From Soil (2025)

first it sleeps

Lëtzebuergesch

He was born in Salvador of Bahia but grew up in Luxembourg capital city. We met while living in the same London apartment building when I was 19. We candy flipped on the way to Ministry of Sound, where he crip-walked while wagging his pointer fingers like a zootsuiter. I took him to the Tate Modern to pick up one of Ai Wei Wei’s sunflower seeds. We would spend four summers living with his family in Luxembourg city proper: his mother translated for the EU and insisted I speak German in the home. She also grew up a Nazi: she adopted him in her 60s, which was not perfectly illegal. In silence, they watched me gag down a slice of Rieslingspaschteit, an aspic-based meat pie with green olives and a tough bread crust. We visited his sisters in France, where we silently purveyed unassembled Scandi handiwork (mixed media: particle board and polyester) at a blue cube situated next to a nuclear power plant. He and I spoke broken French together, filling in each other’s blanks, and we traveled through Central and Southern Europe together, where I would take pictures of him planking on statues. We carved our initials into a heart on the Coliseum.

I graduated at 20, and he faked his transcripts so that he could study at the places where I was accepted for grad school. He was caught, so I attended a less prestigious school to remain living with him. He told me verbatim that my breasts and ass weren't enough to satisfy any man's primate (sic) urges, and we fought nightly in bed after that in our shared apartment in Chicago. I left him for a local writer I met in grad school, and we still lived together; he stayed in the living room on a blow-up mattress for two months, and he pushed me down at Eataly. No one said anything, even though they were looking. Once, he did unspeakable things to me when he thought I was asleep. I still have nightmares about it.

The Rose of Tacloban

He took me to Bouley to smell a room full of apples and to view rich-people pastoralist artwork framed in gold. He proposed we make love in the bathroom at the Guggenheim. We stayed in his parents’ condo next to the Dakota and watched Barry Lyndon on the big screen while making out on memory foam beanbags in the building’s vacant private theatre. We met Sting in the elevator. He asked which Broadway show I wanted to see, and I picked Here Lies Love. He danced like a zombie on downers. He took me to a bed and breakfast in the Hamptons for NYE. The art everywhere was atrocious, and the gas station bagel sandwiches were great. He made playlists for me that were each a collage of playlists he had made for my predecessors. He taught me North-Shore Geography, and I spoke to his bubbe in Yiddish. We both had Shoah grandmothers, but they never met. He took me to Alinea to watch chefs do their job through a glass pane like zoo animals; I licked rose foam off a leaf. He told me I was just like a prostitute between the sheets. I wasn’t sure how to interpret most of his words, but he was a very talented science fiction and comedy writer. We wrote bits together. He did a lot of expensive drugs and we watched a lot of HBO. His last real job was at Blockbuster in 2002. He asked me when I was getting my boobs done, and I left him. Rich people really have no taste.

Ivan Ramen

He was a quarterback at New Trier, and he had perfect ACT and SAT scores. He worked at Wells Fargo, wanted to die, and so became a chef in Manhattan. He taught me how to cook difficult recipes and told me about how much coke everyone in The Industry does. He disappeared from town one day, out of nowhere. I didn’t see or hear from him until six months later, when he asked me for a ride to his parents’ place from a truck stop and offered to cook me dinner. We lived together for another year.

then it creeps

You Spit on My Shoes

He drew delicate converging line work on motorcycles and skateboard decks. His own artwork was all that decorated his walls, which made a pretty clear statement. He got in a fight with a guy in the backyard of a dive bar in Milwaukee. He had a dog of some breed that he treated weirdly. He didn’t stop when I said no, and then he begged to see me again.

Cookie Monster Feeding Koi with His Bare Hands

He was a DP and cinematographer who was making a name for himself in The Industry. We went to Luftgekult and watched Jerry Seinfeld wear douchey sunglasses and mingle with Magnus Walker. We sucked down lattes at Deus Ex Machina, and he took me to hang out with various Sesame Street puppeteers. I had Venice Beach sand in my socks on the flight back.

I worked with him on projects: I was an art director and unnamed woman who turned products around on set so you couldn’t see the brand, and I got very built from carrying half of the camera equipment. We would lay in bed and watch The Sopranos. He insisted on facing the front door when we went out to eat. He taught me that Indian motorcycles were the best, and I did not fight him, though I knew Honda is objectively superior. I felt trapped when we fought. He took me to see David Byrne on tour for my birthday and yelled at me publicly, backing me into an alley and barking at me in front of big glass windows with people inside. He promised to marry me but didn’t. Gabaghoul.

then it leaps

It Was Written in the Stars

He was the Chemistry and Physics teacher where I worked. We brewed our own beer in our lakefront triplex’s backyard. We lived out of his 2000 Ford Focus and slept on campsites at national parks during the summers off. We skinny dipped in the moonlight and couldn’t find our clothes in the dark. He played the saxophone and I played the violin. We climbed the Rockies, and he held me while we watched the stars. I invited him to come teach with me in Vienna, and we did. I would run off to take a walk when we fought. He kicked me in the legs after I had been hit by a car, and he punched a hole in our bedroom window on a starry November night. He was so ashamed that he didn’t have it fixed til May, and the lakefront wind was really cold. I dated him because I wanted to know everything he knew, and when I did, I left him.

Onion Boy

He wrote for The Onion.

He was not funny.

permafrost

Disney-Princess Pedigree

We met for the first time when we were young and played for MYSO or CYSO. He does not remember me then. He went to Cleveland for viola performance and dropped out due to performance anxiety. On our first date, as soon as he saw me, he grabbed my face and kissed me for a long time. We got engaged four months later, after talking about it briefly over lunch. He talked so much that I did not speak for most of our marriage, which lasted under a year. I took him to the Saatchi, but he preferred the Wallace Collection: he was a North Shore boy to the core. At least he liked the Barbican, and I showed him how I would sit in the first-floor bathrooms to listen to the symphony practice. We watched Thomas Ades conduct his work. We watched a quarter hour of celebrity ass at the Tate Modern’s Yoko Ono exhibition. I wrote on a slip of paper, “I wish this feeling would never end,” and I tied it to Wish Tree.

We were both lapsed-Jewish socialist atheists, and we protested at every event and joined every group Chicago had to offer. His family were intellectual Ukrainian Ashkenazim. We fought for Palestine despite it being an antisemitic time, and we both felt intense pain and stress. He was too scared to drive or bring up his needs in conversation, even though he honestly did all the talking. After I was sexually assaulted on the way to work on the West Side, he fell out of love with me. He told me that the immense amount of activism I did on behalf of my students meant nothing. He ghosted me after I was admitted to a hospital for wanting to die, and he said I caused him a breakthrough hypomanic episode when I cussed him out when he didn’t accept any of my calls. He called the hospital and told the staff I was harassing him with all of my calling, and that I also showed symptoms of BPD because I spent too much money on Amazon and wanted to die. I was then diagnosed on the basis of “clinical interview.” My therapist and psychiatrist ruled out the diagnosis as soon as I was discharged. I sent him walls of text about how his love felt like the sun on my skin and how I loved feeling his back through his threadbare shirts, but he had placed my number on mute. He told me that my trauma had a common denominator and it was me. He was always better at math. He told my parents he needed more stability and he wanted his own kids with someone who wasn’t me. That he was my caretaker. That he still had time. We divorced shortly after I got out of the hospital (he didn’t allow me back home and claimed I made him mentally and physically ill), and he told me he was scared I would take all of his money and buy a Rolex on Michigan Avenue.