On Account of Having Nothing to Say

Journal entries from a "different" time in my life.

Excerpt of a painting by Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu.

November 28, 2023

I’m at a crossroads with talk therapy. 

My therapist shares a name with the girl he chose over me. They spell it differently. We’ve been talking for a little over a year. I haven’t spoken to him since last summer—a year and a half ago.

When she asks me what’s been on my mind this week, I tell her, “I feel like I have nothing to say.” She writes it down.

Today I bled through the ribbed cotton Hanes underwear that sag when left to their own devices and don’t particularly flatter what is left of my ass and onto my favorite pair of tan knit pants. I thought about throwing them away. The underwear, not the pants. Instead I tossed them over the towel rack to deal with later and slipped on another pair of the same ones. They are purple. I hope the stain comes out of my pants.

The full moon in Gemini must be to blame for my starting a week early. I use an app that encrypts your data to track my cycle, ever since Roe v. Wade got overturned. In eighth grade my literature teacher began every class period by praying for an end to abortion. The app crashes a lot and it’s frequently a few days off. I feel like it doesn’t matter how prepared I am to start; I’m always bleeding through shit. I wonder how long it’s been since my lit teacher had to worry about that. Since last June, what has occupied her prayers?

I’ve been twenty three for one month to the day. I spend a lot more time than I’d like to around teenagers. Campus swarms with unfamiliar faces, yet somehow yesterday I ended up right behind a guy who’s been inside me. 

I haven’t had sex in a month. I don’t feel desperate to change that; it kind of parallels what I’m doing now. Just writing and seeing how long I can go.

Over winter break, I decided, is when I’ll start applying for jobs. Any sooner and my finals won’t get done. 

I haven’t eaten much today. I’m supposed to be downstairs fixing that but I’m trying to figure out if I have anything to say here. When I stepped on the scale in a stranger’s home office, I wasn’t surprised by what I saw so much as I was awakened. My relatives tell me I’m in the best shape of my life and it’s all because I take medications that make me forget to eat. That’s part of why I like dragging myself to Alamo Drafthouse. Not only do I get the chance to watch a movie the way they’re meant to be watched—on a big screen, surrounded by others in the dark, distraction-free—but it guarantees I purchase a calorically-dense appetizer or entree. It’s where I go to indulge my vices, too. I get high in my car and sometimes the bathroom stall before the big show starts. Once I left my dab pen on my seat and when I came back for it, I pretended I was looking for my keys. The staff who were closing saw right through me. It was a funny moment for all of us. I also order a massive fountain Coke (not Diet, never Diet) with a straw. I try to limit my soda intake to once a week. In high school, I didn’t drink it or smoke at all. I think I might want to be that girl again.

November 29, 2023

I’m forcing myself to get another page down. When I tell someone that I feel like I have nothing to say, they usually want me to elaborate. But I can’t, on account of having nothing to say.

Today I was supposed to take a friend’s hip hop dance class after my weekly work meeting. Only the meeting ran late, and by the time I got home, there were just ten minutes remaining before the class started. Commuting back to campus would take at least fifteen, and I needed to change. I could have shown up late, I guess, but on the truncated drive from the art museum where I work to my parents’ garage, I basically talked myself out of going. This wasn’t particularly hard to do. Even earlier this afternoon, when Izzy suggested we ride to the studio together, I hesitated. I had my qualms about the class all along. Qualms like, I’m not a hip hop dancer, and I haven’t moved my body in any meaningful way beyond walking to class in months, and my self esteem is fragile enough as it is. Still, I feel guilty—both for letting a friend down and for lapsing on a commitment I made to myself.

Guilt drowns out most other emotional responses I might identify these days. When I cry, which is often, and the other day in public between classes, it’s about guilt, not sadness. I feel guilty for taking six years to complete my undergraduate degree. For not doing my homework on time or sometimes at all. For spending most of the day on my phone and most of my money on weed. For allowing friendships to fizzle out and letting precarious romantic situations last too long. For sitting in silence at the dinner table with my mother and in the car with my father. Maybe most of all for standing by as the distance between who I am and who I want to be grows and grows and creates a chasm I can’t clear.

Last night I got high and had dinner at Alamo Drafthouse. The burger I substituted with Beyond Meat was about as good as the feature presentation, Saltburn. Going into it I didn’t know what to anticipate, because friends and others whose opinions I respect have rated it anywhere from one to five stars. Around the time my food came out I realized I was watching a rip-off of The Talented Mr. Ripley. It received two stars from me. I suppose you can only trust your own taste.

November 30, 2023

I’ve never seen The Birds, but now I know how Tippi Hedren’s character felt. No fewer than six crows are chatting it up outside my bedroom window. That can’t be a good omen. I didn’t go to class today, even though it’s the penultimate week, so I’m feeling guilty for that, too.

Now I’m going to do something rarely carried out by me: calculations.

There are six days left in the semester. Then three reading days, and five days of finals. Add the weekends back in, and we have eighteen days total. 

I have three more pages to write here, and then eight pages of added/revised material. I still don’t know what this essay is about. For Pleasure and Politics in Popular Music—which I skipped this afternoon—I am writing a 15-page paper on Lana Del Rey, my top artist this year according to yesterday’s Spotify Wrapped. And fifteen on the Guerrilla Girls for Power and Protest in Modern America. My research methods professor has asked us to write an annotated bibliography of at least 2500 words—10 pages. That’s 51 pages altogether. Over the next eighteen days, I need to write at least 3 pages a day to knock out every assignment. 

Daunting for a girl with nothing to say.

It’s not that writing in general is hard, though it is always that in the background. I can crank out three pages on female subjectivity in popular music, no problem. It is when I am expected to turn to my personal life that things dry up. 

I should really take out my contacts tonight.

I don’t have a “nighttime routine.” I typically fall asleep with my contacts still in and my jewelry still on, facedown in the clothes I wore to school. 

I just poured myself a tall glass of tequila and limeade over ice, which bodes in favor of my passing out as described above. Home from an impromptu screening of The Wolf of Wall Street at Izzy’s apartment (a film I’ve seen many times), I’ve committed to turning in this assignment tonight. It’s certainly taken me long enough to write. 

December 1, 2023

Still have not written enough. This is agonizing. I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed with my favorite espresso tonic from the literary arts cafe by my side. Earlier this morning Izzy interviewed me about Eurocentric beauty standards and trends for one of her classes, and I struggled to scrape my thoughts together. I’m wearing my tan pants again. The blood washed out. In the new year, I should really try a Diva Cup. And a nighttime routine. And a tolerance break.

Of course I passed out last night and slept through my one class of the day. Well, I did wake up for it, but I made the choice not to go. I’m chronically late and absent from school, but always on time for work. My priorities are in the real world, not the academy. I do worry about appearing disrespectful to my professors, but I think (hope?) they understand I am one foot out the door already. 

Fall semesters always sucked for me and I was never quite able to break the pattern. The pattern is as follows:

In August I bend down and pick up my disappointments. I evaluate my summer, the high and low of it, which for the past two years have been exactly the same: dream job; getting ghosted around the Fourth of July. I do my best at making my peace with what transpired. I wince when syllabi are posted to Canvas. 

August lets itself out without much fanfare. Things hum along. I’m keeping up with preliminary assignments. Labor Day feels earned.

Something traumatic happens in September or October. Twice, it’s that I’ve been stalked. I start to fall behind but I vow to catch up during Fall Break. I do not. 

On my birthday, the guy I am fucking disrespects me. He lurks in silence as I celebrate myself. But I have to have the last word. Then it’s over. Meanwhile, I miss a major deadline.

November again. I listen to a lot of Labi Siffre and Amy Winehouse in order to heal. I turn things in four weeks late. Finals draw near and I need this to end but I’m not ready for it, either. I’m probably going to have to take an Incomplete, aren’t I? 

Suddenly my new age isn’t so new anymore. 

I am walking behind him but he doesn’t see me. 

I didn’t take out my contacts last night.

To be honest, I want to highlight all this text and hit delete and never think about it again.

I always say what I should do, but I never actually do it.

One whole page to go.

What do you think you think about the most?

For me, it’s two things. Sex and how I want everything to be different.

My five-year high school reunion is later this month. 

The last time I felt proud of myself was when these people knew me, and now most of us are a notch above strangers.

I wonder if I’ll tell the truth when asked how I’ve been.

“Stuck in a karmic time loop” feels like an inappropriate reply.

I’ll go if it’s not too expensive.

My sentences are getting shorter. I’m running out of steam.

I guess you’ve already figured it out. It’s not that I have nothing to say, it’s that I wish it were something else.

December 6, 2023

How long until I can’t eat whatever I want without facing some physiological consequences?

Is what I’m wondering tonight as I pop another Reese’s dipped animal cracker into my mouth. They taste like Girl Scout Cookies. Nothing feels new, even this new product. I wash them down with a glass of water.

Izzy and I raid the QuikTrip on Gravois for snacks sweet and savory alike. It’s the only semblance of a nightly ritual I have going on at the moment. She is watching HBO’s (well, really, Lena Dunham’s) Girls for the first time, and I drop in on a few episodes at a time when I can. She is wildly attracted to Adam Driver. I am not.

Tonight at the gas station she poured two cups of hot cocoa: one for herself and one for her subletter-turned-semester-long-roommate, Lily. I fill my own with crushed ice and Cherry Vanilla Coke.

“That cocoa is really tearing up my stomach,” she comments later while we watch Dunham and Driver fuck. None of the sex in Girls is simulated. Izzy is turning twenty five toward the end of this month—the week of my five-year reunion, to be exact. Is that how long I have left before my digestive system turns on me? Less than two years?

Clancy sits in my lap and vibrates with approval at the palm of my hand patting him on the head; fingers scratching behind his ears. To him, in this moment, I make all the right decisions. The only behavioral pattern of mine that concerns him is the one my palm makes across his snowy fur.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful? To make all the right decisions according to someone?

December 11, 2023

I am sitting next to Izzy in the East Asian Library for the first time in my five years at WashU. Campus really is beautiful and I could never deny that. Maybe if I had studied more often in spaces like these I would find it easier to romanticize this whole “college experience.”

When I look up from my laptop, there is a December graduate in her emerald regalia taking photos against the rows of volumes. In less than six months, I’ll be doing the same. Probably not here, though. It’s hard to think of anywhere meaningful enough to memorialize the past eight semesters—ten, if you count the two when I withdrew from all my classes. This university is hardly a home to me.

St. Louis, on the other hand, teems with formative landscapes and locales. All of which I will write about in due time. The coming-of-age memoir that was supposed to be this assignment remains off the page for now, but not forever. I want it to be a love letter to the Midwest. To growing up in St. Louis, to summering in Chicago, to Halloween house parties in Kansas City, to museum visits in Milwaukee. To road trips from Missouri through Illinois to Wisconsin and back again. To where I live, which will turn into where I came from, and then hopefully become where I return.

December 14, 2023

My mother’s high school boyfriend died yesterday.

Tonight at dinner I forced down falafel salad while she pulled up their last exchange on Facebook Messenger.

From him: “And your daughter is beautiful! When I see her, I see you!!!”

My heart breaks for her twice over. Once for her loss. And again for all the time she spent watching me teach myself that I was ugly. I was too self-absorbed and consumed with mourning my teenage girlhood before it was even gone to consider how it might have made her feel.

Mom was a beautiful teenage girl. I was not. I left the orthodontist’s office with clear braces, and I stained them with yellow curry as soon as I could open my mouth far enough to eat it. I was a sophomore. In her senior portrait, she looks like a grown woman. Her makeup is undetectable, save a shiny bottom lip and a touch of shadow along her eyelids. I forgot to take out my new retainers for my yearbook photo. My smile was rendered cloudy; hers, pearlescent.

Two summers later, the world around me started to indicate that I was worth looking at. But that’s the story I’m not quite ready to tell.

Beauty feels productive. I don’t use my hands for much besides blending concealer and blush. When I haven’t written in a while, I can put my face on and convince myself I’ve accomplished something. The beauty industry wants me to correlate applying makeup and how I’m treated by others. To believe that the repetitive motion, the patting of product into the skin, “pays off.” When a stranger buys me a drink or the barista pretends to ring me up or the guy I’ve been pursuing leans in to kiss me, I remember dragging my ring finger across my under eye.

“Patpatpatpatpat,” my mother chirps. She watches me from her bed as I move in front of her mirror.

December 15, 2023

This morning on the way to Coffeestamp I queued Wham!’s “Last Christmas.” After all, there are only a handful of days left before doing so becomes socially unacceptable. 

I spent so much money on myself this afternoon that you’d think there wasn’t a major gift-giving event coming up. After breakfast—an everything bagel topped with mashed avocado, goat cheese, and strawberry slices, and an iced vanilla latte served in a generous glass—Izzy and I trailed each other down Jefferson Avenue toward Cherokee Street. There are several vintage storefronts in the neighborhood, and naturally we wandered into the most upscale one. While Izzy chatted it up with the owner, another woman named Izzy, I grimaced at the price tags on Gucci dresses and cashmere sweater sets. I didn’t leave empty handed, though: Izzy (owner) offered me a 30% discount on a gorgeous Diane von Furstenberg maxi skirt in an undulating black fabric, which hugged my waist perfectly when I tried it on behind a curtain in the corner of the room. A few doors over was another floor of pre-loved clothing, and what it lacked in high fashion brands, it made up for in affordability. I snagged two more long skirts; one of royal blue ribbed cotton, the other, dark denim with a girlish ruffle hem. I love the silhouette they create when worn with a cropped top or sweater.

Christmas is cancelled in Bethlehem this year and the “War on Christmas” crowd are nowhere to be found. I have burned bridges with so many WashU acquaintances for speaking up on social media about the atrocities unfolding in Gaza, including a guy I let finish on my chest. At least once a day I recall the Dread Scott performance, Our Grief is Not a Cry for War, arranged in the wake of September 11, 2001. My stance is no more complicated than the title.

December 16, 2023

My holiday shopping escapades continued today after another everything bagel with hummus, spinach, tomato, red onion, and havarti cheese. I braved the Galleria to restock my foundation, cheek tint, mascara, and body cream, as well as to pick out a skincare set for my mom and a gift card for my grandma, at Sephora. I found a parking spot right away and beelined from the Nordstrom entrance up the escalator and across the mall to the cosmetics chain. As expected, it was crawling with customers and I felt like I was in the way no matter how close to each display case I stood. 

The mission only took about half an hour, and soon I was en route to the antique market on The Hill to find something cutesy to round out Izzy’s birthday and Christmas presents. I gave her a pair of oven mitts last night, just in time for her dinner party preparations this evening. She called me while I was antiquing with concerns that no one would come and a desire to cancel, but I eventually talked her out of it. I decided on a pair of porcelain angels, which turned out to be candleholders. I also had my eye on a Creem magazine ashtray, and I might go back for it before our group chat’s White Elephant exchange. I know the gift is supposed to be a gag, but purposeful glassware would be a big hit with any one of the many stoners in our fold.

I’m anxious about impending deadlines and, just as Izzy feared, not exactly in the mood to celebrate. It’s something I’ll push through because of what our friendship means to me. I hate the idea of her feeling overlooked and underappreciated.

This has been the mildest winter I can remember.

December 17, 2023

Tonight instead of working on this assignment I went out to dinner with my friend Rachel. We stopped into the cozy pub around the corner from my house and ordered two cocktails apiece and shared parmesan garlic fries, brussels sprouts, and goat cheese dip. To our right sat a raucous party of ten or so millennials, and we did our best to carry a conversation over the din.

Rachel is trying to set me up with her older sister’s friend from college. He’s turning twenty eight next week and works in publishing. He’s also much better looking than the last friend of theirs I attempted to date. When Rachel asked him to meet us at the restaurant, which was a four-minute drive from his go-to bar, he countered with an offer for Tuesday night. Not wanting to reveal my undergraduate status, Rachel told him I had a nondescript “busy week” ahead, so we’d have to circle back. 

Before putting a pin in the exchange for the evening, she sent him a screenshot from my Instagram. Taken by Sarah, an upcyclist jeweler who graduated from WashU before my time and recently moved to Kathmandu to study metalsmithing, the image was meant to advertise the pair of rings on my right hand and the silver dangling from my ears. But the photo’s focal point, by far and away, is my cleavage, threatening to spill out of the scoop neckline of the cocoa bodysuit I wore tucked into light wash, distressed denim shorts. He opened the message immediately and replied, “Woah okay. I’m sold.” 

I brought my whiskey fizz up to my lips to conceal the smirk that was forming there. Rachel rolled her eyes. “I hate men,” she managed without a hint of performativity, something only lesbians are capable of doing. When I didn’t chime in, she considered her words carefully. “Doesn’t that offend you on some level?” Before I could give my honest answer—no—she added, “Like, I find it a little offensive.” Taking offense wouldn’t change the reality, I wanted to tell her, that most men have little room in their hearts for women they don’t find attractive.

His initial inquiry to Rachel had been whether or not I was his “type.” This has always been thorny territory for me when dealing with guys, especially white ones. There’s usually a 50/50 chance (I think the actual statistics on this are a lot worse) that any prospect of mine will reveal his dick goes limp around Black girls. Of course, he’d never make such a crass statement. I’d have to figure it out based on context clues; shifty nonverbals and laced language about how he found me “intimidating” and “hard to read.” Earlier in college, I expressed to my best friend Cassie immense shock over matching with one of our frattiest campus celebrities on Tinder, to which she retorted, “He’s not blind.” I didn’t know how to explain the relief I felt each time this happened. 

When the check came, so did more messages. A recent photo of himself. “Am I her type?” “Should I get a haircut?” “I’m stressed.” We laughed. In the car on the way home, Rachel warned me that he is looking for a girlfriend. “I can be a wife for the right guy,” was my cheeky comeback. But could I? I thought as I punched in the passcode that unlocks our front door. I’ve been single for almost two years, and in that time, I’ve adapted to the horrors of hookup culture better than anyone else I know. I have become as avoidant as I was once fixated on abandonment. This October, I refused to shed tears over a birthday gone unrecognized. My roster abruptly toppled as a result, and I’ve been going it alone ever since. Solitude and celibacy were ways of life I couldn’t fathom this time last year. 

So I can change.

December 18, 2023

My period arrived a week early. It’s hard to believe I’ve been journaling semi-consistently for almost an entire menstrual cycle. If I keep this up, the memoir I’m destined (cursed?) to publish will write itself.

I’m pretty much out of weed and have decided I will leave my pen here over the holidays. From Christmas Eve till the day after New Year’s, I’ll be at my aunt’s house outside of Washington, D.C. And while I’m there, I’ll definitely want to get high. But more than that, I’m curious what my day-to-day might feel like if I were a little less California sober and a bit more Missouri sober—that is, nursing a beer while I’m out at a dive bar with my best friends.

Rachel’s friend will have to wait until the new year. There are too many friends I need to cram in visits with this week before I leave town. I can only hope distance and delay make the attraction grow stronger. Or, I can release a desired outcome entirely. I like how that sounds.

Tonight I will moisturize my skin and brush my teeth and floss and wear my retainers to bed. I took out my contacts to wash my hair, and I’m typing this from under my duvet. My days of falling asleep face down are behind me, or at least I intend to make them so.

Once I started writing about what I was doing rather than what I was thinking, everything changed.

I have therapy at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.

When my therapist asks what’s been on my mind this week, I’ll tell her how much it turned out I have to say. About sex and the seasons of my life and vanity and vices and death and desirability. About how I want everything to be different. And how I’ve concluded it can be.

AFTERWORD

These journal entries sprung from a suggestion raised by a Los Angeles thirtysomething who paid for explicit photos and videos of me. Over the past two months, our relationship has morphed from transactions to daily text threads to nothing at all. During the second phase, I voiced my frustration with the personal writing I’d been doing (or not doing, as it were) for this class. “I just feel like I have nothing to say,” I told him. “Well, why don’t you start with that and go from there?” was his advice.

When I sent him the first half, I asked if he had any thoughts on it.

“Not really,” he said.