Related Recs

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date idea

The sharp scent of rain tumbles clumsily in as you tease window-hinges wider with the pads of your fingers. A siren trails close behind, uninvited, sears your eardrums, dies off down the block. Your neighbors are arguing again. Laundry, loans, lack of commitment… like yesterday, like the day before. You think it would be suffocating to wrap yourself up in someone else’s sheets.  It’s five o’clock. Leaning against the sill and flicking the radio dial with one recently manicured nail, you tune into the local news. Roaring wall of static, then calm conversation between two anchors bubbling up through an old set of Panasonic loudspeakers. You are feeling incomplete today, like yesterday, like the day before. Rigatoni boils in the kitchen. You check the leftmost cabinet and find strawberry jam, unopened. You check the cupboard and look over a tub of tahini, a collection of canned soup, and a stack of pie tins. You check the counter, behind the cutlery. Finally, you check the fridge, ducking down to see only your own brown-eyed reflection in one last — now empty — jar of Prego. Your shoulders dip. You slip on white sneakers, not-so-white-as-they-once-were. Why did you try to paint the front door? It is peeling now, ugly like a fledgling losing young feathers. Flecks of buttery yellow dapple paisley carpeting. The great outdoors wait for you at the bottom of a cramped stairwell with twin light fixtures, both broken. A sky like an old sweater is draped above Brooklyn, ready to wring itself out again at any moment. Once around the block, rubber soles brushing damp cement, you walk briskly. At first you fling yourself against the humidity, then become self-conscious and adopt a slower pace as you near the corner store. Two dollars, sixty cents. Like last week, like the week before.  You and I, we are looking down at our phones and stumble into each other, halfway home. It is no one’s fault. You recognize me from somewhere, you say, and feel like a bad person for lying. You have never seen me before in your life. I ask for your number. That night you eat too quickly, knowing you’ll wish you’d saved some leftovers. I come over once, then again. We go out for dinner at tacky restaurants, where art deco posters from the nineteen-thirties have pinned themselves up in scattered flocks across worn-out drywall and the menu is printed with strange font on laminated placemats. The appetizer sample photos are unnerving; the bruschetta cowers like a scared animal awash in excessive camera flash. I make a joke about it, and you laugh. We order dishes to share. The food is always better than I expected, but not quite as good as you wanted it to be. You don’t mind. We talk for hours. We agree, ballpoint pens are better. I hold you, and the ten p.m. bus pulls you out of my arms and through the dusky streets, past crowds and utility poles. I hold you, and we rhyme our steps. Burgundy is around us in the leaves and in the dirt. You wear a coat I gave you. I hold you, and we swat flies out on your porch. The days are getting shorter. I hold you, and we watch blu-ray CDs you found on sale. Soft light from the flatscreen plays across your face as you fall asleep. I keep the movie on a little longer. I hold you. In December, we bring a blanket to Long Island and listen to the sound of snow falling on the dunes. You call in sick for work too often. I hold you, and you know my callouses well. We share the same sheets; we are wrapped up in each other. I hold you, and kiss your hair. You smell like candied oranges. The afternoons eat away at one another. Dishes pile like uneven layer-cakes in your kitchen sink, crested with suds. You say you feel uninspired. Now we argue about laundry, and the sounds of your unhappy apartment are heard through half-open windows.  You shout, eyebrows furrowed like the pages of a book. A white plate soars from the grip of a trembling hand, misses an upturned chin, and interrupts us with its shattering. This time, it’s different. Sleep escapes us ‘til the sun is already planted on the easternmost rooftop. I hurt you the way I learned to, and stay awhile, but don’t know why I stay. We sink into sweet, heavy things: the saxophone in “Charcoal Baby”, shared creamsicles on hot Saturday evenings. I see you less and less, and remember less and less of you. Will I see you next week? Yes, if you text me. You forget, just like we’d both hoped.

@ad

Sep 17, 2024

🩻

nervous, like a dog

nervous like a dog i lower my head as i come to greet you. i can only actualize through your likeness, through your touch. love me, mother earth, with the gentle hand you give offer your children. love me, please, somebody love me.  nervous, kind of like a dog, i kiss your face. i’ve never been nervous around anyone before, i just was always kind of just nervous around myself. but you but you that’s what i always say: but you, my favorite exception but you make me nervous. i don’t think it’s in a bad way, but rather in a natural way, like a human has ought to be nervous like a dog, cautious and slow, hesitant, but still excited to love, in order to survive. wound up but relaxed. scared but safe. anxious to give. i think that this is the right way to be. to be nervous, to be strung tight, but also to feel electric, to feel in the nerves. kiss my shoulder and i jolt, my back and i squirm, my, well my anything really, and i will lose focus. my electrochemistry, my feel of my own body, my understanding of who i am on a chemical level, is conducted by the girl i am in love with. bring me to life. please, oh please, let me live. breathe into me the words of old lovers and the grins of new faces. let me become divine through your touch. let me become.  to become a lover is to become something outside of yourself. i love vinyl and the soil, and so i will take this love inside of me from the outside world. i love stand up comedy, and so often i will tell a joke like people are watching. to love, and to internalize that love, is to be otherly: to become a mosaic. my body is almagate of record players and alligators and shitty punky bands and ottessa moshfegh novels and that is who i am.  to love is to be.  and i am scared i will never become you. not that i want to be you, but that i want to be like it is nothing but natural to want to become like what you desire, to find her in yourself and suddenly become relieved to be the girl you are, and yet, nervous, like a dog, i greet your towering presence, scared i am not like enough, but beaming with the joy of being loved by the only individual. 

@starbelly

Feb 13, 2025

7

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I ate my heart today

My four chambered friend writ across stolen paper your red walls pulsing in my hands with a song so loud, so salty sweet, my lover to devour in the afternoon up three thousand steps, poetry on company time, secrets held close to the chest like playing cards, nine of hearts in my arsenal like a cat falling from the roof eight times into oblivion I save my ace. I’m a hunk holding a hunk, I’m Casanova and I really want to know you, I’m a heart throb on a mission. My star across the sky and on a waiting list a meteor patiently in line at the self checkout, with a fistful of ibuprofen and a need to speed right into my bed. Answer my emails from between silk sheets with a rose between my teeth. Leak your devotion all over my best shirt on Mondays my love, come apart in my hands, melt into a silky hot drink for me to guzzle. Beat like a drum for me only, my ever-marching accomplice, you complete me. Let me crawl into you and take solace there I’ll eat you from the inside out, melt your walls down with my hands and leave no residue.

@caskeyc

May 13, 2024

Top Recs from @cupofboiledwater

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against nihilism

It’s easy to condemn the world of QR code menus, HR talk, and big-box stores as bleak. It’s a reflex to be revolted by the sterile dust that now seemingly coats every corner of the Western World. Blue pill or Red Pill, I guess. When the only alternative seems to be outright populism. There seems to be a lethargic and sneering shadow that nips the heels of every passer-by. Isn’t easy to be ironic. Isn’t it easy to hold an air of apathetic sardonicism. Isn’t it easy to curse the cage we are locked in, only to tighten the bars in fear of what lies beyond. If Emily Dickson claims that “hope” is the thing with feathers, I wonder what she will make of the bird who clipped its own wings. Be brave, I think. Take courage to revolt against the programmed norm to hate and to despise. See beauty in the perfect cubes of Chocolate Milk cartons, find humour in the abrupt slopes of beer bellies. You haven’t even lost your skin elasticity yet, maybe you should just go fly a kite.

@cupofboiledwater

Apr 17, 2024

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cigarettes and steaks

one should treat smoking with the same temperment as eating meat, grotesquely decadent if done daily. sumptuous and graceful if they are intaken sporatically with intent. this of course excludes railway workers, who should huff and puff to their hearts content.

@cupofboiledwater

Apr 10, 2024

🎲

Money talks

Some of the best conversations I’ve had are at the smokers area of the casino. Tales of glory and shame exchanged in the burning of one cigarette. It’s the 21st century’s town square. A third space- kids these days may call it. You should try it too sometime.

@cupofboiledwater

Apr 10, 2024