Every time I go back to New Jersey, I spend most of my time sitting in the passenger seat of my best friends’ cars. They will pick me up and hand me the aux cord and we will invent some destination to end up at—usually a coffee shop that is unnecessarily far away, or the empty flea market parking lot late at night, or anywhere in New Hope that we can walk across the bridge from. The point is never to go anywhere, it’s to be in a car together.
I spent one afternoon in January going on my usual walk, following the trail that cuts through a farm and into the trees. On my way home, I was walking along the street I used to live on and a car pulled up beside me. It was my friends, hijacking my walk to pick me up and go to the movies.
We sing a lot. We sing very, very, very loudly. My friends actively resent my attempts at background vocals. We play through every One Direction album and then we do it again, with the Hairspray soundtrack instead. This routine is a total guarantee of happiness for me.
My dad took me out to dinner one night after a snow storm in Lambertville. In the car, he played “Pretty in Pink” by The Psychedelic Furs and “61 Seconds” by The Outfield and talked about how important that music was to him in high school. In response, I played Bleachers music.
Spring of my senior year, the day that “Stop Making This Hurt” was released, my friends and I left school during lunch and took a drive through all the backroads and hills. It was so warm. All of the windows were rolled down and Alayna was practically hanging out of the passenger side window. We just kept laughing through the entire song because we couldn’t believe how much it sounded exactly like us. It felt exactly like growing up in New Jersey. I think about that day all the time, one of many days spent doing the same thing. It’s maybe the happiest I’ve ever felt.
Little Joe was the first car I ever drove, an old Jeep Rubicon. This winter break, I found out that my parents finally sold the car to another family nearby. My mom said she drove past it the other day in town—it’s still around. After my dad handed over the keys, he came home with a small pile of forgotten things that had been left in Little Joe after years of my brothers and I driving it to school, a bit of a time capsule. A cardstock coupon for Uncle Ed’s ice cream that I never used, my old parking pass for the lot behind the football field, and some of my brother’s basketball stuff.
I used to think I would care a lot when we sold Little Joe, but I didn’t. It was near impossible to take that car onto a highway. The battery had died on me multiple times and the brakes were really bad. But it was such a great first car. If it was warm enough after school, I would put the roof down and let my hair get all tangled on the way home. It’s a relief to let the car go and not be bothered.
The new car that I drive (lovingly called Little Freak) died at the beach this winter break and I learned how to jumpstart it with some help from my dad and the Delco neighbor across the street.
Besides the car death, it was a good trip to the beach. My friends and I cooked dinner together and held a “summit meeting” in the living room to talk through our various life crises. There was a huge storm that weekend. Both nights we were there, I could feel the house swaying from side to side while I tried to fall asleep. The wind was screaming. The first night, I had to keep going outside in the pouring rain to fix the covers on the outdoor furniture. It was comical, trying to fight the wind and the rain and the sand and the dark all at once. We joked that we were captains going down with our ship. In the morning, we went for a walk on the beach even though the wind hadn’t died down at all and the sand was wiping at our ankles and our eyes. I went for a very quick swim and it was electric even though I lost feeling in my toes. We stopped by the used bookstore and I got another John Steinbeck book.
I have a lot of seashells sitting around my room in New York. Most are from Ocean City, though a few are from Deauville or Fort Myers. One small pile are clam shells my dad gave me after a walk he took on the beach one morning over the summer. He picked only the shells that the waves had carved little holes into so that I could string them onto my necklaces.
In early February, we very successfully launched our literary magazine, The Weasel. We completely ran out of seats for people at the reading. Strangers and friends kept pouring through the doors. We’re combing over submissions now for the spring edition and planning another event. Hoping more than anything that people keep showing up.
I managed to get myself a real adult internship. I’m working at W. W. Norton & Company doing publicity for their trade books this semester and learning so much about book publishing. It’s magical and everyone is lovely. I get to work in a big building on fifth avenue with a fancy lobby. I get to wear nice shoes and everybody calls me “Eliana” except for the other interns.
I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve also been editing a lot. I seem to always have some kind of writing to edit these days. The other day in my fiction workshop, the professor said she wanted to hear my thoughts on a piece because “you’re an editor.” I was very taken aback and subsequently very stressed about saying the wrong thing, but she wasn’t wrong! This realization is shocking!
I’m really trying to write fiction. The level of choice that fiction requires is very foreign to the bitter journalist in me. I’m now trying to get over the mental obstacle of finding any fiction that I write excruciatingly embarrassing.
I enjoyed Ash Wednesday this year. I never observed Ash Wednesday growing up, but I’ve grown to appreciate it in adulthood. Some of my friends were doing prayers and ashes for people in Washington Square Park throughout the afternoon, so I stopped by for a little bit. It’s hard to put into words how powerful it is to pray for a stranger. And I’m not sure why, but I was a bit surprised by how many people asked for prayer. The second we set down our things, someone walked up and asked for prayer for her mother.
On the train home last weekend, I heard a woman on the phone say that her mother was in hospice and that “it’s kind of nice.” I thought that it was the saddest thing I ever heard, and then I thought that I understood her completely.
I’ve been thinking about the nobility and absurdity of faith, and how these things work together. I’ve been thinking about this because my friends keep talking about it. Faith gets harder as I get older, but it also becomes a lot more rewarding. It gets a lot stronger after you’ve battled it out with God a few times. “But by faith, says that marvellous knight, by faith I shall get her in virtue of the absurd.”
It seems like everything in my life is happening “out of the blue” these days. I keep hearing that phrase. I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell it means. I know what it means, but isn’t it strange? Apparently it has to do with the likelihood of a lightning bolt striking out of a clear blue sky. That doesn’t seem strange enough, though. I’ve certainly gotten lost in the blue before, especially when I look at an O’Keefe painting. I don’t want to be taken out of the blue. I like it in there. I just keep seeing this image of giant gloved hands dragging me out of a big blob of Yves Klein blue, and I’m kicking and screaming the whole way.
Grief wears a pair of gloves and it is very heavy when it enters a house. It curls around a doorframe, slowing everything down, and then makes its home in the back of your throat for a while.
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
I first read this book in my sophomore year of high school and never forgot it. In my fiction workshop, we studied it as an intro to writing vignettes and I was reminded of how truthful it is. Should be essential reading for everyone.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
I’m taking a Jane Austen class this semester and reading through all of her novels. Northanger Abbey is my favorite Austen so far. It was a total masterpiece. “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
The Weasel is open to submissions for the Spring 2024 issue! Send us your art and writing! Tell your friends! Tell your friends to tell their friends!
Listening to a lot of “Walking On Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox and “If Anyone Falls” by Stevie Nicks. Just those two songs every morning. Earnest over-the-top pop anthems keeping me awake on my morning commutes!
Also revisiting music that feels like summer: “I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen, “These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding, “Jersey Girl” by Tom Waits, and “Jack and Diane” by John Mellencamp. These songs make no sense for the weather right now, which is generally how I decide what music to listen to, but they keep me warm and remind me of home.
Currently reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and liking it so far. I got to hear Akbar read a chunk of this book over the summer in Paris before it came out and have been thinking about it ever since, so getting to read the whole thing and hold the final product is a real treat. He is a poet first, which is very clear in his prose.
“I'm not unfaithful, darling. I've plenty of faults but I'm very faithful. You'll be sick of me I'll be so faithful.”―Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”—Joan Didion, Blue Nights
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I love the reflections on faith. Prayers for strangers. And the heaviness I feel in the way you describe grief entering a home - so powerful.
I finally got around to reading this post from my crowded inbox...so glad I did! I love your writing and thank you so much for sharing it!