I want my own Marriage, Not ur Open One

& Maude Latour's New Album

I try to separate my identity of internet girl and writer and girl and writer and writer and person being alive in the world, because I can get to this weird place where I do things just because they are interesting and my life becomes the anticipation of something I get to write, either online, or on a piece of paper, or in a journal that I will shut and only come back to after years. I live a sort of uncanny life, often by accident, and sometimes against or in spite of my will.

I'm writing this at the end of a Thursday. In my room with my laptop on my bed. I like typing into the blog when I feel frenetic and have something to get out, the sound of the keys that have come between man and pen and paper. I got home very late. A man I've been out with (but not really because we have different definitions of "date") was swinging by my deli.

"Are you going to go?" My close friend and publicist asked, standing there with me on the sidewalk.

"Why not?" I said shrugging, and did. He was leaning right there against the ice cream. He looked nice. We chatted for a few minutes as the night characters lurked on the corners. He was looking at me like I was sparkly and I realized he'd found Hot Literati through a link I'd sent him and did a deep dive. If you are reading this, I like walking, but a walk is not a date. I don't mind, but take me on a real date. Preferably to a restaurant that uses a scraper between courses or to a club with red light and black boxes and bass and bass and bass.

He asked what I'd done that day. What time I get up.

I love mornings. I am a nighttime person and a morning person. I do so much in the mornings and I always read my devotional before I leave my apartment and a book book before I enter the world to be a person that day.

Today, I was running late for an appointment, so I just skipped it and walked to get an Americano instead. I had my first Americano at 16 or 17, when I was training for a pageant and I figured out that caffeine could make me less hungry and that lattes had milk.

I went to my day job. In tech (gasp!). Sort of. I enjoy it. During, my father texted a Bible verse:

"I am sending you out like a sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves." Matthew 10:16

A bit later, my mother sent me this reel about how people's lives changed when they stopped trying to be nice and learned how to be kind instead.

I left work, hopped on the phone with the bartender for tomorrow/tonight's event (come) and then finally had a few minutes to sit down. This is where we go back now for context.

Remember when I went on 3 dates to The Mulberry? Well I chose Mister 2 to write about online because it felt the safest. The most normal and least intimate and he lived in the midwest and only traveled here for work sometimes, so it felt sort of low stakes, right?

And I don't remember what exactly I'd written (I don't re read a lot of my own stuff), but I'd gotten the sense that he wanted to come into my apartment and something in my gut was saying no, no, no.

But a while later (maybe after writing the mulberry piece) I'd texted that I was thinking about him and he let me know that he'd be back in town and that he'd like to see me. A few days later, I was thinking about that feeling in my gut the first time I'd seen him and I put a few key words -- his name, industry, location -- in Google and came back with a website for his business run by him and his wife. They also had children.

I felt immediately empty. Empty but sort of unsurprised, because just one day earlier, I'd watched a man, completely unprovoked, and unprompted, and unwanted, decide in real time that he wanted to cheat on "his lady" with me.

"You're such a babe" he said over and over, often preceded by "but."

I often feel quite divorced from how the world sees me. Extremely unaware of what the world sees when they see a young woman. I feel like a vessel. Like a lost child vessel thing just trying to understand what it means to be.

And when that happened and then I found Mr. Mulberry 2, smiling with his wife I began to question what it was I'd done to be seen as other woman material. I don't want that. I don't want that.

My thoughts began to spiral. I thought about the tall, saurian man who courted me until he felt like he didn't have to.

"You have a very sexual laugh" he told me.

"It's something in your eyes" he told me.

"You're evil... I'm into it." he told me.

All of these statements, especially the first, broke my heart a little. What do I have to do to be taken as a real person? How do I know that I am one.

I finally confessed my discovery about Mulberry 2 to Vic in a Williamsburg basement. She described the way men speak to her as someone who is only attracted to women. We discussed having her go in my place, to dinner with 2. Gushed at the idea, but it kind of fell apart and I was left figuring out what to wear with 20 minutes until I needed to leave to sit across the table from a man who I now knew was married.

I put on a Baby Phat vintage dress. The same one I'd been wearing the night I met the infamous millionaire two ish years ago. I put on some Prada flats and set out. I thought about bringing something else I'd written, and handing it to him and making him read it, but I decided that I wanted him to look in my eyes. The same eyes that are always getting sexualized.

Pageant fans once said that they didn't like my eyes. The way they stuck out or "drooped." A makeup artist once complained that my eye shape was the most difficult. A man who I never spoke to, but only saw from time to time at one of my doctors followed me like 7 blocks home.

"Remember me" he said.

I'd never met him, not actually.

"It's the eyes" he'd said.

This made me so angry so angry so angry.

I was going to look at Mulberry 2, make him look into my eyes as I said whatever it was that I was going to say.

I walked to the restaurant. Stopped and got a pack of gum.

Walked some more.

"Are you a model?" this man walking parallel to me asked.

"No," I said, "I'm a writer."

He explained that he was a director. Claimed to be working on a sci fi movie with Zendaya. I mentioned my love of sci fi and that I studied screenwriting. By the time the conversation came to a close, I'd given him a card and he'd promised to go buy We.

But as I continued to the restaurant, I was left wondering if he took that romantically, or if perhaps he was nuts and why it is that I'm so trusting of strangers especially when they are in "the arts". I tried to push it out of my head as I got there.

He was seated at the bar. He was excited to see me and I ordered a club soda.

"Would you like to have something to drink?"

I explained that I only drink on weekends. He seemed disappointed. They got our table ready and the waiter made me follow him around 3 or so tables to sit on the other side.

"A lot of pageantry" I said, laughing, as I sat down.

We ordered two salads and the Branzino, and I felt something and in the corner of my eye and -- I kid you not -- I saw Mulberry 1 leaving the restaurant. I wondered if he'd seen me, he probably had, and I felt a tinge of guilt, until I remembered that every time we talk/talked I feel/felt as if he was trying to pull unearned intimacy from me.

"Do you miss me? Do you want to see me? Were you thinking about me?"

These are best offered. Someone's focus / attention / care. You can't force it. You can't force it.

So we're talking and eating -- Me and Mulberry 2. And as I'm picking at tomatoes and talking and listening to him discuss American culture -- how he doesn't feel like he really fits into the American midwest, how he prefers to travel, and so on -- I'm looking for his wife in the words. I'm looking for his children in the values he claims to have, or the way he claims to spend his time.

He tells me that he has crazy dreams. That in a dream he sees celebrities -- Obama, Kobe -- and that he can fly. That he once flew to see his father who gave him something.

"He gave you what?" I asked and he tried to clarify a few times, but gave up. I took it as some item specific to his culture. Cultural dissonance, I guess. We talk about dream analysis and I bring up the book in my bag on the subject, and how it emphasizes focusing on the feeling of your dream rather than the meaning. That the feeling matters more.

I talk about Jung and integration a little.

"Wow," he says, "I love talking to you. Your bubble is big. You've read so much."

We talk about my future. Places I could live. That apparently, the last time we went out, I told him I was afraid to be a mother. He seemed to latch onto that.

I'm looking around. I notice snake decor everywhere. On a giant painting. On a statue of a nude female torso.

And in comes the owner of this new buzzy restaurant who I was eating lunch perpendicular to just hours before. He doesn't know me and I don't know him, but I'd had a hunch and googled some key words and found a feature in one of the Vogues on him and his wife and how they are a perfect match. A perfect marriage. (As I type this, I'm reminded that a recent date who I wish I'd been romantically compatible with because we would've been great together had this notion that we're developing technological instincts as a species. Very interesting.)

So the owner of the restaurant comes in and I'm thinking about the spread with him and his wife and Mulberry 2 is asking me about therapy and I'm thinking about how happy he was to see me, how enthralled he was with my background, my little heart tattoos and spontaneity, and I'm thinking about how my mother once said that with one child she felt like she still had agency, but with two she could no longer just "get up and go" and I tell this man, in this crowded scene-y restaurant full of beautiful not-American people about how I had a therapist I loved and I found out the day before our last session that I'd been cheated on.

He started to laugh.

"Why are you laughing?" I said, sweetly.

"I'm not laughing, I'm just smiling."

"Why are you smiling?" I ask.

Everyone in the restaurant is beautiful. The branzino is good. I get a bone, in my mouth.

"It's loud," I say, "Do you want to get the bill and leave?"

He nods. I go to the restroom. The woman who was at the table next to us is there and I take a moment to look at myself, to look in my own eyes, (I am always surprised by seeing myself) before coming back to the table and he is talking to her and her date, in Russian, I think. He goes to the restroom and I initiate.

"I love Russian literature," I say, "But I only ever read translations.... I love Dostoevsky."

She opens up with this and says that she had to read him starting in the third grade. I tell her about our Dostoevsky party, and her date suggests that me and my date go to the scene-y lounge upstairs next.

"It's hard to get into." he says, and then asks how we met.

I explain that Mulberry 2 cold approached me.

"He says he's in New York once a month" he says, "How do you feel about long distance?"

"Woah, big questions" is my answer.

"Too much for a second date," he agrees and I feel a little weird realizing that Mulberry 2 had been talking about us as something real, as something with legs while I was gone. I was very confused.

He gets back and we get up and go, through the maze of dramatic waiters and beautiful Europeans. A man corners a waiter in front of me, blocking my way out, and I realize it's Zach Bia.

I am irritated, and then, for a moment, I wonder if perhaps we're in one of Mulberry 2's dreams.

We walk outside.

"Such a beautiful night" I say, relishing in the summer air.

He agrees and asks if I smoke during the week if I don't drink. And I wonder if he's felt the change in me, feels that I'm stiffer, more detached than the last time. I check my friend's location. Mulberry 2 mentioned the hotel he's staying in.

We wind around Manhattan. I take him past the spot where the man looked at me and went, "My lady, I have a lady... but you're such a babe." I look at the spot and it reignites something in me. Because throughout this whole night, this whole dinner, I was trying to put myself in his shoes, running different sorts of code, thinking how does one omit this. How does one omit a family. I created so many opportunities in the conversation, and he always only mentioned a sister when I asked what kept him in the midwest.

We get to his hotel and I direct us to a bench. I sit. He sits.

A person of the night walks by and yells at a woman on the bench near us, "Suck dick, bitch," they say to her violently, and then they pass us and I wonder if I should flinch, but they say nothing, choosing to single out the woman alone as opposed to me, the woman sitting next to the married man.

On the last stretch of the walk, he was reflecting on college. How he felt like he wasted five years of his life and felt lost.

"I was so focused on having fun" he said, echoing things he's said this whole time, that he feels like untapped potential. At dinner, I had told him that one of my pet peeves is people who complain about their lives without doing anything to change it. I emphasized that anyone can do anything, that life is a series of decisions (like a professor had once told me about characters) but that they have to deal with the consequences of it.

We're on the bench. I tried to empathize, but I keep coming back to the woman alone on the bench and the couple asking how we met and the fact that he cold approached me. Saw something in my eyes and took it as an invitation. This happens to me often.

"We made crazy eye contact."

"I made eye contact with a cute stranger and thought I'd..."

"Remember me... It's the eyes."

I think about the snakes all around the restaurant. How my entire life I've felt like a lamb at the state fair, being shown around and no one will tell me that the slaughterhouse is waiting after the awards ceremony.

I've gotten really bad nightmares my whole life. Very violent ones. And when I started integrating the darker parts of my personality they went away. But I had one really terrible one a few weeks ago. I woke up feeling like I had some sort of responsibility to get a little gruffer. To hiss when I need to and bite when I must. To be kind, but never nice, not nice.

And to have fun.

"What's on your mind?" he asked.

"Why don't you guess," I said.

"Is it how big my room is?"

"No, I know that." (I'd had family stay there).

"Is it that you want to kiss me?"

"No," I said sweetly.

"That didn't work" he laughed.

I thought about this one bartender who used to give me free drinks and I used to feel bad because he was an artist too and I felt like I owed him something because he used to hold his heart and look at me with these dreamy eyes.

"I think he just sees a pretty girl" my friend once said, when I expressed this, "that's all."

"Is it how I smell?" 2 asks.

"No, not that."

I thought about book club and how we were just talking about the theme of smell in Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. How intuitive it is. And the theme of self presentation and fun. You have to learn how to have fun.

That's what I'd told him on the walk. I told him that it makes like easier, even when you're put into situations you don't want to be in. I'd told him that fun makes it easier to be alive. I'd said something similar about love, humble love, when he'd asked about my heart tattoos.

"You really have no clue?" I say.

I asked him to describe his kitchen in the midwest. White marble. I asked how many days a week he eats there. He talked around a family, a wife, a family. He talked about how much weight he loses here. How when he goes back to his country his friends all remark that he looks like a skeleton. He says that his culture is very body aware for better or worse.

"It's so hard for women," I say, "We have to do so much, so much maintenance, so much self regulation, just to be treated a certain way."

"Yes, it's awful," he agrees.

"When I first went to my therapist, I went for an eating disorder" I say, hoping to pop the bubble of perfect young dream girl, "I had an eating disorder for a very long time." (I was still afraid to order anything with substance at the restaurant that evening)

"Beautiful girl, beautiful night, delicious food" he'd said, in response to the subject of fun.

He doesn't know what to say to this, to me, in a light, that is decidedly not fun.

"And it's part of the reason why I'm terrified of getting older," I say, "The world is not kind to women as they get older."

He agrees.

"And still, I can't wait to be 30."

"More confidence" he agrees.

"My mother says 'wait until you turn 30 because that's when you stop giving a fuck'" I say. I look at him. I look past him, and then in his eyes, and then past him, and then in his eyes...

"But having had so many experiences so young, and lived so many places, and owning my own business, I've learned how to stop giving a fuck now," I say. "The last time I was with you, I just had this feeling, and then a few days ago, I decided to look up your name, the industry you work in, and some keywords, and I see that you have a wife and three children."

He is surprised.

"Look, it's not that...we don't own each other," he says.

"Are you married? Yes or no." I say.

"We're business partners --"

"Yes or no."

"It's just a sheet of paper --"

"Yes. Or No." I say, "One word."

I think he finally just said yes, but he continued...

"She knows everything" he said --

"-- But I didn't," I say. There is bass in my voice now. My fangs are out and the words are flowing and I'm not afraid of anything, I am a lamb with hooves to kick, I am shrewd like a snake.

"It's New York," I say, "There's an open marriage around every fucking corner, you don't think people have tried with me before? I have two parents with a lovely marriage and even though it's just a sheet of paper to you, that doesn't mean that's what it is to me. I have so much respect, so much sanctity for the institution of marriage. You lied by omission."

"I didn't feel comfortable telling you yet."

"If you had told me, I wouldn't have gone on a first date with you to begin with. You have your values. I have mine."

I stand and announce that I'm going to a party.

"I feel violated." I say. "This is our second date (and our last)" (I think I said that last part out loud.)

I blow a kiss and do this weird little jaunt away and make a heart with my hands. (When I get to the party, the stamp put on my right inner wrist is also a heart. A reminder, always, that there is still love out there, it is still out there somewhere, somewhere, or inside to come out and finally be given to the right one).

As I leave him on the bench, I think about the subjectivity of personhood, of values, of life. He had mentioned that there were no bones in the Branzino. I'd gotten one right in between my teeth.

Men look at me as I walk and I avoid eye contact for fear that one of them will take it as an invitation, will project a version of me into my eyes and that I'll perhaps go on one, two, three dates for the experience? For the story?

I arrive at my destination. An album release party for a very special real and internet girl, Maude Latour. She is an internet girl to me, until tonight, because that is how we've known one another, until tonight. I enter alone and she is immediately warm and bright and a sparkly beacon in the night,

"You made it," she gushes, standing tall and beautiful in a white dress with a drop waist.

She introduces me to some of her friends.

I hear the word "sex object" in a conversation and I join.

"Hi, can I join, it sounds like you all are having an interesting conversation." I talk to the two -- a writer named Emily (I think) and a musician named Lauren about what it feels like to be a woman who is told that you look like a celebrity. I get weird and existential pretty quickly, questioning what it's like to be told you are like anything. I mention that a man once told me my laugh was sexual and that it made me sad.

"Men don't know how to give compliments" Emily said.

"Sometimes I want to be sexy" Lauren said, "Like when I'm dressed up, when I go out, but not at the deli."

We get into Madonna Whore stuff, and then a photographer comes over and starts taking pictures of us. This is Alex. She is a photographer and filmmaker and she is brilliant, we spend a good bit of the evening gushing about how the internet has made every artist feel like they have to do everything, instead of championing real artistic collaboration and the pursuit of a single calling.

Maude gives a speech. About how the album is like the last two weeks of New York summer and how she really just wants to make music for her friends.

My friend arrives. He's been traveling for so long, we have so much to catch up on. And we do, in this room of friendship and conversation and more beautiful people, but a younger, more innocent beauty than the restaurant, more of an innocent, eager kind. And very American. Very American.

Eventually, my friend and I go to the club next door. We dance for a bit, I stand on something because I had the thought to and then it made me a little nervous, so I knew I had to do it.

We eventually leave, and beautiful Maude is radiant, talking to the bouncers. She doesn't see us and we slip out. I hope she'll become more than an internet girl to me. There's a moment when you meet someone in the flesh where you feel their very essence, like I did with Mulberry 2 and felt that something was not good. Maude has a good essence.

We walk for a bit, in the still, summer air.

"What a beautiful night," I say.

We pass a group of men.

"Are you a model?" one asks.

"I have a boyfriend, but I'm very flattered" I announce. (this is the safest way to say no)

"Treat her well" he says, to my friend, and my friend and I both laugh.

"Should we hold hands now?" I suggest.

"We might as well make out" he retorts.

And eventually, we arrive home, and talk to some neighbors, and then I get that text about my deli and so on, and here we are.

It's morning now. I slept for a bit and dreamed about writing and woke up and finished this, even before my pot of coffee had brewed and I'd had a first sip.

Talking with Mulberry 2, he'd asked how alcohol, how smoking makes me feel.

"Everything makes me want to write." I'd said.

He mumbled something about it making him more present.

But, as I'd told Alex, at the party, I love words. Words feel like music to me, they dance around my mind and nestle on the tongue.

Men are very into a writer.

I was once bringing a copy of a story to the man who told me I'd had a sexual laugh, and on the way home, this man approached me.

"You definitely look like someone, you look interesting... what do you do?"

"I'm a writer" I said.

"I don't know if I love you or hate you." he'd said.

"That's a good line," I said, "I may write about it."

Eventually, I said "I'm walking home, and respectfully, I'd like to walk home alone."

His face changed so fast. I shrugged.

"Read my blog. Hot Literati."

I used to be so scared to write about my real experiences. The way people made me feel. The things that they said or did. Part of it is narrative subjectivity and wanting to be fair, part of it is fear.

Mulberry 2 called Midwestern American culture very fear based. I speculated that perhaps it was because people consume so much media in the midwest -- news and such instead of being in third locations. He seemed to think of himself in a very romantic way. Believed that living in the right place, or being in a constant state of roaming would make him more who he is.

Part of me is afraid he'll read this. The part of me that can hiss is maybe excited he will, in a sadistic way. Hello there, just because you choose to keep secrets doesn't mean I have to. And if you're going to keep secrets, then you should definitely avoid trying to make a writer your other woman, unbeknownst to her.

And most of the men who I've dated never read my writing anyways.

I think about identity a lot. I've been writing about it in some of the mail only pieces. I think everything is balance. You get to decide some of it. Some of it you don't. But you can try.

I am very American, but I am not afraid. I am very American. I think the American narrative of self-creation and pursuit is as equally beautiful as it is dangerous. I've taken my own little internet world and created something out of it, because to be an internet girl is less lonely than being a woman in the eyes of men who always see something different, something that is never really you in yours, and now I've taken my internet world and woven it in with the real one, and I try to be honest. I try to always be honest, for better or worse, for better and worse.

To make art, to share it with the world, is to let the world step into your mind, behind your eyes, to see the world in the way that you do. And perhaps you can give someone a lesson, a different perspective on the world, or perhaps even themself.

I am very American. I drink, only on weekends like a real, rowdy, protestant-culture-baby. I was raised on a mixture of food, real and artificial, I didn't have a TV in my room and then I did and then I didn't. I love standing next to a football game. I was hit by a firework on the fourth of July in 2017. And I believe in monogamy, and marriage, and what it means to sign a piece of paper and then fucking honor it.

A girl I know recently got engaged. She was telling me about it.

"That's lovely," I said, "I love engagements."

"Really?" she sounded surprised.

"Yeah," I said, "To make a real decision to commit to one person. It's beautiful."

Playgirl Spring was an exercise in de centering men and doing what you want because you want to do it.

(re)Cognition Summer was an exercise in mitigating our relationship with tech to practice being in the world again.

And now, we are two weeks of summer away from ♡Lovergirl Fall♡. What it will entail, I'm still figuring out. Because at the end of the day, I'm just a writer sitting quietly across from an oblivious man, choosing to trust the world, sitting quietly on the cusp of a party, observing little moments and how they turn into words in my mind, and needed a place to put them.

And so we end up here. On the internet.

We'll have one last (re)Cognition Summer piece. From the very bright, very wonderful Dagny of Pilot Magazine. And then, we look toward Fall.

Enjoy the rest of your summer.

Stream Sugar Candy by Maude Latour.

xo,

Hailo

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