riding in cars with boys

For most of my life my hobby was having a boyfriend. I had many, different shapes and names and ages, but they all could be a gray generic boyfriend fresh from the boyfriend factory. The purpose they served was not a romantic one, but a practical one - they gave me the opportunity to be a girlfriend, which I took up like a vocation. Not a title I put on a pedestal, but an identity I could assume. A part I could cast myself in. I wore girlfriend like camouflage or a mask to evade facial recognition technology. Observe me as a girlfriend doing his laundry, smiling serenely at his mother fawning over me, pressure washing his vomit off the back patio when he got too wasted on New Year's Eve. I would just show up and not leave because my boyfriend wanted me to stay. I was so good at sitting on the couch watching him play video games. I was good at being a passenger princess in his car when we'd make the 2am Taco Bell run.

Until I got bored or disgusted and it was time to move on to the next boyfriend. I think about an anecdote about Lana del Rey told by maybe her psychic, about how during some kind of spiritual exercise she said all her thoughts were in the shape of men. There always seemed to be a man. I could be on the most barren rocky deserted island and somehow there would still be a man. I kept them two or three deep until one told me they slept better with me next to them. And all this time later, worn down by the psychic erosion of marriage and divorce, I look back and wonder if I even liked men to begin with. It was something to do. It was better than being at my house and looking at the green carpet of my bedroom and listening to the rustle of the air conditioner and thinking about killing myself. 

Let me be clear, I wasn't a party girl or a vixen or even particularly hot. I just made myself available and mostly agreeable, which made up for what I lacked in beauty. The only part of my hobby I regret is that I could have used all the time I took caring of boyfriends when they were hung over or angry or horny to do something enriching like educating myself or traveling. I was neutralizing the fire in my brain by being a girlfriend. It made me feel less like a ghost and more like an anthropologist. 

One short-term boyfriend lived in a trailer with the walls painted black and cigarette burns on the couch. His breath was hot on my neck when he talked about our future Christmases, future anniversaries. I took him to the urgent care when he had pneumonia and the doctor said "Don't go kissing on your bride when you're sick, son." After I stopped seeing him, his roommate tried to hit me up. I don't remember either of their names. Sorry, boyfriend. You were one in a long line of the thousand ways I erased myself, longing to be as blank like untouched snow. 

I've seen you in a dream

The first anniversary of David Lynch's death was two days ago. One of the more magical parts of being a human is experiencing art made by a stranger that feels like the dreams you have but can't describe. Or what was scribbled in the journal you kept when you were thirteen and lived on a culdesac. 

In July of last year I moved back to the suburb I'm from. I haven't lived here in 20 years. The first few days after I moved had an amber haze over them. I got in my car and went south, and it was if my car was driving itself past all the places I knew so well - that I remembered in some lizard part of my brain. I wondered if this is what it feels like when birds and butterflies migrate, you just go and you wind up where you need to be. The path is rooted in deeper than any lost memory could touch. And things are different, of course. The Blockbuster is a vape shop, the mall with the movie theatre was demolished in 2017, there is an IKEA nestled on the side of the highway. My childhood did not have the fog of nostalgia drifting across it, high school was not the peak of life for me. But still I was happy in some kind of way in 2005, driving down Carrier Parkway in my little green Ford Ranger listening to Thursday and AFI, feeling free as any teenager ever did. 

I never thought much about suburbia until I read the play A Cheever Evening by AR Gurney when I was in college. I should read it again and see if I still like it the same. I'm sure someone has written about it, but I always felt like Mad Men and Draper's double life as family man and ad man had to be inspired by John Cheever's work. Does he romanticize the suburbs? Did David Lynch? Do I? Why is it when I watch Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet I feel this ache behind my eyes? The shot of the ceiling fan in Laura Palmer's house felt like a portal to teenage me draped halfway off my bed, starting at my own cream-colored ceiling fan, listening to the radio, thinking about death. Or how the parking lot at the Denny's always had a crackling weird energy at 2am when me and my friends would go get coffee and mozzarella sticks. Being at the park late at night, far into the woods where there was an old pony corral, listening to the shots from the neighboring gun range. My city is old in the north and young in the south. The roller rink and bowling alley and those motels with neon signs in the northern industrial area never made me afraid, but I knew behind closed doors things were happening I didn't need to know about. And the countless hours I spent sitting on a curb in a subdivision watching the boy I liked skateboard, my flat ironed hair curling in the humidity. 

I see shades of all of that in Twin Peaks. The wall between the collective dream of the suburbs and the collective madness that can wind through it is bone thin. What does it mean to grow up in a town built to be a liminal space - half an hour to the big city, even less to wide open pastures? I still don't know, only that it is familiar in the way running your finger over the old scar from when that dog bit you is familiar. David knew, I think.