Hometown Hero

My first gig, how I'm a "Carrie", and heat waves

When I stepped off the L train, guitar, tote bag, and stuffed duffle in hand, I felt an overwhelming urge to cry. Though I had been home two months ago, I feel it has been a lifetime.

If I love, then love will come. If I live, I love.

Summer is alive and well after a long nap. My shirts cling to my skin, and anything but shorts seems like a form of torture. My mom cuts watermelon in the kitchen while my sister and I watch baseball, and we buy steamed buns at the Chinese bakery and dirt for her gardening. I buy my little brother ice cream from a truck after school. My life flashes before my eyes when a shelf falls on Aeriel, Ella, and me at a Japanese market by the East River. Blood stains Aeriel’s white socks and dents her silver flats, and our soon-to-be half-off sushi is now free. I count how many influencers I see to relay to a friend trapped in North Carolina.

I walk through the West Village, and the streets smell like pollen and half-smoked blunts. Every single corner boasts a crowd of art school graduates in a cap and gown that only took four years and 400,000 to obtain, a stinging reminder that next year, it’ll be me, except I’ll be twenty-one and done a year early, and finally the woman I’ve waited my whole life to become.

Besides the one year left of obtaining a music degree, I’m quite close to what I’d always hoped twenty-year-old me would be. The kind of men I ogled at as a shy sixteen-year-old ogle back. I’m barely five foot two and don’t weigh enough to donate blood, which shamefully pleases me. I have adult interests like memoirs by dead people and movies in black and white, and have been around the block enough to have been drunk and sober and California sober and somewhere in between and back. I’ve learned I don’t like myself when I drink, yet I seem to do so every so often, and that maybe I’ll go back to sobriety again, even though I am not an alcoholic and also twenty. I pinky promised I would quit smoking. I can ignore my confusion with my feelings enough to be normal during the day and fun and charming.

You told me once, when you were cold and cruel, that I used you to fill a void, but I don’t think you were right. The void I’m trying to fill now is one shaped like you.

The second anniversary of my father’s death was two days after I played house with someone else, and I don’t forgive you for letting that frustration stop you from reaching out to me. I never asked if you read my work, and I’d rather not know, but I hope that if you are reading this, you now know I am upset. I think I’ve been fighting with you every night since we ended. I am not above anger. In fact, it feels familiar.

I’m wearing a Yankees cap and a silk slip I left here last fall and your shirt that I refuse to give back, and glance up from my novel every so often to watch the children running and shrieking, chubby legs and soccer jerseys. I told the 4-year-old my sister babysits that I’m getting a music degree, and she told me, “In my school, I learn.” I hop on the swing next to her until it makes me wildly motion sick, and I remember I am no longer as young as I once was.

I see my psychiatrist on the hottest day of the week, and my skirt sticks to my legs. “I’ve, like, had people that have been jealous of me, and I’ve lost friends because of it, but I’ve always been really frustrated with it. Like why? My dad is dead, my boyfriend dumped me four days before my birthday, and I’m so sad all the time. I don’t get it,” I say, rattling off these thoughts with a flourish of my fingers. “I’m super honest, too. If anyone asks me how I’m doing, and I’m doing badly, I’ll just say that. I don’t really put on a show anymore.”

She smiles sadly as I grab my water bottle off the carpeted floor, wiping sweat off my forehead. “It’s not jealousy of what you have, but how resilient you are. You are someone constantly bouncing back. You’re strong, Maia, and most people are frustrated by that.”

I am indeed boundlessly resilient. I somehow have crawled out of every pit with no explanation. I shock myself with my unrelenting trust that things can’t get any worse.

People ask me why I want to spend the summer in Boston, why I want to finish a year early, why I feel the need to keep going, and the only answer I really have now is I don’t know how to stop. I have unexplicable momentum I can’t let go of, like lightening in a bottle.

I have been a performer of some kind since birth; before I was ten, I’d already dabbled in singing, acting, tap dance, and writing screenplays (for short films about the Brady Bunch, of course), but I’ve been a songwriter since I was thirteen and heard Live Through This by Hole. I had never been so physically struck, unable to move, by a record. From then onwards, I drafted many horribly angsty pieces about boys I liked, and my dad’s cancer diagnosis, and it filled the void I had.

When I started college, I knew I had already grown closer to wanting to major in more than vocal performance, and during orientation, I played my new friend a song I’d written about a boy I drank Fireball with while we were dressed in horribly campy outfits on a warm Halloween evening. Though we no longer speak, I will never forget the astonishment that graced her face. “If I could write like you, I’d never shut up.” I haven’t since my first semester.

Historically, I’m not one to get stage fright. When I was the lead in the musical in sixth grade, I pretended to have it for attention, but truthfully, I never felt any fear getting on stage.

However, I was consumed by a pit in my stomach for most of the day before my show. I barely stomached half a bagel and a matcha, and haphazardly grabbed a protein bar I knew I wouldn’t eat on my way out.

I am still overwhelmed with the love my friends and family showed me that evening. My set consisted of six original songs, little sonnets ripped from the stitching of my own skin. The vulnerability that I had to display still frightens me. To have lights blinding my view, a room full of people who love me, and nowhere to hide is something that both thrills and disgusts me. I crave nothing more than this form of torture: a complete barring of my soul to all willing to listen.

I cried hugging my best friend, I cried hugging my mom, but the tears fell most unexpectedly when the man who helped raise me alongside my parents, who now lived in Portugal, who extended his trip to see my show, wrapped me in his arms and began to cry himself. “You did good,” he whispered, “so good.”

When I woke up the next morning, my mom pointed out that it was the closest I’d ever get to my father at a show.

My friends and I walked through the park licking multicolored gelato, laughs following. “Maia is such a Carrie,” she says as I nod. “Thank you!” One of them lets out a snort, “It’s not necessarily a good thing.” I roll my eyes as I grab my long, now frizzy hair behind my shoulder. “My friend Kate once called me a ‘new age Carrie Bradshaw’, so I have to agree. Anyways, I feel like that has to be right.”

We continue to walk down the street we’d always known; the dive bar where we went on a crawl once, the liquor store where the owner gave us pens with lemons on top and told us to “bring back a poem next time”, mere blocks from the elementary school we went to for approximately two years. “I’m, like, at a place where I know I’m not ready to see anyone else. I tried, and it just didn’t feel like I could,” I sighed as they nodded. “That’s okay, Maia,” I scrunch my nose as I shake my head. “And of course, I find the only man who actually wants a girlfriend. I spent all those years seeing men who didn’t, and the one time I don’t want one, I find the only emotionally available man left.”

If I wasn’t sure I was a Carrie yet, that moment pretty much cemented it for me. I am similarly asking myself her famous question: “If you loved someone and you break up... where does the love go?”

Similar to Carrie, I spent a good chunk of my biweekly paycheck on Jeffrey Campbell shoes I don’t technically need (though it feels like it) and alcohol.

I wish I could conjure a better ending but the only thing I have in my head now is the ending to Chopsticks by Liz Phair, in which she says, “Secretly, I’m timid”.

Things that inspired me this week:

• The Cardamom bun from Smør Bakery in Williamsburg, BK

• The Club by Evil Adeline

• Writers & Lovers by Lily King

• Watching the Yankees play every night with my little sister

• Making Shirley Temples with seltzer because we ran out of soda and it was surprisingly perfect

Farmer’s Market blossoms

Short (I think?) but sweet (I hope?) and certainly disjointed but I am feeling all of those things <3 Thank you for reading see you next week

xoxo Maia