Elizabeths'

Pooja asked me what’s it like to be in love this time of year. I said, I don’t know, it’s not that easy. I was thinking about how my snake plants aren’t doing well and when I tugged on them ever so gently a few of those spears immediately came out of the dirt and had no root structure at allll and I was going to just throw them out but my boyfriend made me put them in jars of water in the sunniest spot to see if maybe the roots would regenerate. And NOW I have no jars left to piss in when I’m really drunk and my roommate is in the bathroom. There’s hard things like that all the time.

On the winter solstice I made him sit with me while I journaled my intentions for the new year. I saw an instagram reel that said the best time to manifest is while you’re having sex because orgasms open portals. That got stuck in my head but I keep forgetting to tell my boyfriend that that’s what I’m doing. Last week I came and then just yelled WE’RE GOING TO BE RICH and he just agreed with me. The instagram reel said to be specific, and to manifest your futures aloud together, but I don’t think of that in the moment. Lately, I’ve just been coming and yelling I DESERVE THIS!! I don’t know what that’s all about. I think if I was his random hookup, it would be really funny. But because we’re in love it’s something else.

Deserving makes me think of this unfinished calendar I posted in 2024. A lot of the comments were like, I’m so jealous, or, how do I have this kind of year? I remember being so shocked. We see the words sex and love and get stupid. Maybe we think we need to have survived something to deserve anything good.

Sometimes I want to say I had a dream when in reality I just had a ridiculously vivid and detailed daydream, fully awake vision. I like the excuse of starting a story with “ I had a dream that…” because it is innocent and not your fault to have a dream and having an awake vision is something that seems willful and deliberate to people who don’t daydream. My older sister calls me and asks me what I did today and I tell her I tried on all my dresses and stood really close to the mirror so I’m face to face and then acted out aloud what I’d say if I got stopped by that guy on the street who asks couples, Hi are you a couple? Can you tell me about how you first met? This occupies me for hours. My sister says I would have never imagined that’s what you do with your time.

I had one of these vision daydreams that filled me with certainty that my boyfriend had bought me really expensive bluetooth headphones for Christmas. I was preemptively annoyed with him because I don’t need or want expensive bluetooth headphones. But instead, he got me loose leaf tea and a pink cashmere sweater and a beautiful stuffed animal rabbit I named Elizabeth.

Weirdly frequently I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem In the Waiting Room, where the narrator suddenly gains self-awareness sitting at a dentist’s office reading National Geographic.

February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.

That sentence is inside of me now, the phrasing you are an Elizabeth, an Elizabeth like a heavy object, a true noun. The incredulousness of the italics. I think I’ve been resonating lately with the shock of being myself and being so much a part of someone else and a part of a community. Not only can I see myself but they can see me too. A dialogue in staring back.

I am happy my rabbit can feel being an Elizabeth, and I cried when I took her out of the bag my boyfriend wrapped so sweetly.

Wearing my pink cashmere sweater holding my rabbit made me feel like a baby in a good way, made me feel loved really well the way a baby needs and wants. I’ve written too about how something about sex makes me feel like a baby, but like, in a normal way. I’ll include the horse post here for you.

I remember turning 7 like Ms. Bishop. My grandmother was visiting us from Poland and she came into my room before midnight when she thought I was sleeping (I was always pretending I was sleeping) and left this beautiful stuffed hound on my chair with a balloon tied to him. She named him Seven because to her Polish ears she thought it sounded like a beautiful name. I think it’s beautiful too. My grandmother felt very clever for coming up with that name and she also still reminisces about him and how tasteful and not like other toys he was. My little cousin visited us this summer and my sister told her she can have any of our old stuffed animals. Out of the giant bag, she found Seven, and claimed him as her own. For a moment I was like, actually heartbroken, and then I was like, no it’s good, she has good taste. He had been living in the bag for many years.

Sometimes my boyfriend and I stay up late to call each other when one of us is actually too tired to stay up and call, and then we don’t get mad at each other but we quietly get a little mad at ourselves. Sometimes it takes a long time to actually say what we mean. Sometimes I think, if he wasn’t already a person, I would have really loved to give birth to him.