How to Exist

A weird girl's guide to presence, gaze, want

I want to feel the liquid brown of his eyes in my mouth. I want to bury my face in the velvet of his voice and swim in the warm sienna of his skin, count his beauty like heavy coins, clink, clink, clink.

-Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

I’ve made a hobby of talking to strangers. I’m not particularly good at it, but sometimes my luck strikes hot and clumsy turns charming in all kinds of places. You don’t actually have to say anything interesting to be a skilled conversationalist, and you can be even less interesting when you’re twenty-five and pretty and blush a little bit when you talk.¹

I take note of new people. I’ve started writing their names in my diary, or descriptions if I don’t learn names: a polite young man stops me on the Staten Island Ferry to ask me what I’m reading. (I write two sentences about him with my fountain pen, freshly loaded with pink ink, and never mention him again.) A faculty member at my workplace introduces herself, and I’m secretly excited because I’d been too shy to start a conversation. (I mention her mid-sentence with three other professionals I met that day. I’ve had black ink in the barrel since September.) A beautiful big-nosed boy holds the door for me at Dunkin’ Donuts; I’m too far behind; he waits with a smile. (I still write about him, and in every color.)

A stranger is a wellspring, but talking is a fright. I read too much—read eyes, read faces, read bodies and gestures to exhaustion. And it is exhausting, consuming the human image without end and with such intensity.

It should be easy for someone like me, oozing some odd concoction of beauty and agitation all over myself, out and down; it curls my hair, pads my blazer, spills down the aisle on the top deck of the Staten Island Ferry. Some commuters lift their feet to avoid it. Most don’t notice. Most don’t notice anything, ever. In New York, absurd is mundane, mundane is invisible, and no quantifiable measure of eccentricity might ever be enough to upend its fragile peace.

The more interest I have in a stranger, the more I am repelled by the prospect of conversation. And the reason is simple: the more interest I have in conversation, the more I threaten routine—my own, of course, and others’.

Observation is the lifeblood of a writer. I’ve stopped wearing headphones, even during commutes and at the gym—two places that are as populated as they are physically isolating. Perhaps it’s bold. Perhaps it’s freeing. Maybe I stand out from the rest of an otherwise-distracted New York throng. But empowering myself to observe is a deceptive feat: observation is stable; observation is safe; observation is a writer’s curse, an ever-damning comfort.

I’ve fallen in love and done nothing about it. I’ve second-guessed myself out of many a potential friendship. Still, I kick and struggle and scream to love the world around me, and on occasion, my labor bears fruit.

(Some hobby I’ve got.)

I wonder if it’s this hard for everyone else. I see couples on the old school double-seaters, the ones you can only find on the R or the Q or the Staten Island Rail, and I steal constant glances like an unruly kid. I want to know how they met. I hate what phones have done to socialization and dating and everything else, and I ignore the probability that their affection was arranged with some degree of digital precision. Which one changed the other’s life first? Is this some rehearsed behavior, performed in public and perfected over time? How haven’t I learned it? Does this just happen, and when? What have I missed?

There they sit, hands intertwined, heads on shoulders, former strangers. And all I can do is watch, intrigued, tormented, deeply and utterly unchanged. Deeply, utterly safe. Mundane. Absurd.

I watch existence all around me and wonder how I’m meant to experience life. Can I force upon myself the social discomfort that seems so normal to everyone else? Is it too late? Am I too old? Too young? Am I cursed to observe? How do I exist?

It hasn’t ever become easier for me to express my interest in others, so I’m learning to approach my newfound social bravery like I approach writing or the gym or anything else of minimal holistic value: with strict, unfeeling, left-brained discipline. I take my thyroid meds because they help, not because I enjoy the experience or feel particularly motivated to crunch on tiny orange pills at 6 AM²; in the same way, I force myself to write because it will never be anything but grueling, regardless of my devout submission the craft; and in that very same way, I am learning to hold eye contact and smile instead of pulling away in horror, to compliment every curly-haired woman I see, to give my number out to lovely strangers, to introduce myself if I feel like it and for no other reason, because I want to do more than observe. I am young, but not for long. I am ready. I want to exist.

1. For more on blushing, see my post “i could do without the heat” (feb 2024).

2. Fellow pill-chewers, I humbly reveal myself to you.