I Wrote This Stoned at 2PM on a Tuesday

I haven’t slept well in 2.5 years.

About six months after we moved into our last apartment, we got new neighbors above us. Neighbors who never slept, nor removed their boots, in a building with the construction of a cardboard box. When I say there were times during the pandemic that I truly believed I was going insane, I’m not exaggerating. I’ve been meaning to update this blog for months, but it’s hard to care about anything extraneous when you’re that tired.

We stayed at the Bad Apartment for at least six months (or, arguably, two years) longer than we should have because rent prices are insane and better the devil you know, etc., but eventually things got so awful (for a multitude of reasons) that we had to get out of there. We’re on the top floor at the new place, and that alone makes it feel like our own little paradise.

I have a tangled relationship with transitions. A creature of habit who loves routine (my parents used to call me Emily, after Emily Bronte who happily roamed the moors alone), I’m almost always forced into them, but then they nearly always turn out to be the catalysts for better things. Which makes them even more infuriating.

But I actually kind of like the process of moving, once I’m dragged into it kicking and screaming. The weeding out of things you no longer need or didn’t realize you still had. The planning and list-making. Unpacking in the new place, which is all rose-tinted with your optimism and relief, and which you can still believe, fervently, is going to be so much better than the last place. My anxiety creeps back in, often—it’s always the times I feel most alive that I’m most terrified of dying; I know I’m boring in this way—but there’s always another task, another tangible goal to focus on, another reason to move my body and get out of my head. It feels like a good time to make new habits, to start if not fresh, then at least different, somehow.

We’re finally into the good part of moving, the part where all the heavy lifting is done and we can start to enjoy where we are, at last, even while everything we own is strewn in boxes and bags littering the living room floor like a stretch of ceaseless desert. It’s a liminal space, characterized by strange schedules and blankets on the carpet to substitute for furniture. Lots of afternoon sex, and getting high* before emptying boxes upon boxes of stuff—how do two people acquire so much stuff?—into closets, quibbling over where to put rugs and side tables and how we can corral all my teeny, tiny bottles of products. It’s nice, in its own way, all these repetitive, soothing tasks. They make life feel manageable for a change. Containable, if only I could find the right-sized bin for that funny-shaped spot.

Paired with the chaos of a too-loose schedule and the blazing L.A. sun in July, things feel a bit underwater, lost in time in the most pleasant ways. Running out at odd hours to the greasy spoon around the corner for breakfast burritos exploding with potatoes and carne asada and hot salsa, or soggy-delicious burgers with eye-wateringly salty fries plucked from paper bags. And coffee, too much coffee. This is a summer I will remember in cold-brew-coffee-flavored sips and drips, and by the colors my nails were painted** while holding iced coffees sweating hard in clear plastic cups, their swishes of liquid like caramel and sticky-sweet cream making streaks that remind me of ice cream in cones, of something I need to run my tongue over. We count our new bruises at the end of each night and fall asleep at 9PM, then wake up early to the sun bursting through the blinds again. And again.

Once in a while you get a moment like a breath, and life can feel so utterly honeyed and kind.***

*On weed; it’s legal here, get on board folks, even the real housewives are doing it.

**Barbie pale pink; I am nothing if not a product of the times.

***This is my way of saying I’ll post again soon, but at the moment I’m trying to let myself enjoy the slow life.