Welcome to vvn town! Here you’ll find unhinged essays, random musings, and an occasional advice column. Think of it like an OnlyFans, except it’ll be my goopy little brain that is naked.
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A well-timed wedding means you have an excuse to visit your childhood home in the village of Morton Grove, a twenty minute drive out of Chicago. The secret is this: there is a funny shape lodged in your chest that tells you there is something unplaceable and wrong.
Nothing urgent, but keep your eye on it maybe, the shape says. So you fly home, scream your face off to throwback RnB music while you jump up and down with the bride. When you go to the bathroom, you lift up your dress and check. There is no protrusion between your ribcage. It’s not medical, silly, the shape (now strangely cubic) says. I’m not like the other metaphors.
When you extend your stay at home, you tell everyone you just want a change of pace. You tell yourself you’ll return when you feel better. You nuke your social media accounts and crawl into a den so others can avoid the grisly mess of you.
Home is a comfortably rotting time capsule; the austere order and clean lines from childhood have long faded. The elliptical that no one uses is now in the home office, where your dad spends 90% of his time. The living room has been repurposed into an art studio, where your mom spends 90% of her time. Your parents have aged enough for you to notice, but not enough for you to be forced to confront the fact. The family room is now an alarmingly pumpkin orange, and the eclectic collection of home decor now includes a placard that says, with no further context, “Friendsgiving.” The sister has COVID. Lmao.
Still, things are quieter. Peaceful.
You live across the street from a nature preserve, where you drag your feet on occasion. There is plenty of time to think on a walk, but why would you? Right now, there are only a few things in this world. A tenacious bichon frisé tugging on a leash. Discarded firework containers on the rocky path. A thicket of trees on both sides of a winding creek, a small prairie of wildflowers, the buzzing power lines that stretch across it all.
When the first blurs of a tan line begin to form, you get laid off. The manager who axed your position with two days notice has had three official HR complaints from women of color for workplace discrimination, but no matter. The relief is a thunderous flash of rain. The shape changes shape.
To stay busy between Zoom interviews, you drive into Chicago several times a week. It has good public transit, a well-rounded museum collection, and Pequod’s Pizza. Also: old friendships, those of the top-5-bestie caliber, good and sweet like mead. This unintelligible language you speak with them is safe, and so are you. How could anyone feel tenuous and shapeless when they have friendships this solidly absurd?
In any case, it’s a 93.9 Lite FM kind of summer, a wet hot American best-summer-city-in-the-motherfucking-nation kind of summer. Chicago is the rain-soaked hair at Pitchfork and the sweat between your skin and your bra band. It smells like sun-steamed Midwest vegetation, so in-your-face you choke, and when you swallow it goes down like root beer floats and lime paletas and the salt on your upper lip. Yeah yeah, sounds vaguely erotic but this year’s hot girl summer is literal.
One month passes, then two. In this season, the act of refortification feels just like living. As you doggy paddle through time and space, all the seconds you pass are tiny telegrams from the void. They all say the same thing:
HI VIVIEN, -(STOP)-
YOU WILL SURVIVE MOST THINGS PURELY BASED ON THE FACT THAT THERE IS STILL MORE LIFE TO LIVE. -(STOP)-
When you notice the shape again, you realize you don’t remember a time without it. You pluck it out with your thumb and pointer finger — who knew you could do that? — and take a look.
It has a long jagged edge and glints in the light.
It doesn’t say anything.
Summer time chi 😎