crying in the bathroom at infatuation station
dear mfers,
Last week, the yearners of NYC gathered in Brooklyn for a night of nonfiction and live advice. It was our first reading event, ever, hosted in collaboration with Limousine Readings at Finback Brooklyn.
An audience of over 140 people gathered to hear writers Brock Coylar, Eliza Dumais, River L Ramirez, and Brendon Holder read works related to the theme “infatuation,” as well as answer questions submitted by a handful of y’all (mostly about intimacy, lust, crushes, and generally being lesbians in love).
This is the first of what we hope will become a recurring series of sharing the literary prowess of some of our favorite writers in the mf community. But for those not based locally, we’re publishing an excerpt of multi-hyphenate written, visual, and comedic artist River L. Ramirez’s essay “27 Playlists” here for you. “This is a story of a love affair that began two weeks before the pandemic started,” they said of the piece. “I chose it for the mixed feelings x Limousine Infatuation Literary Salon because it captures a moment in my life where infatuation was a useful tool for survival, while it also reveals the moments where infatuation begins to crumble and you start to see the real person behind your fantasy.”
Enjoy their words, below.
xo, Mi-Anne
It was 2020, I was in Chile, and I had just matched with a woman named Coco, 38. We met up for wine before she took me to a lesbian house party and told me about her girlfriend and lover. I kissed Coco in the middle of the dance floor at the party, I’m sure everyone saw because we did it twice. When I kissed her, I felt nothing. Her lips turned to stale gum against mine. Nothing was sticking. There was no communication between our bodies, an emotionless forcefield kept us from melding. It might have been because our gender expression was too similar or because she looked a lot like my favorite aunt, Dalia. Dalia is the coolest and hottest of my mom’s sisters…but, no. That’s too…como se dice? Close to incest.
With my lips locked on Coco and my eyes wide open, I saw her friend Ella watching us from across the dance floor, sipping a beer. It dawned on me that I’d met her earlier at the party. She bought me a drink and touched my tattoo. Soon after, my lips and Coco’s unlocked. Ella came over and joined us. She said something like, “I probably look so uncool just standing back there.” I looked at her and said, “I don’t think so, if I wasn’t here with your friend I would have gone up to you.” She stood there, surprised.
“Me gustas?” I said, beaming like a puppy. “I like you, do you like me?'' It was so unlike me to have been so bold, but a powerful force controlled my body.
“Are you single? Like, are you seeing anyone?”
“No, I am not. I’m very single, I’m on the apps but… nothing.”
“Well, I felt nothing when I kissed your friend and she has a girlfriend and lover so, I think this should be fine. She has more than enough.”
“How should we do this?”
”I’ll tell her I like you. I’ll tell her the truth!”
I went up to Coco and got real close, talking over the Latin pop coming from the speakers, “Hey, I really like your friend and you have a girlfriend and a lover. Would you mind if I kiss her?” “Sure!,” Coco said, surprised. “I mean, have fun”. I grabbed Ella and we left. On the way out I gave Coco a kiss on the mouth in a friendly way. Who was I?
Never in my life has it been so easy to get what I wanted. It could have been that I was in another country or that I had just left a heterosexual relationship that didn’t fulfill any part of me; body or soul, that I was “late to the gay”, that I was holding in romantic scenarios involving beautiful women since I was a kid that I never got to express. It could have been the Chilean mountains channeling their intense energies through my body, it could have been spiritually karmic, or it could have been because I was so horny and I thought she was hot. Whatever it was, it overpowered me.
I remember the feeling of getting in her car and smashing our faces together, her big, soft curly hair on my cheeks, the softness of our lips touching your face — an unbelievable joy. Finally, getting exactly what I wanted. After an intense two weeks of being soooooooo gay, the pandemic became a reality, and we were separated. With the news of a killer virus, I had to return home immediately. Agony. But, agony that turned out to be more of a blessing in disguise.
When I met her I felt we were on the same frequency, oozing a hidden tenderness that neither of us could express; an innately sweet and hidden passion, a little dream our hearts had always desired of a love bigger than logic, a love that felt like a spiritual soothing amidst all the pain in the world. And it was during the worst times, each isolated in our rooms across the world from each other, that we shared music and I could feel what she felt for me.
The first time I surrendered to the magic of this connection was when I entered her home in the lesbian district of Santiago and heard a Laurie Anderson record playing in her house. “I am fucked,” I remember thinking. Laurie Anderson is my idol. She spoke at my college graduation. She said, “I had no plan, I risked it all, go and do whatever you want!” Something along those lines. I cried in the audience, no money, no job, no prospects, but her faith got to me. Now here, in this stranger’s house, in Chile, on a job that only dreams had led me to believe I was capable of, was another dream. With Laurie Anderson playing in the background, I let my guard down as if soothed by the universe into succumbing to my desires.
She made me 27 playlists during the darkest days of the pandemic. Every day, I would receive a new love letter in the shape of songs, in the shape of a vibe, or something that I would pretend was her way of telling me about the deep feelings she held for me that she couldn’t possibly express. She taught me about Spotify’s ability to blend song after song and instructed me to carefully listen to each playlist with this feature because she had carefully thought of how they would blend.
As a child of abuse the smallest thing can make my heart swell; a text, a song, a word. It hurt me to use the Spotify “blend” feature a year after our breakup. The thought of Ella thinking about what feelings she would want to induce in me, overwhelmed me with sadness at the loss of her attention. We spent a year and a half talking over WhatsApp, my heart swelling with the simplest sight of her curls through my screen, imagining the feeling of her beside me. I had started writing about her in my room instead of looking at my phone, diving into my imagination; running away with her, eloping in Mexico, running into her arms in the middle of an ocean, eating her out in my bed. Things that had never happened — or maybe never would — kept my hope intact, kept my heart beating ridiculously, kept me dreaming, kept the feeling of hope within me alive, enough to survive the darkest days I’ve ever known.
The reality was, I was dating a woman with alcohol abuse disorder in a country that had been victimized by mass trauma; death caravans, dictatorship, illusion, disillusion. A country where women fear for their lives, where lesbians get targeted, killed, and abused. Where being yourself is kept under wraps. Although this powerful feeling of love kept me going, it might have been a miracle how the pandemic kept my illusion intact in order to make it through.
The fantasy erupted when travel restrictions were lifted and I went back to Chile and saw her life: two cats from an ex, the fear in her eyes from hearing a sound on the roof, cases and cases of champagne, her friends, a community of lost, hopeless people that money and privilege had destroyed. After my few attempts of getting her to go to AA, presenting her with a plan we could do together because I believed that love would save the day…SHE dumped ME. Broken beyond repair, I made a quick exit back home to Miami where I would watch astrology videos titled “TRUE LOVE FOR SCORPIO” night after night for an entire year, crying quietly everywhere I went.
Two years later I was sent back to Chile. I heard rumors that she was seeing someone else. I was there to finish “Los Espookys”, a show in which I played a really mean hot girl. I cried in front of wardrobe, I cried in between scenes, I cried to strangers saying “She doesn’t love me anymore.” A day before I was set to come back to the states I WhatsApp’d her, asking to meet. Unbeknownst to her, I had planned on giving her a love letter that I hoped would one day break her heart wide open.
After days of chain smoking in my AirBnB, the day came. I approached the juice spot and she texts “In the back.” I walk in and spot a stupid cartoon orange mascot with a straw in its head and feel my heart senselessly beating as if to leap out of my mouth. I see her big hair. She looks worse. Her face is bloated, she’s harder, stone-like, emotionless, hadn’t bathed in 5 five days and had “no regrets”. She was seeing someone new, she was in love, she was happy, she said, “I’m in love.” I ask if she would like to speak in my airbnb, she says “no”. In broad daylight my face fully trembled, I let out hot tears, I felt them like warm bullets – I was alone, I was unhappy, I was not in love. I pulled out the love letter I wrote, my hands shaking, lips twitching, holding in what felt like a waterfall of sadness. We walked out of the door of the juice shop and she asked me, laughing...
“What did you expect?”
My body felt hot with shame, because she was right. I had a pathetic dream in my heart that I expected her to share. A pathetic dream that I was holding onto for the last year as I writhed in pain in my brother’s round tub in Miami, crying as if someone died while listening to “The Virgin Suicides” soundtrack. She was right. I imagined that maybe my letter could fix her, maybe my vulnerability and my openness and my pathetic wobbly tears would break her open to say "Let's go, I love you, I fucked up, lets go away together to Mexico, let’s elope immediately, let’s start over, let’s live in the woods by a gentle stream like that dream you once shared with me, and I’ll change everything for you because I love you. I love you and love is real, love is magic, it’s everything you ever dreamed of and more and you’re not delusional or crazy about its power to heal. You healed me with your love. Our love is real. Our love is magic!” But no. What did I expect from someone who did not love themselves?
My heart dropped into my stomach looking for a response I wouldn’t regret, for words that would make me seem cool, collected, not like a total wreck. Every embarrassing confession of love that went awry played over and over again in my mind in a matter of seconds. I held it all in and mustered up the courage to say: “Nothing, I’m just being my authentic self.”
We stood in silence as I ordered a car. She waited with me, my unread letter in her pocket. I looked at her and she looked at me, my mouth a straight line and I had to look away. When the car came we hugged. I tried to pull away but she kept hugging and I could feel her sweat. In the car, I saw her big hair getting small in the distance and reality sunk in, the fantasy was over. I’d never see her again. My heart ached. A chapter closed on a love that kept me alive during a time of death and devastation. Knowing now, the beauty of it was all my creation.
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loved the event (and the anime backdrop)! thx for having me 🙏🏿
this piece was so refreshingly vulnerable.