WRITING UPDATE
I know I've been slacking, but...
I know I’ve been slacking, but…I’ve been focused on finishing my first ever feature-length screenplay and a few other writing projects. I’m definitely going to be getting back to writing about movies, but in the interim, here’s the start of something I’m writing. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I’m having fun with it.
—
I was floating down Fulton, my brain playing back the last year of my life—as it had been doing every day since I moved back to New York three months earlier—when I ran into Hannah, someone I knew from undergrad but hadn’t seen since graduation. Hannah was friends with everybody, which meant she was friends with nobody. She wasn’t someone you were ever able to get to really know, and she wore this mask of general amiability that I found suspect, all the more so because she was so adored. But I was nicer back then, or at least could wear my own mask better, and tolerated her bland friendliness because she had an epic rooftop and hosted some of the great parties of my college years. It’s where, early in the spring of my junior year, I met Eddie.
When I ran into Hannah that day, around a decade after I first met her, her sunny-as-ever disposition was a surprising but not unwelcome disruption. My head was able to bookmark its current preoccupation—my Goodness and whether there was enough of it in me to be considered Overall Good—and for that respite I was grateful.
She pointed to my chest. “That’s a beautiful sweater,” she said as her eyes landed on the cashmere mock neck I was wearing underneath a tan coat. “It’s funny, I always remember being jealous of your sweaters. I guess some things don’t really change.”
I laughed and immediately felt guilty for all of the horrible things I thought about Hannah. She didn’t deserve my venom, then or now, and for a brief moment I felt a tugging sensation as new disruptive questions filled my mind, ones about my Behavior and how I Moved through the world for all 29 years of my life. Was I always such a terror? What did I actually hate Hannah, or anyone for that matter, for? Why did I enjoy being cruel?
I was able to stop myself before I got too overwhelmed, and shifted my attention to Hannah herself, and the grotesque oversized tie-dye hoodie she wore, which read “Jacob’s Bar Mitzvah 2022” in a send-to-the-Hague worthy serif font. I then remembered she was from Long Island, and that we all must do the best with what we are given.
“How are you?” I asked.
“You know, fine. I moved to the neighborhood about two years ago. With my boyfriend Samson, not sure if you two ever met. Oh, and I’m in sales now! Boring stuff, but you know how it is. Living la vida not so loca!”
“Hey, boring is stable and stable is…” I couldn’t finish the bit because I didn’t yet know what stable was, having given up every chance of it the moment I touched down to LAX. “Well, it’s something that seems nice,” I finished, which earned me a snort-laugh.
“How is it over there? I was staying with a friend in Long Beach last fall and was gonna text you, but then I thought that might be weird, you know.”
I wanted to reply that it would have been weird, but quickly realized that, despite my initial relief at being engaged, I didn’t want to continue the conversation.
“I actually moved back last month. It just wasn’t for me,” I said instead.
“Is LA for anyone?” She joked, and I gave her a weak smile. I was hungry and had only eaten a handful of raspberries for breakfast, which I only did to take with my SSRI and its supplemental NDRI, which helps with the sexual side effects caused by the SSRI, even though the NDRI gives me insomnia, which I have to take a third drug for.
“Well, I gotta run. I have a meeting in an hour, and if I don’t grab a quick bite I’ll be a monster,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask anything else, worried that by saying “LA wasn’t for me” I was inviting her to ask why or a million other questions I didn’t want to answer.
“Oh my god, no problem. I won’t keep you! But we should definitely do drinks or something sometime soon. Would love to catch up and hear more about your time in La La Land.”
She gave me a hug, and I embraced her back, inhaling the sunscreen fumes that lingered on her neck from that morning’s application. We separated, but not before she looked me over once more and left me with perhaps the most upsetting comment I, with all my pervasive doubts and insecurities, could handle.
“You look really good, Cam. Happy.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “I only moved back because I killed a guy, and at least here I can try and pretend that it never happened. So, I’m actually not all that happy! I responded.
She laughed, we waved goodbye, and I walked towards the Downtown Brooklyn Trader Joe’s, today’s destination. I knew she’d dismiss my confession, but I thought about her compliment. I thought about how much I craved compliments like these in the weeks after things first ended with Eddie, when all it took was just a thimble’s worth of validation from anybody to make me feel like a human being. I felt so outside of myself in those early days, that a simple positive reminder that I had a shape was enough to ground me. A “nice haircut” told me I had hair. “I love when you smile with your teeth” reminded me I had teeth and a mediocre close-lipped grin. And so on.
For a minute I forgot why I hated compliments. But as I crossed Fulton, I was reminded of the kind my mother used to give when I did well in school or remembered to check in on my grandmother. My mother’s compliments were empty, and I could never internalize them because I knew, from a young age, they were never about me. She was thinking of herself, and anything decent I did was simply an affirmation of her good parenting, which she decided she needed more than I needed to feel valued.
Hannah, in her own way, needed to feel like I was happy in order to affirm something within herself. If I was happy then she was happy too and had no reason to interrogate her post-college existence. She had Samson and her sales. And as I moved on, trying to distract myself from myself by skipping over the cracks in the sidewalk, I thought about what it would take to be happy. I thought about the callused person I had morphed into, worn out by time, experience, and bad luck. That was just the start of it though. The reality of the matter is I had become cruel and manipulative. The reality of the matter is that I, like so many before me, had weaponized my brokenness in order to break others. I wasn’t Overall Good, but Someone Too Frequently Bad.
As I walked on, indulging these familiar thought loops, something suddenly shifted. For no discernible reason, the nagging worry dissipated. Whether it was my encounter with Hannah or if I was finally just too exhausted to continue on, I can’t say. But I felt immediate relief. I felt, for the first time, that in order to make sense of my crime, I needed to write something. And not a detached account of actions and reactions or a grocery list of my misdeeds. I realized I needed to break through my own bullshit, my own deep fears about being Bad and Monstrous and Wrong (and what that would say about me at large) to see how I had become Bad and Monstrous and Wrong. This would give me peace, I thought, as I entered Trader Joe’s and made my way towards a pyramid of bruised apples.