Thoughts from Heathrow
Remember, remember the ninth of November
Does walking on a path beside a sheep pasture count as contact with livestock?
Why is the throne room music from The Last Jedi in my head?
Two seats over, I can see a woman logging onto her computer: Walsh, Chloe. Did she became goth because her parents gave her the cute name Chloe Walsh or in spite of it? She’s working at 7:30 am on Sunday. Chloe Walsh is diligent.
Purple and gold LED Christmas decor is a bold choice. These trees look like The Cones of Dunshire. I would love if whomever arranged them was playing a game. I would love for things to be thoughtful like that.
Heathrow had me arrive three hours early, but won’t tell me my gate. This has fast become a withholding relationship.
If I open instagram, I will lose these three hours passively staring at other peoples’ content, and I should just download a movie because isn’t it better to decide to eat a bag of chips than to kid yourself by sneaking one at a time?
I don’t think I will ever be as interesting as the man sitting behind me must be to the person he has been monologuing to on the phone for the last five minutes.
No one ever talks about how the door in Rachel and Monica’s apartment is the same color as the kitchen in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Why were the early 00s so obsessed with cornflower blue?
If I share this list will I regret it?
Is sharing inherently icky? Or is it implied in the creative impulse? I made something and I want you to see it, is different from I made something but it’s not real unless you see it, is different from I made something and it’s not good unless you see it. Would I share if I hadn’t been encouraged? Do I make inherently for myself or for others? Am I writing this for someone else even if I never show it to them? Are the projections in my head more precious to me than their walking counterparts? They are more portable, and they can never walk away...
Perhaps I’ll share a purple Christmas cone to my stories.
Foggy and bright: not mutually exclusive.
I did not need to bring two notebooks on this trip.
The man behind me, a new man, is praying using an app. I pray all the time, informally. I am forever sliding into God’s DMs. I believe a lot of things at once.
Is that red lipstick tube real or did the person who shot this ad use a prop, like the plastic red lipstick I had as a child, some Fisher-Price-esque object that was not lipstick but taught me to imbue lipstick with a kind of forbidden candy apple magic?
A very mousy woman with a very gutteral laugh. “I am here,” this laugh says. “I am not what I look like. I am fully alive in my Kelly green airplane dress.”
The Vinery.
Do the puffed up ads work? Yes, people love to be puffed up.
Do people actually “vote for Heathrow”? They must if they’re pushing it so hard.
My purple cone story has received three views. One viewer, I think, is a robot. The other two are humans who live on the West Coast and are awake. They are in the same city and they are not friends, but they used to be. And I wonder if they have any inkling that, even though they don’t speak anymore, they are still connected, as the only two living souls on this earth who viewed my purple cone story.
Maybe this is why we share. Because we are all each other’s conduits and the people we lose are never really lost and we all might be useful in ways we don’t yet understand.
Updates
Currently Reading: I’m about to attempt Alchemized…!
Currently Watching: Music Box: Listening to Kenny G
Weather: There are now more leaves on the ground than there are in the trees, and at night the wind is biting.
Books I Read Last Month
Mate by Ali Hazelwood. I mean what is there to say? Ali Hazelwood is an auto-buy for me and this book is another barn burner—set in the same universe as Bride, Mate follows Misery’s best friend, Serena, through health crises, cult intrigue, and falling in love with Lowe, who…trust Ali Hazelwood to make me like a man bun.
200 Monas by Jan Saenz. I’m obsessed with this book, which officially comes out in March. It follows soon-to-be-college-grad Arvey, who has 48 hours to offload her dead mother’s stash of the most rare, erotic drug on earth (think ecstasy x 1000) OR ELSE. She teams up with a hot drug dealer named Wolf and oh my did do hijinks ensue (they take Mona themselves within the first 50 pages). This book is literary in that it’s beautiful written and explores some big questions, but it’s also supremely entertaining and incredibly propulsive. I turned down birthday cake because I didn’t want to stop reading, if that gives you an idea. Available for pre-order here.
June Baby by Shannon Garvey. This book pubs next May and is just the perfect slice of summer. Set on Block Island with all the insider-y references you want, this story reveals itself like a sun-kissed, wistful Russian doll, with layer inside layer of personal history and emotion. Some summer stories are about the ephemeral and some are about the cyclical—this is both. Mystic Pizza meets Little Fires Everywhere meets Elin. For updates on how to pre-order, follow Shannon Garvey.
