015. JUST LIKE ME.
"i write best when i'm suffering."
Welcome to ISSUE 015: JUST LIKE ME 🪶
I either never experience limerence or am never not experiencing it. I thought the word for it was passion and that this passion pulls me through life in targeted bouts. I have never felt eros that was not explosive and finite; it has not been stable in the way limerence as a concept implies that love is supposed to be. Isn’t love, in general, generative and annihilating and polyvalent and unfixable? There is a severity behind every meaningful relationship—with art, with objects, with persons—that threatens to consume. (And, if that vulnerability wanes, the meaningful thing really isn’t that potent anymore, is it?) No care for a friend, a lover, a thing, has ever transcended obsession—I think about you all the time when I do, and I am dripping in missing you. Even if you’re my neighbour, even if you’re across the world, even if you’re sat at the other end of the room. Even if you’re a book or a long-dead artist. I am full to my eyelids in wanting you and only you when you are what I want. I resent the resurgence of this vocabulary and its promise to pathologize creative thrust and deep longing. Some (intense) people will be assumed to be unreliably limerent now instead of quirky and loveable. (I’m some people.)
This desire inspires in me manic artistic production. Every day I love one thing really hard. Everything I do (what I write or speak or record) is to become close to whatever I love today. I speak in riddles a single person at a time can decipher. My affection (some would suggest neurosis) must be reproduced materially in some way and be witnessed by a select audience of one. This is a code for you. The code? Prove to me that you are just like me. Just like me. All that I make and do will be a plea: understand. After the fact, frequently, I feel that if I were not myself but receiving these charged messages from someone like me but not me, I would get it. Do you get it? Send me a sign (or symbol). We need other people, we are preoccupied with them, and it is most always involuntary and uncertain. That chaos is why art happens. Fuck pop-psychology.
The connection to others and things and, by extension, to ourselves by way of them, and our desire to make it tangible is prominent in ISSUE 015. What parts of our selves and relationships, asks us, in her short fiction “Bird Brain,” are only actualized through art? Art and the self are reliant on others and our consumption of or desire for them, and so we pull them in and release them as needed—we create with them. The ever-dependable Vasundhara Singh chimes in to demonstrate that in observing, caring for, and loving others (or, in being made to do so for others), we can sidestep deep self-adoration; it is possible to have to worry about nothing. It is also possible to start anew, with and despite loss, because of old and new passion. Katie Wolf’s almost-legible visual art, “To Quietly Weave,” begs you to read it, to figure it out, while her “Missing You Already” is fried and worn up with reminiscence and nostalgia. Closing us off, Sara A’s script, “Two Girls, Once Crowbar,” presents a tight friendship between women and their short and sweet (and probably frequent and transient) obsessions with ideas, bits, or scenarios which grant reprieve from the crushing droning of life as we know it. Oh Love, Oh Art!
| editor-in-chief
Bird Brain by Cait Barlowe [Fiction]
Lata is a Widow by Vasundhara Singh [Fiction]
Missing You Already and To Quietly Weave by Katie Wolf [Visual Art]
Two Girls One Crowbar by Sara A [Script]
Bird Brain by Cait Barlowe | Substack
So, I’ve started seeing someone new. We go out to a dive bar for punk rock bingo and get heckled by the emcee, I throw my head back in laughter and we press our knees together under the table. She puts her hand inside the back of my shirt, I feel this ache growing inside me, the way I want her is all consuming. At the break between rounds, I ask her to show me where the bathroom is. She knows it's a ploy—I want to taste the beer on her breath. We kiss while the music pulses quietly outside the door, something cliche is always happening to me when I’m with her. She makes me feel like time doesn’t exist. I drink a bunch of whiskey but I’m sober enough to drive when we are ready to leave. I park outside her house and we touch each other to “Norman Fucking Rockwell.” I feel fourteen again, but in a good way.
I drive home alone and I think that every time we touch, there is a pain growing somewhere, waiting for me. It’s like my hand is on the pain doorknob, twisting slightly the more I fall for her. But I write best when I’m suffering, so maybe I’ll let myself lean into this for a minute.
The first time I kissed a girl I was fourteen and she had the same name as me. I told my friends afterwards that she just pounced on me. She got on my lap and straddled me and suffocated me with her mouth on mine, her hair falling forward and obscuring my view, as if lesbianism was just something that was happening to me. I was simply something she was acting upon. I kissed her back of course, but passively, politely. I was afraid of wanting too much, scared that if I named it, it would disappear. When I got home that night, I looked in the mirror for traces of her embedded in my skin, like somehow my lips would look different now that they had been kissed by someone just like me.
We went to the used book store once after school and she found a tattered copy of Kama Sutra and she discreetly stuffed it into her book bag as I bought a copy of The Bell Jar. In the car driving home, she placed it in between us on the console, suggesting something more than a kiss. That night she slept over, but it was different than before, the air heavy with tension. I unclasped her bra and we put our foreheads together. As I touched her, I tried to make out the shape of her face in the dark proximity, looking for signs that she was just like me. I thought I saw her mouth opening up, her eyes rolling back in her head, but maybe I was thinking of my own face.
When we finally slept together, I felt we were becoming one, I felt I was becoming whole. Touching her was like touching myself, it was something I knew how to do innately, as intimately as I knew myself. I whispered her name, my name, in her ear and felt her body move beneath me, then my own body moving in turn. It was like I’d invented a new version of myself in this space that we were creating together, filled with new tastes and smells and sounds. I felt liberated from everything heavy and difficult and turned loose into a new world, a world in which possibility for life existed.
Each time I sleep with someone new, I’m terrified that I don’t actually know how lesbians have sex. I worry there might be this secret that I still don’t know, or that my brain is rotten by porn and Hollywood. There’s something about other women that I find extremely withholding and impenetrable. Despite my sexual inclinations, I’ve always found it difficult to relate to other women. I feel somehow infantilized around women, maybe it's something to do with competition. Maybe it's Freudian. Regardless, each time feels like the first time, I’m fourteen again, fumbling in the dark, performing the things I like to do to myself and praying to God that it feels good.
So much of what I’ve learned about being a woman has come from being with women, replicating the parts of them I found most compelling, trying on the way they move or sound or speak, letting them inside my body, teaching me how to feel good. My bedroom is like a shrine to all my past lovers, trinkets I’ve stolen from their kitchen cabinets, or gifts they’ve given to me. Little notes tucked into books, pieces of jewelry, underwear. I become birdlike around women, attracted to the shiniest parts of them and constantly building something with the things I’ve taken from them. I’m flighty, I scare easily, I actualize my relationships more in writing than I do in reality.
A few months ago, I found out I have an STI. Is it fucked if I say there’s something that struck me as romantic when I got diagnosed? Someone left something with me forever, albeit a virus. Isn’t that sort of what love is like? An incurable infection, something that routinely makes me sick with despair. Now my skin will sporadically blister and I’ll understand it as a sacrifice I made to feel alive. In this way, I keep collecting bits and pieces of my lovers, their sickness becomes my sickness. I think about the cost of carrying this illness and I decide it was worth it, it’s a way of keeping love close.
So, it’s autumn now, soon to be winter. This is the time for suffering and indulging in my most selfish behaviors. I have to end things. The timing isn’t right. The last time we slept together, she told me I looked sleepy and pulled me up to her mouth instead. My eyes were half-closed, crescent moon shaped, I wanted to tell her it’s because I’m terrified and it's exhausting to give myself in this way. Emotionally I can feel myself draining into her, a process I find incredibly difficult. Instead, I said nothing. I kissed her and tasted myself on her tongue. In this moment, I can envision my life with her, it doesn’t matter that these moments may be fleeting. I let myself imagine anyway.
I envision that we’ll get back together someday. I do this lots, with old flings and new, we’re on and off again like the waves of the ocean ebb and flow. It’s an iterative process, every version of my relationships becomes something new and unique. I have more still to borrow and more yet to lend. I have visions of our life that we haven’t yet enacted, outfits I haven’t stolen and songs she hasn’t written. Drinks to be shared, orgasms to be had, I haven’t adorned my personality with her traits yet.
I fashion myself after the women I love, I recreate myself carefully, tucking away all the best parts of other people until I become an amalgamation of everyone who has touched me.
Lata is a Widow by Vasundhara Singh
She moves around the bedroom with a certain caution as though she might bump against something or someone. Silence follows her like a clingy child. The house in Bharti Nagar feels smaller since her husband passed away. She sweeps the floor of her bedroom and changes the bedsheet. When he was alive, she would never lay a white sheet because he never washed his feet after work. The maid who generally arrives by eight in the morning will not be coming today as her youngest daughter is getting married. The curtains, white with pink tulips embroidered at the borders, need to be washed. She writes in her square-shaped notepad, “Tell the maid to wash the curtains.” She walks out to the living room which has seen visitors before, but looks like that isn’t true. Eight months ago, officers and their wives would sit on the faux velvet sofas and consume vegetable cutlets and roasted peanuts prepared by their servants. Eight months ago, Lata was the wife of a Police Officer who believed her life would never change. She picks up The Hindu from the doorstep and glances at the advertisement on the front page. Her husband would read it every morning and call out for a cup of tea or a lemonade depending on the condition of his gut. After nearly a month, Lata has to dress up in six yards and visit the pension office to avail fifty per cent of her husband’s last pay. She would be receiving nearly one and a half Lakh Rupees each month. Suddenly she remembers her late mother’s words on her wedding day, “once you marry an officer, you will have to worry about nothing.” After spending three decades with an officer, Lata can only partially agree with her dead mother.
When her husband was alive, Lata’s access to government-sanctioned vehicles, sometimes a Bolero and at other times a Ciaz, was only a phone call away. “Tell the driver to get the car,” she would ask her cook to inform the driver and fifteen minutes later, a chauffeur-driven car would be parked at the front gate. Today, in her first autumn as a widow, she stands by the corroded metal gate of her house and waits for the cab her daughter has booked online. Her daughter, wife to a District Magistrate in a town of Madhya Pradesh and mother to two rowdy spectacled boys, has asked her mother to move in with her and even though they share a cordial relationship, Lata isn’t too keen on the offer. As a child, she saw her widowed grandmother living with them who did nothing all day except for feeding the children, scolding them or asking her daughter-in-law to prepare a cup of tea. Lata doesn’t want to burden her daughter and their young family. Her son-in-law is shy and reticent and she knows her presence will cause him to retreat further in his cocoon. Her late husband often joked, “I last heard our son-in-law speak on his wedding day.” Despite his commanding and authoritative ways (“I said so!”), she finds herself thinking about him at odd times. He was never one to shy away from showing emotions. When he was angry, he would rant about everything that was wrong with the world. If he felt joy, he would sway a little to an old Bollywood song and when he felt sorrow, he would sit with the newspaper in his lap and stare at the wall in front of him. He was popular among his batchmates and juniors for he was generous with his time and money. But, when she remembers her husband, she has difficulty positioning herself in his life. When he was throwing parties, she was sitting by his side, laughing when he laughed. When he received a promotion, she made sure to utter the right words. He didn’t like condescending remarks. When he felt sorrow, she made sure to mirror his silence lest he hear her breathing.
The cab finally arrives, a white Innova with stickers of blue stripes on the door handles. A young boy, who appears to be no older than twenty, opens the door for Lata. Once inside, she examines the shiny covers of the seats and the tiny statue of Lord Hanuman hanging from the mirror. As he starts the car, he introduces himself, “Madam, I am Akash. Please remember to give me a rating on the app after the drive!” His lively voice unnerves her for she is used to servants acting as if they lack a voice box. When he turns his head a little towards her, she nods. If she doesn’t move in with her daughter and son-in-law, she can stay in the apartment her husband bought in Saket a few years ago. She can furnish it with the pension money. She already owns a lot of furniture but she might need to arrange a guest room for her daughter. Her phone rings. On the other side, she hears the shrill voice of her daughter asking if the cab is alright. Suddenly, the reality of being a widow slaps her in the face and she swallows hard.
Her daughter asks her to call when she returns home and adds, “You can never trust these drivers Mumma.”
The Central Pension Office (CPO) is only five kilometers away from her house but they halt at their second red light. The image of sitting alone in an apartment while the world dances around her makes her feel like a lone matchstick left in the matchbox. Her eyes begin to blink to prevent the tears from flowing out but a few escape. She clicks her tongue because she isn’t carrying a napkin. This is her life now—wake up, collect her husband’s pension, go to bed. The traffic light turns green and the car zooms ahead. She can sense Akash looking at her from the corner of his eye. “Madam,” he begins hesitantly, “my father died when I was thirteen years old. He fell off a ladder while cleaning the roof of our landlord’s house.”
Lata feels her insides burning up. She doesn’t know whether to admonish him or to let him go on. He continues, “My mother came to the city with me. We had nothing. We lived in a slum area and ate rice with water but she started working as a maid.”
She feels her breath returning to normal. When he doesn’t continue, she says, “Then?”
He nearly jumps in his seat. “Madam, her first employer was horrible. She didn’t even let her use the loo but the second lady my mother worked for was a kind woman just like you. She helped my mother buy a rickshaw for me. That’s when I began to work too.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen, madam.”
“The police never stopped you?”
“Madam, the law is only for the rich. The poor have to do whatever they can to feed themselves.”
The car turns at Nizamuddin Road and she sees the beautiful hibiscus and poppies in the nursery. She asks, “How is your mother?”
“Oh!” he shakes his head with giddiness, “The second lady, the one who bought a rickshaw for me, sent her to a polytechnic college. She even paid the fees for the course. Today, my mother manages sixty women in a textile factory in Noida.”
She looks out the window and notices the purple jacaranda blooming. She thinks of her dead mother who never got to live as a widow for she died a month before her husband. They reach the office on Lodhi Road and Akash opens the door. He tells her that he will park the car in the shade till she returns. She walks ahead but at the door, she stops and turns back. He is getting into the car.
“Akash!” she calls out for him.
“Yes Madam,” he jogs to her.
“What is the name of the polytechnic college?”
He smiles.
Missing You Already by Katie Wolf | Website | Instagram
To Quietly Weave by Katie Wolf
Two Girls One Crowbar by Sara A | Instagram
INT. Raya’s Scattered Living Room - AFTERNOON RAYA is sitting, slouched on her throne (secondhand pink suede loveseat) in her castle (700 square foot bachelor). And what a mighty ruler she is, having cluttered every inch of at least this one small room–this single patch of 30-year-old scratched-up hardwood–with only the girliest of treasures. The room is very pink but there is some purple, some dark blue. The colours of the bi flag. In a world of indifferent spaces, she wants to live in a looking glass. Her friend ZARIIN, who has been lost in thought since she graduated college, is sitting on the floor, slowly turning the pages of an interior design magazine. She is wearing a pale green linen two piece. She needs to be on a fainting couch, with a scribe standing over her shoulder, at the head of the couch, ready to put to paper every dainty little thought she has. Instead, she is here, trying desperately to absorb as many carved sofa legs and linen bath mat combinations before Raya inevitably erupts with her new fascination du jour. Some of us dream away our uncertainty, others counteract it by buzzing after every worthwhile distraction. Raya plunges forward in her sofa, not a word from her lips yet but the air filled with anticipation. Here it comes. Raya: Ok so you know how you don’t know what you’re doing with your life? Zariin looks up from the curtain-curator interview. The curator had wanted to be a writer when she was younger. Cute. She widens her eyes a little at Raya. Raya: EITHER, I mean either. I don’t know either, but I’ve hatched a plan, Zariin. And I mean the real goddamn deal this time. It has the works: chaos, financial stability, a straightforward path of entry. AND it’s not that committal: we can just come away from it whenever we need, we can do it on the side, we can do it for a year. Do you have a year? Disappointed, Zariin looks back down to the magazine. And then the curator she is reading about wanted to be a teacher, when she figured she probably wouldn’t actually ever write anything. Zariin sighs and looks back up. Zariin: Raya, there aren’t actually any hot sugar mommies who are looking for young unstable women. That’s not like a situation. Stop with that. Raya: Zariin, locksmiths. We become fucking locksmiths. Wait, now that’s an interesting thought. Zariin: Oh? Locksmiths? Zariin looks intrigued. This never happens. Raya is so self-assured now. Raya: I know. It’s perfect. Locksmiths. Don’t you see the vision? Me and you, partners in something that is usually crime but we get to do it in the legal way. It’s kind of sexy isn’t it? We show up in our little fuschia jumpsuits–two girls, one crowbar–and we help people who are having a really shitty day. And then they give us like $400. Maybe they’d tip us too. And we could actually offer a skill to the people around us. Maybe we could even bring writing into it. One of us opens the door and the other writes our client a poem. We solve their practical issues, we calm the accompanying emotional distress with a dazzling string of words, and voila, we’ve opened for them the door into their home and the door into understanding that problems need the artistic and the practical. We have a mind and a body. We have a physical door and an emotional one. Plus, you were locked out of your apartment TWICE last year. It’s a skill we could’ve used. Zariin: It doesn’t count if I’m high. Raya: It does count when it costs almost a grand. Zariin: Ok, but it’s still a commitment. A commitment, financially and in all the other ways, to something we just thought of. Raya’s eyes are glued to her phone. Zariin is going to make sure that Raya’s piqued interest will evolve into obsession. She is going to bring this idea to full bloom in the world. After so many ideas spring up only to die back down in her heart, this idea will be the one that persists. The idea is glistening in her head. It is groundbreaking, shiny, new, unrealized. She’s felt this way before. Raya: It’s a 6 day course and some shadowing. People on Reddit are saying it’ll take a few years to really become a competent locksmith, but competency is not like a requirement. And most of the time, it’s just a student losing their key. And we’ll ask them screening questions on the phone to make sure we can take on their job. And then whoever we shadow, we can recommend him to the calls we can’t take. And we’ll make a really bitchy website, two girls one crowbar dot ca. Our whole thing will be that we are emotionally-supportive locksmiths. Like if we are helping out a really anxious girl, one of us would open the lock and the other would be like “Honestly, I would be so mad at myself right now if this happened to me. But like, it happens. And, honestly, what are credit cards for? Everyone has debt nowadays, especially with rents skyrocketing and moneyed landowners manufacturing a housing crisis so that common folk can’t even invest in property anymore. The other day I got caught in the rain and this vintage store tried to sell me an umbrella for 35$. Plus tax.” Zariin: Absolute genius. Or I would be like “One time my boyfriend broke the key in the lock of my apartment hours before I was leaving for a week-long work trip. And then he took a glue gun and, like, poured the glue around the key, like, into the hole. And also all around the lock. And then he waited for it to dry and thought he would be able to pull it out easier. After all that. It cost me over a thousand dollars.” Raya: Wait what, he fucking did that? Zariin: No but this story would be exactly what I would need to hear in this situation. If I heard that I’d be like, “Sure I lost my key, and it was a stupid mistake, but at least I’m not dating an absolute moron”. Raya: You’re so right. And you know what else, it would help us with our writing in so many ways. We’d write out all of these irritating characters. We would try out all of these ways to redirect our clients’ frustration with the situation at hand to the situation in general. Stressed that you have to pay for this? Maybe your government should be giving you more money and resources, instead of using that money to buy weapons for other countries. And why are they even doing that in the first place? Zariin: And our number can be 416-CRO-WBAR. Raya: 416-CRO-WBAR. We would probably have to track down whoever has it. It’s just too good. We could probably just call them and be like “yo, we’ll give you free locksmith services for life if you just give us your phone number”. Zariin: And if it’s someone cool, we could even offer them a job as our secretary. Everybody’s looking for a side gig these days. But this would need to be in the future, after we already had some cash flow. Raya: And the print shop by my house was doing graphic tees for $17.50 each this week. So that’s like $40 combined and the uniform is done. And then after the cash flow starts, we’ll get another two shirts. Alternates. Zariin: We’ll get them really small and thin too. Portable shirts, we can always keep on us. Like if we’re in line for popcorn at the movies, and it’s one of those movies you don’t really wanna see, but you’re going because you heard it was bad and you’ve seen everything else and you love the movies, and we get the call, the $400 call, we’ll skip the movie, throw our shirts on and jump into locksmith mode. It’ll be superheroesque, but in a good way. We’ll be a little evil too. Why not? We’re already going to be armed, we’d have to be in a job like that. Raya: It would feel so exciting. We’d be costumed and armed, kicking in doors across the city one at a time, in our cheap pink graphic tees and then someday, after the cash flow, in our fuschia cargo jumpsuits. Zariin: It could be really fun, but there would probably be problems. It wouldn’t be fun right away, we would have to do a lot before it would get fun. Talk about a burst bubble. Raya: It would be a commitment. I guess everything is. But it would still be fun. Zariin: It probably would be. A long, drawn out pause where, at first, the girls look at one another with light, longing, smiles, gently nodding knowingly. They start fidgeting with magazines and their clothes and menus on the coffee table. Zariin picks up a menu. Do we want to order sushi? Raya: Yes, I just want a green dragon roll. Maybe a salad. I’ll find us a movie. The girls pack a bowl and prepare for a laid back night of TV and dinner. The end.
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a beautiful issue!