of her life’s work like a wild animal. It was exhausting labor, physically and emotionally, and even more so for her adult son, the artist for whom I was working. In teaching me how to process paintings, wrap them, divvy them up for sale, he was also processing his own grief. It showed in subtle ways: brief moments when his eyes appeared watery, silent breaks he would take to stare pensively out the window and crunch on dried seaweed. “Want some?” he would ask, and I would take it, smelling it curiously, glad he didn’t know what kind of cheap groceries I was buying to sustain myself in the most expensive place to live in the country.
One night, after eight hours sorting and shipping paintings, Imani persuaded me to accompany her to the club. Her boyfriend was in town visiting. On the subway, he commented, “It’s really a shame you’re a lesbian. What a fucking waste.” When we got to the club, I extended my arm for the iridescent wristband identifying me as under twenty-one. Imani, who was twenty-two, promised she would sneak me drinks, but I said I just wanted to dance. As it got later and the club got more crowded, bodies closed in on me. I felt hot breath on my neck. The club had various rooms and mirrors in which everything was distorted like a fun house. Someone had a bubble gun. I smelled something cotton candy-sweet. The flashing lights and fog machine made me feel both sleepy and too conscious at the same time. Then I saw Imani in the crowd. A wave of relief washed over me and I moved toward her.
Her eyes were closed, and she was swaying and grinding against muscular silhouettes. Men were touching and groping her as her boyfriend watched. He appeared to be too intoxicated to care, or maybe it turned him on. Imani’s sensual dancing and her body, which was draped in gold fabric, reminded me of the Gustav Klimt poster I’d purchased for fifteen dollars at the beginning of the semester and hung on our dorm room wall. The painting depicted on the poster was called “The Kiss.” Goldleaf (and silver, and platinum, in the case of “The Kiss”) was characteristic of Klimt’s “golden phase.” It came after a three-part series called the Vienna Ceiling that was ridiculed for being pornographic and perverted at the time, but to me just looked erotically powerful. When Imani opened her eyes and saw me approaching, she motioned for me to come forward. Pushing the men back, she grabbed onto both my hands and pulled me close to her. At first, the gesture seemed loving. I thought she was going to ask me a question. How are you doing? Do you want to go home? One hand cradled the back of my head, and her thumb made little circles in my hair. But then, she forced my mouth to hers. Her eyes stayed wide open. Her tongue shot into my mouth: a slimy, writhing thing. The men started hollering. I tried to pull away, but our bodies were locked together. The hand not pressing my head to hers was exploring me. Spit slipped down the side of my mouth. When I finally succeeded in tumbling backward, I stared at her in disbelief. She didn’t even meet my eyes. She was already back to dancing.
In our final weeks in New York City, Imani and I continued to live together in our tiny room, but we barely spoke. The night of the kiss, I stumbled home alone from the club and constructed a makeshift fort on the top bunk by hanging all my clothing from the pipes and piling all my belongings along the railings. I popped Xanax like Sweetarts. I got a teddy bear from MoMA with a t-shirt that said “Follow Your Art.” I bought costume jewelry on Sixth Ave and cheap trinkets in Chinatown and clothing at every thrift shop in Manhattan. I used money I didn’t have to pay for high-quality sketchpads for all my figure drawing classes and frames for all my photographs. My objects were a comfort when I piled them around me, these cheap little things. They were practically trash, as Duchamp’s “Fountain” was trash: a literal porcelain urinal he elevated to great art.
One of the last things Imani said to me, snapping her bubblegum and standing cross-armed in the doorframe to our dorm room, was, “How are you gonna’ get all that crap back to Michigan?”
“I’ll find a way,” I promised.
Back home for the summer, after all the boxes I had decided to ship had been delivered and my fifty-pound suitcase unpacked, I spent entire days in my basement darkroom. The paintings and photographs I had made in high school still hung on the walls, but while I was in New York, my parents had delegated everything of mine they no longer wished to see into the darkroom: sports trophies, the shoebox where I stored my pinhole photographs, the lamp I had made in sculpture class.
A year after returning home from New York, after I had graduated college early, I would have to leave all of those relics behind when I made the snap judgment to move in with my girlfriend and leave the house I was raised in. Home wasn’t safe and hadn’t been in a long time. My body shook every time my mother spoke to me, or through me. No amount of Xanax could make me still. I waited until my parents were at work. I packed only the objects that could fit into a garbage bag that I could not live without: my digital camera, my journals, a sketchpad, some clothing, my medication, a stuffed bear from childhood. I stopped at the bank and withdrew my entire savings from working throughout college. I drove straight to Ohio with no breaks.
From my girlfriend’s apartment, I thought about the abundance of objects the artist I worked for in New York had to sort through after his mother’s death. This was not my first period of estrangement from my own mother, and my grief for her was mixed in equal parts for all the material items I had to leave behind. I missed the inscriptions my friends had written in my high school yearbooks. I missed my novels. I missed the high school graduation cards from the people I worked with at the public library and the thick books of family photographs I convinced myself I may never see again. In a nuanced piece of writing about losing her best friend to suicide and having her heirloom jewelry stolen, author Sloane Crosley explores the idea that, “Grief is for people, not things,” and, squeezed on a twin bed with my girlfriend in Ohio, I worried that I had somehow gotten that all wrong.
But that would come later. Upon my arrival home from New York City, in the basement swimming with my knickknacks and art supplies, I could hear Evelyn’s muffled screaming at her Jack Russell Terrier outside. I stood on my tip toes to stare at her through the little window. Not much had changed since I had left. She was still half-paralyzed. The Jack Russell Terrier was still fat and mean, leashed to the top of her wheelchair. They both still meandered back and forth along the block like the Pirate ship boat ride at the county fair. For a brief second, I considered taking some of my artwork out to Evelyn to show her what I had created during the semester, as I had when I was a child after art class. I could ask for an honest critique. But I was still scared of her—her brashness, the way she could pop off, unprovoked, like a Roman candle, and the fact that one day, everything had changed for her. I was worried about what Evelyn would have to say about my gayness, and wondered if her daughter had come out too. Was that part of the reason I hadn’t seen her back home in months? Were Nova and I just two parallel lines living next door to each other our entire childhood: two girls with mothers who couldn’t see them properly?
In this imagined scenario—the one in which I brought a stack of my artwork out to Evelyn and placed it in her lap to inspect—I would watch through my fingers, heartbeat clearly audible in my eardrums. Maybe Evelyn would tell me she liked the wet-on-wet technique I had mastered in the watercolor paintings I had done my first week in the Big Apple. Perhaps she would say the way I had ground the charcoal into the paper during my figure drawing class was sophisticated, even though the proportions of the model’s body were off. Maybe she would say my photographs abided by the rule of thirds and possessed a certain chiaroscuro beauty—a playful dance of light and dark—and which was necessary in so many masterpieces throughout history. But I also feared she would say I still wasn’t brave enough, and that part of me would believe her.
Gabe Montesanti is the author of Brace for Impact: A Memoir (The Dial Press, 2022) and is currently at work on a second memoir. Keep up with her work on Instagram @gabemontesantiauthor or her website, gabemontesanti.com.
BACK TO ISSUE
