5:11 pm
my bad couch, which is different from the terrible chair (where i work now)
Regression in six scenes
1.
I spend too much money on puzzles and a sketchbook and dish towels. My sister is collaging again and I think to myself that I should be too and why didn’t I keep all of my old Teen Vogues, never mind that I’d carved them all clean and papered my old bedroom wall with carefully cut pictures of Agyness Deyn in House of Holland shirts and whatever smallish images I could scrounge up of my spindly British miniseries-regular crushes. Also my mom always yelled at me for being a hoarder of papers and she isn’t wrong. There are ticket stubs so faded I can’t make out the movie titles anymore in all of my pants pockets.
2.
Right before we were all sent home, I was on a reading kick but I lost my mojo when I lost my commute. I should read one of the library books I can’t return since the libraries closed but instead I read just the love confession scene from Emma while eating lunch. Nearly all my childhood books fall open at the spine to the climactic moment of angst and confession because I like when boys are tormented by their adoration. Emma doesn’t fall open though, because it’s a hardcover.
3.
I’m on Archive of Our Own looking for Pirates of the Caribbean fanfiction and not in a private browser like I usually do, even though it’s my own damn laptop (only one time I was about to plug my laptop into our TV so we could watch a movie, and nearly put Reylo fanfiction up on the screen, and so it seemed safer to have a separate tab). It feels like a transgression even though it means nothing. We’re all openly horny now. Imagine all the people... with their clothes off.
4.
I’m obsessed with Phantom of the Opera. I want to say again, but frankly it’s worse than when I was younger. My first solid cry of quarantine was to a video of Andrew Lloyd Weber playing “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” on his piano (this was before my Phantom madness)––I was watching it casually as I rolled out of bed and it caught me by surprise, the way I had to crouch for a bit on my floor sobbing lightly while putting some socks on. My social distance walk is to a cemetery, a really beautiful one, where I stroll around feeling dramatic and a little like singing (I’d never). Could I pull off a cape?
5.
My roommate and I watched the new Emma., the stylish and sexy one that has a butt in it, and now we’re casually making our way through other Austen adaptations. Sometimes in the middle of the movie I’m struck with the thought that I’m back to where I started, going all akdjaksfjdkasjf when Darcy looks longingly at Elizabeth (we were watching Bride & Prejudice though, so Lalita), waiting for life to happen to me.
6.
This is a playlist about going back—not to dim-sum brunch and parties and browsing linen button-ups at Uniqlo—but to the last time we were stuck and impatient and daydreaming.
We just have to fill the time. Might as well put our records on.
—miya singer
|