my complicated relationship with alcohol and dogs and kalashnikovs
august diaries
August 2nd
I’m currently in the process of ghosting my estranged father for the fifth time in my life. Maybe it's the sixth, I don’t remember. I used to instantly block him whenever he tried to get in touch with me in the past. It’s been five years since the last time he tried to contact me. I didn’t block him this time. Looking at the ‘follows you’ stamp on his Twitter profile feels like picking a scab. I don’t know how he found my Twitter anyway, I don’t use my real name on there. I can’t think about it too hard without making neck clench. I have never spoken to my father before. I drafted a message to him and made my friends proofread it for me at the bar. I never sent it and I probably never will. Maybe.
I went to a friend's flatshare barbecue today where I became increasingly claustrophobic from the concept of millennialism. I’m having more and more moments recently where I feel as though I’m in a film, or a dramedy. Something Sex and the City adjacent and definitely out of my tax bracket. Like last night, when I rode the train to my friend’s house clutching a foreign bottle of wine I bought in a French winery in the expensive part of town, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a ribbon. When I shook hands and made eye contact with strangers like a nice, well adjusted lady. When I said sentences like We never got to try this when we were in Portugal, and I have to see you again before I go to Paris next week. It feels luxurious and mildly uncomfortable, which is I suppose how most luxurious things feel, really. I was never supposed to be well put together.
August 6th
Last night I went to a concert alone. It was loser music, really, the kind of band popular with Anthony Fantano fans with social aversions, the kind of music I make fun of because I like to make fun of myself. I developed an instant friendship with a Californian in the drink line on the basis of his obnoxiousness. I’ve been so charmed lately by the very arrogance all Americans harbor that I used to despise. Perhaps it's familiar, or perhaps it's just refreshing, compared to German stoicism and coldness.
I forgot to text back my father. It’s been almost a week now. Saying anything at this point would just be awkward. I can’t think of the last relationship in my life that didn’t end up trapped in this same purgatory.
August 10th
Paris was incomprehensibly hot and crawling out of Bercy station felt like entering the mouth of an oven. Two Dutch boys in my hostel room started chatting with me the moment I sat down on my bed, and they invited me to invite them out for dinner, I can’t say I had too much of a choice in the matter.
I’ve been to Paris twice before. Once when I was a child with my family, and once a couple years ago with my ex-boyfriend. I keep waiting for the day that I’ll come down with a bad case of Paris syndrome, when one wrong move will cause any love that I have for the city to shatter like tempered glass, but that day has never arrived. We sat in the stuffy back corner of a bistro in Montparnasse that I'd been to with my ex before, and it was weird, because I think both boys were flirting with me, and they didn’t seem to care about stepping on each other's toes. Maybe I was reading the situation all wrong, though. I wasn’t really paying attention, I was too busy eating entrecôte.
We met a group of other travellers at a bar in Pigalle, and I found myself in the same situation I seem to always end up in: I implicitly become the nominated as the leader of a bar crawl I wasn’t aware I was organizing, and I have to deal with everyone in our suddenly-too-big group suddenly looking to me for our next move. Another situation I always seem to end up in: a brown haired boy with an accent sits down across from me, we make eye contact, and from that moment I already know the night will end with my knees on a tiled bathroom floor.
Being inside Pigalle Country Club feels like floating in the hollow base of a candle, watching the smoke billow overhead while melted wax drips down the walls. I do my best flirting in rooms that are too dark to see my yellow teeth and my smile lines. I do my worst flirting in places like Silencio nightclub, where it’s too hot and too humid and bodies are packed tight like sardines and I get so overstimulated that my playful teasing turns too mean. Sometimes I pull it off anyway. My knees ended up exactly where I knew they’d be.
August 11th
I’m trying to write a novel. That’s part of the whole reason I’m in Paris. I bought myself a new notebook as an attempt to rely on my laptop less. I’ve been living like my character and I’ve been really annoying about it. I’ve been floating around museums and taking moments to squat in the corner with my pen and my paper whenever an idea strikes. I’ve been overwhelmed by The Birth of Venus and underwhelmed by The Thinker. I’ve been taking the front row seat at any terrace that calls my name and ordering rose and olives and writing paragraphs I may never use in handwriting I can hardly read while watching the world go by. Yesterday at Les Deux Magots an American couple sat next to me, and the wife leaned over and tried to call me pretty in broken French. I learned into the bit, and thanked her in the best Parisian accent I could muster. She left the cafe before she had to watch me ask the server if we could speak English instead.
The other reason I’m in Paris is to see a boy. He lives out in the country, beyond Paris’s suburbs. Before I saw my country boy, I saw the boy responsible for my knees on the bathroom floor again. We watched the sunset at Sacre Coeur and had dinner at a quaint terrace in Montmartre. He kissed me goodbye at the station and I hopped on the RER to head out of the city. I’ve never kissed two people on the same night before and it made me feel a little bit evil. I defend it to myself by saying I was simply behaving French. Me and my country boy spent an evening tangled in the basement of his family home and he drove me back to the station in the morning. I might like him a little more than I should.
Belleville feels like Boxi, in its colour and its sound and its life. I fell in love with Belleville and the terrace near the mural on a bustling street corner and the golden stranger that kept lighting my cigarettes at the table beside me. When I fell in love with Boxi I ended up moving to that area a year later. Not to put any expectations on things, of course.
August 13th
I’m definitely getting sick, because my throat is sore and I’m starting to get sniffles. I’m also getting a bit sick of myself. It was another night with another group of hostel strangers, and there was another brown haired boy with an accent who seemed to enjoy me being mean to him a little too much. This boy and I did nothing together. I’m thankful for it. I'm growing to despise my own predictability. I drank a whole bottle of rose during sunset at the Eiffel Tower and then wiped out on a lime bike on my way to a bar. A lot of people watched and a lot of people laughed and now my palm has a crater in it and I think I deserved it, really, because I was being really annoying that night and I was overdue for a moment that reminds me I’m not as invincible as I like to convince myself I am. I don’t really remember how this night ended, and I don’t really care.
I spent the day in the 3rd arr. and I fell in love with a girl working at a cafe that was also a library that also archived subculture literature. I fell in love with the girl or maybe I fell in love with the place, I’m not sure. I walked and sat and walked and wrote and read and I felt like shit but I drank rose anyway. I was stopped on a street corner by a man on a bike who asked me if I’d ever modelled. He told me that he’s a photographer, and that he’d love to shoot me sometime. I thought to myself that girls with tattoos aren’t supposed to get trafficked, but I gave him my Instagram anyway. When I was his follower account I decided it could be worth it to be trafficked if it resulted in 15 minutes of d list Instagram fame. I celebrated the joy of being noticed by scarfing down a massive steak frites all to myself, in 35 degree heat, and it made me feel even worse.
I saw my boy out in the country again that night. I don’t know what to say other than old habits don’t die hard, they cling to you like an illness that’s immune to medication, and I definitely like him much more than I should.
August 14th
I’ve never seen a city that looks like Bucharest before. Paris lives everywhere, through replicated monuments and detailed apartment facades, and Romania is no different, but here the buildings are darker and neon billboards that cling to the roofs turn the sky pink. Seeing Izzy makes me mean in a way that’s really fun, or maybe fun in a way that's kinda mean, but either way it's a feeling that I’ve missed. We sang Stereo Love at a painfully tacky tourist bar and had an early night.
I’m on a tour bus right now and we’re going to Transylvania. I’m very sick and in very deep denial about it. All the mailbox orthodox altars on the side of the road keep reminding me that I’m a little bit awful.
August 17th
I am the stupidest girl in the world. I am selfish and mean and I keep running headfirst into my own demise without considering the consequences because I think it makes me a more interesting person. I’m not sure if I sincerely believe this or if I’ve just been on this minibus for too long. I’ve spent the past four hours slipping in and out of sleep while crumpled like a garbage bag against the backseat window and my body is drenched in a kind of sweat that feels like dread.
‘Dracula’s castle’ is a hollow shell of capitalist folklore, but Peleş Castle was nice. We adopted a little gay boy from Tennessee during our journey and brought him with us to get unreasonably day drunk at a village pub before our final coach ride back to the city. At night we went to a fancy cocktail bar in an old bank safe and drank dirty martinis to make ourselves feel worth something. We ended up at a tacky tourist club where the music was way better than what the straight guys looking for a quick fuck in the crowd deserved.
The next day I metaphorically almost died 10 times, but realistically only almost died once. We did a lap of downtown Bucharest, which feels a lot like an alternate universe, but also feels a lot like my street back home in Berlin. Then we met some other hostel travellers and caught the metro to the edge of town to explore an abandoned factory.
The factory area was huge and overgrown. A section of it was boxed off for construction, and though there were plenty of workers present, none of them seemed to notice or care about our trespassing. The window frames were rusted and the glass was smashed in patchworks, casting checkerboards of light all over the dirty, wiry factory floors. We hovered near the doors of every building's entrance but never went too deep. The grounds sprawled out in maze-like turns beyond the entry road. It was such a balmy, lazy Sunday, and I guess we must’ve felt invincible, because we kept pushing deeper into the property without a care. What happened next was an action movie sequence, and I’m sure one day it’ll make for an incredible story, but for now it still makes me sick to my stomach to talk about. We were wandering and laughing and talking far too loudly when a dog's angry bark cut through the air from a distance. Before we even knew what was happening, a pack of stray dogs began charging at us with open jaws, drool flying from their mouths. We ran, because what the fuck else do you do in that situation, and suddenly nobody was laughing, and they gained on us and our hands stopped working and we dropped a breadcrumb trail of human evidence, my headphones included. I’m not sure at what point they trailed off and returned to whatever prized possession they were prepared to attack for, I was too busy manually breathing. I don’t want to think about what would have happened if any one of us had fallen. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as lethal as I’m making it out to be in my head but fear doesn’t really work rationally. I don’t see myself being able to keep my composure around an unleashed dog for a long long time.
What a normal person with self compassion would do after experiencing a draining and traumatic event would be to balance the chaos with tenderness. Maybe an early night, maybe staying sober, or if not, maybe a nice full dinner with a single glass of wine. Instead we decided to get drunk and drag all our luggage through the underlit streets of south Bucharest to a techno club where we camped out until our 3am bus to Moldova was due to depart. I schmoozed with strangers to try to find uppers to make the whole process a bit less insufferable, but apparently all of the dealers were at the coast that weekend and weren’t available to help me out. The party was outside, so we sat in the corner of the unused indoor dancefloor and waited for the night to go by. When the time was right we crossed the street to a cavernous old bus terminal where a lone minibus idled. Everyone only spoke Ukranian, and Izzy apologized for only being able to converse back in Russian. We stopped for gas at daybreak and I bought orange juice and maxi pads. A stray dog prowled the premises and I hid from it on the empty bus while everyone else soaked up the fresh air. We’ll be at the Moldovan border soon.
August 19th
There's a building in the centre of Chisinau that makes me feel sick. I think there is something deeply deeply evil baked into its concrete, but I can’t explain why, nor can I prove it. The abandoned hotel stands in the center of the city like a tipping crown, marking the place where a major boulevard is split into a T. It’s brutal and oppressive and it has trees growing over the edges of its balconies that look like stolen captors reaching towards the outside world. I can only look at it for a couple seconds at a time. I’m convinced if I look at it for any longer something bad will happen to me. The north side of Chisinau feels like something so familiar that it's eerie, and the south side feels like something so unknown that it's sinister. The area around our hostel in the north reminds me of Ontario, and that realization doesn’t sit well with me, because it doesn’t make any sense. The area around the hotel in the south feels grey and imposing even on the sunniest day. It’s full of the kind of buildings that are beautiful because they’re mean and that give you vertigo to look at vertically.
We went to a local rave in a cave that doubled as a bar and grill the night before. We spent the evening with a group of five lads from our hostel who were mildly insufferable but also deeply comforting. I interviewed one of the DJs for a story I’m putting off writing. The rave was Berlin themed, in the sense that everyone wore black and they put stickers on your phone cameras at the door. It was not so Berlin themed in the sense that they handed out glow sticks and glow in the dark rave paint, and in the sense that people were laughing and socializing and making new friends. It was this part of the party that made the theme bearable. A brown haired boy with an accent painted neon circles on my collarbone and I wanted to bite his hand off, but more so my own, because I did it right back to him.
We shot a Kalashnikov in the basement of a strip mall at the southern tip of the city. We didn’t know what it was when the gun shop worker handed it to us, and we didn’t exactly have a choice. He barely spoke English and he didn’t care to look at our IDs or offer us eye protection, but we didn’t dare to question his methods with our weak Western expectations of gun safety. I hardly understood his instructions but I shot anyway. I wasn’t very good but Izzy had a knack for it. I had a moral crisis afterwards, over two glasses of Moldovan wine at a terrace we were nowhere near fancy enough to be invading.
We went to Transnistria, which isn’t a big deal to anybody that doesn’t have a fixation on Soviet history or geography or sociopolitical conflict, but it was a big deal to me. The Russian military controls the Transnistrian border and one of the border agents tried to flirt with me. He did it in Russian, which I didn’t understand, so when everyone turned to laugh at me I thought I was getting deported.
Tiraspol is serene in the same way a sleeping lion is. What makes it precious is also what could hurt you. Our hostel was sprinkled with freaks, because no other type of person goes to Transnistria, so I suppose we were no different. We got a tour by a girl we met at the rave in Chisinau a few nights prior, and we ate borsch and drank vodka at a USSR-era diner. We floated through an old abandoned amusement park on the eastern edge of the city. The water in the bumper boat basin was yellow-green and the swings were completely blood tinted with rust. There was a ferris wheel in the center of the park, just like the one in Chernobyl, that you could sit in and maybe even turn on with the right keys, but we weren’t about to try. As we left the park a group of teenage boys were putting a derailed train ride back together by hand. Maybe they’d be able to figure the ferris wheel out, but we didn’t hang around long enough to see for ourselves. We bought instant noodles for dinner from the oligarch-turned-pseudo-dictator-owned grocery store chain that clogs every main street in Tiraspol. I got questioned by a stranger for my gothness and we had an early night, because we had the itching feeling that something very bad was going to happen if we didn’t.
August 22nd
It’s my birthday and I’m too tired to care all that much. I’ve spent the day napping with my window open. I have a cough that feels like gravel in my throat because the pretty pastel vogue cigarettes that I bought in Moldova are trying to kill me. I’m not sure how I feel about being 24 yet. I have time to figure it out.
August 23rd
I’m starting to figure out how I feel about being 24. I’ll arrange it in a series anecdotes:
Being both a hedonist and a people pleaser are not compatible identities. Being a hedonist and a people pleaser with anxiety and a self-loathing reliance on male validation is even worse. The antidote to all of this internal conflict might simply come by standing up for myself every now and then. I kicked a rude boy out of my birthday party and it made me feel higher than all the lines I ingested that night leading up to that point. I’m finally discovering the simple pleasure of self defence at the age of 24.
I’ve become the butt of a running joke that I think is really funny but also is a little too humiliating to laugh at entirely. I deleted my Hinge account. There will be no more brown haired boys with accents in my future. (Maybe. I’m also a huge hypocrite, and that's not a habit I’m ready to let go of quite yet).
I can’t tell if it's bad that I find so much joy and fulfillment in being entirely liminal. I keep meeting people who talk about security and it fills me with the same dread I used to get as a child hearing a ghost story by the campfire. It’s not as if I’m undriven. I have big dreams and I work a good job. I just don't want to stop moving. Why would I stop while my bones are still oiled and painless? There will be so much time to rest later.
I need to eat more and walk more and stop taking so many naps. Lethargy stopped being romantic the moment I aged past 20.
August 27th
I’ve been doing a whole lot of nothing, which somehow feels like a whole lot of everything, since getting home from my trip. It feels like I’m the only person in Berlin who wants to go out for a beer on a Wednesday. I wake up at 9, go on my phone until 11, and take a 45 minute nap at 1pm. I can’t write in my own bedroom but every time I bring my laptop to a terrace I end up ordering one too many beers and I completely lose my ability to form coherent sentences. This will change in September because it Has to.
I played a show with my band on Monday and I came to the realization that my purpose in life is making a lot of noise while nobody is looking directly at me. That’s why I drum and that's why I write and that’s why I travel without staying in one place for too long and that’s why I dream of publishing a novel. I hope 24 brings a lot more of these experiences.
August 31st
For the past three years August has lasted forever. It makes me nauseous in a way that I crave, like riding rollercoasters or spiking my own drink with molly.
Since turning 24 I’ve been living like a piece of shit, and for the first time I can’t bring myself to feel guilty for it. I’ve spent the last week squashed like a bug against my mattress and my vibrator has died three times.
The other day I went out for drinks with a bunch of strangers and it made me realize that I’m finally too old for a lot of the bullshit I enjoyed basking in during my early twenties. I still find sick pleasure in poking things I shouldn’t touch but I now watching them squirm just makes me sad. Everything feels a bit too helpless, everyone feels a bit too desperate.
Today I vacuumed my floor and washed my bedsheets and built my calendar for the next month. I laid in bed naked and watched the Arsenal game and drank two beers. I had some stray receipts that I wanted to glue in my journal, and I saw my list of goals I wrote on the first page at the beginning of January. I’ve done so much this year and yet I’ve barely done a thing. I am no thinner and no more well read, I’m not a better chef or a better friend. I did not make it a goal at the beginning of the year to almost die in the jaws of stray dogs or to shoot a gun in a Moldovan basement or to ghost my father on Twitter. Now I’m left here holding these things and I have nowhere to put them. I laugh as I hold them because they make for interesting stories. When will it all get a bit too heavy?