✮⋆𝒲𝑒𝑒𝓀𝑒𝓃𝒹, 𝒜𝓊𝑔𝓊𝓈𝓉 𝟤𝟥⋆✮
Noel Martin
I’m getting my nails done in LA. I’m walking, so naturally it will take over 90 minutes to get there, but I put a spliff behind my ear and took a diet dr pepper with me to make it all more favorable. The air feels heavier today, but maybe it’s just the sun. Finally the marine layer is breaking up so it’s starting to feel more like summer. I’m staying with Lyla, a love witch who’s boyfriend is out of town visiting his schizophrenic grandfather in Laurel Canyon. I think she misses the feeling of his boner against her back when they are in bed, because her hips keep fishing around under the sheets while I try to go to sleep. Everyone is having schizophrenia breaks these days. I don’t miss New York yet, and I don’t necessarily think it’s the space of LA, I think it is a direct correlation that before the plane in JFK took off, I deleted my instagram. In LA you don’t need social media, because every other boulevard cafe is a living breathing fallacy waiting to be photographed by a canon. I caught myself comparing my hair to the girls that I’ve seen walking past with pinkalicious candy fruit vapes, but they are just richer than me with an entirely separate hierarchy to consume. The finance bro in New York, is like the creative director here, maybe I’d rather corporate dickishness to stay in its own lane, leaving the artists alone to their own identities. Of course, Californians love to fight for the artist’s path to money, but not without favors. Lyla told me she used to be friends with a girl working on a coffee startup specializing in mdma espresso blends, she recruited Lyla for some basic drawups for branding, with the promise of some basic contract pay. When asked months later about the invoice, she claimed she had never offered anything and that the exposure was worthy of a year’s sum of networking, now she co-runs a retreat in Joshua Tree that is facing possible cancellation because she called two of the visitors fat. Everyone feels fat here, but nobody is fat here. I take back my previous statement, I miss New York because of the fat people. Perhaps I should ask Lyla where the fat people go to hang out, they gotta be somewhere. Even the fat people have abs, I’m on the smaller side and I don’t even have abs, I’m probably the pubescent awakening of some of the children here, they’ve never seen cellulite before. I wore an extra small dress today so the back of my legs have no choice but to shine their shadowy divots of fat to the Santa Monica residents. It was freeing to hate New York, but I couldn’t help but feel awful for thinking the things I do about the city that cradled my (any) motivation for life and personality. I dreamed of New York as young as eight, I craved her before the desire to explore my own body. And now I spit on her ground and wish to trade her for LA. When you live in NYC, it’s fun to hate on LA and even write off your consumption of its glamour as a satirical act. When I first picked up Eve Babitz, I laughed at the book’s body in my hands and deemed it as a simple fetish into voyeurism. With all due respect to both parties considered, maybe there’s a part of NYC that drives you to LA, and a part of LA that drives you to NYC. I had a breakdown in a bar bathroom last night because three gentlemen I talked with all had their parents paying their rent; an epidemic sweeping NYC and the sole reason I have made no long term friends. I could never understand that kind of privilege and would often panic about it, until I realized that the way they live is not normal, I still panic about it sometimes. I imagine myself here as the furthest from anyone’s help, not asking or expecting anything nor dreaming about someone coming to save me (pay my rent and get me out of medical debt). Sometimes I genuinely believe, with every ounce of blood in my body and every hair follicle standing sideways, that I have no passions. No career, hobby, dinner recipe, outing with friends, a certain skirt on the rack, no daytime naps, crocheting, shopping, saving, being good and acting a fool, school subject, documentary, ceramics, roth IRA, falling in love and keeping yourself glued together, running your fingers through sand, writing a letter to someone and sending it hoping they respond, writing a letter and never sending it, wearing costumes, restocking your bar cart, visiting your family, making a list of baby names, looking at yourself in the mirror, gardening, organizing birthday parties, attending weddings, frequenting museums, looking on wikihow, looking out a window, sending emails, your favorite album at 17, I wish I could melt. I can’t tell anyone this because anytime I do, they try to dig for things I sometimes fill my time with. It almost gets offensive, the things they come up with, reducing me to mediocre parts of my brain’s capacity; I make chia seed pudding every once and a while. Instagram was my vice in trying to figure all of it out, but I fear it has brought me to the seventh and final circle of hell. The algorithm has broken me, I have lost all sense of my interests, even what I look like is an experiment of metamorphosis. Men look at tits all day and expect to lock a woman down, go build something or hunt me a turkey so that I can stop asking my deli guy if they have turkey bacon because apparently pigs have parasites; (even this sentiment was gifted to me through a reel).
Noel Martin is a writer. She writes about love.