wall to wall no. 02: digging through the archives
For the love of storage units.
Meet Wall to Wall, a new segment of Love and Other Rugs, A place for all the love and all the rugs in between issues.
I’m never inspired to write in New York. This always makes me think I should leave or at least spend half my time in LA. When I’m on the west coast, I often have one plan a day and don’t really drink and wake up at 7am (this is not the case in New York, as you can imagine). I spent my childhood there, in Silverlake, while my mother was a professor at USC and Cal State Northridge. I saved all the materials from her time teaching, among her other possessions she left behind. Since her death seven years ago, these objects (now whittled down to 15 boxes) have moved from one basement in St. Louis to another to a barn in Vermont to a family member’s storage unit in New York. Last week, I moved them into their own storage unit near my apartment in Brooklyn. This task is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it was harrowing and heavy. The first box I opened contained her wedding dress. It was sitting on top of her books. My friend asked me how it made me feel. Great proud sad, I said with no punctuation. That was all true.
Since we last spoke..
I’ve been on zero dates, but flirted with 2-3 real men at real bars. I ran into 3 friends’ exes, 2 in the wild and one on hinge. I promptly shut the app.
I spent a day last weekend shopping around the East Village. Highlights included—a face chair at Cure; a studded suit, a gold bag wall, and a perfect bra from 9th Street Vintage; Diamonds at Still House; a sweet winking napkin at Jane Cookshop; sexy dresses and good vintage jewelry at Duo.
We are narrowing in on a dresser. I nearly bought one from Rabbithole Vintage. And liked this from Good Behavior.
I sent my hairstylist Monica an unhinged face-to-cam video which I do quarterly so we can chat about cut and color. I’ve been swearing by K18 these days, the peptide prep is basically the only shampoo I’ll let touch my head. And speaking of vanity, I have never received more compliments about my skin than the last month—I would like to thank Mario Badescu Vitamin C cream & Sofie Pavitt Mandelic Clearing Serum.
I drank a filthy martini at The Nines and went to a wine rave. I saw glorious carpeted stools at Time Again. I ate at the newly opened wine bar at Quarters, plus Corner Bar, Eel Bar and Bridges (if it’s good enough for Chloe...).
My long-time friend Christina announced that her brand Great Eros was shuttering. I bought so many things—it's my favorite underwear on the planet (as previously stated in the Strategist). Go buy what is left.
And now for some words…
Opening up my mother’s things again reminded me of a piece I wrote based on a page of her encyclopedia. I called the story Good Mourning. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Good Mourning
My mother would wake up every day at 5am—brew a pot of coffee, take magnesium and B6, and eat a singular microwaved potato with chipotle powder and olive oil. After watching the birds, she would return downstairs and sit with her books. Before we called it doom-scrolling, we called it reading.
Her daily practice included pouring over the dictionary and encyclopedia. She read like a sponge, absorbing the minutiae—only to run upstairs when she woke me up 2 sometimes 3 hours later with an oddity about the past, a fact about her own existence that she’d hadn’t yet considered. She read like her life depended on it, maybe it did.
Months after her death—after starting therapy, attempting to recenter my life, hosting not one but three funeral services for her at the age of 22–I felt heavy. The insurmountable weight of her things loomed over me. Could I, and in turn she, be free of the memory-holding stuff that dragged her to a point of no return?
Brendan, my therapist, had told me that mourning comes in stages—6 weeks to get out of the fever dream, 6 months to regain the day to day, and 6 years to let grief find a comfortable place in your home.
Grief (apparently) would replace the boxes and piles of life that were collecting dust and waiting to be touched again. Taking up an entire floor of my grandmother's basement while quickly losing meaning—their keeper was now unable to define their purpose, their story gone, their place in the puzzle of her brain missing.
I briefly moved home to St. Louis—to find her, to unpack her, to give her up. What I didn’t know is that I’d fall in love with my best friend, find more clues to string together, and end up with a lot of marked up books and a twice-broken heart.
Page 73 of the 1975 Encyclopedia Britannica was open on a stack of boxes. It was, I assumed, the last page that she ever read, the page that was open when her body was taken from the house, the page that I would find and inspect months later, reading and rereading in a small effort to piece her last days together.
The words Bismarck and black-and-blue were printed across the top—bookends to her death, literary crypt keepers.
The first thing I noticed was a small drawing of a bison. Across the pages’ column, an image of the plant called bittersweet. Ironic. A woody vine with bright orange seedcases that split open to show red seeds. I pictured the veins in her hands—the same rounded, iron-deficient ones I have. Then her red blood, once life-giving, now spilled. I had been thinking too much about death. I read on. Adj. both bitter and sweet; also, both sad and happy. Ha.
Bitch was circled audibly with blue ink. Maybe someone called her this and she’d gone to understand its etymology. bitch, noun. Was she a bitch? I imagine she dissected it—wrote it out on paper, rearranged the letters to assign new meaning. Bitch, noun: a female dog, wolf, etc.
Was this her goodbye? Remember me for the bitch I was. She wasn’t really a bitch. Emotional, yes. Unforgiving, sometimes. A bitch? No.
The word black was a few entries down, it had thirteen definitions. Although we speak of black as a color, it is really the absence of color. That was the second listed. Death, it really is the absence of life. I imagined how death is defined. Despite her provable absence—a death certificate, a carved tombstone—she didn’t feel dead at all.
Black out was the last readable entry on the page, to become unconscious. Fitting. Black and blue was cut off. I thought of bodies, of bruising, of falling and not being able to get back up. How she died exactly, I refused to find out even after all these years.
A bruised body, the bittersweet symphony of grief, death as void, a blackness—inescapable. My mind bounced throughout the page—making up meaning. I grasped at the dried ink of a blue bic ballpoint pen sold in packs of 12 at Target. Did any of this mean anything? Did it mean nothing? Did it matter? All the same, she had memorialized herself in the middle bs.
From the Love and Other Rugs archive:
