Public Service Announcement: One of my essays titled “God Bless you, Glimmer Mirage” was recently published by Crybaby Press in their new magazine "The Dry River”. It’s very fun and I talk about how L.A and Vancouver are similar in ethos. Maybe it’s a bit gauche to say, but I’ve been reading a lot of Eve Babitz, and I think she’d agree with the sentiments of the magazine on a whole. I think I say “this town” a few too many times though, which would annoy her. Check it out here, and of course, as usual, thank you so much for your eyes and ears— especially the people who already know I’m talking about them. xo
If it was possible to write a love letter to writing love letters, I would. I’d take my prettiest red pen and a piece of handmade paper, and with it exclaim in various ways the virtuosity of its eyes, it’s lips, how it says the word “pillow” and “home”. I’d wrap it in lace and spray a little of my perfume on it and send to the house of love itself, so that it knew how important it was to me. I write texts as if they’re to be read by candlelight (HINT: they are!!!), I write poems for people who I love and who I hate, which is all to say that I think that the act of transcribing is equal to the act of loving, because they are both about paying attention.
There’s a lot of jokes to be made about me being the person equivalent of an open wound, but it takes a lot to meaningfully sit with my own emotions. Most of the time it requires me going to the sit by the ocean, dramatically. I spend 30 minutes getting the perfect outfit on every day, and even still sometimes I can’t tell if it’s really me. I’ve had a lot of people struggle to give a strict definition on me, and I struggle even more to stay the same when I’m in a room talking to 20 different people. It’s likely symptomatic of other things, but I can’t really push myself into focus in a lot of ways. I determine most of my taste through the people around me I deeply admire, Pinterest, and as much as I hate to admit it, whatever crush du jour I have that week. I really can’t figure out what I look like aside from the basics, or even what I’d like to. It changes a lot, and though there is something freeing in the idea that you do not need a solid state, that you’re allowed to ebb and flow and build yourself back again until you’re stuck thinking about the ship of Theseus; I’ve also spent a lot of nights crying because more than anything I’d just really like someone to tell me something perfect about myself, and specifically why and how they love me because of it. There are nights where I feel like I am so full of love that I could glow in the dark. There are other nights where no one is answering my texts and I am a moment away from being absorbed by my mattress, as if I was never there.
Speaking to one of my dear friends on the subject of our writing styles, I said that I admired their work because it was able to firmly plant the reader in the bar, in the stand up show they were writing about. She was able to describe exactly the way that she felt about it all- how picking her fingernails felt and the specific kind of sound that the rubber soles of her boots made sticking to the pint-soaked floor. It was a love letter in the most singular of definitions to both stand-up, and the subject she was writing about. I wish that I was more sensorial in my writing, and less heady, but then again I think that’s just how I walk around. I’m starting to realize that I’m the type of person to be mad about something for months, and only realize I’m mad after reading the passage in my journal where I state that I’ve inexplicably started listening to punk music at 90% volume and going on very long walks. Articulating things through writing is, and always has been, the only way for me to recognize that the world is spinning and I truly exist, and that both of those things are happening concurrently because of each other. I write and make movies to prove that I am real. I read and watch movies to prove that other people are real. This is exactly why I care so much about loving the same music as someone else. Books, and poetry and movies, too. You could read and relate to this essay, or you could listen to the entirety of Bury Me At Makeout Creek and hopefully get the same three things out of it. I’ve written actual love letters that quote movies, which are love letters in and of themselves. Sometimes my art is a love letter to grief. Sometimes it is a love letter to the way that someone makes me feel, or the specific angled slant of a lover’s nose, and the way it creases when they close their eyes to smile. I think that your soulmate has to like popcorn the same way as you. I am very scientific, but there’s gotta be a way to explain soulmates.
{ Journal excerpt 1. Love Letter, from some time before :
“I feel slow with you in an easy Sunday morning way. Where the two of us get coffee and I chastise you for your smoking habit, even though I think it’s sexy. Where we sit at the half stage half slam poetry venue and do the Sunday Times together, and we sit and talk and I laugh with you and we both feel like birds without the hollow bones. Do hippies hate fluoride? Neither of us know, but you buy the all-natural toothpaste in case it hurts the fish. I don’t write love poems about you, because I don’t have to.”
Exerpt 2. Some sort of old draft of writing, a few weeks ago:
“She is very kind, and very talented, and one of the most genuinely interesting and giving people I know which took me a very long time to come to terms with considering that she’s also incredibly beautiful. Maybe I’m just calloused, but I didn’t expect my most-likely-to-model friend to also be my hand to hold at a gynaecology appointment friend. Admittedly, to my own fault, it took a long time for us to be real friends because of that.” }
One of the things I can definitely define myself by is this: I can describe other people with a kind of vivid ferocity that sometimes makes me wonder if I have crushes on every single one of my friends. I made a new friend a little while back, and I’m not sure how to tell them that I adore the way that they laugh (delighted, with an incredibly endearing snort every once in a while) without making it sound like a play. It isn’t! I just think it’s cute. I work at a cafe and I get worried sometimes that my coworkers think I’m being insincere when I compliment people, because I do it quite often. The lady with the perfect shade of lipstick, the person with a name that suits them perfectly. If someone says something kind about someone else I know, I try to relay that to the person. We live such a lonely existence so much of the time, I hope that in some small way saying something will make it feel like it’s impacting someone else’s. We give so much love in secret, that often it feels as if we don’t love at all. There is some kind of existential magic to speaking things out loud, or transcribing them.
Last year I took a class that in part studied Iranian and Hebrew magic systems, and the one thing I learned was that if you say abracadabra enough times and do a lot of watering, it’ll sometimes make crops grow. I know I am firmly 22 because I feel old for my age, which I think only happens to people when they don’t realize how little they actually know— but I do think that my life’s purpose (maybe the only real purpose there is to anything) is to try with all my might to make people feel seen. I am a hopeless optimist when it comes to other people, a fact that baffles most people considering my broody exterior. I hope that says more about me than I am able to say myself. I boast a lot about how cool my friends are. I know talented painters, and writers, and filmmakers and journalists and baristas and travellers. I know people who live like art, and remind me time and time again that there are parts of the world that are not trying to eat you alive. Sometimes I want to be eaten alive and they’ll tell me I don’t need to be, and sometimes the eating alive is just a mouth that has sharpened teeth because no one has ever tried to feed it hot chocolate when it got sad. Sometimes I am the sharpened teeth, and I need someone to feed me hot chocolate when I get sad. And people do. I don’t think that anyone ever has to deserve love, because love is not a thing to be deserved. Time, maybe. Energy, for sure. But never love.
I do hope that one day I will be able to write about me the way I write about others, but then again maybe the magic in it all is the fact that no one will ever be able to describe themselves the way that that other people can. I don’t like having to “succumb” to “being known” because it means I have to give up some semblance of control on the matter; but perhaps there is some comfort to be had in the idea that it is not completely up to us to define ourself: only to find hands that will hold us kindly like slowly running water, so that we don’t have to do any of that for ourselves. As much as I’d love to control that, whenever there is a moment of wild recognition, it feels so much more beautiful. The times that I have felt genuinely loved, the time I spend genuinely loving, are the times where I care very little about what kind of adjectives are used to describe me outside of kind, and honest, and hopefully sometimes a little witty (though I would never complain about being called erudite, sexy and wildly talented, either). One of my newer friends called me a “very special girl” on my birthday and there was something about that wording that will roll around in my head until the day I die. I wonder if in the same way that describing is loving, being loved does the defining for you. I feel a bit like an imposter sometimes because I get to spend time with people I think are incredibly, insurmountably cool. I’ve decided that I can extrapolate beyond my own affinity for poetics and general predisposition for neurosis, that they must think I’m cool too.
Thank you for all the love. I promise to do the same.
big hugs and kisses,
Kenna
PS: the banner I used for this piece is a painting by Lily Oceana, which is hanging in my bedroom. She is one of my good friends, and I could write an entire excerpt about how insanely talented and kind and lovely she is. I picked it because there’s something about the piece that reminded me exactly about how I feel in love. I wrote in my journal once that if love is a dog from hell, the right person is the baby blanket it’s born on; the kindness that will always lull it to sleep. I think it somehow perfectly visualizes that in my opinion, which is why I love it so much. It almost made me cry in her studio, and I do not feel worthy of having it on my wall in my room, which is mostly full of dirty laundry. Please go look at her other works, and buy them if you can. Her instagram is @lily.oceana !!