nathan’s Reviews > Famesick > Status Update

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.

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.