girl-with-the-flaxen-hair

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

A “Modern Love” Reject

I got broken up with, moved cross country, and fell in love — all during a pandemic.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a pandemic will inevitably make or break a relationship, or, at the very least, it’s a joke universally repeated throughout the COVID crisis. I suppose there is some validity to the concept  — add stress and prolonged periods of isolation to two people and a volatile chemical reaction seems entirely likely. Not for me, though. My relationship wasn’t ending because of a pandemic.

It was ending because I was moving across the country — during a pandemic. 

He was a college boyfriend who had seamlessly transitioned to a postgrad one. When I moved to New York City after college, he spent the first night with me sleeping on my unfurnished room, a full-sized sheet-less mattress on the floor. He was still attending college six hours away, but he’d visit every other weekend. Immediately, and nearly effortlessly, we fashioned a mosaic of our relationship within the fabric of the city. We discovered a coffee shop near Washington Square Park that put all other cappuccinos to shame. We went bar hopping in the East Village and ate pizza slices on benches at 2 A.M. We made our stomachs hurt trying to find the best wings in the West Village. We would laugh and laugh at UCB improv shows then split slices of cheesecake at Juniors (are you sensing a food-related theme here?) — happily and sleepily riding the subway uptown back to mine.  

It was wonderful, but hardly real life. Real life consisted of 18 hour days on film sets, a nearly 3 hour commute to and from Brooklyn every day, living paycheck to paycheck in a small apartment in Hamilton Heights often visited by a rogue cockroach or occasional mouse. In real life, New York never felt like home. I never felt the ingenue-like emotional catharsis of riding the subway, never looked at the cityscape with wonder and awe, never experienced a sense of belonging that my peers so keenly felt. 

I grew increasingly anxious in New York, especially in the colder months. I began to resent the lack of greenery, the clubbing social scene riddled with blackout finance bros, the sounds of screaming matches and techno music outside my apartment at 4 A.M. The pandemic rendered New York City “dead” to many, but to me, its appeal had passed away long before COVID. 

Newly unemployed and painfully lonely after three months of isolation in my apartment, the decision came easily. I was moving, pandemic be damned. 

The news did not come as a complete shock to my boyfriend, who had been made privy to my unhappiness with NYC-living about a year prior. And serendipitously, he had been given an opportunity to move abroad for a prestigious job opportunity. This was great! We both had exciting prospects on the horizon! Besides, we had done long distance for two years, what was a little more? 

A lot, apparently. It soon became clear that my boyfriend had no interest in eventually moving to the west coast, and every interest in moving to Europe and/or staying in NYC. And, a bit more surprisingly, no interest in committing to me. 

And thus our relationship went into flux — broken up, yet not — jointly deciding to take advantage of any and all time we had left together. The end date seemed interminably unclear — I struggled to find a job or an apartment, his fate abroad left up to the chance of the international travel-during-a-pandemic gods. 

We went through to motions, but it was already over. I daydreamed about my equivocal new life often, a life far away from the concrete jungle, away from the boy who no longer saw a future between us. New people, new friends, fresh start. I was technically broken up with, right? I was going through a break-up. But I felt no sadness, no self-pity. I was too delightfully drunk with the promise of possibility.

Then, towards the end of the summer, things suddenly fell into place — almost comically so. I found an apartment in Los Angeles, then a job — all in the span of three days. My now ex-boyfriend received news that his job was in fact happening, so he booked a one-way flight to Austria. 

We sat on a bench and reflected on our relationship — most fondly, on our warm and wonderful weekends in the city. We said goodbye, and I cried. Then I went home and shopped for furniture online, my new California address written on a post-it-note besides my bed. 

It’s four weeks later. I’m at that California address sipping red wine on my porch (a porch!!) It’s four-dollar Malbec from a Trader Joes walking distance from my apartment. You can actually buy wine in the store — something you can’t do in New York, a discovery that continues to absolutely delight me. 

I am surprised by how my friends and family comment on my “bravery” at moving cross-country. “You don’t know anyone!” “You’ve never lived on the West Coast!” I laugh at them in response. Because it feels far from brave. It feels stupid, and it feels like an adventure. 

There’s a guy on my porch drinking wine with me. He’s from work. I don’t compare him to my ex. He’s too wonderfully new, and inexplicably, I want to know everything about him. He is older than me and seems to know exactly who he is. We’ve both lived in New York. We both dream of being writers. He is so funny that my cheeks hurt from laughing. 

We’d finished work at 7 P.M., and suddenly it’s 3:30 A.M. How? It feels like it’s only been five minutes. I walk him to his car, and I lie awake until 5 A.M. with intoxicating adrenaline coarsing throughout my body. 

Two weeks later, we’re hiking up to the Hollywood sign. It’s hilariously cliché, and I can hardly believe this is my life now. “I don’t want you to idealize me,” he tells me. I shake my head — pained. I don’t either. The question had been surfacing in my mind throughout our time together. Was I sacrificing my independence — an independence most ardently proven by moving alone cross-country — by being with someone else?

Some may think so. But I’ll know what’s more true. That just as my ex was not New York, this guy was not Los Angeles. That by pursuing my dreams in a pandemic I had shown who I was —  truly and fully. 

We reached the top, and he held my hand. I looked around, slyly knowing I would remember this moment. I would remember the lingering feelings of loneliness from COVID isolation being shedded like snake skin. I would remember the quiet feeling of effortlessly falling in love. But most of all, I would remember that Los Angeles was my home, and I made it that way. 

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

Amalfi Coast, Italy, July 2019.

Shot with Canon AE-1, kodak ultramax 400

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞

http://www.instagram.com/devolkitchens

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

Bryan Daugherty

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

Abelardo Morell. Camera Obscura: View of Landscape Where Galileo Died in Exile, 2009.

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

Anna Campbell, After Anne Carson, After Sappho, 2015

This pick – or plectrum, which the lyric poet Sappho is credited with inventing – is foil-stamped with a fragment of Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s Fragment 31, also known as the Poem of Jealousy, sourced from If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2003).  Each pick is set into a laser-cut mount that still bears the tendriled smoke patterns of its production, pointing back to the burning energy that fueled the poem.

source

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

““What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian’s. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…”

— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

“Decembers are for dreaming of all the things to come. Just turn towards the eastern sky, that’s where the sun wakes from. You’re at the end but what lies next is all that you will be. So close your eyes and wait for dawn. The future’s yours, you’ll see.”

— Ellis Nightingale

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

pizza and red wine and slow dancing to sinatra in the kitchen, please

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

Better watch out Autumn! Winter is already lurking behind your back. 🍂❄️ | Daniel J. Schwarz

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]

[girl-with-the-flaxen-hair]