sex and rage
on the first day of spring, Meghan told the guy who stamped our wrists outside of Rose and Crown that it was the first day of spring. by then, I was used to smiling noncommittally to a side as she made small talk with strangers. if I were less shy, though, this would be the kind of thing that I’d want to tell strangers too: it’s the first day of spring, everything is waking up, things are going to get better again.
winter in California is ephemeral but still heavy. chalky dust collected on my shelves, neglected vitamins collected on my desk and cigarette butts collected on my balcony until I picked all of them up one day and looked at them in the cup of my hand. up close, they were crumpled and sun-bleached, almost sheepish-looking.
inside the bar, I was reminded of a December four years ago when I drove to Yosemite with my parents and stood in snow so white and boundless that nothing in my life had ever felt so holy. I couldn’t see it of course because I was there, watching men play darts over Meghan’s shoulder, but in my head I was back beneath that whiteness, feeling the snow thaw beneath my feet. it was raining outside, and I remember that it was too cold to take my jacket off, but in my memory the night was still warm. it was both the spring equinox and the last day of winter quarter — we had just taken our last exams that day — and I felt more entitled to a heady blitheness than anyone else in that bar. at 22, I think you are still self-centered enough to believe that no one in the world has ever felt like you have before. or maybe that’s just a character flaw of mine that’ll never go away.
it is a self-prophetic axiom that winter is the worst quarter at Stanford. here are a couple vignettes from mine this year: I spent 50 dollars on a speaker to backtrack my morning routine, but then all I could play was Lucy Dacus’s ‘Ankles’ before it broke. in January I made a pan of banana bread out of Greek yogurt because winter is when I invariably start counting my calories again, but then I never ate them and when I finally peeled the Tupperware back open, there was a downy crust of mold coating the entire thing. I preemptively took cold medicine one night but then cruelly woke up with a horrible illness that brooded over all my final exams. the paper lantern I made Catherine nail into my ceiling fell in the middle of one night and shattered lightbulb shards everywhere. one day I suddenly started crying so hard I couldn’t breathe and didn’t even know why I was upset. all minor inconveniences, in other words. but it was a quarter of a lot of those.
ok, it wasn’t that bad. all things considered, this winter passed much more peacefully and unremarkably than in years past. I stopped taking reading notes, started wearing lip liner, learned how to cook raw meat and then ate chicken breast every night for several weeks straight, pasted fake emerald tiles all along my kitchen walls, got a job and said yes to a lot of things just for the sake of saying yes. but the mundanity was the problem. the days were short and gray and entirely uneventful, and at a certain point, I retreated into my room and essentially never came out again.
when I was last home for the holidays, I reread Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage. at the time, I remember thinking that there was neither as much sex, nor as much rage, in the book as I was expecting. in the unsteady cracks in my composure this term, though, I understood that these things are never so obvious.
Sex and Rage is dreamy and effervescent, which winter quarter decisively was not. but there is something identifiable in Jacaranda Leven for any 22-year-old who intentionally plays the ingénue but still resents that she has never been taken seriously by most of the men in her life. a woman’s rage is quiet. and when mine builds, I am so good at pretending it isn’t there that when it finally explodes and I am screaming into my sheets, I genuinely don’t even know why I am. the lightbulb that shattered across my carpet still works, so I swept up the shards and put the rest back inside the lantern. sometimes I am acutely aware of those incandescent wires, suspended precariously close to paper with nothing in between, and I think about how sometimes I feel like I could burst into flames at any moment too. the trouble with writers is that even fire hazards become metaphors first.
but maybe this is all just me projecting. recently, I’ve been thinking about whether I lean into a preemptive self-infantilization so that I can beat men to the punch. youth is both sword and shield until you realize that it was never anything advantageous to begin with. maybe I’ve always known that and ignored it. maybe I’ve never actually known it. a few weeks ago, I asked my brother and sister-in-law when they would have found it weird for one of their friends to be dating a 22-year-old. I don’t know what I wanted them to say.
in January, I impulsively took a Lyft to Balboa Café so that I could tell a 30-year-old ex of sorts that I was going to be in the city. but then Manon and I started pretending to be psychics to get free drinks and funny stories out of the men who approached us, and I stopped replying to his texts. we turned out to be pretty good at it. maybe it was just beginner’s luck. I was mostly grabbing low-hanging fruit anyway: I told a man with graying hair that he was struggling to get back in touch with his youth. (‘I’m very in touch with my youth,’ he said, then called us his dream girls.) I told another guy that he was in the process of overcoming some deep-rooted insecurities and he scoffed but then cried to me about his parents’ divorce for thirty minutes in the cramped backseat of an Uber. sometimes that’s the way things go.
I’ve always wondered how easy it is to see through me like that. divorced-parents guy guessed that I once thought I’d found the love of my life, but then had turned out to be wrong. easy and generic enough to have a statistically high shot at being right, just like what I’d said to him. but then I spent a few days thinking about whether I carried that loss on my face somehow, like a stubborn acne scar that keeps re-opening because I won’t stop picking at it. well, whatever. a month ago I learned the word ‘limerence’ and realized that I’ve just been repeating the same mistakes this whole time anyway.
I am 22 for less than one more month, and then I think I’ll be too far away from my 19-year-old self to still feel like her. to be honest, the times that I still do are getting rarer and rarer. when the new year started I became obsessed with wellness and started buying produce from the farmer’s market and rinsing my Greek yogurt containers to reuse as Tupperware. guys, my brain is finally developing, I declared to my friends. the verdict is still out on that, but often I do catch myself thinking about her, my 19-year-old self, as her instead of as me. Proust writes about the inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of our past selves, and for a long time I saw something to grieve in that. but now, I find relief in it instead — how comforting it is to write about that still-teenaged girl in the third person and know that I have shed her annoying, self-martyring naivety at last.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that this winter sank slowly into a lot of accidental introspection. it was a season spent on the line: between hedonism and asceticism, between petulance and composure, between sex and rage that I could only name as such in retrospect. and now those lines are coiling, and I am jumping off with them.
winter, to me, is about hope: it’s about sitting with the cold and watching your breath idle in the air and knowing that the grass will be sun-drenched again soon. Camus wrote once that ‘in the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’ on the second day of spring, Meghan and I drank an entire bottle of Aperol, and sat in the sun on Wilbur Field, and walked to The Melt at 2 a.m. with our friends just because we could. and I ran through campus to feel my heart beating beneath my hands, and played the first page of an old Kalinnikov elegy over and over again on the piano in Munger 4, and it was all so banal but so joyous and I felt electric and not angry. and I wanted to tell strangers that spring was here, and that I was happy.