My boyfriend breaks a glass vase we bought the day before at a chic interior design store on Valencia. There is a shard of it lodged deep in his thigh. His legs are tangled with wires from his elaborate synthesizer setup and he is screaming “FUCK FUCK FUCK” over and over again. I look up from the interior design blog I am reading and ask, “Is the vase broken?” and then “Are you okay?” in that order. I immediately feel like an asshole and his leg is gushing blood so I go to Walgreens to buy him Neosporin and Bandaids. I patch him up and go to sweep up the glass, but find that he doesn’t have a broom. The vase cost $32.
This is the world we inhabit now, one straddled between the Ramen-stocked college dorm with permanently dirty floors and the quaint San Francisco apartment decorated with expensive vases. We have vases to break but no brooms to sweep up the mess. I don’t make enough money–and probably never will–to shop at Ethan Allen or Pier One or even the nicer sections of Ikea, but recently I have begun obsessively watching HGTV and posting links on Facebook to fake wall-mounted fireplaces and acting like $2,000 is a reasonable sum to spend on a sectional that will get beer spilled on it immediately after purchase. I have several theories as to why this is, but aside from ‘the biological desire to settle down’ and ‘wanting a familiar space in a foreign city,’ the most accurate is that recently I have felt restless in the way college encourages and ‘real life’ beats out of you.
It is cliche to think things like “College was so easy” and “I really miss getting black out drunk” but I totally think them–a lot! Last week my best friend and my boyfriend and I sat in a bar in SoMa that was playing Bruce Springsteen’s entire “Born to Run” album and talked about how apathetic we have become, how passionless, how much we ache for a shake up. For the first time in our lives we have no clear goal that we are working towards; we are on no preordained path. In high school we studied to get into college, in college we studied to get a good job. How easy! Of course, even then I knew it was easy, would light cigarettes at four in the morning on a balcony overlooking some restless avenue and think, “It doesn’t get easier than this.” I knew it, but I didn’t understand. I never realized how much comfort I took in the linear unfolding of time until my life lost its defined edges.
It is 2011 and I guess we still believe in the American Dream, but only begrudgingly, like Catholics who go to church just for Christmas mass. We believe in upward mobility and the eventuality of owning nicer things than our parents, but we don’t believe any more that working hard will get us there. We have realized that good things do not happen just because you work hard for them. That we ever believed that at all seems absurd and embarrassingly entitled, but it’s a reality that is necessary to stifle in order to successfully jump through all those academic hoops. Back then we believed in the American Dream entirely–our comfortable middle class upbringings gave us that luxury. At home and at school we were taught hard work always pays off. We just didn’t know any better. So now we drink and buy vases and analyze our emotional experiences based on how well they’d translate into personal statements for grad school applications, which we fill out half-heartedly, just to feel productive, just for old time’s sake.
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After corralling the broken glass into a corner of the room, my boyfriend and I take the bus to a thrift store and buy another vase for $1.50. On the way home, we buy a dustpan. We put the flowers in the vase and stare at it from the couch and wonder which one of us will break it first.
When I first moved here, my best friend and I spent five hours assembling an Ikea dresser, and jokingly deemed the subsequent madness we developed from the ordeal “Stockholm Syndrome.” I guess the same phrase can apply to my fleeting obsession with interior design. It is Stockholm Syndrome that made me buy that $50 wall clock, that caused me to ask about the broken vase before my boyfriend’s wound. It is a fever dream spurred by Stockholm Syndrome that has me drifting ghost-like around my neighborhood, staring jealously into perfectly framed bay windows. It is so much easier to control the external, anyway, to focus on what we see around us instead of how it makes us feel. So I hang more pictures and measure the windows for curtains. I force myself to write, even when I’m angry for what seems like no reason and just want to drink Nyquil and sleep for 12 hours. I write, and I buy fresh flowers, and I wait for the fever to pass.
(Images via)