1.
Polka dot tights & 90′s crushed velvet for ramen in the East Village with Sam when he was visiting from Shanghai; sharing my heart stuff with my best girl Leslie at an all night diner where we WORKED on food smothered by other food followed by more food smothered foods; my parents have been married and taking care of each other for 30 years; the gold monies my mother coerced me into having and then I ate them later that night so that I could later “pass” fortune through me; my glitter shoes; Julia getting ready for her reading at AWP & me being the happy observer; Tony, my rice brother from another mother, & me trying to to figure out this bar that just had a political rally for a local democrat and was about to become a bar for a literary reading of slipstream/sci-fi/fantasy short stories. Most of these photos are from my instagram. I’m jennybagel on there, and you can follow me, son (if you want.)

2.
The luminous Helen Zou interviewed me for Chictopia‘s blog Everybody is Ugly. It’s a long interview. We talk about my favorite fashion blogs, my ambivalence toward fashion blogs, Diana Vreeland, cultural appropriation, Trayvon Martin, the time I danced so hard my dress literally unraveled off my body, my love poems, the performance of dressing up, being a dum-dum in France, whether or not there is such a thing as good style or bad style, my mom, and many, many other things. You can read the whole thing here.

I think you’ve seen this photo before. I found it again when Helen asked me to pick five photos for Chictopia and I realized this is the only full-length picture I have of myself from the past year. My friend Harry took it for me when he and his fiancée visited me in Paris. We were in Montmartre. I was happy and less lonely than usual on this day. I can’t believe this photo was taken almost a year ago. Why was it already so long ago?

3.
I forgot to post this back in February when I was frantically moving apartments and going out of town every week and trying not to spill my guts out onto the grassy plains of America from the excitement of my book coming out, but a few weeks ago Autumn Giles, poet of the sun, the moon, and stars, the magnifico behind the food blog Autumn Makes & Does, interviewed me for her biweekly podcast, Alphabet Soup, where she talks to poets and food makers and bloggers about food and poetry and consumption and creation. I’m not a food blogger, but I do make and consume food and try to create as much poetry as I can in my little life. If you’re interested in hearing me talk with Autumn about my fantasy food day, thousand year old eggs (aka preserved duck eggs,) the C-Town of Paris, crying while eating, loving our siblings too much, concealing my poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Fernando Pessoa, the gurlesque and the gross, wanting to stay ignorant to love poetry more, the first things I learned to cook, and not being ashamed of being wild, then you can listen to it all HERE. You can also subscribe to her podcast, which is the bomb diggity, and listen to all her podcasts on itunes if that’s your jam. Click HERE to listen via itunes.

(photo: Wikimedia)

4.
Zachary Schomburg is biking around Portland and reading the poems of Portland poets. He’s a mouth for other mouths today and it’s all happening on the Academy of American Poet’s TUMBLR. I’m too fucking slow for TUMBLR (it took me several hours just to write this post,) but I know the rest of you can catch up quickly. He’s posting a video an hour. You’ll want to see this.

5.
Speaking of videos, I’ve been making some ‘lil somethings and I will show you the first thing tomorrow. Today, I’m happy for everything and am not going to be afraid when I walk outside. I’m happy you’re reading this. I’m happy we know each other however what way we know each other. I’m happy I still have time to know more people. I’m happy I still have time to know the people I already know. I have to go outside now.

Love,
Jenny

I just hope I can be half the hot mess I have always wanted to be.

Please stop by and say hi if you aren’t busy with cooler shit to do tonight.

I’ll be reading with Adam Wilson, Abby Sher, and Joseph Bernardo for the Sackett Street Writers’ 10th Anniversary Bash at BookCourt Bookstore in Brooklyn. Games and baked treats and wine and giveaways start at 6:30. The reading starts at 7.

Here are the deets:

Facebook event page
BookCourt
163 Court Street, Brooklyn
7PM

Love
Jenny

I’m back from tour. I will tell you what happened on tour–the rock that shattered Zach’s van window, and the porcelain figurines of Jesus and Mary and Joseph and the angel Gabriel and the other angels whose names I don’t know, and sneaking kisses on stranger’s porches in the rain, and seeing miles of abandoned homes, and reading in a beautiful house that sat on the corner intersection between several crack houses, and listening to Jade Tree records, and running away from an Iraq war veteran–I will tell you about all that! But right now I am too weak to say more and I am back in my home and there are so many people in my life I wish I could take better care of, and also right now, I want this song to be the arms that cradle me or the hands that could have caught me when I lurched out of the subway today thinking I was going to faint and hit my head on the platform or, if I was lucky, maybe on the box of candy that the very nice boy who sells Welch’s fruit snacks on the D train on Mondays and Wednesdays had set down next to him.

I also want to say hi to new readers of this blog. I wonder if you are disappointed because I think I’m not doing a very good job interacting with whoever is reading this thing and I would like to do a better job but I feel like I’m always putting off the good stuff and coming back right when I’m in the middle of bad stuff, which makes sense because it’s like who is going to stop the best week of their life to talk about how great it is when you could continue just being in it? This week has been a hard week. Last week was bathed in a golden happiness that I wanted to stretch out like a blanket over the rest of my life, and maybe that is contributing to my current state of decline.

If you’d like, please say hi in the comments and leave your blog or website address if you have one so I can visit it and say hi back or if you don’t have one I will try to send you an email to say hi if that’s okay, and if you have any questions for me, or anything you want to say to me, whether it be important or trivial or kind or cruel or sad or hopeful or annoying or clever or whatever, please say or ask it in the comments as well and I’ll answer everything in the next post.

With love,
Jenny

Just about nothing is significant and yet I still experience it all like I can’t wait to go on or else just go on. Today was full of people I love like Claire and Kyle on three-way, no-video video chat and Patrick and Eric in the back of a bar that smelled like citrus fruits and seeing my dad outside his workplace and him walking me to the subway which was only a two minute walk but the happiest two minutes of my day and, of course, happy new home times with my new roommate, Steve, who runs The Rumpus, which is something you should be reading if you aren’t already reading it because it’s one of the most hospitable places on the internet for perverted and elevated conversations about literature, poetry, sex, jealousy, not-jealousy, and the other tortured and pleasurable miscellany of our pleasurable, tortured lives.

Tony took the picture of me trying not to noticeably tremble while reading twat poems at the Hideout in Chicago for the Black Ocean/Octopus/Letter Machine off-site AWP reading. It was a night of good trembling and trembling-trembling. Thank my depressed butt that I was in a Mandate of Heaven playsuit, which always gives me courage, and a flower crown from Lou Lou Loves You, which I had to take off at some point because I didn’t want people in the audience to think I thought I was someone who feels floaty enough to wear a flower crown, and because at some point, I didn’t feel floaty or floating but so solidly planted and so solidly rooted that I very much wanted to take everything off just for the pleasure of being unburdened, but I knew that would be an act that would be interpreted and read in ways that would depart too drastically from how I envisioned and felt the act to be if I were to commit it, and I know I can’t control how other people read me or understand me just as other people can’t control how I read them or understand them but still, I have my dreams.

Tomorrow, I’m going on tour with Zachary Schomburg, whose poems make me want to pee and cry (I smell a meme: cryingwhilepeeing or cryingwhilepeeingwhilelisteningtopoetry, or actually nevermind, I’m bad at the internetz.) He’s promoting his new book of poems, Fjords, which is a beautiful book of poems, and he also happens to be my editor at Octopus Books, and there will be six puppeteers with us from Manual Cinema putting on a brilliant multimedia live performance inspired by Fjords that will make you want to spoon yourself in public. The original music score alone is twenty baby hugs and ten more cute animal kisses. I’m joining him and the puppeteers on the East Coast/Mid-Atlantic leg of their tour. Today (Saturday,) we will be in Philly, and Sunday in DC and then Baltimore, and then Baltimore again on Monday, and Richmond on Tuesday, and Raleigh on Wednesday, and then I’m taking my broke ass on the Greyhound and maybe visiting some pals on my way back to New York. If you live in any of these cities, please say hi. I will either be shy or not shy and either way, I will be eager to talk to anyone and everyone and eager to be in out in the world and eager to share my car snacks with you and drink wine and beer and spirits with you and eager for whatever else is coming our way. You can find out more about when and where here, or I could just cut and paste it here on this site so you don’t have to click on any more links!

Dates (links take you to the Facebook Event Page):

March 17: Philadelphia, PA. Wherever We Feel Like It Reading Series
March 18: DC. Three Tents Reading Series. Big Hunt Bar (Afternoon)
March 18: Baltimore, MD. The Whole Gallery
March 19: Baltimore, MD. 1818 East Lafayette Ave. Say It With Writing
March 20: Richmond, VA. Gallery 5
March 21: Raleigh, NC. So and So Reading Series

I worry sometimes that I’m talking too much about me, but then I think if I worry about that, then why have any of this or try to do anything ever, and I don’t know, honestly, except I know that I am really happy I wrote the poems in my book, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, which, if you like, you can order from Small Press Distribution, or from my publisher Octopus Books, or from your favorite independent bookstore, or from the usual corporate suspects. And by the way, you can check out future upcoming readings in the NYC area or beyond at my website, www.jennybagel.com, and specifically here on the EVENTS page.

Well, I’m done talking about ME for now. Until next time, when I come back to talk more about ME.

With love,
Jenny

Yo New Yorkers! I am going to be reading from my teenage diaries tonight at for Cringe and talking about my love for the Hanson brothers, which I already went into embarrassing, uncensored detail here for Rookie last month for our OBSESSION theme. It’s a whole night of people reading from their teenage diaries, letters, and ephemera. If you have nothing better to do, please stop by! It’s happening at 7:30 at Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, 627 5th Avenue (between 17th and 19th Streets) in Brooklyn.

Saturday, I leave for a mini tour down the East Coast. You can see the dates here, and more on that and more on everything later.

love,
Jenny

Hi warblers and ramblers, if you’re in NYC this week and have some kind of desire to spend your time wastefully, I am here to let you know that I will be reading TONIGHT from my forthcoming book of poetry at Goodbye, Blue Monday in Bushwick for the Stain of Poetry reading series, along with four other brilliant poets–Dan Magers, Lauren Hunter, Kendra Grant Malone, and Matthew Savoca–who also have new books coming out (or recently published.) It starts at 7pm and here is the Facebook event, if you like that kind of thing.

On Tuesday, my horrendous existence will be reading fiction about love, lust, and longing for the Fiction Addiction Reading Series in the East Village. The event is happening at 2A Bar, starts at 8pm and you can get to hear fiction from Edmund White, Patrick McGrath, Helen Phillips, and MOI. All the readers will have their magnificent faces projected onto a brick wall on Second Avenue, which is a nice perk for that brick wall, at least until my ugly mug appears. Here’s the Facebook link.

For those you who live in Chicago or plan to be there for AWP, I will have copies of my book, Dear Jenny, We Are all Find, hot off the press in my clammy, greedy hands. Octopus/Black Ocean/Letter Machine are hosting a night of poetry, hand puppetry, video, and music at the Hideout on Friday, March 2nd, 9pm. I’ll be reading from my book and trying to get my face to look relaxed. The real beauty will happen when Feng Sun Chen, Christopher DeWeese, Rebecca Farivar, Peter Gizzi, Thurston Moore, Andrea Rexilius, and Zachary Schomburg take the stage. There will be a DJ spinning your best jams until late into the night, and I will dance like a Peanuts character because I don’t know any other way.

I will also be doing a mini book tour down South with the inimitable Zach Schomburg and his posse of peaceful, righteous marauders. I will post details about that soon!

Sorry everyone for so much HUMBLE WAG in this post. I will try to keep this stuff to a minimum and write about real things next time. Hope to see you tonight, Tuesday, next Friday or any day in any place that we might be.

Love,
Jenny

love,
Jenny

If anyone who lives in New York City or the surrounding neighborhoods is interested in taking an advanced fiction writing workshop with this totally organized and totally inspired lady who e-sits before you now, typing with great conviction and meaning, please sign up for the fiction workshop I am teaching through the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. It starts the week of February 13th, and I will be teaching it in my living room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn! And I have cute teenage writers and equally cute college and college grad-age writers who can vouch for my dedication and weirdness as a teacher.

Holding pommelos in Shanghai. It is winter.

How Shanghai looks in my dreams is how it looks in my waking life or reverse.

Chinese New Year fart fest underway

Wearing a unicorn dress on the eve of the year of the dragon

See? Unicorns

I went to Shanghai last month and visited my grandfather’s ashes in a giant locker room full of the ashes of famous martyrs. Was my grandfather a martyr? I saw my friend Sam, and for two short days I felt as creative as I’ve felt this entire year. That either speaks of a very fucked up year or my friend Sam is not a real person with the usual constraints of mortality and mediocrity, but a vertically-victorious person sent down by a tremendous deity to teach me valuable lessons that I then squander.

I found the tiny, tiny baby ring that once belonged to a boy I loved the most in the world but we don’t speak to each other anymore, and I’m so afraid I will lose the ring somehow, and one day when we talk again, if that happens, I will know that I lost his baby ring with his initials on it, and I will feel sad and pathetic and useless and incorrigible. My book of poetry is coming out very soon, and next month, I will be doing some readings for it in New York and Chicago, and instead of disappearing, I will be HERE, telling you about all things ME ME ME.

Speaking of ME, if you want to see photos of the food that makes me happy and gassy and the occasional pointless, sulky, GPOY(M?) you can follow me on instagram at jennybagel. Also, I recently wrote a few things for Rookie: a story about loving your (my) sibling too much, an essay about the brown and black and yellow girls on Of Another Fashion and why their pompadours and poodle skirts mean so much, and a little essay about being bullied and bullying others in high school. And oh, I made a playlist of my favorite 50′s and 60′s girl groups singing my favorite sassy songs that were about boys and also not about boys. It was for Rookie and also, of course, for you.

Love,
Jenny

On the train ride home, I sat next to this woman and her son. He was so little. Maybe he was six or seven, and he was wearing a little three piece suit and a baseball cap and he was telling and re-enacting the entire plot of Star Wars, except he didn’t know any of the character’s names, so he kept stuttering, like, “And then there was this man who was breathing a lot and very good at sword fighting,” and then the kid jumped off the seat and showed an example of this unnamed excellent sword fighter. There were these two geeky sci fiction nerds also on the train, sitting across from the little kid. They were hanging on to his every word, and occasionally they would interrupt the kid and be like, “Oh man! Are you talking about Darth Vader?” and the kid would be like, “Yeah and then there’s this other sword guy and he’s like pow pow pow pow.”  It was adorable. When the boy and his mom got off at 125th street, one of the sci-fi nerds also got out and he caught up to the mother and said to her, “Man, your son and I have the exact same tastes in movies,” and then started rattling off a list of movies he recommended. The mom was like, “Wow, I, personally, have not heard of any of these.”

On another train, I sat across from a woman who was a trichotillomaniac. She had all of these broken short hairs at the back of her head. She would pull on a few strands of hair until she had loosened one and then she would run her thumb and index finger along that strand of hair like it was a ribbon she was curling with a scissor. Then she would take the curled up broken strand of hair and lay it flat against her notebook and press down on it. Then she would write a few words in her notice, and then finally, she would sweep the strand of hair off the page and start over again. She did that for fifty minutes. By the end of the subway ride, my heart was racing.

2.
Carissa, the brilliant designer of kitten playsuits and party pajamas over at Mandate of Heaven, just revealed the lookbook video for her Spring ’12 collection, and man alive, it’s a thing of beauty. And trust me, I’m not saying this because I’m it. The video was filmed at the amazing Wonderpuss Octopus Ink studio. Check it out if you want to see some killer playsuits, the best possible 70′s vibes, and some demented acting and dancing from yours truly untruly.

Here are screenshots in which everyone is beautiful, and my eyes are perpetually closed. (Probably because I’m ovaries deep in reverie and can hardly believe I’m wearing a locally handmade, one-of-a-kind playsuit with split balloon sleeves with a heart cut-out back and scalloped shorts re-purposed from vintage material!) Carissa’s clothes have this way of making every body type look so divine and babely that it’s honestly kind of unreal…

Blurry iphone photo taken with Aimée. Isn’t she such a babe in that two-piecer?

You can see more photos at Mandate of Heaven’s blog.

3.
The police teargassed peaceful Occupy Oakland protesters and fired rubber bullets. I mean go ahead and read this or this or this or watch this or this if you haven’t already. And if you’re convinced (do you need to be convinced? Or do you already stand in solidarity against the violent repression of community organizing and protest with militarized force?) then sign this.

4.
Are there too many disparate things in this post?

5.
I teach a college course at two high schools in the Bronx. Half of my kids immigrated to America two years ago. I want the 99% to rise up and organize and stand in solidarity for a world that denies no one an equal opportunity for a meaningful, happy life. It’s hard to imagine that isn’t still so so so much left to say about a statement like “We are the 99%.” Sometimes, when I’m walking around after work, I wonder how many of my friends who have lived in New York for ten plus years have ever stepped foot in the Bronx neighborhood I work in.

About half of my students have told me that they don’t think racism is a big deal. Last week, we discussed the Clark doll experiments in class, and talked about the 2005 documentary, A Girl Like Me, where a 17-year-old-girl recreates the experiments with twenty-one black children and fifteen of them choose the white doll over the black doll, just like seven decades ago, when eleven of the sixteen black children said that the black doll was “bad,” and then the Supreme Court decided maybe it was not such a great idea to keep children segregated, but guess what else was and is not a great idea? Movies that always ask us to root for the white characters. Movies where people of color always play supporting roles or worse–criminals, drug addicts, violent losers, janitors, wacky immigrants with exaggerated accents. Also what is not a great idea is a society that has a major fucking dearth of positive examples of people of color doing something interesting or great or complicated or funny or awesome. But how on earth can the Supreme Court “order” a change like that?

One of my students said, “That’s your own fault, if you don’t like the skin color you were born with,” and I thought, But that’s exactly what racism and other structures of oppression want you to believe. When we are oppressed, we are denied the opportunities and privileges that other people have benefit from and have access to. Then, instead of questioning why the fuck does this inequality exist, racism and other systems of oppression tricks you into thinking you’re the one to blame. If you fail at school, if you don’t become rich, it’s your own damn fault! Sure, 15% of Americans are living in poverty, and if you happen to be among that 15%, then clearly you did something wrong. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with the rise of minimum wage paying service sector jobs.  If black men are 5.4 times more likely to be incarcerated than white dudes, well duh, it’s because black men are born criminals! They’re fucking deviants and white people are just naturally morally superior beings. Well, BULLSHIT.

All of my students are black or Latino. Most of them do not own computers. Most of them have to deal with bullshit that I can’t relate to, and I don’t think most of my friends, who are in the 99%, can relate to it either. Why does it seem like the people who have the most to be angry about are often the ones who are most hesitant to express anger? Why does it trouble me that the people who are the most comfortable expressing anger, and the most willing to organize that rage and anger into a progressive movement are the people who seem to live in the lap of luxury, at least compared to the people who don’t have the time and privilege to be quite so visible or vocal, at least compared to the people I know, who I think deserve so much–better schools, teachers and guidance counselors who don’t quit after a year because it fucking sucks to be a NYC public school teacher, safer homes, safer neighborhoods… the list goes on, but I don’t want to be someone who speaks for other people. I don’t want to take away someone else’s right to voice their own struggles, but does that also mean I have to be okay with someone not wanting to voice their struggles, not wanting to feel the least bit angry that because of their ethnicity, they are way more likely to be stopped by the police, to go to a shitty, underfunded school, to live in a violent, shitty neighborhood that only has shitty supermarkets with shitty, expired pasta on the shelves?

6.
Are you still with me?

Love,
Jenny

One year and three weeks ago, I arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris and I took this photo. I honestly don’t even remember how I got from the airport to the train station. But somehow, I was there. In stretchy leggings that have yellow stains on the knees because I once cleaned the floors in my Iowa City apartment with this horrible cleaning solution that had a ton of bleach in it, and when I knelt down on the ground to clean, the floor bleached my black leggings yellow, and then when Michael came home, I showed him my pants, and he told me it was no big deal, but two days later, I cried and told him it was a big deal. That was a long long long ago then, and this picture of Gare de Lyon was just the then that was a little bit long ago.

I remember feeling like I was on the verge of something and also on the verge of nothing at all, and I remember thinking: I will always be about to do something really significant and it will always turn out to be nothing at all, or I will be doing nothing at all, and maybe something significant will happen to me. I was thinking of the ending of “At the Tolstoy Museum” by Barthleme that always makes me so sad, and always makes my students scratch their heads and say, “So was this dude just trying to be weird by writing this story?” And there’s a huge gap that I cannot bridge, like why for me, does this story move me so much, but for others, it’s just some smart-ass trying to be a weirdo?

This is the Paris that I first saw when I turned away from Gare de Lyon to look out onto the street. This is the way I walked in the four hours I had to kill between when I arrived at the train station and when my train was leaving for Avignon, and this what I looked out onto eight years ago, when I was living in Paris for the first time, and falling in love with a Scottish boy who worked at Shakespeare & Company. We were both in love with other people who were not living in Paris and also with each other, and we took a trip together at the end of my summer in Paris and his three years in Paris. We went to Nice and then Monte Carlo, where I climbed up a tree to watch an open-air French dubbed version of The Terminator 3, and I had an urinary tract infection so I peed in the tree and drank cranberry juice and laid my head on the shoulder of the boy I was so in love with and had so little time with, and a few years later we met again in Beijing and then never again, which is okay, because just remembering these things makes me feel lucky enough, especially during these times of profound loneliness, when I think I might not have a lot else to comfort me except little stories about things that have already happened, and during these times of profound loneliness, I can’t help but pity myself for not creating new stories to remember, but I have to remember that ever since I was alive, I have always felt as if I am not creating new stories to remember years later, and then years later, there are always things to remember.

One year ago, when I was walking through the streets of Paris for the first time in eight years, I was so hungry that I couldn’t push open the door to a little Vietnamese restaurant that was owned by a Chinese family who asked me if I was a student, and I said no, and then asked me if had a husband in France, and I said no, and then they said, Well aren’t you brave coming all alone to France at a time like this, and all of this was in Chinese, which is not a language I speak confidently, and I remember feeling lonely and scared and hungry and tired and homesick and excited.

This is the inside of Gare de Lyon. This is what it looked like last year, when I saw it for the first time in eight years, and then over the course of nine months, I saw it twenty more times, and each time I walked out of the train or walked onto the platform, I remember thinking, Something is happening to me. Something is happening right now. I am a part of this.

This was the view outside the window of my first apartment in Avignon. I don’t know if I talked about it on this blog, but I was living with a woman who began to have a disturbed relationship with me and my other roommate. There were nights when I didn’t want to sleep until 5 AM, because I knew if I stayed up, then I would wake up in the afternoon, and the woman whose house I was living in would be gone for the day. I had a roommate across the hall, who I loved and loved, and cooking pasta with her and cooking tom yum soup for her were the tiny parts of the day that made the big parts of my day bearable. Walking around Avignon with Martin and holding on to his shoulder when I felt dizzy from too many glasses of rosé were the big parts of the night that made the interminable stretch of day bearable.This was the gate to the outside world. When le Mistral came into town, I had to push on the gate with both hands to get it to open, and trash cans would fly against this gate and wake me up in the middle of the night, except I probably wasn’t sleeping anyway, so I was already awake and pretending to be woken up as if I were really sleeping. Sometimes, when no one was home, I would lean against this gate and feel the sun on me. Have you ever felt the sun in the South of France? It is the warmest sun I have ever felt in my life.

This is how I felt the first week I was in Avignon, living in that house with the woman who wanted to make me her daughter and who was also cheating me out of a lot of money and who watched me like I was a creature she had never seen before. I felt blurred, inchoate. There were afternoons when I felt so lonely I swore I didn’t exist at all.

This was a night when I walked home from the centre-ville. It was a night when some of the language assistants were having a potluck, and somehow I was invited, and I remember wearing this sheer leopard print dress and a long sweater over it, and walking down Avenue Saint-Ruf and being followed by men on the street and men in cars and men on bicycles. They were saying things to me that I didn’t understand at the time, or maybe I understood a few words and I understood that they wanted me to stop and talk to them, but I walked with my eyes on the ground, and that was why I didn’t see much of Avignon in the first few days I live there because I was constantly looking down to avoid the men who followed me and asked me why I was shy, and did I speak English or what?

At the potluck, I wore red lipstick and brought cheese and crackers just like everyone else who brought cheese and crackers, and at some point in the night, I was talking to some girls and they said that they were amazed by “the spread” and I thought, “What spread? It’s just bread and cheese and a huge platter of potato gratin.” You know when you talk to someone and you just know–you just know–that person will never become someone that you will want to share your secrets with, or even worse, that person might not ever be someone who will crack the kind of jokes that make you laugh or be the kind of person who laughs at the jokes you crack, and maybe one night you will stumble out of a strange French club together and maybe on another night or the same night, that person will run across a highway divider and pee in the bushes on the other side of the road and then run back with his zipper unzipped and flowers in his hands for you, and maybe you will feel so old and so strange about it all that you just start walking home by yourself, and the next day, you hear a story about how he gave those flowers to some other girl, and you will think, That makes so much more sense.

I want to explain how strange I felt walking home that night. How I kept wondering, Is this my life? Are these the people who I will grow close to one day? And somehow, it didn’t feel right. Honest to goodness, they were really lovely people. It was nice to split a bottle of wine with them. It was nice to eat cookies with them. It was nice to run into them in the street. But you know when some people seem so many planets and moons away from who you are and how you have been, that it only makes you feel even more conspicuously alone before, during, and after spending time with them? Like, What a fucking weirdo I am. Why do I have to be so fucking strange all the fucking time. And I cringe writing these words because I probably wrote these exact words in my teenage diary, and here I am, far from being a teenager, and feeling no different from how I felt twelve years ago, when I thought maybe I was just too fucking strange to be liked and loved by people who weren’t related to me by blood.

That’s how I felt that night, walking home to an apartment where I was living with a woman who wanted to be a part of my life in a way that I didn’t want, and I sat on the curb and listened to the same five embarrassing songs I listened to on repeat during my first month in Avignon, and a man drove past me on the street and asked me to go home with him, and then asked me to give him a cigarette, and then asked me to at least keep him company, and I wanted to say in French, “Please, will you leave me alone, I was just about to have a poignant moment alone, but now you’ve spoiled my cry,” but I was too shy and too bad at French at the time. I remember the next day, I woke up to the warmest sun that I have ever felt, and a few days after that, maybe a day or two later, I met the person who would later become my best friend.

A few weeks later, we moved in together and spent so many afternoons feeling small and vast on our balcony. We spent so many evenings feeling negligible and profoundly important on our balcony, in our shadowless living room. We drank hot toddies and clung to each other. I went to Paris and Edinburgh by myself and when I came back, I wondered if we were falling in love. We were. I went to Nice. I went to New York. We went to Paris together. I took the train to Paris with someone I loved. I went to Morocco with my friends. I went to Marseille to visit Laura. I went to Marseille to visit Marianne. I went to Paris to see my mom. I took my mom to Nice. I went to La Ciotat to visit Laura. I went to Tarascon to sleep at Claire’s house. I went to Les Angles to play games at Bruno’s. I went to the other side of Avignon to watch the Jersey Shore at Rémy’s. I went to Villeneuve to eat lunch at Cécile’s. I went through Arles to eat beef at Veronique’s, and we walked along the Rhône on a day that was windy as fuck. I went to Nîmes to have Thanksgiving dinner with Hervé. It was an amazing dinner. I went to Paris so many times. I was in love the whole time. And I was scared and scared and happy and not happy.

It’s hard and it’s easy to think about these things. Like what do I do with the part of me that wants to go on adventures abroad because I have always chased and am still chasing after the kind of loneliness that has always accompanied that first phase of displacement? Like my first month in France, when I lived inside my head, but everyone else only ever saw my Chinese face, my visibly femme body. And then comes that period of utter, inconsolable, unrelenting fear, when you think, What if this isn’t a phase? What if my life will always be like this here? And those were my late October days, when Avignon was on strike, and no matter how brilliantly warm the sun felt on my back, I swore I was going to collapse from wanting so much and existing so crudely, and then–to quote the brilliant Junot Diaz–”the nictitating membrane obscuring the world suddenly lifts,” and then–then what?

I live in Williamsburg now. Now what? What now?

Love,
Jenny