Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

Suffering feels religious if you do it right.

I've had enemies so intense that it felt romantic, so mutual it felt like love.

I might be better as an idea, you said, and it was hard not to agree - everyone is better in theory.

I alternate between deciding I deserve the world and deciding I deserve nothing.

What's the end of longing? More longing. What's the point of longing? To continue.

Think of someone you want to touch whom you cannot touch, someone forbidden. Think of a room where there is nothing except the two of you: still, you cannot touch them. Think of the heat between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence.” from “A Simple Woman

I once loved so hard I almost lost everything, including his life, including my own. Only then did I realize: perhaps love’s physicality is death itself. I think I was taught that love, in its ideal form, is like a newborn baby: full of possibility, still warm from the heated privacy of the womb. But I think, at the end of my life, I won’t see a figure cloaked in black velvet or a swirling void waiting to take me — I will see the face of love. It will be a recognizable light, the one that lived behind all those other faces I knew up close, the light I suspected but could never prove. When I see the face of love, I won’t be afraid. I will see what I’ve been searching for all my life.

I’m trying to write something so good, so pure, so perfect that I’ll never have to have children; I’ll have created something that can stand in for me, that can live on after me..

I’ve always liked men who look as if they’re from another time.

I was so lonely I began regarding my broken heart as the most beautiful thing in my life. Soon after that, it was gone, too.

I told you I was moved to tears by a speech a former president gave. It's not that I love politics or even the president--I just love to be convinced, to be guided into feeling exactly what the speaker wants me to feel. I give myself up to oration, to God, which is you when I let it be,

All characters appearing in this work are you. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely you.

He slept with his back to me, which made me jealous of his dreams. Hey. Hey. Wake up.

The only thing worse than hearing your voice at its most desperate is recognizing it.

I return to memories of the people who taught me something, even accidentally. I love them, not for who they are but for the way in which they altered me. In this way, my love for them becomes a love for my own deterioration.

With my eyes closed, I heard him say, I don't love you anymore...I could hear the words but I couldn't quite access them, couldn't quite accept that it was me living my life at that moment. Surely he was telling this to someone else, surely we would be together forever, the way we'd talked about. This was before I needed passion and wildness and to be on the verge of every emotion at once—I wanted safety and beauty, and he looked like Bob Dylan in the middle of the desert, and I thought that was what the love of my life could be.

I'd been trying to turn my life into art, but I wasn't sure what form it should take. I played guitar with half-callused fingers, I found a discarded headboard on the side of the road and tied a hundred rope knots around it. I rented a studio so I could feel like an artist, and that worked for a while. I taped parts of essays to the wall in order to liberate them from my hard drive--to see them as whole. Rearranging them felt good, throwing them away felt even better. I was getting closer to saving only the most rapturous moments of my life. I disposed of memories until everything served me.

I didn't keep a journal then. I was busy, or I thought I was, but mostly I thought anything important would stay with me.

I was writing everything down as if I knew what I was seeing. I was pretending to be a neutral observer, but I kept trying to override my heartbreak with poignancy.

Isn't it remarkable the way knowing one person can alter a life? If you're really lucky, you'll find someone who reminds you of yourself. Not the version everyone knows, but the part of yourself you thought you kept hidden: now you see it in him.

There is an island where former versions of myself gallop around on all fours. Untouched, the island populates itself; the versions share what they’ve learned. They never run out of things to talk about by the fire that the latest version knows how to start. If Joseph Delmont came to the island intending to trap a tiger, he might find one. The version might go willingly, without a fight. The island feeds off itself. I wait to be discovered.

For our high school graduation party, our school hired a hypnotist. My best friend volunteered herself, went onstage, fell asleep, and then he had her dancing and singing Backstreet Boys songs. When she woke up again, she walked back to her seat and I tried to tell her what she'd done while she was out, but she said she was awake the whole time. It was easier to just do what he wanted me to do, she said, and I knew what she meant.

Bianca had the kind of knowledge other girls could sense in her right away—it was as if she had already lived her adult life and had come back to her thirteen-year-old body to tell us about it.

I have nothing but fondness and affection for you, I said, halfway out the door.

Money can do that if you let it--if you close your eyes and enter its dream, the one where you are well dressed, fit, successful, in love with exactly the right person. The gym I used to belong to cost $30 a month, but sound judgment gets lost so easily in unhappiness: the new price seemed justifiable because I would have paid almost any price to become a new person.

Back then, I believed in change. I believed scaffolding was the same thing as structure. I thought I could build it.

Isn’t it remarkable the way knowing one person can alter a life? If you’re really lucky, you’ll find someone who reminds you of yourself. Not the version everyone knows, but the part of yourself you thought you kept hidden: now you see it in him.

One of us had a beautiful voice, the other had a bonfire memory, and we rearranged ourselves until we forgot who was who.

simply being near her made me bold. When it rained, she’d stand in the backyard and hold her arms out and face the sky—that’s how alive she was. I loved her dirty Vans and her academic probation and the way everyone cheered like in a sitcom when she once rode her bike straight into the living room of a house party. I can’t bear to think of her now, out in the world, getting older like a human.

The day I decided I was more miserable than ever, my boss said, You know what I like about you, Chelsea? Nothing is ever wrong.