To S

Monday, June 16, 2025

3:29am

S,

I’ve stopped photographing myself again. I fear I’m disappearing. After that second Mounjaro shot the self-portraits lost their luster, but so did the camera. A sat across from me today, on a damp, sagging picnic table, his hair longer and shaggier but still too beautiful to be believed. He too seemed to be disappearing, right in front of me. He noted that it was strange that I didn’t have a camera with me and I told him that I couldn’t remember the last time that carrying my camera was the norm. A roll of film at this moment is either $17 or $1700 and I shudder every time that I think about it. He said that we are being priced out of being artists. I said that the tools have officially gotten in the way. We fantasized about making art outside of America, him more ensnared by the proximity of his subject matter than I. I could go. Move to France or Amsterdam and commit to writing rather than photographing. I’ve done my time in this shit hole. For him, it’s far more complex.

You texted me last week for the first time in months, it made my skin crawl. You are a ghost to me now, but far too petulant to be haunting. Why are you always doing that? Coming and going from me like a worn out airport or a musty train station, stepping into me like familiar old loafers, and why do I give it a second thought? What must you think of me to believe that you can discard me so? What must you think of love, of friendship? I ignored you, as I did three months ago, and thought cynically then critically about how one exercises a poltergeist.

When you texted me I was with T. Finally we met! He lit up my insides like I knew he would. His feverish intellect, hypnotizing charm, and encyclopedic mind made my spirit race. In the evening, feet up on the chaise, he read me poetry. Poured over every syllable, page after page, with a syrupy slowness and an age old confidence. I was pacified. He told me about the film Belfast and I watched it after he’d gone. I cried a guttural, profound, lonely cry. A real one this time, tears, snot and the like. There is a brief melancholic saxophone in the film that haunts me, brings it all up again.

I saw J last week. This time it wasn’t so awkward. But seeing his crooked smile reminded me that my whole life is a collection of cascading endings and that everything that once was familiar becomes new again. How does that song go? “Isn’t it strange? How people can change.” I felt split down the center with him, by him, as I’m oft to be. Felt that there is no there there anymore, but that maybe a seedling grows? These days, my whole life feels like a run on sentence. When will it finally end? I saw two friends in a row last week, same arrangement of café then park, same grey sky, hot and moist. I misremembered an event with the second friend and swore that we’d experienced it together. He laughed me off, dismissing my flawed memory, then I realized it’d happened a few hours earlier with the first. The events are the train stops, but every day, the monotony of the train.

Speaking of events, the film came out two weeks ago. I’m sure that you watched it and that it prompted your text, but I could be wrong. I was overwhelmed by the responses and couldn’t really engage anyone around it. There were too many comments, too many messages. I shut down. I felt a great simmering guilt about the fact that I’ll probably never watch the film again. Once was enough. It’s too vulnerable, too self-indulgent, too many ghosts a bit too close. Talking with Z about it made everything alright, but it was challenging. I’m so grateful that this document exists, that this visual time capsule against my vanishing, as Nan Goldin would say, is out in the world, a constellation all its own.

C consistently throws around the word glamour to describe me. Today he said, “you have such elegance to your depression. Such glamour.” This affirmation makes me electric, the joy of being seen and understood, like the time when JW described me on their podcast as “ethereal” and I felt justified. I am all glamour and always have been. I don’t think that people understand glamour anymore. Some days, in my commitment to it, I feel like a costumed diva, a deflated Hollywood starlit of a bygone era. But anyway, back to C.

Yesterday my poem came out in The Atlantic. It was met with small but critical praise. People don’t really read anymore, it seems, and the photographic audience that I’ve cultivated doesn't really follow me to the well of my writing, but I digress. It’s only been a day and I’m a neurotic nightmare of insecurity. When the poem came out I met W for coffee first thing, I felt glamorous then too, as if sitting among the people in the café I was holding onto a secret, a joy sprouted from my own heart and mind. C spent over 100 minutes on the phone praising and explaining the piece, the “get to it” brevity of the writing and its substantial impact. A quality to the writing that he understood as “the efficiency of the sublime.” He said that the first line brought him immediately to tears.

C too, is all glamour, all old-world refinement and genius. He embodies his appreciation, and at times obsession, with aristocracy. He is, we are, I think, an outgrowth of what Hilton Als once termed, “high-faggoty style.” He is committed to his tangy soup of southern charm, erudition, and comedic elitism and God knows I cannot get enough. I believe what he tells me because I know he tells the truth, albeit with a tendency toward overly superlative polish. I want to describe, in grave detail, how much my friendship with him means to me, how we just feel like two old girls on the phone, like Toni and Maya, Elizabeth and Joan, Sonia and Amiri, trapped in the wrong time–or is it the right time? But that’s a different correspondence entirely. C loved the poem and winning over his praise made me laugh myself to tears over and over and over. My God, what a mind he has.

Why are we so cavalier when we’re in the presence of the real thing? Is this how the friends of Jimmy felt each time they hung up the phone? After their lengthy phone calls, did Lorraine Hansberry hold the receiver to her breast, astonished by the fact that she’d become a confidant to THE James Baldwin, a little sister to a literal otherworldly being? I doubt it, Jimmy was probably too drunk and bitchy after a while for his other-worldliness to be seen through the slurry veneer. But C, I see him clearly.

Over the last few calls, in anticipation of the poems arrival, he started referring to it as “the po-em” dropping all the weight of his dramatic flourish and southern emphasis on the m sounds, sawing the word in half. A po-m. It tickles me every single time, a nod to Maya Angelou’s Charlie Rose interview. He is so unserious, and I am completely thrilled by it and by him. Our relationship produces within me a strange sadness, as if he’s leaving soon or as if I am. It’s eerie, to love someone so dizzyingly that it’s always just a little laced with anticipatory grief, like the very act of loving them means they are slipping away. Do you get that? Have you ever loved in a way that felt like holding a bar of wet soap in your hand, laced with looming? Sometimes, that’s how I’ve loved you.

I remember back to that evening when you cooked for me, that God awful meal, and I threw my head back in laughter so intense that for a moment it seemed like I’d splintered off into another dimension, saw the future, saw you abandoning me. But again, I digress.

At the end of our call, which truly made me feel impossible, C said “thank you for your contribution to American letters.” His voice, sick with flu, still strangled by that old-world elegance. He really believes it, you know? Believes the things I can’t believe about myself. Yesterday I read an interview in Granta with Renata Adler where she spoke at length about her complex relationship with Hannah Arendt. It was so clear in Adler’s responses that she admired Arendt a great deal, still tinged with girlish reverie. One part stayed with me. Adler offers, “She has a line where she says: ‘Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine, processes, and procedures.’ Doesn’t that strike you as brilliant?”

I remember initially dismissing that line as robotic and prosaic. Then, I spoke with C, and caught a whiff of something deeper. That for each other, we are both events, stops on the train, interruptions in a process. I’m just not always sure what that process is and where that gloomy train is headed.

I’m heading back to LA in a couple of weeks. Why does it always feel like I’m rushing back to ruins? First the ruins of us, then the strikes, the fires, and now the protests. Like a moth to a flame, I guess. I’m anxious about it all. I want to find some ways to get involved in the moment and I will. With each visit it becomes harder and harder to stomach the business as usual of Los Angeles, of white supremacy as a whole. Protests are exploding across the city, across the country, people are being tear gassed and pepper sprayed, women are being snatched from crowds and deported and folks are still ordering croissants and sitting down in front of their laptops. It seems that the “citizens” of this country have also splintered off into a dislocated, dissociative state. This world is so far past saving and we are all culpable. But there is love waiting for me in LA. Friends that I cannot wait to squeeze as if I’ll never see them again.

D got a new apartment last week and the maternal, sending-my-baby-off-to-college feeling that I’ve been holding needs to be made real in his embrace. I am so proud of him for choosing himself. Friendship is the only thing, it seems, the only reason for doing any of this. Friendship, and my understanding of it, has taken a serious beating these past few years. It is the area in life that can bring me to my knees the fastest, make me weep the deepest, and make me love the hardest. Love is… really something isn’t it?

And speaking of love, I asked you to stop reading my letters, but I know you still do. I wish that you wouldn’t, that throughout our tribulations you respected me more. Maybe this is all we can have now and isn’t that just awful? There is such a strange love between us, one that draws us back to each other like two ships, not quite passing in the night, but circling each other, magnetized, nearly striking the other one down. What a calamity this love has been for me. I’m doing my part to stay away. Will you do yours?

-G.