This diary belongs to: Elaine
Stop. Do not go any further.
If you're holding this, it means you either found it or you did the one thing I can’t stand...looked for it.
This is private. If you keep reading, you are trespassing.
You should put me back.
I’m serious.
If you don't, then at least be honest about what you are doing.
You are not a reader.
You are a fucking thief.
Here’s the deal. When you're twenty, twenty-one, twenty-twoish, you're not supposed to have money like that. You're supposed to split dinners and count change and do that stupid humiliating mental math in line at CVS. So when it shows up, real money, adult money, not just adult money but FUCK YOU money. It lands like a drug. And what do you do with a drug? You take more than you should, faster than you should. The thing no one tells you is that making money fast at this age makes your relationship to money... porous. Like your sense of value becomes permeable. The boundaries between “need” and “want” kinda dissolve because when it arrives in strange waves, you stop living on a steady salary logic. A good week means you feelinvincible. A slow week means you feel doomed all over again. You start spending like you have to outrun the fear of the next dry spell. Because if you're honest, the money doesn't feel stable or real sometimes. So you spend it quickly. I'll tell myself I’m being responsible,” and then I’ll do the exact opposite in a way that looks, from the outside, like self-care.Thats the other trick. When you suddenly have access, you want to buy things that say you belong. You want proof. Designer is the most obvious proof. Designer is a language most people here speak fluently. A bag is not a bag. A bag becomes: I have access. You don't. Its a little passport you carry on your arm. It tells people you're not struggling even if you are. The salesperson will smile at me differently, and that smile will make me want to cry because the world is so easy to buy into when you know the code. Restaurants are another way I launder it. When I have a good night, I don't go home. Fuck no. I go somewhere dim and expensive and order oysters like I’m doing now. Sometimes I'll book a last-minute reservation at a place I've seen on Instagram and I'll pay without checking my bank balance. paying without flinching. It’s not even about the food. It’s about the moment your card goes through, and nothing bad happens. Spas are dangerous. You can say you're taking care of your body, and no one will question it. I’ll book a lymphatic and lie on the table and let someone press the city out of me like juice, and for an hour I can pretend my body is just a body. Then I walk out and tip too much because tipping makes me feel powerful. Of course, the dumbest, purest kind of spending is the impulsive little purchases that feel like talismans. The objects don’t settle my nervous system. They just temporarily mute it. They make me feel better for an hour, a day, a week, until the next quiet stretch, until the next dry spell, until the next moment I look at myself in the mirror and remember none of this is stable. So you keep moving. You keep buying. converting the money into things that look solid and tangible. Solid is what you crave when your income is fucked and then royalty unfucked and then super fucked again. I realize the most addictive part of this money is not what it buys. Its the way it lets you borrow a self.
have to. I can just watch, and there's something almost spiritual about that. Something that feels like what Simone Weil probably meant when she talked about attention as prayer or whatever, except she definitely wasn't talking about watching two guys suck each other off on a shitty pleather couch.
Code name: Homeboy.AKA, my first real boyfriend, the one who wore those terrible cargo pants but had a great sense of humor. (He quite literally laughed me out of my panties) I used to lie in bed after sex and imagine him with his best friend, who was definitely straight but had these delicate wrists and this way of touching Homeboy's shoulder when they talked that made me insane with possibility. I would construct elaborate scenarios
And in my fantasy, I was there but not there. Perhaps watchingfrom a doorway. A ghost of pure desire. A consciousness without a body. How could I tell him? "Hey, I love you, but also I want to watch you get fucked by your bestie"? That's not pillow talk. Thats not even therapy talk. That's the kind of thing you're
supposed to keep locked in the basement of your psyche, along with all the other wants that don’t fit into the narrative of who you're supposed to be.
Code Name: “Mr. I” boyfriend number three. With him, the
fantasies got more elaborate. I would imagine him discovering something about himself that had nothing to do with me, and somehow, in my imagination, this discovery would make him more mine. As if by watching him
become someone else, I could finally possess him completely. Is that fucked up? It's definitely fucked up. But it's also true, and probably indicative of some deep psychological wound that I should address in therapy, but won't because my therapistis on maternity leave.
The porn itself is almost beside the point. I mean... yes, I watch it. Yes, I have my preferred sites and my preferred scenarios. Maybe what I want or what I've always wanted is to see the men I love become pure desire. And to watch them stripped of all the performance of heterosexuality, all the ways they have to be for me, and all the emotional labor of being someone's boyfriend.
No one knows about any of this. They must think I'm normal or normalish. They must think my sexual imagination begins and ends with a neat, folded bow.
The laptop is open. It’s 2 AM again.
I bring absinthe the way some people bring a book, they
haven't read. Half as proof, half as alibi. It's not that I wantto be drunk. I want to be filled. There’s a difference. Drunk is a blunt instrument. Full is a theory of the body. a soft bright pressure that says, YesI am here, I am taking up space, I am not apologizing for my pulse. I arrive holding the bottle. It's embarrassing, honestly. How much hope can you pour into a glass? I
can already see myself from above, a girl walking into a room trying to look casual while radiating the specific desperation of someone who wants to be remembered without having to become unrecognizable first. This is the part where I would tell you I’m chill. (I’m not chill.) I'm actively creating a scene in my head where someone says Who brought absinthe? and the room rearranges itself around me like I’m a new kind of furniture or something.
The party has its own weather. Humid laughter, thin compliments, the occasional cold front of someone's ex-lover. I stand there, and I can feel the familiar panic of being a person with a face. When you're anxious, your body is too visible. Everything becomes evidence. The way you hold your cup, the way you stand with your feet too close together, like you're afraid of taking up floor. I think maybe the green bottle is not a drink but an event. Maybe it's a ritual disguised as a party trick. I set the bottle down. I become very competent, which is always my tell.
I talk about cold water and slowness and the strange kindness of dilution, which is maybe the only way to live. By adding water to your intensity
until it becomes something you can actually taste. There’s an intimacy to watching liquid change. The clear turns cloudy, the green turns pale like a secret deciding to be visible. And while the drink becomes milky, the room watches, and for a second, everyone is quiet in the way people get quiet around fire. This is the moment I wanted. Not the intoxication, but the attention
that feels earned. I want to be the person who brings
transformation. I want to be the one with a little ceremony in her bag. But my mind, being my mind, immediately ruins it by narrating my own performance. Look at me, I am a witch of artisanal alcohol, I have brought theater to your IKEA coffee table. I can feel my soul rolling its eyes at me.
I take a sip.
It is bitter and shockingly alive, like recalling a memory you didn't know you had. It tastes like green things and old rooms and the part of yourself that gets lonely at parties. Then (this is the important part)I
feel the hunger underneath the hunger. The real thirst is for permission. Permission to be intense. I want someone to look at me and think There she is. Thats her. Shes real. The bottle doesn't do that. Of course it doesn't. A bottle is a bottle. It cannot carry you across the room and put you gently into someones attention. But it can make you pause. make you slow down long enough to feel
your own body again. People drink. They laugh. I watch everyone. I let the party
happen around me. Let my face be my face.