A Bombshell Has Entered A New State Of Being

Ahhh, here we meet again. Perched at the edge of desire, hope, and bikinis so teensy tiny that they make me constantly wonder how are more people not showing hole on this show?

That’s right, it’s season 8 of Love Island USA. And that’s right, I’m back to wax poetic about it. If you don’t remember, last year I took myself on a torrid yet rewarding emotional journey inspired by the question “What if I, a 36-year-old woman who sometimes forgets to brush her teeth, were a contestant on the fever dream that is Love Island USA?” The twists and turns of my own mind led me to god1 and back again. But we’re not surprised, are we? Nay. The best there is on prime time TV has that effect on people2. It makes you think. It asks you to hold the human condition in the palm of your hand. It pushes you outside yourself, beyond time and space, to a point of no return.3

So, hark! A new season brings new pondering. As I turn my favorite show on and dissociate to the slurping sounds of people unhinging their jaws to swallow each other whole aka kiss, my mind wanders back to who I would be on this island, this love island.

In my regular life, I am Layne. A 37-year-old who takes a lot of baths and says worrisome things like “when you die, I die” to her dog. I am completely and utterly unable to hide how I feel. CC: grimacing in a wedding or laughing during a funeral. I love hot dogs and I like most people. I’ve been filmed while eating a salad by a group of teens, not once but twice. I believe in ghosts, because they are real. One time, my anxiety was so bad that I convinced myself my tongue was too big for my mouth. I walked around for a month asking my friends to look at it and tell me if they noticed anything “off kilter”. I shrugged my shoulders a lot and woefully exclaimed, “Well, I guess I’ll have to give up public speaking!” I went to the dentist, and while she was in there cleaning, I shakily murmured, “Is my tongue… normal-sized to you?” She either pretended not to hear me or just straight up ignored me, which is fair. And then I got on Lexapro! And all my problems were solved.

Just kidding.

Despite the horrors, this life of mine is pretty cushy. I don’t have to deal with things like dating 2-7 different people at the same time, horny dancing to essentially no music4, or playing5 sexy6 games,7 aka passing baked beans from one mouth to another while adorned with matching lingerie. Sure, my dad has dementia and suuuureeeeee we had to take my stepmom to court over who should be his legal guardian, but I’d be lying if I said the former didn’t make me break out in hives. Family trauma, I can handle. A mid-season recoupling based on America’s vote…I honestly don’t know.

Alas, the show has ended, but the question remains:

Who would I be on Love Island USA?

I could be shy. When I roll up in a Jeep, I wouldn’t be halfway out the sunroof, titties bouncing and navel piercing glistening in the midday Fiji sun. I’d be in the backseat reading the last 100 words of Plato’s The Republic. In my first confessional, I’d mumble something like “Don’t look at me” or “I’m just a girl…” I speak only in whispers, and I sit down in the shower. At the first kissing challenge, I excuse myself to the bathroom for 45 minutes. When I come back, everyone is still making out, except this time Tabitha and Becs are doing splits on each other. I hide behind one of the palm trees and name three things I can see, two things I can feel, one thing I can smell. On episode 5, I am so quiet in the dressing room that one of the other women mistakes me for a lamp.

One afternoon by the pool, someone steps on a dragonfly and kills it. I see the opportunity to break outta my shell. I go to my hands and knees and softly wail, “Glasses! He can’t see without his glasses!” Surely someone here has seen My Girl. All the boys are busy comparing calf muscles and don’t notice, so I gather some courage and try again. “Glass-”. Before I can get the rest of the sentence out, Chad uses my body as a launching pad to do a backwards flip into the pool. When he comes up out of the water, he burps and yells ‘Why are you talking to a spider?” Before I have the chance to tell him it’s actually a dragonfly, a symbol of transformation and strength in some cultures, Boots dunks him under the water.

“Titty Twister!!” he yells, and suddenly all the boys are flying over me into the pool like rats to a gutter during a storm. They grunt and laugh and twist each other’s pink little nipples. I pick up the dragonfly and give it a proper burial by the Hibiscus flowers. As I push one final mound of dirt over its fragile iridescent wings, I whisper, “He was gonna be an acrobat”.

Before the fire pit dumping that night, I pack my bags in secret. I switch out my kitten heels for my Dansko clogs and walk to the end of the gravel driveway leading out of the villa. When my Lyft driver pulls up, she asks where I’m headed.

I take a deep breath, trace my finger along the tinted window.

“I walked across an empty land
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand”

I can sense her looking at me through the rear-view mirror, so I continue.

“I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?
Is this the place that I've been dreamin-”

“Do you have an address?” she interrupts.

I buckle my seatbelt. “Somewhere only we know,” I say, gazing out the window at the moon. “Somewhere only we know”.

She drops me at the airport Hampton Inn and Suites.

Then there is the version of me who is not shy, not even close. I enter the villa week two as a bombshell, essentially cosplaying as Patti Lapone trying to hail a taxi on a bad day. My personality reads more Cunning chimney sweep steals old woman’s watch and pawns it off for bread rather than Young, hot and available. In high school, I was voted Most Likely to Come Back As An Alley Cat. I have gout, and I like that about myself. I am 42.

On my third day, Rick dares me to kiss Tom “mouth to navel”. I do the thing I always do at kissing parties, the thing that earned me the nickname The Endentulous. I stand up and yell “With THESE teeth?” and promptly pull out my dentures. Before I have a chance to explain the freak horseback-riding accident that left me toothless and chronically online while I was working as a background magician at the Downers Grove County Fair in 2007, everyone has cleared the fire pit.

I put my teeth back in, look straight to camera and exclaim in a cockney accent, “Tough crowd!”

I am promptly asked to leave by production.

Then there is the version of me that enters via Casa Amor, but not the way you think. I am not there to shake things up or make a scene. I’m not even there to find love, per se. I am there to be subtle, which isn’t hard because I am small. So so small. Small enough to dodge any of the humping games the islanders insist on playing. Small enough to weave in and out of the pile of thonged bikinis in the dressing room. Small enough to find a warm place to sleep when all the beds are occupied with humans moaning, snoring, and slurping. And I am also quiet. So so quiet. Quiet enough to hiccup unnoticed. Quiet enough to sneak downstairs for tiny nibbles and petite snacks. Quiet enough to scurry away and hide when someone yells “I GOT A TEXT!”

I am a mouse. A stowaway mouse.

I hitched a ride via one of the shorter male’s hoodie sweatshirts in the LAX airport. Day three, I am almost stepped on by Ariana Madix, and my hairy body trembles at the honor of being flattened by the world’s most iconic bisexual multi-hyphenate. I spend the rest of my time slowly eating the crusts off the sourdough, splashing in rain puddles and using my twiny wittle fwont paws to cwean my fwace in a weawy cwute way.

I almost make it to the end of Casa Amor without being found out. But all good things- a block of cheese, a pumpkin seed, a week in the Casa house-must come to an end. One of the women, the flexible one they call Sarah, goes into her suitcase to grab a maxi pad and instead wraps her soft, doll-like hand around my smooth, furry body. Before I know it, I am soaring through the air, and islanders are running around me stampede style. I land with a thud at the top of the stairs. I know better than to stick around, so I scurry through the small hole by the light socket. I weave myself through the insulation in the wall down to the kitchen and squeeze my body through a dime-sized crack underneath the refrigerator. I hightail it to the dock, but before I sneak on the motorboat that will take me to some other human-sized adventure, I look back at the Casa House. My vision suddenly blurs. I blink away tears, small small tears, and marvel at how much these hairless adults take for granted. I say a prayer for each of them. Not for love or coupling up, but for peace. Whatever that means. What do I know, I’m just a mouse. A smwall, qwuiet vwewy cwute wittle mwouse.

And finally, there is the version of me who enters the Villa ready to risk it all. I enter the villa day one with 9 other singles. I do the silly dance they make us do for the intro, but I’m not even embarrassed. I’m excited. I believe in love, and while I don’t need it, I want it. I always have. For so many years I denied myself that truth. I equated that truth to neediness and desperation. I wore nonchalance like a wool cloak, every inch of my skin itchy and uncomfortable. I had a reliable mantra: to want is to be the weaker one in the equation. I told myself and anyone who would listen that the power lies in being wanted. Not known, not cared for, not understood. I swam in a vast pool of want and mistook it for worth.

And then my dad got in a bike accident that kept him in the ICU for a month and his bed for three more. And I watched my mom care for him. I watched her chase down doctors, pad and pen in hand, weaving in between gurneys and wires to catch up and demand more. More answers, more clarity, more attention.

I watched her bend my dad’s legs back and forth when they got stiff from lying down too long. I watched her rub his hands with almond-scented lotion. I watched her make him laugh, his head tilted up and smile open towards the hospital ceiling.

I watched her look at him when he slept. I saw her eyes memorize his face, every curve dip and wrinkle. Loving someone makes you acutely aware of time. The time you had without them, before you even knew they existed. The time you have with them now, and the time you have left that will never feel like enough. And I saw that in the way she looked at him.

Love begs time to change its ways, but it doesn’t. All it can do is finish its story. So I guess we are the ones who have to make a choice. We shake hands with life, or we don’t. I could either keep going, trying to convince myself that the disappearing act of my own feelings was enough to keep this whole big bright thing afloat, or I could say fuck it, love is why we’re here, I’m going to risk it all.

And now I’m on Love Island USA, looking at myself in the mirror at the villa. Earlier today, we played a game in which we had to squeeze hard-boiled eggs between our thighs as we waddled across a moving dock to our partners, who sat on vibration plates. Once there, we had to pass the hard-boiled egg from our thighs to our partner’s open mouths. Then they had to spit the eggs into a bucket until it reached exactly 8.6 pounds. It’s important to also mention that we are dressed as sexy farmers and covered in spoiled milk. The point of the game? That’s between the producers and god.

I study myself in the mirror and suddenly time slows. I could be in any other bathroom in any other place, but I’m here, right now, truly looking at myself. I look at my eyes, the color green shot through with golden yellow, like my mother’s. I pay close attention to the streaks, the same way I did with hers when I was a kid and we went to Niagara Falls. We slept in the same bed together at the hotel. She was so tired, she fell asleep almost immediately on top of the covers. The light of the TV she left on cast a moving cool-toned hue onto her features, like a lighthouse sweeping its beacon across a sleepy Maine town. Her mouth was slightly ajar, and if I got close enough, I could feel the cadence of her breath inhaling and exhaling tickling my eyelashes. I scooted back so I could really see her. My small hand traced her eyebrows, the ridge of her nose, the curve of her chin. I knew I was hers, but she was also mine. I was filled with a feeling that has taken me until right now to grasp. Love isn’t a thing I have to go searching for. It doesn’t appear out of thin air. It runs through me, and it runs through you.

The thread that connects us all shines golden in the right light.

Tomorrow I will decide to pivot and couple up with Chad.

And there we have it, another Love Island USA thought experiment done. I’ve learned, I’ve laughed, I’ve pondered my way to god and back again, again. If anything, I have discovered how much melatonin, probiotics, and LMNT I would need to pack to survive a week in the Villa. Which I could. Ok? You hear that production. I could. I could and I WILL. Think about it. No pressure, but seriosuly think about it.

Until next time,

Layne