I'll Never Be With You
Exes, incel e-girls, and a life online
There are many, many downsides to art school, even more to music school. As an arts high school veteran and music school patron, I have experienced all the worst people they have to offer me; the rich-girl-cosplaying-as-poor, the crazy-girl-that-wanted-to-fuck-you-and-your-boyfriend, the suddenly-distant-former-best-friend - to name a few.
However, it has also introduced me to some of the softest, sweetest hearts around, those that simply ooze with goodness. I still consider one of my high school friends one of my best ones: My friend Gillian, an art major turned philosopher, who is effortlessly charming and a master at tough love, who has held me at my lowest and also told me to get serious. I have met some of the kindest, brightest hearts just this year alone, but it is no surprise to long-time followers of this publication that my best friend in the hellscape of music majors is my friend Ethe, who is also one of the most magical performers I have ever seen. A composer that makes me love music without lyrics with unnerving focus and delicate strokes, Ethe is just as good a musician as a friend, and they are one of the best friends I have ever had.
My power has always been words. Songwriting, memoir writing, poetry, birthday texts; I have never struggled to speak my mind. I don’t know if I would be making music if I weren’t as good a singer as I am - my passion for music doesn’t hurt, but I’ve always felt my strength wasn't in composition. However, Ethe manages to create full worlds, full conversations without a single word. I am forever in awe.
Ethe is also my ex-boyfriend’s roommate, whom I knew I would run into at their benefit show.
Your hair is the shortest I’ve ever seen it, still growing out from the buzz. I hate your cutoff jorts, and I hate your polka-dot socks even more. I can tell you’ve stopped eating, and I wonder if you search my frame for the same thing. You greet my friend until you learn she is indeed here with me, which I can see scares you. It pains you to even say hi to me, but I can feel your eyes burn into me from across the room, as if someone threw cigarettes at my soft skin. I feel you settle in right behind me. Though we’re both in a church, I don’t believe God was looking out for me this time.
Malavika, who is sweetness through and through, like a marshmallow with a chocolate center, read my mind before I even could; It was time to get out. I leave as soon as they finish and order the yummiest-sounding cocktail at the Thai Restaurant three blocks down. “You know this is all him. Like, all his problems are internal. It’s not you,” she sighs as I clutch onto my elbow. “He’s just a little bitch,” I scoff. The waitress tells me I look young when I hand her my fake ID that has frayed edges, which I bought from a Chinese website when I was eighteen, that no longer scans. I’m six months away from being 21, and I pray it makes it to then.
After I break from drinks with Malavika, I lift a cigarette to my lips shakily, the constraints of my vintage Lilly Pulitzer pencil skirt keeping my pace slower. After one month cigarette-free, I caved to the fear of seeing my ex. I am only so strong. I feel like you’ve found a new way to take your guilt out on me, to make me feel the chains that shackle you down, the anger you like to hold towards me. When I update my mom, she responds with “It’s heartbreaking,” and that is the only word to describe what rose in my chest, the sadness poured out like the cocktail I downed. What a waste of unconditional love.
I let myself curl up into bed with my Greg Heffley shirt resting just above the lace hem of my underwear. I never listen to Gracie Abrams anymore, not since I was a sophomore in high school, but I let myself indulge as I scream into my pillow. A slight buzz and tears blur my vision.
It's a pain that I caught you at a bad time/It's a shame that I memorized your outline
Since we broke up, I’ve had sex with one person. I cried the second night he came over. I dissociated the whole time, eyes fixed on my bookshelf. Before he left for three months, I told him to expect nothing from me. I am ashamed that I don’t miss him and the kindness he showed me, but I just truthfully wanted to get hurt again. I wanted you to hurt me again.
I don’t want to regret loving, much less loving you, but to feel used and discarded makes me resent you. I love you, because how could I not, but I don’t think I’ll ever be in love with you again.
The next morning, I lie near the pond on sheets from my freshman year twin bed, my first proper tan of the summer. I kick my feet up as I click-clack on my laptop. Not even the ducks are coming around this morning; besides the two older men chatting on the rock across the way from me, I am alone to crisp my skin. I have Olivia Rodrigo’s new album on repeat because I am finally learning that the coolest thing you can do is admit to liking popular things. I want to be her friend and live in her brain, and I’m not scared to say it, goddammit!
The last time I was at the Museum of Fine Arts was in February, when I wrote one of my favorite pieces here, and then, I was the observer. I wanted to watch the world then, but this time, I wanted to feel the weight of each piece physically. I’m taking a class on Contemporary Art & Gender, and I have a paper due on Friday, so I was a woman on a mission. My bathing suit strings pool out of the sides of my skirt, and I feel each step from head to toe. I have Ethe’s compositions in my ear as I watch the sun hit every corner. I spent a lot of high school adjacent to visual artists, and maybe adulthood made me appreciate an art form I am quite bad at. I let not only faceless artists speak to me through shapes and colors, but Ethe as well, from a time before we met.
My campus has been overtaken by high schoolers hoping their dreams will come true in a one-week summer program at their dream school, which, after two and a half years of attendance, I can guarantee is not true. I am brooding and moody on the corner of campus, and a Mormon missionary asks if I want to learn about the Church of Jesus Christ, and for once, I am kind and polite, and say, “No, thank you,” because I have a soft spot for Mormons after watching a gay Mormon romcom with my younger sister and I once had a big crush on an ex-mormon. “That’s okay,” he sighs. “You have cool glasses!”
I’ve been working out a lot again. Part of it is because I forgot that my CorePower membership unfroze and accidentally paid for this month, bur also but it just simply feels so fucking good to move my body. It used to be about losing as much weight as possible, but now I simply want to move and contort into spine-relieving shapes. I’m policing my eating less, even when my brain tells me to stop, and to my surprise, the world didn’t end. I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t feel great to feel small, to associate thinness with desirability, but what feels much better is to feel strong.
The Scots have overrun my neighborhood to celebrate with artisan beers and kilts, and they are certainly a lot happier than I am as I walk myself around the block to avoid any more pouring of my heart. My hair is flat and big, my cheeks sticky. A Joe’s Pizza opened up across the street from my place, a little taste of home I’ve yet to indulge in. When I pass by in my I HEART NY mini shorts I bought for a tourist-themed dress-up day my Senior year of high school, and an old Brandy Melville tank top, I pray no one looks at me hard enough. A drunk guy next to me starts singing Don McLean’s American Pie, which always makes me think of the summer before college when Emelia worked at Brandy Melville, and it was always playing. Instead of being surrounded by teenage girls looking to buy another tank top, I am haunted by his wiry voice. Bye-bye, Miss American Pie. I decide to end the night with Sex and the City and dairy-free mint-chip ice cream. I cry until my eyes are itchy and blurry on the phone with Ethe and decide I am on a strict feel-good-music-only diet from now on.
A strange word suddenly leaves my mouth this week, foreign on my tongue. “Oh, I can’t that night! I have a date,” is not something I have said since October, since before my move to the land of Girlfriend-dom and my exiling, since before I fell into love so hard I crashed into the floor and broke a tooth, since I have grown to love and hate you more and more every day.
Except that the date gets canceled. Whether intentionally a fade or not doesn’t actually seem to concern me. I am surprised by how little it seems to affect me personally, as it would’ve years ago. I was once desperate for connection, to be understood, but instead, I know it is a possibility. I’ve been understood and loved as a whole being by a man, sure, but even more by my friends. By girls I think are beautiful and cool. By adults whom I respect and admire. By people who knew me as part of two and love me as one. Instead of potentially wasting a free Tuesday evening on someone I don’t know, I got pizza and watched a movie with Ethe, laughing until my sides hurt. Who needs a partner when you have friends like that?
After a brief week and a half of being eagerly on the market, I now remember why the best part about being in a relationship is that you get to stop dating. Maybe I’m just not a Hinge-r. Or maybe I should just never date again.
I fall in love with the man in the pasta aisle in Target. I fall in love with the man buying tickets to Furious, The while I wait for Chloe at the AMC near the Commons. I fall in love with the girl in the green paperboy hat on the T. I fall in love with the father taking his son out to breakfast while I wait for my coffee, who eyes me up and down. I am timid when we make eye contact. I turn around quickly and can’t bear to look back.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the internet, more specifically, the parasociality I seem to cultivate. I attract a lot of attention, most of it foreign, most of it because of my looks. I began to play into it, because if I can’t control it, I might as well have a little fun. It’s not degrading if I like being objectified, right? At some point, the fun wears off, and I’m left with the same emptiness I started with; a feeling that I am never going to live a life unremoved from my body.
It is not, and has never been, a compliment when a man tells me I am going to make it as a musician because I “have the look”. In my book, that has always resulted in a ghost.
There is a song by the band Mitsubishi Suicide, who I saw as an opener at Bowery Ballroom when I was sixteen, called Song for Ciara H, which opens up hauntingly with a woman saying, “ You will never meet me. You will never hug me. You'll never hold my hand. And I'll never be with you”. It has been on my mind all week, because I have been wishing I could say something of the sort, wishing I could free myself from everyone’s desires I will never fulfill. I found out this voice, and Ciara H, was Ciara Heron, an underage 4chan darling who would spam post often and date multiple incels, who allegedly overdosed on heroin. The incels that outlive her have had her immortalized as an “attention-seeking whore”. She is lost to time, trapped in the cyberrealm she tried to seek comfort in.
I would have never stumbled upon her otherwise. I’m clearly not involuntarily celibate, nor have I ever been. I don’t get off on goading incels to be sad they can’t have me, nor do I enjoy interacting with men who hate women because they are unfuckable. I have no interest in 4chan. But, I can’t help my fascination with Ciara, with her tragic death, and even more tragic rise. I can’t help but feel for her. A girl who was so desperate for love, to be seen. Isn’t that what we all want?
The internet grows these grifters and reactionaries like a farmer grows crops; carefully, precisely, and with growth hormones. The Dasha Nekrasovas of the world, or the Claviculars, or the Ciaras, even, exploit their deep-seated insecurities for more clicks, more likes, more money. You, too, can be like me. You, too, can stop eating and take methamphetamines to be skinny. You, too, can profit off of right-wing grifting and edgelord content. The rest of us will carry the hopelessness we feel like baggage.
Am I any better? Typing every feeling, every moment, every tragedy, for the pity. The validation. The complex you gain when people call you “talented”.
I saw you through the screen.
In my contemporary art & gender class, we watch Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance piece Cut Piece, in which she sat motionless as she invited audience members to cut pieces of her clothing off. In the beginning, women came up cutting tiny pieces of her sweater. As the video progresses, a man comes up to cut her bra off. “I don’t want to cut her,” he says as you watch her stillness begin to falter. The video ends with her holding up her chest.
It is horrifying to watch a woman’s armor stripped away in front of your eyes. Instead, we watch it online.
I love to play with juxtaposition in my art. I had to give a sort of artist pitch, to which I started by saying, “I am soft. I am really sensitive, and I’m a big, big feeler with big, big things to share. So, I play with that. I like to be raw and vulnerable and still sweet.” One of my classmates raised his hand after I finished, standing timidly in the front of the room in my thrifted Acne Studios jeans and a tank top that hugged my sides, subconsciously shifting up and down my torso. “I found it really interesting when you said you were soft, because you’re so confident. I’m really glad you talked about this juxtaposition.”
I’ve been “the feminist”, the fiery kind that opposes everyone, but I don’t necessarily think that is my place to stand anymore. I am not the kind of girl who should be at the front of the fight, because I am luckier than most. But, at the risk of being that girl again, I shared why this juxtaposition fascinates me. “When I started making music, I was really angry. But women aren’t usually angry and pretty. I really fell in love with so many women who were these things, who were angry and sexy and pretty and raw. Women aren’t always allowed these multitudes, but I have them. We all do.”
Today, my hair is frizzy and wild. I wear my purple Hunter rainboots, except I never run into any rain, and lazzily sling a Hysteric Glamour sweater I bought when I was in high school on top of my shirt. I spent one hour before noon at the T-Mobile store because I erased my phone and disconnected my SIM card. I will wake up tomorrow morning in my childhood bed.
The girl I sit next to on the cramped bus back to the city circles between reels, YouTube shorts, TikToks, and episodes of High Potential.
Like any native New Yorker, I despise Time Square, but watching the billboards full of celebratory films of the Knicks, the streets full of royal blue and orange, still, a week later, I can’t help but choke up a bit. A weight is always lifted off of me when I remember that I am home. Just like my mom will when I open the door to our apartment, New York is opening its arms out to me tonight as my head rests against the window pane, vibrating as we hit each bump.
I’m tired, but of what? Of having something to prove? Of eyes on me? Of my eyes on others? Of my body? Of my mind? Of the internet?
You will never meet me. You will never hug me. You will never hold my hand.
Things that inspired me this week:
…has sails that are made of silk by Ethan Huang … I still can’t believe I know someone who can create such magical things
Matcha with coconut water! No places near me make this so I use matcha from my favorite cafe, As You Like in Williamsburg, BK, and Vita Coco water
Making your classic breakfast foods in the morning, I had French toast & pancakes this week, and it made me truly happy
Watching silly movies with your bestest friends. I rewatched 21 Jump Street with Ethe & saw Stop! That! Train! in theaters with Chloe, and we were dying
Pigtails! My hair is curly so I typically avoid them but I was inspired by my girl Ms. Carrie Bradshaw. Also bobby pin buns… see below
home2hide by Pretty Sick!!!!
Hiiii! Today is a special Talking Secret Friday because it is my mom’s birthday! If you are a longtime reader you know how special she is to me and how strong she is & I’m so lucky to be home to celebrate her!
Happy birthday Mamma <3 In addition, my interview with JustSomeMustard is also out today! I had so much fun answering these questions & I am honored to have joined Substack’s favorite condiment to talk about my work!
Alright … enough from me! I will see you all next week for another Talking Secret piece! As always, all my love
xoxoxo Maia
Fantastic writing as always<3 you shine. And happy birthday to your momma x
I agree!
" I have Olivia Rodrigo’s new album on repeat because I am finally learning that the coolest thing you can do is admit to liking popular things. "