'the years' and this year
I’ve grown up in a city with no seasons (save for wet and dry). It has taught me to see change without the world spelling it all out for me.
The TikTok audios rattle my eardrums: as the 2023 season draws to a close…I close the app. No more montages for me.
This has been a quiet year. I moved back home with the slowness of a full-body stretch in bed on a Sunday.
For the first time in years, I stopped filling nights with green lights. Instead, I began to moisturize maniacally. Hand cream, eye cream, foot cream, nail cream. After the gym, after the sauna, after the club. My hands became so soft I couldn’t help but wonder if something was slipping through them. I put on a homemade lip mask of coconut oil and honey and I tried not to think about being kissed. Journalling into the night, I wrote down all the circuits that were shorting in my brain, then tried on end to re-wire them. It was a year of working to be Right. Seven pillows, satin headgear, decaf cups.
In the past, I’ve lived rawly, clutching onto the present with my teeth and letting bleeding on my lips be a sign of doing something right. So, usually, my life is measured by its highs. And I’ve had them this year too, in foreign lands of crimson adventures (A French sailing aficionado I met in Istanbul has taken advantage of New Years’ to ask if I have plans to be on a boat in Marseille anytime soon). My job has flung me into the folds of India in a way that is both instructional and thoroughly unmooring. These varied trips reminded me of who I used to be, who I could be, and who I want to be, the way some ghosts are friendly in their chill.
But the best parts of this year came with yawning sustenance. As the liquid gold of the last year drained away, and the drunken disarray of college flaked off, I was left with white tablecloths and a desperate need for purity. Clean living. Avocado eggs and stir-clear driving. Perched on my desk of glass, kaftan sweeping the floor, I did the crossword. Its black squares and knowing wittiness became my matutinal co-conspirators. 5-letter word, ‘They work in meters:’ POETS. Ten-letter word, ‘Bookie?’: AVID READER. Fitting, for after years of PDFs and drought, I finally got back into reading. Underlining in ink on paginations of past lives brought me the great privileges of connection, understanding, and perspective.
The first book I read this year was Annie Ernaux’s The Years (Les Années). Its poetry of part-memoir-part-collective-history stuck to my teeth like caramel now hardening. Somewhere, Ernaux writes: She has gone to the other side but she cannot say of what. The life behind her is made up of disjointed images. Elsewhere, she reveals: She dreams of writing in a language no one knows. She writes in her diary that she longs to return to an original purity: “I am a will and a desire.” She does not say for what.
Like Ernaux, my diary is a tome of disjointed images. She seems overwhelmed by the need to take everything on board, as if assailed by a whole that she alone perceives. Here are some flyaways from it.
In the midst of a home renovation where I fought to keep the weird ornaments and Gothic wooden furniture, on 20thMay I say, “I’m not sure when aesthetics became attachments – time has been flattened into desiccated decoration.”
After an intimate evening in lawn grass, I sadly note on 12th September, “I’ve made delicacy a religion and I will go to its hell – for never living up to the gracefulness of its asks.”
In a year of feeling unenthused and relentlessly disappointed by men and mirages, I force out by December 2nd, “But who is really cool? Can I actually name a single cool person?”
And yet, the respite from chaos in my day-to-day created windows for creative (and crazy) storms in my mind. Away from my ritual hazes of smog, these days, I can remember each hour of the clock. My dreams have never felt this true and this far. I am seeing myself come into focus under an eye-mask, fantasies unspooled through psychoanalysis. On 11th December after a dizzying set of REM reveries, I write, “This day peeled over my eyes, closing at every ray. My dreams have grown in their architecture. They are now a madhouse I inhabit with knowingness and precision. When I realise at moments of ecstasy that they are false, I love them all the more for it.”
I’ve grown up in a city with no seasons (save for wet and dry). It has taught me to feel change without the world spelling it all out. This year was filled with chemtrails spurring over country clubs, old friends returning to me with silken casualness, and watching television with my mother on the sofa. It was a year of burying into my own interiority and seeing, not a finished film, but each still frame. But slowness does not inhere stagnancy. I am thinking, I am writing, I am wanting. To exist is to drink oneself without thirst.
From a May covered in dust to a December glittering with festivity and too much champagne, tonight, I celebrate the quietness of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet, “I am a little world made cunningly.”
Did you find this too referential? Too many quotes, too much media? Too bad! Here are my favourite cultural artefacts of the year.
Best Podcast – the Paris Review Podcast (particularly the reading of the short story ‘Fairytale’ by Alexandra Kleeman) and ArtHoles (the Jackson Pollock series was fantastic!)
Best TV Show I watched – Mad Men, twice
Best TV Show (that released this year) - Succession (he’s the eldest boy!!)
Best Film I watched – La Haine
Best Film (that released this year) – Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon with Coppola’s Priscilla a little further behind
Best Albums (that released this year) – Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want to Turn into You, Lana’s Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard
Best Book – Madame Bovary by Flaubert, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera
Happy new year, postmodern princesses and handsome heretics.