Days 19 & 20
Day 19
I’ve been feeling the urge to reinvent lately. I bought $200 worth of clothes on ThredUp* today, chasing a new look but really chasing elusive feelings—security, self-confidence, worthiness, love.
I get like this a lot in the fall—it’s the new school year energy all over again. The promise that with new pens I can be a new person. The type of person who starts her work when it’s assigned instead of the day it’s due. The effortlessly well-dressed person. The girl with every hair in place, with flawless makeup. The cool girl.
I’ve wasted so much of my life chasing the cool girl stereotype. Throughout my teens and twenties, I hooked myself up to an IV of cool girl pop culture—Robin Scherbatsky. Summer Finn. Black Widow. Francesca.
I heard what Clementine Kruczynski said in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and just rolled it into the stereotype. Clementine is a cool girl too, after all.
Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.
I did it to fulfill the fantasies of the men around me but I did it for myself most of all. Cool girls don’t need anyone, cool girls don’t get hurt. The cool girl has fun, is never afraid, and always makes it to the end of the movie. Who wouldn’t want that?
Day 20
Rain smells different in Los Angeles.
I woke up to rain this morning. As soon as I saw the damp sidewalks I threw open all the windows in the house. I wanted the fresh air to roll through. It’s supposed to rain all day; I hope it storms. We need it.
I grew up in a suburb outside of Dallas. There, rain in the summer smells hot. It can be raining and still 90 degrees out, and if you stand in it, it feels like heated water is pouring down from a kettle beyond the clouds. It soaks into the dirt and perfumes the air with that earthy ozone scent, like dirt opening up and coming back to life.
Right now, in the fall, rain smells less like heat and more like relief. After each relentless Texan summer, the first autumn rain is a signal that we survived.
This morning wasn’t the first time I clocked the difference in the smell, but I’ve never bothered to write it down.
(I know the word is petrichor. I know some people love it. Petrichor. I can practically hear Brandon Scott Jones chanting it like he does ‘Rihanna.’ It has a certain ring to it, but I never loved it. It’s got too much science in it, and the smell after rain is too primal to measure.)
This morning in LA, the rain smells like stones, like metal and rock and oil. Rain still smells like ozone and dirt, but it misses that coming-to-life element, replaced by the smell of civilization. I don’t feel the ground swelling beneath me. There’s so little dirt to soak it in. In Texas, if you sat outside after it rained, you could practically see the plants around you grow. Here you just see oil slicks on the road, shimmering down the nearest drain.
Getting ready to write a novel for NaNoWriMo? Come to our virtual write-in tomorrow morning—the first of three for Preptober! Learn more about them here.
I started the Writer’s Notebook as a 28-day challenge to find joy in writing again. Traditionally, a writer’s notebook is a collection of observations, reactions, ideas, questions, memories, quotes, sketches, lists, snippets of moving language, or some combination of the above. (Sometimes they’re also called Commonplace Books!) Want to join in? Leave a comment below and I’ll check out your work!