nathan > Recent Status Updates

The world digs a hole in your yard & it’s up to you to fill it, up to you to find something useful to do with your sadness.

I pull myself up over the wall and take a look. It’s a long garden, with a patio by the back of the house. Everything’s dead quiet. I dunno if I can go in. Not yet. If he’s gonna be there, then that is a problem.
Wait.
There’s a shed. A fucking shed.
That’ll work. That’ll do.

all, I smile, and repeat, ‘We have sex,’ softer this time, smooth and alluring. I try to fill the words with pleasure, but it’s hard. It’s hard to do that with only three words. I know, because I have tried multiple times before. Different words, but the same lie.

I have an immediate and disturbingly intense understanding that I don’t recognise myself at all. I feel completely and utterly unknowable. It is as if I have floated out of my body, and I’m looking down from above at a woman sitting in a car, waiting to join a homosexual subculture in her Lululemon anorak.

STAY AWAY from chemsex parties. People die at those things. Do not go to one, you’ll need more than Jesus to help you get out. Chemsex? Jesus? People die?

Virginia Woolf would have loved Grindr.

🤡🤡🤡

Gay and Sad. Gold dust. I suddenly remember. I was once called an honorary gay. Yes. Or should I say, Yas! I was. Just like Judy Garland or Barbara Streisand or Madonna or the Babadook.

Virginia Woolf was a little bit gay.

The Hours. I loved that film. The scene where Ed Harris was so riddled with shame and HIV that he threw himself from the window. It made me cry.

A Little Life. Oh my God, I bawled and bawled, and it was so long. Come to think of it, some of my favourite films, too. A Single Man – so sad, and so chic. God’s Own Country. So raw and so real. Milk. Sean Penn was breathtaking – he won all the awards. Philadelphia, too. One of the greats. Tom Hanks lost so much weight for the role, he was remarkable.

Also – always remember: gay is in. Go gay. It’s cool now. It sells. However – here is the gold dust – the perfect blend is gay AND sad. You nail that, you’re minted. And probs an award winner.

The truth lies in Reddit.

This mirror is distressed. That’s what the man at Neptune’s furniture store told me. ‘This is a distressed mirror.’ I have tried so often to find its emotional anguish, to relate. But all it means is that the glass is purposefully tarnished to the point where you can’t really see yourself in it at all.

Some people are good at performing; some people are good at observing. I have always been good at observing. I study the paparazzi. The way they communicate with celebrities and the people around celebrities, the places they hide, how fast they run. Everything.

How different from Las Vegas, which is a valley, open and obvious. Here, yards are full of succulents and trees are heavy with lemons—so heavy the fruit falls from branches and rolls downhill. In Las Vegas, the plants are sunburnt.

Our apartment is at the base of a hill. On our first night there we walk the narrow, winding road to the top. It is impossible not to make comparisons. For me, they’re all positive: The hills in Los Angeles seem to undulate, containing mystery.

There has to be a narrative; that’s what everyone wants now. It’s not enough for the celebrity to just be there; there has to be another layer. The celebrity can’t just be getting lunch; they have to be getting lunch amid pregnancy rumors.

“Have you ever done that? Hidden and secretly gotten a photo of someone who didn’t want to have their picture taken.”
“We all have to do that sometimes.”
“What about if someone is really in crisis, or is doing something that feels very private, very personal? Have you ever photographed someone like that?”

Malibu I associated with being alone; Venice Beach with being so embarrassingly hopeful upon first arriving. It seemed to me that during my twenties, I’d somehow managed to taint entire boroughs, entire metropolises.

They meant I could sit without folding and refolding my limbs, that my voice didn’t start to wane toward the end of a meal. They meant I had waited it out—minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, year by year. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve survived.

..these days, I tuck my stomach into my pants like an undershirt made of flesh. They certainly didn’t mean my eyebrows, which are only half there. They meant something in my eyes: After so long spent as two solitary wells to nowhere, two black holes of need, they were simply brown again.

Honest was all I could be.

..a day in bed staring at the ceiling, an afternoon with a book I was too anxious to read, a few hours with my cellphone charging outside my room. I didn’t give myself room to dream, to heal, or to grow. People on the Internet were cruel to me, but nobody was crueler to me than I was to myself.

Then there were the smaller traumas, the spikes in cortisol, the wounded friendships, numbers blocked and unblocked, waiting for embarrassing stories to fall further back into the Google results for my name. I’d give myself small allowances:

I began to resemble a person who was part of the world.

We cling to our tragedy just as tightly as we cling to the things we love most, airtight explanations for what ails us.

I barely slept, as if in some kind of pheromonal withdrawal. “How can you go from having sex with someone five times a day to not even wanting to know them?” I wailed to my mother. “Well, that’s your issue right there,” she said. “You can’t have sex five times a day. You won’t know which way is up.”

“But the timing could have only been the timing,” he said like some sort of surf Buddha, smiling radiantly.

.. it has the melodramatically girlish timbre of that movie where Mandy Moore sings a gorgeous song to her high school class, kisses the popular boy, and then promptly dies, just as things are getting good for her. This has been, I was saying, a walk to remember.

He was the kind of sex partner who put in exactly as much effort as he needed to in order to seem like he cared about how women felt, which was not that much. But he was a dazzling kisser—to attempt the sports metaphor, it was like he was mastering the form and might even become a coach once he was past his prime.