BY LAURA JANE FAULDS/ ILLUSTRATIONS BY JEN MAY
I like waking up the morning after I got really drunk and watching the hazy pictures of what happened in my head like when we were kids and there were still photographs, they were glossy and the paper had a bit of a snap to it, you’d shuffle through the pack of them really fast one by one and even as a kid when your fingers were crayons it was like slight of hand the way they moved. You did it elegant, like when you have to count money for your job and you start off pretty awkward but two months later your fingers know how to move around the weight of that paper. Fingers are good at paper. I want to be that lazy kind of elegant about everything.
I like aging. I used to wake up the morning after getting really drunk and I’d watch the hazy pictures shuffling and I hated them, I’d done a bunch of stupid shit and I regretted it. The truth was heavy, it was trash, I didn’t want it. It was a dumb person’s body pressing down the back of my ribs and I hated everyone and I hated myself for hating them. Life was something I looked forward to, not the thing I did.
I’m older now. When I wake up and remember what I said and did the pictures make me laugh. They were the cool kind of stupid. I had a great time and I liked my friends and I still do. I said everything I wanted to say and I did everything I wanted to do. I represented myself perfectly.
There’s no song about what it feels like. I’m not depressed. I eat whatever I want and I grew my hair out. I can run really fast, I run every day, I don’t want to run away but I’m leaving. I haven’t lied in a million months. The only thing that bums me out is other people lying. At the gym there’s three TVs playing three different 24-hour news stations and the news is always people dying. Death is the news’ favorite news and I get why- because it’s spooky, but it’s also so boring! The news is all, “Who died in the most interesting way today?” or “Who is the most interesting person that died today?” when it could just as easily be “Who lived in the most interesting way today?” or “Who is an interesting person?” but I think maybe the dirty logic behind it is that the news is there to remind people no matter how crappy their day was at very least they’re not DJ AM or Oscar Pistorius’ girlfriend. People feel so fucking sorry for themselves for not being a statue at the Louvre carved out of sapphires draped in chiffonade and jellied lilac leaves while their favorite band drinks champagne cut with lemonade and plays their favorite song at their ideal volume as their statue self gets fucked by the 1950s movie star of their choice and they are twenty pounds skinnier than they actually are and also billionaires, and then they watch the news so they can feel guilty about it and feel sorry for themselves for feeling sorry for themselves! Which is such an interesting and useful way to live your life.