On Twenty-Six (An Excerpt)
By: Brooke Finegold
The song 26 by Paramore is something I’ve been listening to for years in anticipation of what this age might bring for me.
It’s the age my parents got married, the age I thought I’d get married. 25 felt like teetering on either side of the 20s, and I’m enjoying a gentle descent into the falling action of the hellscape of my late 20s.
Photo by: Jamie Finegold
I started the year off on a bad omen. I’d planned for a long distance lover to come visit me for New Years, but the distance became more palpable when we were in the same place. Right before she arrived, she told me she’d been seeing someone else. It wasn’t anything serious and we lived in different countries. What, did I think, we’d seriously date? It wasn’t like I’d fantasized about my life with her in the UK already, imagined what our shared apartment in East London would look like, how our decor styles could mesh, how I’d tell my roommates that I was breaking our lease to pursue the only great thing in life: love. They would have to understand.
At my New Year’s party, I saw her texting her new girl right in front of me. I hated this ethical non-monogamy bullshit, whatever happened to hiding things? We kissed at midnight, mostly because the flight was so expensive. I didn’t care that I was mad at her, at 25 I thought I would rather be kissed half-heartedly than not kissed at all. At 26, I’m choosing to not be kissed at all.
After getting dumped in British, I did some pondering. When I say pondering, I mean crying in the bathtub. I also started working as a nanny. On the third day of my job, I decided to get back in the game. I had a crush on someone I briefly met at a poetry reading, maybe something would happen.
Photography by: Alex Brown
I put on my jeans, a sweater from an ex-lover, no makeup, and biked to a poetry reading she’d invited me to. She was also a pisces, had a weird gay haircut and a very magnetic energy—a confidence and charisma I wanted to be around. The poetry reading was packed and weird yet sort of cool. I read a piece of my own about my British lover, a poem called “american girl doll”, and got some laughs. She read off a massive scroll. Everyone there had inside jokes, I was on the outside, I wanted to be in. Someone took a photo of me. Afterwards, I wanted her attention. I didn’t realize it, but the reading was at her house. I asked for a tour. She showed me her room. Stuff everywhere. I picked things up. I put them down.
I looked around. There were lighters, cigarettes, loose tobacco, canvases, dirty paint brushes, dust bunnies, braids of hers she’d cut off and attached to skulls, glittery stickers of dinosaurs. I asked if I could have one.
“Take the lot,” she said. It looked like my room if I’d been unmedicated. I was fascinated, a little scared. We sat on the hardwood floor. We talked.
You can read the full piece in Issue 1. Available here:
