“again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the hollywood onto the harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. on the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”
—joan didion, play it as it lays
in early june, i woke up with a pit in my stomach. as a person who has never felt completely aware of herself in any physical or internal way, the fact that i was experiencing this feeling and could identify it came as a shock. i hoped it would go away on its own, but after days of feeling the same, paired with an increasing inability to wake up from a night’s sleep, i took it into my own hands to figure out what was wrong. and then it dawned on me: i was lonely.
in the early days of the covid-19 pandemic when i began working from home, i remember telling some of my coworkers that i felt as though i was “built for this,” largely referring to staying inside, cooking involved recipes for one, reading books and watching movies on end. normally, i am a person who savors solitude. it turns out that it’s much easier to prefer being alone when you’re given the choice. after six weeks of sheltering in place and only stepping outside to get the mail and chat with neighbors from a distance, i started to miss one thing very explicitly: driving to los angeles to get a cheeseburger.
at the time, restaurants were figuring out how to safely serve customers within the parameters of a global crisis (???), so i sat at home and dreamed about making my own version of the cheeseburger i wanted to purchase. in the end, i decided i could still drive and the cheeseburger would have to come later.
over the past four months, i’ve spent most of my weekends driving around southern california. these long, circuitous drives have—not to be dramatic—sustained me. similar to maria wyeth, the protagonist in joan didion’s novel play it as it lays, i’ve always found a sort of maniacal comfort in the freeway. whether this problematic comfort stems from being on traveling athletic teams as a kid or the fact that the infamous regional traffic has never been a part of my daily routine, i don’t really know.
a few weeks ago i watched the film adaptation of play it as it lays. released in 1972, it stars tuesday weld and anthony perkins and is hard to watch. a loveless marriage, a covert abortion, hollywood hedonism. still, there are highlights: wyeth’s bright yellow corvette stingray, when she says, “existentially, i’m getting a hamburger,” and watching it while knowing that, even though she wrote the screenplay with her husband, didion didn’t like how the movie turned out.
that’s something that i’ve always found intriguing—that didion wrote the novel and the screenplay, was on the movie’s set, and the film didn’t turn out as she’d imagined. i’ve been thinking a lot about memory, especially within the context of loneliness. in march, i would wake up with an unshakable need to write everything down that i was thinking and feeling—the first time i’d felt that way in years. perhaps it was because i had no witness. it’s alarming how quick we are to question ourselves when our years-old tidy routines disappear.
a byproduct of these thoughts is that i’ve been able to consider myself and my surroundings fully—an enormous privilege in the midst of widespread turmoil. the freckles dotting my shoulders from reading outside all summer, cooking with leeks for the first time, a pot of tea most evenings, even though it’s still 97 degrees in october. loneliness and memory beget nostalgia, of course. the strangeness of being wistful for tiny, mundane activities—sitting next to strangers at the movies, walking to the farmer’s market and thoughtlessly touching a tomato to check for ripeness. even more strange is the occasional longing i have for the beginning of quarantine, when it seemed as though a light might appear at the end of the proverbial tunnel if we just stayed inside for a few weeks. but alas.
mostly, i’m trying to seek out the silver linings. feeling lucky that i have the time to fully catalog the day as i move through it, even when it feels similar to the one that came before it.
what are you up to these days? i’d love to know.
tiny morsels
MUSIC: the best sufjan stevens album (NO SKIPS) and leo takami during work hours, brian eno for reading, and new future islands singles the rest of the time
BOOKS: fragmentary novels all summer long—endlessly returning to and recommending kate zambreno and jenny offill
INTERNET: when writers get deep about rom coms, the millennial problem of loving boring narcissistic novels, and choosing between two luxuries: when joan didion forwent a trip to paris, instead choosing to work at vogue
ETC: my friend kelsey’s modernism driving tours of los angeles and seattle for people after my own heart and a deliciously good podcast season about polly platt, of bottle rocket and broadcast news fame