There and Wanting
MASSEDUCTION – St. Vincent
Spring 2018. My dad and I are barreling up the California coast in a rental car that we both wish was a convertible. I haven’t been back to this state since my grandfather was buried 11 years ago. We’ve left my older sister behind in lush Los Angeles and are headed straight for San Francisco, the city where I was born, the city that was supposed to be mine.
Three months have passed since my first sort of anything sat me down in her dorm room and told me she just didn’t feel anything. Not the way I did. I lower the passenger window, smell salt. No one ever feels things the way I do.
My dad’s left me in charge of the music. I’m playing St. Vincent’s latest album, recommended by a friend I share with my first sort of anything. With every blink comes a barrage of memory: the typewriter on her desk, hauled across the country despite its inconvenience, a letter from her little sister still pressed tight between the rollers. The rotating cast of Faulkner novels she carried in her New Yorker tote bag—the one that came free with everyone’s student subscription—during her Southern Gothic kick. The brown-strapped Birkenstocks she always wore with socks.
The hollow sadness that used to overtake me when I remembered her freckles, her glasses, her tight choking laugh has finally crossed over to fury. Now I’m trying to stay as angry as possible for as long as possible, because I never thought I’d make it out of the hurt. So far, St. Vincent is helping with that. Furiously pulsing synth, smooth and biting vocals, violent bass riffs.
A couple years from now, I’ll realize the unrelenting restlessness I feel is mania. My dad’s doing eighty on the open road but it isn’t fast enough. The music strips down. I’ve never shown the city that became mine to anyone but her. I can’t resist—I shut my eyes and her hair blows into her face on the High Line as she smiles at my phone’s camera. Her head presses against mine as we take selfies in the Glossier pop-up store. Her eyes sparkle under the giant Christmas tree in Bryant Park, because it’s still November so I can’t give her Rockefeller Center. Barely breathing, I reach for her hand but stop just short of taking it. We watch the ice skaters zoom around the rink and she whispers something I can’t remember anymore, but I do remember the heat as I imagined she was saying it about me. Incredible. Beautiful. Wow. I wanted her to see that I could show her everything, if she let me.
I open my eyes and turn to the Pacific, bluer than anything has ever been.
About U – MUNA
Midsummer 2018. Every morning I wake up bruised. I thought I was over it, I really did, but everything’s sticky in the Connecticut summer and I have too much time to think. There’s only one person who makes me feel sane. I walk to her house every Friday after work. It’s twenty minutes and I dance the whole way there with MUNA in my ears, slapping away mosquitos and imagining the euphoria of her air conditioning. We cook dinner in her tiny kitchen with the skylight over the sink. I unplug my earbuds and set my phone in a cup. The song is a little too sad for her, she says.
After the dishes are washed and the leftovers packed, that’s when the danger starts. That’s when she sits down on her couch, I burrow into her arms, and she rests her chin on the top of my head. She turns on the TV and we lay there watching. Somehow we can hold each other and not want the same things. She wants to stay the way we are. I want more. I always want more.
So I try dating boys for the first time in my life. There’s one who will keep coming back for years, long after I finally understand my indifference. In spite of his girlfriend, he’ll call me in the middle of the night because he saw me on the street all velvet and glow and he just wants to know what I’m up to, and of course I’ll say no, but he’ll hear my smile because I like the idea of having enough power to take things from people. I’ll like this idea even more a year from now. But I don’t know that yet. I just know that the people I want have two things in common: they’re not men, and they don’t want me. So I beg my body to feel what it can’t, and when it can’t, I punish it.
I meet my first sort of anything for drinks. I want us to thaw for our mutual friend, and maybe I’m a masochist. “If it makes you feel better, I also thought my first kiss meant a lot to the other person when it didn’t,” she says. Condensation pools between our cups. I think this is a surprising amount of effort to take just to destroy me again. I tell her it doesn’t make me feel better at all. I smile. It’s easy to tell when someone is afraid of themselves. I walk home listening to “Around U” on repeat. The reverb in the opening seconds sounds like her name, over and over again.
I find solace in synth and crying in public. I drink and don’t eat. I waste days walking circles around campus and to the house twenty minutes away, earbuds in. The door always opens. At least we both know we’re using each other.
Bury Me At Makeout Creek – Mitski
Late spring 2019. I wasn’t even supposed to be at this party, but my friends are still full of energy and want to make the most of the night. They drag me down the street promising a good time, promising her. I can talk myself into anything, including that she loves me, too. I walk behind them on the sidewalk. When we get to the house, I peer through a hole in the fence and see her kissing him. There are fairy lights in the backyard. He holds her hand, I think. It’s nice. It’s normal.
This one lasts far longer than seems possible, given how little I will remember of it later. I am hormonally imbalanced, freshly violated, prone to melodrama. Everything is devastating and euphoric. She is there and beautiful. She writes poems about Mitski that are really about the men she chooses. I am always right about them, but she just thinks I’m a lesbian. I start listening to the same stripped electric guitar, every chord holding the rage and anguish of women like us, always waiting to be chosen back. This is when I start conflating revolution with the taste of salt on someone’s skin. This is also when I learn that the only person stopping me from filling my water bottle with rum is myself.
While I’m walking her home from a party one night, she stumbles on three margaritas, two Moscow mules, and a tequila shot. I hold her up and she says she loves me. She says it makes her sad that I never say it back.
On the other side of the fence, my friends are saying he means nothing, she’s different around me, she doesn’t know what she wants, and I laugh in their faces. She wants me, and she wants normalcy, and she knows she can only have one. In five months I’ll sit on my bed and she’ll sit at my desk and she’ll tell me she thinks she’s too trapped in compulsory heterosexuality to be with a woman. She doesn’t know how lucky we are that I already spent April mourning her. She’s the only one I never tell.
Willowbank – Yumi Zouma
Summer, fall, winter 2019. (And again, summer, fall, winter 2021. It will be identical. I don’t know this yet.) She’s my first. No, not that first. No qualifiers, no almost-sort-of-kind-of-maybe. She just is. First to grab my messy bun and squeeze it in tender playfulness before I go down on her. First to look up at me through her eyelashes. First to be surprised by me. I can see it in the way her thigh bounces as she lights a cigarette. She doesn’t know how good I am at noticing. She doesn’t stay long enough to find out.
She’s a comically obvious foil to my suffocating, predictable life: thrilling, irreverent, perpetually unavailable. God, and a smoker—my one and only dealbreaker, tossed out the window so easily in exchange for a sky-blue pack of American Spirits. I can’t help it. An entirely different city, an entirely different set of rules. I know who she belongs to, and it’s never me. Yet I’m the one chosen to bear witness to her body shimmying beneath the harsh fluorescent light in the CVS, beat for beat with the Yumi Zouma song crackling through the intercom.
In the millisecond before the meteor hits, I make a new list. I justify: I love people who dance in public and don’t give a damn what others think about it. I love people who wear chains and smell like smoke and read anything, everything. I love people who are a little bit terrified of what they want. I love people who absorb me. I love people who turn me into someone free and feral, someone who’d do anything for one more taste. Someone unafraid. But now everyone is afraid of me. Everyone who isn’t her becomes collateral. For the first time, I don’t care what it will cost. I break worlds for her. I step off the cliff and stand upright on air.
We stretch out before ourselves. What we do, what two mistimed people have always done, only ever has one ending. It will never be clearer than it is right now. In the toothpaste aisle at CVS I grin so wide she can feel it from a yard away, and she looks at me and laughs. My eyes say give me everything you’ve got. I’m ready. I’ve been waiting for you all my life.
She does. It burns. I barely make it out alive. She doesn’t know how to apologize. She stands above and watches as the edges dissolve around me. I fade to black. I’ll forgive her anything.
Miss Anthropocene – Grimes
Winter 2020. Wake up. Get up. Claw your way back to consciousness. Get the fuck up. Look at the ruin you’ve made of your life. Stare it in the eyes and don’t you dare look away.
I’ve done it now. Wine bottles cover the floor. I can’t blame her for not wanting me, but I can blame her for everything else. And I do.
Last night with the belt still coiled around my neck I was thinking I know it should not hurt as much as it does, I was thinking I have always been so disproportionate, I was thinking she was just a rebound anyway, but to be frank, after Yumi Zouma in the CVS, I was already barely holding it together. I still have the screenshot of her confession. To admit to someone that you broke them intentionally, that you saw their affection and recognized it for what it was, used it to stroke your own ego until it became more human than fun, takes a degree of cruelty I cannot understand and a degree of bravery I cannot help but respect.
I think I might be addicted to women who apparently plan ahead to discard me. I lie on my twin XL mattress blasting “You’ll miss me when you’re not around” and wonder, just like I did last night, whether the rest of my life is worth living if another person can treat me this way. Grimes seems to agree. Her new music is dark and apathetic, a soundtrack to giving in. There was a time when I idolized her, when her music saved me from myself. So when she tells me that she’ll drown herself by tying rocks to her feet and smile at the bottom of the river, it feels personal.
But even in this pathetic aftermath of hope, there’s something stubborn in me, something scolding. It’s not fight or strength or any of the words people use to imply you’re worth less for wanting to die. It’s an illusion that stings enough to make me scream to life, to stick me full of spiteful survival: there’s more. I open my eyes. I stand.
Epilogue: Present Tense – Yumi Zouma
Winter 2022.
I leave the city, saturated with grief. I go home to where the nights are silent and the roads are choked with trees. There’s space to think here. What has left me floats in the air around my head. I imagine I could reach out and touch them, if I wanted: difficult women, losing me.
In the eyes of my love, I was passionate. I was hardworking. I inspired her. She gave me a note before the end. I keep it beside my laptop. I carry it in my pocket when I leave the house. She wanted me so much she came back after two years. She wanted me too much, so she gave me up. It doesn’t change the fact that she saw me. She gave me back to myself.
Yumi Zouma returns in parallel. Possibility is the order of the year. I have never needed anything like I need the unrelenting joy of their saxophone solos. I listen to “In The Eyes Of Our Love” and I ache in mourning. I listen to “Give It Hell” and I harden with hope. I sleep late. I drink coffee. I dance to “Mona Lisa” and I survive. Regret is not a word I understand. I have never chosen wrong, because I’ve always chosen love. But now I’m starting over. I’m waking up. I am shouting, stretching, reaching for everything that I’m going to make mine.
At night I walk outside and stand on the slow-rotting deck where I used to read as a child. January blisters. I can see the stars again. My future waits on the forest edge, shimmering in the icy dark. Heartbreak is a tithe for the life I’ve built. I can almost feel the pain that will come with every not-yet lover, distilled and sharp, again and again and again. But I can also hear the music, keeping me company, holding me tight, dragging me back into the sun, and I am not afraid.
Mia Arias Tsang (she/her) is a freelance writer and recent graduate of Yale University, where she studied molecular biology and creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fifth Wheel Press, the Yale Daily News Magazine, and Broad Recognition, Yale’s intersectional feminist magazine. She loves pho, leaf-peeping, and trying to write while listening to Yumi Zouma but getting up and dancing instead. She lives in New York City with her cat, Peanut.