And then it all stops. You realize he doesn’t love you anymore. He has passed the rebound threshold and he’s really in love with this new girl. Really, actually. In. Love. And you completely understand because you passed it, too, when you fell for him.

No more taking solace in his letters, his silent yearning. You are alone. You left him. He left you. He moved on, and you’re really good at pretending you did as well.

I know I shouldn’t call you, but I have a pressing question. Do you respect me? I don’t mean do you love me still, or would you ever consider being with me or doing anything or saying anything that would compromise your relationship with her. I just mean, do you respect who I am and hold me in high esteem? I understand, you moved on. I feel insane right now.  I think I need some semblance of affirmation.

by Hali Gardella 

I have four walls in my bedroom and one of them is dedicated to the unfortunate results of being a young woman who is too smart for her own good. I look at the photographs and prints hanging on it everyday to remind myself how fortunate I am that I could not afford a graduate school education.

Here is a short list I have made of some girls who are/were too smart for their own good.

1.    Shirley Temple

2.     That 16-year-old girl I met in high school who was graduating from MIT. (She had an extraordinarily bad hairdo.)

3.    My own mother

4.    Drew Barrymore

5.    Sylvia Plath

I would never say that graduate school is a direct path through which someone can become too smart for their own good. Some girls are just born that way: too much intuition, too much calculation, too much forethought, and a complete lack of confidence (because they can’t bare the bullshit of peacocking through life).

There is this certain kind of decisive sadness that I know these girls feel, like sharp metal sliding through the soft flesh of the inner arm; scathing but smooth. An awareness and acceptance of the state of sadness, and a constant questioning of whether it will ever get so bad that you look back and completely break down. The tent pole holding up the façade of normalcy snaps, and you run, because you also completely know the massive lightness of freedom.

My only bit of advice to these tragic young women: take a deep breath. One can breathe through anything. 

by Hali Gardella

Here are a few tips on how to make a memory stick to your brain flesh in synaptic perpetuity:

1. If you want to tell your girlfriend you love her for the first time, do it at the top of the YMCA high dive- at midnight- on the summer solstice- then jump.

2. Make some street art in a place you pass by on the way to work every morning.

3. Loiter in a cemetery after hours, listening to a lo-fi album on your headphones. I suggest trying Sad Sappy Sucker by Modest Mouse.

4. Lie to the service industry. Good for you. Today it your birthday, honeymoon, or anniversary!  

5. Drive down a dirt road at night, windows down. Wear a short skirt, and don’t flinch (noticeably) when he puts his hand on your knee. 

6. I know you think you look dumb because you’re probably over the age of 12, but the raised cement edges around the city’s flower planters can still be used as balance beams. 

7. And always remember: the last 5 pages of any novel should be read in a public place. You will spend the next few hours seeing all those strangers for the poetry they embody. I swear to God it must be comparable to the empathogen effects of MDMA. 

by Hali Gardella

Dear children,

I’ve done what I came here to do. I heeded the advice I was given, and I lapped up every bit of it.

Love,
Huli

Today Patrick bought me an old, used book. It was made of floppy paper covers and not the hard kind that decay more slowly.

The copy of the book seemed old, but the words in it could not be considered old by comparison with other words in the classic stories we read in high school literature. The words in this book were not even as old as I am.

Still, it seemed as though someone had already forgotten it. That was fast. 

by Hali Gardella

REVEL IN YOUR CAPACITY FOR NOSTALGIA! It is a legitimate, serotonin-producing emotion. For a long time, I’ve been curious about what biological role nostalgia serves. Maybe it solidifies those memories that time erases. Makes them permanent, so that as we age, we can associate who we once were with who we have become.

by Hali Gardella

{Each day I feel exhausted from working on other people’s projects and not my own. I turned on the radio today on my way home and Spike Jonze was on a recorded interview talking about how he feels about Being John Malkovich becoming a part of the Criterion Collection. I had just been standing in a loft on the 35th floor of a high rise building in downtown Los Angeles greeting him a good afternoon as I applied fake dirt to a new pair of Cole Haan sneakers. I put in the details. Foutry minutes of work on one pair of sneakers. When I watch the movie next year, I’m going to keep a close eye on those sneakers. I probably won’t be tired.}

I remember the golden hour driving down that highway in northern Oregon sitting next to Paul. Through the car windows, each silhouetted hillside unveiled flares of amber sunset as we ascended it, moving onto the next. Bill Callahan’s voice slid from the speakers into our ears while Paul and I were smooshed in the backseat of a 1978 cream-colored Mercedes sedan; I could feel him feeling those lyrics. That’s where I got my sense of him. He clenched his fist as he lipped the words. He brushed his hair back, and I knew he felt poetry.

We talked down by the water of the river about how reading a line could make your heart flutter. You’d have to put a book down and take in a deep breath just to process it- let the line carry out its purpose.

And you were thankful. Thankful to the author, or maybe just to God and the universe for giving you the ability to feel something so sincere- to translate someone else’s feelings, make them real and felt by another person.

I’m frequently effected by elaborations of loneliness in literature. They resonate with me. I know what it feels like to feel disconnected. Disconnected, even, from my own body, and unaware of the way I am perceived by others. I know inside me there is a power with which I am not yet comfortable. Maybe this is not a self-assigned power, but I know it is there. I have seen others react to it, and I am grateful. 

Oh, these things we all think. All we can ever do is allow ourselves opportunity to look inward as we look out through the windows, watching as the light forces our surroundings to abide by the will of its own color palate. 

The golden hour brings me close.

by Hali Gardella

{{I apologize for the hiatus in updates. My time has been monopolized by working on a film project. From now on, I am going to start adding personal anecdotes to this blog to make it more of a cohesive time capsule+writing venue.

For now, I don’t have much more to say. It’s 2 am on Friday night and I am alone in my room listening to Zoe Keating play her haunting cello orchestrations. I just watched Martha Marcy May Marlene and started to feel weird, weird enough to do some writing. I wrote most of the above piece after a trip to Portland, Oregon last Fall. I really loved the city. The image of that car ride still remains perfectly intact in my mind.}}

At least you do something.

May I ask you a strange question (and hopefully you’re in the right mood for it)?

Do you ever want to go on an adventure? I want to ride the city busses around tonight;  Ride them all the way to the ocean, because we don’t see it enough. 

I’d like you to come with me, because we converse well together.

by Hali Gardella