manasvi’s Reviews > Just Kids > Status Update

I told him that pot was supposed to be for writing poetry, not fooling around. But all we did was laugh.

“You don’t shoot up and you’re not a lesbian. What do you actually do?”

To me, Robert and I were irrevocably entwined, like Paul and Elisabeth, the sister and brother in Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. We played similar games, declared the most obscure object treasure, and often puzzled friends and acquaintances by our indefinable devotion.



will forever regret not reading this book sooner

“We’re still us,” he said. He held my hand and I fell asleep on his shoulder on the subway home. Sadly, the new picture of the two of us was lost, but the picture of myself astride the pony, alone and slightly defiant, remains.

“Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he said again. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was as if we were the only two people in the world.

We promised that we’d never leave one another again, until we both knew we were ready to stand on our own. And this vow, through everything we were yet to go through, we kept. “Chelsea Hotel,” I told the driver, fumbling through my pockets for change, not completely certain I could pay him.

Both of us had given ourselves to others. We vacillated and lost everyone, but we had found one another again. We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre? I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination.

“At least they’ll never get it,” he said. “Who are they?” I asked. “Anyone who isn’t us,” he answered.