stephhannes

[stephhannes]

2024, or: it’s not going to kill me, it’s just going to be a little uncomfortable 

i got too comfortable in 2023 and now it’s time to shake shit up again. 

i’ve spent so much time in the last 5 years absolutely fighting to stay afloat- emotionally, financially, socially- and last year was almost like a little break from all of that. 

for the first time, i didn’t feel like i was fighting myself. it’s been a long journey to become a fully fledged person- when i was 23, i thought i had everything figured out. and maybe i did, but i had to re-figure everything out once nathan died. it’s been an uphill battle since then.

toward the end of 2022, i started to feel like my frontal lobe had finally developed, and i went into 2023 confident- in myself, in my life choices, in my friend group. it was nice to spend a year actually enjoying all of the work i’d been putting in.

the work never stops, of course. this year was still full of therapy, and medication, and trying to figure my shit out. the grief isn’t all-consuming anymore, it’s almost barely consuming, but it’s always there. 

this year was the 5 year anniversary of nathan dying. it’s a strange milestone to think about. right before nathan died, we laid out our 5-year-plan, which eventually morphed into my next 5 years, on my own. 

and here i am, going into the 6th year. 

+++

for years now, i’ve held myself accountable to one rule- “i never turn down an invitation,” it’s because i know that if i give myself the opportunity to say no, i’ll never leave my house. so when someone extends an invitation to me, i will always say yes. i love being invited! but sometimes i’ll disregard my rule if the invitation is one i’ve extended to myself, for something that i want to do but no one wants to do with me. 

i started inviting myself to things, alone. i don’t like to do things by myself, and in the past, i’ve straight up skipped events if i have no one to go with. i tried to stop doing that this year. if i committed to something, or if there was something i wanted to do, i’d just do it. i’ve gotta stop standing in my way at some point. 

i went to concerts alone, i went to movies alone, i went to dinners alone. i love my own company- i’m a delight! i’ve also just been cursed with a terrifying amount of social anxiety, but i’ve tried to push myself to feel uncomfortable in public. it’s not going to kill me. i just have to keep reminding myself that it’s not going to kill me (even if i feel like i’m dying). 

i also went to concerts with friends, movies with coworkers, dinners with people i don’t know very well. 

i think i’m becoming someone that likes to go to the movies. an insane sentiment coming from someone who has historically never seen a film before. but here’s the thing: it’s a guaranteed two hours where no one can contact me. it’s like a little break, an off-the-grid reward. i used to take soulcycle classes for the same reason. it was 45 minutes where the only things that existed were me, my nausea and a bike. 

top 3 concerts of the year: the killers, death cab for cutie/the postal service, and caroline polachek. 

the killers have always been a bucket list band for me, i’ve wanted to see them for so long, but i never had the chance when they were actually good and then they kept putting out terrible albums and doing huge stadium tours and i couldn’t be bothered. a few months ago, they announced a surprise show at a venue with a 2k cap. i fought for my life in the ticketmaster queue to get tickets, to no avail. 

in a stunning turn of events, a friend of a friend had an extra that i was able to get my hands on a couple of hours before doors. and there i was, tearing up a bit in a room full of white people absolutely jazzed to hear mr. brightside. 

death cab was the same for me, also a bucket list band. i’d actually already seen them at the top of the year, but the transatlanticism/give up anniversary tour was calling my name. i think that’s one of the only bills that will get me to haul ass out to COTA. 

i forgot that jenny lewis is in the postal service and i lost my fucking mind when i remembered that she’s real and on stage right in front of me. 

i wasn’t planning on crying at the transatlanticism function, i’d already wept to ben gibbard singing “i need you so much closer,” back in february- but then i was accidentally sucker punched by passenger seat. 

i don’t know what it was, but there i was standing and sobbing and being like “why am i thinking about nathan and crying in the club right now?” 

when i was driving home from the show, i was listening to a spotify playlist he’d made for me in the beginning of our relationship, of songs that made him think of me. it had the song that was playing in the background the first time we kissed when we were in high school. it had classic bangers like snow patrol’s chasing cars. it had a bunch of songs that for some reason, made him think of me- some of them, i could connect the dots and knew exactly why he’d chosen them, and some, like…i got the sentiment, but they seemed a little more vague to me- i didn’t know what exactly was making him think of me. 

and on shuffle, passenger seat came up. it was on the playlist. the feeling was mutual. 

i roll the window down and then begin to breathe in the darkest country road and the strong scent of evergreen from the passenger seat as you are driving me home. then looking upwards, i strain my eyes and try to tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites from the passenger seat as you are driving me home. do they collide? i ask, and you smile. with my feet on the dash, the world doesn’t matter. when you feel embarrassed, then i’ll be your pride. when you need directions, then i’ll be the guide. for all time. for all time. 

+++

the best thing i did this year was support my friends. i love an invitation, but i especially love an invitation to something someone i care about has been working hard on. i ended up at DJ sets, and open mics, and concerts, and full on musicals, and stand up and every time i come home and i’m like “wow it is so special to watch my friends do the things they love and share in their passion projects” 

and every time i’m like “ugh i should probably do something”

i want to get better about being creative- i spend so much time working and having anxiety that i forget that at my core i think i’m on this earth to be a court jester. i keep joking about doing stand up but really i should be standing up and making jokes onstage. i keep throwing around the idea of actually publishing something long-form, but instead of writing anything long-form i just throw up a tweet and call it a day. i have a lot of ideas rattling around in this mostly empty skull- in 2024 i want to make something tangible, and force all of my friends to revel in it for a day. 

included under the creativity umbrella- i want to get better about posting on tiktok. it’s always just been something i have in my back pocket, but the truth is- i’m a storyteller! it’s a platform where i can share some stories! if i just churn out constant content, something will stick. 

last year, my tiktoks landed me in two places i wasn’t anticipating on landing. 

the first being: in a business insider article.

i made a video in 2020 about ‘acting your wage’ where y’know like if i’m getting paid minimum wage, you’re getting minimum effort outta me- anyway, according to business insider, 27-year-old tiktoker Stephanie Anne coined the term. 

the second being: published in a paper about grief in The Routledge International Handbook of Child and Adolescent Grief in Contemporary Contexts

there is a person out there that straight up analyzed my content as part of their thesis, and it got published in the aforementioned book- absolutely wild. my shitposts are academic. 

sometimes i feel like i’m yelling about my grief into the void, but sometimes things like this happen which forces me to remember that there are people out there that are a) watching, and b) appreciating my grief content. 

being a grief influencer is a strange place to be in, i hate the internet’s tendency to gravitate toward people in mourning, their weird desire to witness trauma in progress. i’ve always tried to keep a sense of levity to my content, because that’s who i am as a person, but also because i’ve never felt comfortable performing the depths of my grief to the public. i barely want to perform it in front of the people i’m closest to. 

in my personal life, i’m still trying to be more vulnerable. i’m still trying to be better at asking for, and accepting help. i’ve been working toward being less cold. i’m an upsettingly sentimental person, but outwardly expressing that is still nerve-wracking. i’ve gotten better at telling my friends i love them. 

i’ve gotten so much closer to the people that i’ve had around me for so long, i’ve brought in new people that i feel just as close to. it’s been a big year for friendship. 

+++

i rang in the new year in the middle of a slump- the last week or so, i’ve been so depressed. it’s wearing off now, but i still can’t shake all of the nights i spent laying in bed until 5am panicking about what my next moves are going to be. 

i found myself sobbing and repeating over and over “i don’t like change,” but i know that i need some change. 

i’ve given myself the comfort that i’ve wanted for so long, and now that i’m not in constant fight or flight, i need to shake shit up again. i get antsy. 

i want to move out of hag house. she’s been a safe place for me to get back up on my feet again- there are so many things i love about her- and so many things that are absolutely wretched. when i moved in 3 years ago, i was going from homeless, to having a place to live. i didn’t have many options then, and now there are more options at my disposal. i’m at a place where i have the ability to comfortably move, to upgrade my living situation. i’m stuck between deciding if i want to stay in austin, and just move into a new apartment- a new neighborhood, probably closer to work, definitely closer to all of my friends that have now left the south side of town. an apartment with hot water and air conditioning but also no backyard and neighbors on all sides and millennial grey interiors.  

or do i want to disappear to a different coast? try my luck in a different city? 

i’ve always operated within newton’s laws of motion- a stephanie in motion stays in motion. unless some sort of immovable force lands in my way, forcing me to pivot, i’ll stay on the same track. a lot of that is tied to my OCD, which i’ve been working on holding less tightly- in my head, nothing bad can happen if i just keep doing things the same way i’ve been doing them (until something bad does happen and then i have to re-adjust). but like, i can also just upgrade things in my life because i deserve nicer things. i can change things because i don’t necessarily like how they are. i can try new things and not be afraid that my world is literally going to end. 

it’s not going to kill me. it’s just going to be a little uncomfortable. 

[stephhannes]

“do my mom’s cats miss nathan?”

2023 is approaching, and it means it’s been 5 years since nathan died. which is weird, it’s borderline unfathomable. i knew nathan for 13 years, and sooner than i imagine, it’ll have been 13 years without him. 

as the year is winding down, and i find myself with more vacation time and less time with blinders on in survival mode- i’m getting sentimental. 

or introspective. or whatever. 

i’ve already started rounding up in conversation, “it’s been 5 years since nathan died,” it’s only been 4 years and three months. 

and then tonight, i found myself deep in my feelings because i kept asking myself “do my mom’s cats miss nathan?”

coming back to west texas for the holidays has always felt weird. the house my mother lives in has never been my home. 

my parents bought their first house after i graduated from high school. they moved in during my first semester at college, they packed all of my things from the house we’d rented while i was in high school, and they unpacked them into “my room,” at the new house. 

“my room,” was nothing more than a space to hold the boxes and remnants of a life i’d left behind to begrudgingly pursue higher education. 

the first time i felt like a visitor in my parents’ home was when my dad was sick, and i moved back in briefly to spend time with him in his last few months. 

my bedroom, sharing a wall with my parents’ bedroom, i could hear every one of his last labored breaths. 

as soon as the fall semester began, only a month after his death, i never wanted to end up back there again. 

9 months after my dad died, nathan and i started dating. he lived in abilene, and was finishing his last semester before moving to new york for grad school. i was still in austin, with another year of undergrad left to go. 

i moved back to abilene for the summer so we could spend time together before he left. 

by this point, my room was once again uninhabitable. i’d taken my mattress to austin, and the only thing that was left in there was a box spring, and piles of all my items that i didn’t want to shlep across texas. 

that summer was a weird time of being in-between spaces. 

my mom was working the night shift, so nathan would come over and we’d sleep in her bed. when she’d get home from work at 7am, we’d move to the couch, and then he’d go back to his house for the day. 

at one point, my sleep schedule got so fucked that i was waking up at 8pm and going to bed at 10am. 

sometimes we were seeing each other just to sleep. i’d go to his parents’ house to see him, and then pass out on the couch for a few hours, my head in his lap while he would stay up reading. 

one morning, i was still wide awake at 6am, and he’d woken up early. i knew i’d only be awake for another hour or so, but he came over. i fell asleep almost immediately, my head in his lap on my mother’s couch. when i woke up hours later, he was still up. he’d just been watching tv and trying his best to not wake me up. 

in all of the weird time he spent at the house that was never really mine, he bonded with my mom’s cats. honestly, he bonded with any cat, but him and bilbo really had a special little relationship. 

bilbo was never super affectionate toward me, but as soon as nathan was around, he couldn’t stay away. even when nathan and i moved to our own place, every time my mom would FaceTime me, we’d make sure nathan and bilbo got to say hi to each other. 

the second time i tried to make my mom’s house my home was after nathan died. perhaps i felt less like a visitor this time, more like someone doing an extended stay at an air bnb.

i couldn’t stay in philly. emotionally or financially. and so i had to move back to west texas. 

my bedroom still didn’t have a bed. and had become inundated with even more garbage, since i had to move my entire life on the east coast back into my mom’s house. 

i slept on the couch. if you could call it sleeping. 

i’d take an ambien, and hope for the best. my mom was still working the night shift, so sometimes i’d fall asleep in her bed, and then migrate back to the couch when she got in. sometimes i’d stay in her bed when she got home, it was nice to hear someone snore next to me when i got too lonely. it was very ‘class of 2013’ by mitski of me. 

my bedroom was full of suitcases. filled with my clothes, with nathan’s clothes. and sometimes i’d find the cats sleeping in one of nathan’s flannels. 

and every time it would break my heart thinking about how they probably miss him too. 

after a few months, i cleaned out the bedroom. i bought a mattress. i hung photos on the walls. i tried to make it a space that i didn’t hate. and i mostly, didn’t hate it. 

it’s been 5 years since the last time i lived at my mom’s house, and even coming back to visit feels like a strange little time capsule. 

the mattress that i eventually bought for the room was the same mattress that nathan and i had when we moved to philly. i never sleep well when i’m here.  

the mattress here feels tiny. like i’m always going to fall off of it. like there’s just not enough space. 

which is strange, because in philly it always felt infinite. nathan and i always slept very close to each other, but even when we were on opposite sides of the bed, it always seemed like the perfect size. 

i’m sure there’s a metaphor somewhere in there. i’m too tired to sort it out right now though. 

five years ago, nathan and i were driving to get a cheesesteak and as i was in the passenger seat of the 2018 hyundai elantra that is now mine, we talked about our 5 year plan. 

after 3 years at his job, if he still liked the company, he would try to transfer to a different office. we wanted to travel, never staying in the same place for too long. we would have a long engagement, but would start getting wedding plans in motion. we revisited my idea of doing something low-key. he pitched the idea of a small destination wedding. i would find a part time theatre job that paid me enough to handle covering our groceries and nathan’s student loan payment while he dealt with paying rent and bills. we would get a cat within the year, but definitely adopt some big stupid dog within the next 5. i would get my passport, and he would teach me to scuba dive and maybe we’d do our honeymoon somewhere with water. 

and a couple weeks after that conversation, he died.

and the five years after that looked nothing like what we had planned. i read my vows at his funeral, and i adopted a cat on my own, and i still don’t have my passport. 

in the year i spent living at my mom’s house after nathan died, the future felt impossible.  i couldn’t fathom the next 5 years. 

but i think somewhere in the last 5 years, my frontal lobe finally finished developing. 

“i’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and i don’t want it!” was something i remember thinking to myself frequently. i didn’t want it. but i forced myself to get out of bed every day and make things happen. 

the last 5 years have been a triumphant redemption arc. and at times it felt treacherous and impossible. and lately i’ve been learning to celebrate it. to celebrate myself. to celebrate my future. 

even before nathan died, i was so scared. i was so anxious. i was so insecure. when nathan and i made the 5 year plan, even though it all sounded great, it was moreso his plan than mine. i was a passive participant. i was along for the ride in the 2018 hyundai elantra. 

it’s hard for me to imagine myself like that because i’ve grown into such a powerful hashtag boss babe. 

i used to be completely incapable of making decisions for myself. i hated doing things alone. i always second-guessed everything. i felt like i was irreparably broken and wholly unloveable. i was afraid of taking risks because what if i failed? even worse, what if i looked stupid? 

and now that my frontal lobe is developed, i’m out here managing people. and managing myself, more importantly. when i want to do something, i just do it. i make it happen. i’ve stopped looking over my shoulder waiting for someone to validate me. i wear my stupid little clown clothes without caring what anyone thinks and i don’t interact with people i don’t want to interact with and i actually really like myself!!! 

the other day, i realized that i genuinely enjoy my own company. i love coming home and hanging out with myself. i’m fun and smart and hot and i’ve built such a fulfilling little life for myself. 

when i was 22 i hated so much of myself. 

on the wall of my bedroom in my mom’s house, there are a bunch of pictures of me aged 21-23. and the other day i looked at those pictures and i knew exactly who she was. she was so sad, she was so lost and confused and out in the world on her own with her partner that she depended on maybe a bit too much. and i thought to myself “i’m proud of her,” she was doing the best she could with what she had. 

she’s still doing the best she can with what she has at 27, but this time she totally trusts herself. 

i’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and there’s actually something exciting about having all of the opportunities of the future at my fingertips now.

+++ 

half of the fun of going home for the holidays is getting to see your hometown hookup. apparently, the holidays get real weird and introspective when your hometown hookup is dead. 

[stephhannes]

let’s talk about intergenerational trauma

my grandfather died ten years, almost to the day, before my grandmother did. and while his death had a noticeable impact on the family, we were fine, because we still had our grandmother. the absolute rock of the family. 

some sort of a silent agreement the entire family had, like it was just inherent knowledge, was the idea that had my grandmother died first, our grandfather wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long as she did. he would have been irreparably grief-stricken, only to probably succumb shortly after his wife. 

i’ve never necessarily thought of my mother as being a strong woman- and i’m sure that’s partially because i don’t know too much about my mother, and partially because i’m still trying to heal from trauma from our relationship early in my life. i’ve been trying to be kinder to myself, and kinder to my mother in the last few years, because as i get older, i realize that her and i are more similar than i’d like to admit. 

but, i’d never thought of her as being strong until i saw her taking care of her rapidly declining husband. i don’t regret a lot of things, but i do regret how unavailable i was when my dad was dying. i moved back home to be close to him, but i realized that being so close that i could hear his labored breaths through our walls was too much for me to handle- and i barely left my room, barely interacted, up until he died. meanwhile, my mother was there the entire time. she slept by his side, face-to-face with the labored breathing. she was there when it stopped. 

and after my dad died, i realized that had the tables been turned, he wouldn’t have been able to persevere in the same way my mother did. everything in his life revolved around us, and without that huge part of his life, he wouldn’t have been able to keep going. 

nathan used to have nightmares of me dying, vivid awful dreams where he’d be at my funeral. he would jolt awake, and then pull me as close him as possible, to make sure i was still alive. if i didn’t respond to a text within a certain amount of time, he’d get nervous that something had happened to me. he advocated for my health because he wanted to make sure i was alright. he had already lost one partner, and i saw firsthand exactly how much that ate away at him. 

and after he died, i realized that there’s no way he would have been able to handle if i had died first. i’d always known that, mostly because he’d literally said that to me multiple times- but i can’t imagine him be able to plan my funeral, or go back to work, or be anything other than completely stricken with grief. and i’m glad that he never has to do those things. 

it’s a blessing and a curse, or whatever. 

i feel like it’s this matrilineal curse i’m a part of, to fall in love with a man and have to bury him under the same mountains he would’ve moved for you. 

+++

everyone i know is moving in, 

moving into a little two bedroom two bathroom with their partner.

buying a three bedroom two bathroom with a huge backyard. 

building their own texas mcmansion from the ground up. 

everyone i know is 20 and acquiring a spouse and square footage.

and that sounds like the loneliest thing in the world to me. 

i don’t want to love someone so much that we get a huge house together. i want to love someone so much that we’re excited to share a studio apartment. 

i want to have my kitchen in my living room and my heart on my sleeve. 

nathan and i spent the first year of our relationship sharing twin-sized beds and it felt enormous, even though we slept almost completely on top of one another. 

and when we upgraded to a queen, it still felt like a twin, because we were still velcroed to one another. but it felt like we were swimming in a mattress, there was still so much room, because we only took up 1/4th of it. 

and then after he died, and i had to buy a mattress for my room at my mother’s house that i had to move into, i bought the same one we once shared- because i remembered it being a good mattress and honestly i didn’t like have the energy to comparison shop or whatever.

and it was tiny. my arms spilleth over the edges. it was claustrophobic. it was terrible. 

[stephhannes]

I Was a 23 Year Old Widow & Here’s Where I Went From There

a friend sent me a link to a refinery29 article today (I’m A 31-Year-Old Widow, & I Don’t Know Where To Go From Here) and it felt exactly like something i would have written three years ago, when i was in my first year of widowhood. it basically is something i’ve written three years ago. i remember all of those same feelings, am i doing this right? how do i navigate being hot and young but also a grief-stricken widow? 

the most important lesson i’ve learned in the last three years is this: the world doesn’t revolve around me. 

every time i start freaking out about the nuances of grieving i remind myself, the world doesn’t revolve around you, dummy. and nothing has been more freeing. 

everything in my life revolves around my grief, but there is no one else around me that’s thinking about it as much as i am. so much of my anxiety was defined by if i felt like i was grieving appropriately, in a way that society would approve of- but society isn’t thinking about me and my grief. and if they are, who gives a shit? talk to me when your partner unexpectedly dies at the age of 23. 

when i came back to social media after nathan died, i remember getting comments on photos like “oh, it’s so nice to see you smiling!” that made me so self-conscious. is it too soon to be smiling? is it ok to be having fun with my friends right now? 

i returned to dating apps within a year of nathan’s death, and i kept it secret for a very long time. i didn’t want people to think i was moving on. i wasn’t moving on, i was lonely! i was afraid that people would see me on tinder and be like “oh, she’s not that sad i guess” i was that sad! that’s why i was reverting to the ol’ faithful coping mechanism of entertaining gentlemen callers! 

as someone forced to live in my own grief, of course i was out here catastrophizing every situation possible. i stayed awake at night stressing over ok so when i do eventually date again: when do i tell him that i’m a widow? (literally just whenever it comes up in conversation) is it weird to talk about nathan all the time? (not really, is it actually any different than when someone talks about their ex? if anything, it should be less uncomfortable, my ‘ex’ is dead, there’s no threat there) do i take down the pictures of nathan before inviting someone to my house? (no, it’s my house).

in the piece i wrote 20 days after nathan died, this is what i was panicking about:

And I know that it’s only been a few weeks since Nathan died, but I feel the weight of the 21st century coming down on me already. Theoretically, he and I were so lucky to have found each other so early, not having to navigate our 20s with awkward dates and rifling through dating apps. But in reality, now that’s where I’m going to have to find myself again. I don’t know how to date someone that I haven’t already known for 10 years. When do I tell someone I’m a widow? How much is appropriate amount to mention my dead fiancé during a blind date? When is the appropriate time to update my Facebook relationship status to ‘single’? When am I supposed to take off my engagement ring and show my face on 6th street?

What’s an appropriate tinder bio?

“Hi, I’m Stephanie. I used to be engaged but now I’m not! Hit me up!”

How do I navigate a new relationship with someone when I know that they will never know me as well as Nathan did? I can spend all day talking about who I was in high school, I can explain with detail every moment of my collegiate years, but no one will truly know who I was during those times because they weren’t there.

and here’s the update on that, 3 years later:

as previously mentioned, i’ve had success just bringing it up whenever it happens to come up. i played around with immediately being like “hey i’m steph i’m a widow what’s poppin?” but i think it’s a little more palatable to lure someone in with my insufferable personality and then be like “oh btw im a widow lol” 

i went through a phase where i would tell stories about my time in new york, but omit the fact that the reason i lived there was because of my fiance. or i’d tell stories about “an ex” without being like “well the ex is actually my dead fiance” but that felt weird, so i transitioned to just literally talking about nathan, my dead fiance, whenever i want to. and shockingly, it’s gone over pretty well. men are a lot more receptive to hearing about your ex that you’re still kinda in love with when your ex is dead.

my facebook relationship status is still not updated to single. but i did take it off my profile altogether after about two years. 

i took off my engagement ring about 6 months after nathan died. it was a whole thing. i was tired of people seeing it and assuming i was engaged, and asking me about it and then being forced into being like “oh haha well i’m not engaged anymore” i showed my face on 6th street and hated it, not because of my status as a widow, because i’m 26.

i’m banned from tinder, but my bumble bio is “self made hundredaire / used to work on broadway / never eaten a grape before / very passionate about the monster mash and sparkling water” people seem to like it.

if i could go back in time and whisper to myself “shhh you sweet summer child it literally doesn’t matter” god, i would. i sucked in high school, thank fucking god no one knows what i was actually like then. i was unbelievably depressed in college, we don’t need to re-live that in detail. i’m literally so cool now, and that’s really all that matters. like, i’m fun and a boss babe and smart and hilarious and mysterious (but let’s not focus on the mystery just yet) so does it really matter if someone doesn’t immediately know the nuances of my 15 year old psyche?

+++

when talking about my relationship with nathan, i’ve always framed it as “i know it’s not the end all be all of relationships” and i still firmly believe in that. like the ann druyan quote- “we knew that we were the beneficiaries of chance. we found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.” we had a dope relationship, it ran its course, i learned a bunch of shit about myself and what i need moving forward, and now it’s time to move forward. 

and in moving forward, i have to keep reminding myself that accepting relationships as they come into my life is a fun and exciting experience. it doesn’t have to be daunting and serious and terrifying. part of that has been just forcing myself to get out of my head, stop overthinking everything, and remember that the world does not revolve around me. there’s something about being able to just take what i need, leave what i don’t, for as long as it lasts and being fine with things when they eventually end. 

it’s been kind of hilarious finally going through scenarios i used to agonize over in the middle of the night. everything that i imagined to be a huge deal has been actually, not a deal at all. i had a conversation with a friend a couple of months ago where i was like “i just want a toxic relationship to pass the time,” and she was like “are you saying that because that’s actually what you want, or are you saying that because you’re afraid of being genuinely intimate/vulnerable with someone that’s not nathan?” and i was like, ok first of all i didn’t come here to get dragged like that and secondly…yeah, maybe. 

the vulnerability thing is still tough for me- very much not a fan of talking about my feelings without masking it with comedy. but every step i’ve made in that direction, i’ve been able to do without guilt or questioning myself. 

the first time someone other than nathan slept in my bed, i was worried that i would end up upset- it was fine. i was like “oh, i forgot how nice it is to wake up not alone.”

when i found myself in a vaguely toxic relationship i realized “yeah ok, that’s definitely not what i want.” the last time that person left my house, my first thought was “i miss nathan.” and it wasn’t even necessarily nathan that i missed. i missed being around someone that made me feel like they idk…..cared about me as a person and like…..respected me. 

i spent a lot of time seeking out people that i thought were similar to nathan, and then i realized that the qualities i was attracted to were just the bare minimum of human decency.  the things that i loved the most about my relationship with nathan weren’t necessarily qualities that were exclusive to him (they were things he was very good at, but so are a lot of other people). his willingness to listen to me tell the same stories over and over, his patience with all of my anxiety, how much he loved just spending time around me, the way he valued and respected my opinions, his ability to remember very tiny details, our effortless rapport. 

and at the same time, i’m recognizing strengths in other people that fill in where nathan had some weaknesses. the fact that none of my friends liked him, his inability to cope with my depression, all of the times he’d ask for forgiveness rather than permission, his unwillingness to accept criticism when i was upset with him, or the way he’d continue to push buttons i’d repeatedly asked him to leave alone. 

+++

so maybe it’s the zoloft, or maybe it’s just growing up a little bit- but letting go of all of that anxiety has really allowed me to feel a lot lighter. it feels good to finally be present in all of my relationships, not concerned about how anything looks- rather, just concerning myself with shit that feels right. i’ve always been a pretty solid judge of character, and as soon as i stopped doubting myself, the quality of person that came into my life was immediately a lot better, weird. it’s almost like the only opinion that truly matters....is my own. 

[stephhannes]

dressed to anti-depress

in the last two years, i’ve spent a lot of time asking myself questions like “will getting a smoothie today cure my depression?” and “will cutting my hair cure my depression?” and the answer to both of those questions is no. but you know what will kinda cure depression? getting on anti-depressants. 

earlier this year, my mental health was…concerningly bad, and quickly getting worse. i’ve recently gotten pretty good at managing my depression on my own by setting strict boundaries for myself and sticking to them (no screens allowed in my bedroom, exercising every day, no drinking alone etc) but out of nowhere, my anxiety began spiraling out of control. (my doctor suggested it’s due to ‘perhaps, ptsd’). 

but basically, by the time february rolled around i was having a really tough time. i couldn’t enjoy being around anyone because all i could think about was the inevitability of their death. i’d get lunch with a friend and spend the entire time panicking because what if this was the last time i ever got to get lunch with them? i saw my cats and i immediately started sobbing because my first thought was “oh my god they’re going to die one day.” i had a tough time showering because i was convinced that i would slip in the shower and crack my skull and no one would ever know because i live alone. no matter what i was doing, i would find some way to imagine some sort of catastrophe occurring. i noticed that i was starting to develop compulsions- i would obsessively check my rear-view mirror when i was driving, i wouldn’t leave the house without pacing for awhile before i left. i was having a hard time completing tasks which then made my anxiety even worse. every upsetting thought i had felt enormous and scary and would send me spiraling. i couldn’t focus, my memory was getting really terrible. 

and it was exhausting. 

i’ve been putting off trying medication for years. when i was growing up, i remember this weird stigma about anti-depressants. the discourse surrounding them was always like “nah man, they make you a shell of a person. totally numb no emotions or personality anymore.” my parents just like…didn’t believe in mental health so i suffered endlessly in middle and high school because no one would take me to therapy or acknowledge that like hey, maybe my kid isn’t lazy, she’s just clinically depressed. when i was in college, i finally went to therapy for a little bit because it was free through the university. and that helped some, but i still wasn’t completely cured. 

when i moved to new york, surprise, i was still depressed. one of my friends was constantly in my ear saying “hey buddy, you might really benefit from anti-depressants” and i finally realized “actually, i think you have a point, it’s probably worth a try” but every time i’d bring it up with nathan he was super opposed to it and would always just suggest i do something like “get out of bed before 4pm,” or “eat better.” 

by the time we moved to philly i was hitting a breaking point. my anxiety was so bad that nathan hated being in the same room as me when i was freaking out because my vibes were just so wack. the problem was that i had no money, and no health insurance which really left me in a position where the only way i could get help was with nathan’s help- i brought it up kind of casually one day like “hey i really think i might benefit from therapy or medication” and he was like “actually, i think you’d benefit from getting a hobby” 

and then a couple of days later i had a total nervous breakdown and i begged him to help me. i’ll never forget sobbing and saying “i don’t know if i need medication or therapy or both but all i can think about any more is killing myself and i can’t just hobby it away.” and he was finally like “ok, we’ll look into it this weekend” and the next day i woke up with such a sense of relief because i was finally going to get help and i actually had a super productive day. i got some work done, i got a library card and checked out some books. i ran errands, i cooked dinner, i read an entire book. i was actually present in my relationship. i was excited to get my life and myself back. 

and then nathan literally died that night so y’know all of those plans were thwarted. 

and then i spent two years in a fugue state and then i kinda got my shit together and then a pandemic happened and blah blah blah whatever. 

and then we’re back at february 2021. 

after realizing that i had become such an anxious wreck i finally started looking into options. and there she was, an app that allowed me to literally just text a doctor and be like “hey doc im feeling sad :(“ and they’d be like “oh cool, here’s a prescription for zoloft lmk how ur doing in a month xoxo” and for the low cost of 30 dollars a month i have serotonin for the first time in 13 years. 

++

over the last couple of days i’ve been asked the question “what are you thinking about right now?” a few times and my answer is always the same- literally nothing. zoloft has my head so empty and it’s incredible. like, for once i’m not in my own head questioning every god damn thing i do. 

the other day, one of my friends was like “it’s actually enjoyable to hang out with you now” which sounds rude, but makes a lot of sense tbh- sometimes i’m literally just not fun to be around. now i’m fun most of the time- except for the window of time where i realize “oh god i haven’t taken my zoloft yet today” and i start having withdrawal symptoms. but otherwise, i’m great! 

it’s interesting feeling a sense of happiness that isn’t just a manic episode. like sometimes, i’m driving to work and i smile thinking about something one of my friends said earlier in the day. a big 180 from a few months ago when i couldn’t drive without my little beady eyes glued to the rear-view mirror. when i’m left alone with my thoughts for more than 10 minutes, they’re usually pretty decent thoughts, instead of the usual “everyone hates me and i am going to die alone."

i’ve also become a total boss babe- now that i’m not overthinking everything i’m actually able to do my job without an overwhelming sense of anxiety. i’ve always been capable and good at what i do, but for the first time i actually feel confident in my abilities. 

++

with a combination of taurus season being very generous to me and a year of Pandemic Realizations i feel like i’m actually a cool, functional human again (for the first time, even?). i’ve spent a lot of time filtering myself, toning down aspects of my personality to appeal to whoever i’m around, turning up parts of my personality to get attention, etc- and now i’m just out here like “ok so anyway this is me- you get what you get, you don’t throw a fit” 

surprisingly, people have been pretty receptive to that, it’s almost like i am a good person that is worthy of love and kindness or something. 

++

i still haven’t gone to therapy, but i’ve been able to work through a lot of trauma on my own over the last couple of months. i’m finally at a point where i can acknowledge the things i’ve been repressing for a few years without feeling like everything is about to collapse. in time, i hope i’m able to get to a point where i can actually verbalize the feelings i’ve been having, and the things i’ve been (kylie jenner voice) realizing- but i’m not there quite yet. it’s been a weird experience not spiraling every time i feel a human emotion. now i’m able to acknowledge things and be like “ok is there anything i can do to resolve this right now? no? ok then i don’t need to fixate on it” and i can push it away until i need to acknowledge it again. i used to be paralyzed by any sort of inconvenience. 

though, i will say, i’ve started doing this thing where i’ll be like “y’all mind if i share a genuine human emotion?” and then i’ll say something that i never would have dreamt of saying a year ago- generally something that insinuates that sometimes i do experience the human feeling of vulnerability. 

++

every once and awhile i do still get hit with the wave of “why couldn’t i have been this functional when i was with nathan?” guilt. i think that ties into a lot of the grief i feel over all of the years i lost due to my depression- and even more specifically the months i lost due to my depression when i first moved to new york, and again when we moved to philly. when i first moved to new york, i didn’t really leave the apartment for 3 months. i slept most of the time. there were days long stretches where i was just completely emotionally unavailable. and much like in my adolescence when my parents refused to acknowledge that maybe i needed help, sometimes i feel angry that nathan also refused to acknowledge that maybe i needed help. 

i spent a lot of time really agonizing over the fact that eventually i would be stable, and would eventually be a better partner to someone else than i was to nathan, and i think there’s still a part of that that exists in me- but i’ve found a little more peace with the concept. i’m thankful that nathan had the patience to deal with me when i was losing every last marble rattling around in my brain- but there’s always a part of me that’s like “damn, i wonder what our relationship would have been like if i’d been a little less unstable” 

++

you can really tell that my mental health has improved just by the trajectory that my close friends instagram story has taken. it used to just be me drunk and crying every night at 4am and now it’s thirst traps and girl boss selfies. 

there are still character flaws that are so deeply ingrained in me that i’m constantly having to be aware of and combat, but it’s a lot easier to do that when i don’t exist on pure anxious energy. everything i do is still very much informed by the deep-seated fear of rejection i have, but i’ve been trying very hard to start to break that down. it’s like an irrational fear. like ‘afraid to tell my friend i love them when i’m hanging up the phone because what if they actually just hate me?’ level. now my friends will literally call me back if i don’t say i love you before hanging up and be like “hey bitch i said i love you say it back” and now it’s becoming a little less terrifying. 

my inability of showing vulnerability definitely stems from that fear of rejection. look, it’s scary to be like “hello this is a tough thought i’ve been having lately do you mind unpacking it with me?” i know that if i were to say that literally anyone in my circle would be like “yea let’s do it” but just the concept that the option of them being like “nah that’s a lot” keeps me from saying anything. there have been a couple times in the last few months where i’ve stepped out of my comfort zone to acknowledge and unpack some of those hard truths though, so congrats to me or whatever. i’ve even been hugging my friends more often (which is saying a lot coming from a woman that has never hugged her best friend, still to this day). 

++

anyway, as soon as i start going to therapy it’s going to be over for these hoes because i’m gonna be hot and sane and probably unstoppable. 

[stephhannes]

booked and busy

sometimes when i think about dating again i’m like “how am i supposed to do this when i’m not young and hot anymore?” and then i have to remind myself that i’m 25, not dead. it’s hard to not feel behind though when everyone i went to high school with is already on their second marriage. 

speaking of marriage, all of my friends got married last summer. i get that pandemic weddings suck for the people getting married- but they were great for me, because i didn’t even have the option of having to be like “haha hey sorry i can’t come i’m still grieving the loss of my wedding xoxo send me ur registry.” for future reference, i am still emotionally unavailable to attend any weddings. i don’t even really drink anymore so don’t even think about trying to lure me in with an open bar- hit me up for your second weddings, i might be ready by then. 

let’s address the elephant in the room: i’ve been lonely lately. i’ve finally gotten to a point where i’m not constantly in survival mode, the last couple of years have been tough- between the whole being so sad i thought i was simply going to pass away thing and being so poor that i thought i was going to pass away thing. but i’m finally at a place where i have a little bit of time to think of other things than “oh my god am i going to be able to pay rent this month?” and the thing i’ve been thinking about is how much it sucks to come home to…just myself. 

in november, i officially moved back to austin after my departure due to the pandemic. when i initially returned, i wasn’t sure how long i’d be back in austin for. my lease at my apartment ended in july, and i ended up basically housesitting for a friend. and as the paramount kept having events, i kept extending my time housesitting. and eventually i wound up with a second job. 

a coworker asked if i was available for a couple-day gig and i was like “yes, i love money” and that gig has extended until now. it’s not technically permanent, but maybe if i bat my eyelashes enough i can keep working. i’ve now somehow weaseled my way into the TV industry which is hilarious because one of my favorite pastimes in college was getting involved with film bro dudes and absolutely horrifying them with how little knowledge i have of tv/film. 

with the second job, i knew that i needed to find a place to live. i also knew that i still didn’t make enough money to actually be able to rent anything in this hell city without a guarantor, and as a woman that has no financially stable adults, my options were slim. and somehow- i got lucky. the friend i was housesitting for ended up actually moving out, and i just slid right in. and now look at me! the proud renter of a house! i have a backyard! i pay way too much money in rent! i love it! 

i love my house. she’s uhhhh, quirky- but she’s a place to live. in november, i began the arduous process of moving all my shit from abilene back to austin, a shuffle i’ve made too many times at this point. it took three trips, but i eventually moved my wares- a desk, a nightstand, a handful of kitchen items, my clothes. for awhile, it was pretty empty in here. but it’s finally starting to fill in. i spent my first couple of weeks building flatpack ikea furniture, and eventually started scouring the salvation armies near me. my biggest dilemma was trying to find a couch.

how do people with no friends, no truck, and no money get a couch to their home? i’d find a cheap one on facebook marketplace, but would need someone to pick it up for me. i looked through wayfair, but the idea of waiting for a couch that may or may not arrive in 5-10 weeks and need two people to assemble was too much. and eventually, my neighbor was like “hey do you want my old couch? i just got a new one” and i was like “uh yes, absolutely.” shortly after that, i found a chair at salvation army for $25. and hark! there it was, finally i had a place to sit down. as they say, every desk is a standing desk when you don’t have anything to sit on. 

when it came to furnishing my place, i was willing to wait for the right pieces. when i moved in, i thought a lot about the place i had in philly with nathan. if i’m being honest, i hated it. all of our furniture was black, from walmart. it looked ugly, it was uninspired, but it was functional. and sure, at that point, that’s all that mattered. we only lived there for a month, so obviously there wasn’t time to actually move in and personalize it. but still, i didn’t want to have that experience with my place. in all honesty, it’s always felt like home. even when the only thing i had was a mattress on the floor of my bedroom and a bar cart. but now that it’s starting to fill in, it’s been really great. 

when jose first came to visit, he immediately was like “this place has good vibes,” and i have to agree. when i first moved out on my own after nathan died, i moved back into an apartment that i had already lived in during the before times. it haunted me. even though i had filled it with completely new furniture, in a completely different arrangement, the walls still knew too much. 

sometimes it’s lonely living by myself. i’ve always had a roommate and this is my first time where i’m just coming home to me. i miss living with nathan. it was all the perks of living alone (not having to wear pants in shared spaces, being able to be awake at stupid hours of the night) with the addition of the warmth of being able to come home to a partner. to be able to say “hey, i’m at 125th right now, i’ll be home soon,” and have someone excited for my arrival. to not have to stress about doing all the chores because someone else was there to lighten the load. to have someone to reel me in when i start spiraling before bed. 

i had to have a weird conversation with myself when it came to hanging up pictures on my wall. i have pictures with all of my favorite people, which obviously includes pictures of nathan and i had to take a moment to ask myself “does seeing his face every day still make me happy?” when i try to make myself sad, i’ll go through all the pictures of him on my phone. and for a period of time, catching the glimpses of us hanging on my wall would put me in a weird mood. i ended up leaving the pictures up. i hate thinking about the day i’ll eventually take them down. 

becoming a home-renter has taken a village. from my friend advocating for me to make sure i got the lease, to jose and dan coming here on the weekends to do all the stuff i just don’t have time for (yard work, knocking down wasp nests, cleaning my blinds), to everyone that’s given me furniture or other home goods. and most recently, my friends that let me live with them during the snowstorm because my home became uninhabitable because one of her quirks is that she’s impossible to keep warm! 

i’ve felt so supported by my friends lately, which has been dope- but there’s still a lingering emptiness. starting next week, i’m going to attempt to fill that emptiness with 50mg of zoloft (yes, ya girl finally got an anti-depressant prescription), but realistically, i know that i’m missing having a partner.

something i’ve noticed a lot on The Apps is that dudes will put “no kids, never married” in their bio, and while i do appreciate the child disclaimer- the whole ‘never married’ disclaimer sends me on a spiral. because like, yeah i’ve never technically been married, but i feel like that’s an even worse way to try to explain my past than just being like “yes i’m 25 yes i’m a widow yes we exist,” and it’s like- why are you seeing that and addressing it like it’s a red flag? shouldn’t be a good sign that there’s been at least one person who liked me enough to want to marry me? i still haven’t worked out the best way to navigate the whole “haha yeah i’m a widow” conversation, as you can imagine, it’s A Lot to ingest. 

(also, a quick side tangent- over the last few months, my blog has gotten a lot more hits, like literally thousands more than usual, and as a result of that, i’ve been getting a lot of pushback because of the way that i refer to myself as a widow even though i wasn’t married. i’ve never had to make this disclaimer to anyone that knows me in real life, because they get it. but i wanted to make a quick disclaimer to anyone that’s ever thought “lol this poor grieving woman isn’t a widow!!! i must tell her in a very rude way!!!” literally the only reason i wasn’t legally married was because nathan died before we could get married. in every other aspect, we were married. we had joint finances, we were on a lease together, but more importantly, every decision we made was with the other person in mind and with the intent of bettering each others’ lives- we were very much A Unit. being legally married doesn’t legitimize a relationship in any sort of significant way, other than….legally. the whole point of marriage is to promise to take care of someone until they (or you) die, and that’s exactly what i did. and by that merit, yeah, i do refer to myself as a widow. if you want to be technical about it, legally, no i’m not a widow…but like….get over it….are you really going to argue semantics with someone that lost their partner?)

ok so back to the hell that is Being On Dating Apps. i’ve done my time, i’ve put in my work, and when nathan and i got together i was so excited that i didn’t have to date ever again because honestly, i hate it. and now look at me, back in business. 

it’s exhausting being this unimpressed by men. my arms are tired from having to carry every conversation. 

i’ve talked about the first date i went on after nathan died, but the second one is truly a train wreck that needs to be witnessed. 

picture this: i’m on bumble, and i start talking to this dude that’s like….pretty decent. we’re having a good enough conversation, and eventually he’s like “hey! let’s get lunch this week” and like an unsuspecting fool, i said yes. so we go to lunch, and once again, things are surprisingly normal. until eventually, he looks me in the eyes and says with his whole heart- “hey, i’ve gotta be honest with you. i’m actually a magician, i recognized you on bumble from in & of itself and i really just wanted to pick your brain and ask some questions about the show,” and i immediately was like “oh yeah for sure, let me run to the bathroom real quick and then we can discuss magic” and then i literally made myself disappear. i just left. poof. no trace of me to be found again.

i’ve always said that i hate magic because if i wanted to get lied to i would just do it for free by talking to a man- and boy, have i always been right. 

anyway, now i live in fear of being bamboozled by a magician again. 

one time i let my friend swipe through my apps for me, and she was like “you sure do match with a lot of people named nathan,” and i was like “yeah, i think it’s the trauma.” i went through a phase where i’d swipe right on anyone with any sort of commonality with nathan….like literally anything. i’d see someone that graduated from columbia and i’d be like “ok that works” or like…..i’d see a picture of someone playing a trumpet and i’d just swipe right. 

i’ve tried to break myself of that habit because like, that’s not fair to the other person but sometimes i recognize those little patterns and it’s just a little reminder of how i’m still broken. 

when i’ve mentioned being back on apps, sometimes people are like “omg how did you move on? i couldn’t imagine dating someone else” and first of all- bold of you to assume i’ve moved on, also bold of you to assume that it’s not totally terrifying to me. being back on apps isn’t the same thing as being in a relationship with someone else. just because i’ve been casually talking to people doesn’t necessarily mean anything substantial. it’s progress, but the thought of having to be genuinely vulnerable around someone else is hard to wrap my head around, especially now with all this additional baggage. 

there have been times in my life where i’ve struggled with feelings of being unloveable. when i was in college, i was convinced that i would die alone. and a lot of the work that happened within my relationship with nathan revolved around getting me to a place where i was able to be like “i am a person deserving of love.” 

i’ve had to come to terms with the fact that there are also countless other people in this world deserving of love, and i have plenty of it to offer. do i wish i was offering to nathan? absolutely, all the time. i know that my relationship with nathan is incomparable, but that doesn’t mean that i can’t go on to have fulfilling relationships with other men. right before nathan and i got together, in the time when we thought we were about to go our separate ways- we had this conversation where i was like “lol you’ll be fine, you’re about to move to new york and you’ll find someone better than me and forget that i exist” and his response to that was “shut the fuck up, do you actually believe that? i have what i have with you- even if i wanted to, i couldn’t just replicate that with someone else.” and i think about that a lot now- in the sense of i had i had with nathan, and nothing will touch that, or replace that, or compare to that- and that’s totally okay. that doesn’t take away from or negate the importance of theoretical future relationships. 

i can’t say that i’m actively looking for a partner right now, but if the opportunity presents itself, i’m not opposed to the concept of dating someone. like i tweeted the other day, “i can’t believe that one day i’m going to have to be a mother figure to a straight man, yet again.”

ok cool, so that’s enough vulnerability for today- i’m gonna save the rest for my therapist xoxo

+++

the fun thing about having jobs (plural) is that instead of feeling emotions i just feel stressed. i can’t believe that i’ve finally become one of those people that has to be constantly doing something but here i am, working from 9-5 and then coming home to do chores and then scrolling through my phone while watching netflix because god forbid i allow my brain to have one single moment where i’m alone with my thoughts. some days i work from 9am to midnight and those are the days where i really don’t have any time to be alone with my thoughts. thank god! 

i have been taking time to try to do more creative pursuits. i’ve been writing more- recreationally. my resolution this year was to become the most insufferable woman in the world, so i am currently working on both a screenplay and a stand-up routine. i’ve also been doing some freelance editing and social media consulting. which like…..how millennial of me to do. 

circling back to the “having thousands more readers” on my blog thing i mentioned earlier, i checked my stats the other day and i’ve somehow gotten 10k page views in the last few months. i’ve been getting a lot of DMs on instagram/emails/etc from people that are like “oh my god i feel so much less alone now” which is insane. 

after nathan died, i purposefully stayed away from all grief content- i didn’t want any influence on what i was feeling- especially when i started writing how i was feeling. i wanted to be able to look back on it and know that the feelings i was writing about were uniquely mine. and then slowly, i started introducing works about grief into my reading lists and i also remember having those moments of “oh!! other people feel this way!!” but, if i’m being honest, a lot of grief writing makes me cringe. i hate platitudes, i hate cliches, i hate when people try to give me unsolicited advice and i hate published collections of advice even more. 

nonetheless, i keep getting asked the same question- “does it ever get easier?”

so here’s what i’ll say about that, it does. 

there was a period of time in my life where i’d be awake at 4am frantically googling “can you die from a broken heart?” (spoiler alert, apparently you can). i didn’t leave my house for 9 months. i literally could not be social without having to step away to cry. it was impossible to function. everything felt so incredibly empty (and i definitely still have days where things feel meaningless), i was literally a whisper of who i used to be. and then gradually, it got easier. my chest was a little less tight, the weight on my shoulders was a little lighter, and now i probably feel the closest to “myself” i’ve ever felt. 

everyone told me that the second year is the hardest, but there was a chunk of time where i didn’t even think i would make it to the second year. and then i did. and the second year has been weird (love grieving and also getting tossed into a pandemic) but it’s been better. i’ve been joking about it a lot more. which i’ve noticed a lot of people being very confused by- but to paint you a picture, one time pretty shortly after nathan died one of my friends texted me and was like “hey…..you haven’t made any jokes and i’m pretty concerned. you must really be doing terribly if you’re not joking about it” and they were right! i was doing terribly! 

but i’ll leave you with this- perhaps the most egregious platitude of them all- it gets better.

but first, it’s going to be really awful.

[stephhannes]

in light of the my chemical romance makeup collection that’s dropping, i’d like to revisit my undergrad thesis. 

when i originally published this, it was 2017. this was a time before the hype for the reunion show, before the actual reunion show, and before the announcement of the subsequent reunion tour. 

revisiting my thesis is interesting, because there are a lot of things that i still stand by, and a lot of things that i wish i could have conveyed in a clearer way. 

people ask me, “why are you so critical of this band?” it’s not necessarily the band i’m critical of. it’s the entire machine, of which the band is a cog in. i’m not saying that gerard way is sitting in his basement twiddling his thumbs thinking of ways to collect coins from impressionable fans- i’m saying that my chemical romance, llc (really, warner) is looking to cash grab wherever it can.

the heart of my thesis is this: my chemical romance used to make music, and now they make products. the entire point of the band was to rebel against the capitalist culture gerard had become so disillusioned with, only for the band to become what it originally hated. in the blog post gerard wrote after MCR first got signed, he said “This band was started and will end with three virtues: Honesty, Sincerity, and Loyalty. There are bands that have more to say to you than selling t-shirts from their personal clothing company.” when the band broke up, gerard wrote “My Chemical Romance had, built within its core, a fail-safe. A doomsday device, should certain events occur or cease occurring, would detonate. A perfect machine, beautiful, yet self aware of it’s system. Under directive to terminate before it becomes compromised. To protect the idea- at all costs…When it’s time, we stop.” 

yet, despite those declarations illustrating deep integrity and respect to the fans, the band continued to churn out merchandise after their breakup. and then later, announced a reunion despite the fact that the reason the band broke up is written right there, the honesty, sincerity, and loyalty was on the verge of being compromised- and reuniting is exactly what ended up compromising it. 

my chemical romance is no longer a band, they’re a business, and i will always be critical of a business.

also, as an aside: these are my thoughts on the palette. a makeup palette makes no sense as a product for the band to shill, but kudos to WB on doing something other than a t-shirt or flag or whatever. i’ve read that hipdot is decent quality, so that’s cool- but everything about the collection is so uninspired. the brush is bland, would’ve loved to at least see a rose-shaped brush inspired by the teaser video. the eyeliner is nothing to write home about. the shades in the palette do not have a cohesive color story. like i get what they were going for, but jesus christ you don’t have to be so literal. reds are notoriously tricky to make good, so it’ll be interesting to see them in action. the artwork on the palette is lazy, since it’s literally just the revenge cover. the coolest thing is the imprints on the shadows, but if you actually use the palette, that’ll disappear. i guess it makes a cool collector’s piece? but i’m sorry, if we’re eating the rich, the third people on my list are people that buy mid-tier makeup to keep as “collector’s pieces.” 

when i said “i want an album, not a palette,” what i meant by that was “i want something that is actually created by this band, or i want nothing at all” i don’t even really WANT a new album, because in all honesty, i don’t think it’d be good, or genuine. but if they’re going to pump something out, i’d at least like it to have some input from the band attached to it. 

+++

i actually don’t have a copy of the final version of my thesis, but here’s a link to one of the last drafts. 

[stephhannes]

steph’s seltzer showdown 3.0

by now, we all know that i am passionate about seltzer- and i’ve written two blogs reviewing all of the sparkling water i’ve tried. but i realized that the real hot topic is spiked seltzer. 

don’t worry, i’ve definitely got opinions on these. 

when i get tipsy, i send very detailed emails to seltzer companies with extensive reviews on their products, and when i’m sober i go off on rants to my friends when recommending (or talking shit about) a seltzer. here are my definitive thoughts on the seltzers i’ve tried so far:

the journey starts in 2018- i’d just moved to philly and learned what a beer distributor is, my partner and i got into the habit of Having A Drink After Work Every Night, and found ourselves frequenting the warehouse by our apartment. he loved beer, and i’ve never been a fan. so for the very first time, i picked up some spiked seltzers. i’ve always been a vodka soda girl, so it seemed right up my alley. 

speaking of spiked seltzer, the first brand i ever tried was just called Spiked Seltzer (now rebranded as Bon & Viv)

and i was very okay with it. until i tried a different brand- Truly. the difference was astonishing and i recognized two things: i loved spiked seltzer and i absolutely hated Spiked Seltzer. at the time, Truly had better flavor options, but more importantly, it had a cleaner taste, and was lacking the weird sweetness that SS had, with its 4g of sugar in comparison to Truly’s 1g. 

this is how i recognized my rubric for critiquing hard seltzers. 

is it too sweet?

how drinkable is it?

what are the flavor options like, and how consistent are they?

and for fun, what is its ideal drinking scenario?

it wasn’t until a year later that i tried White Claw. she’s like the la croix of spiked seltzers. she is a fan favorite, easily accessible, very mediocre flavor- neither disappointing nor exciting. 2g of sugar is just under the threshold to not be too weirdly sweet. white claws are incredibly drinkable, the flavors are just muted enough to not be overwhelming when drinking a lot consecutively. she’s a go girl, appropriate for any occasion. however, personally, i’d always opt for a truly instead if i’m looking for an easy-to-find standard go-to. but i’ll never turn down a white claw if it’s offered to me. 

the best flavor is easily back cherry, the worst is obviously watermelon. but overall, the quality of the flavors don’t really vary too much, which is expected for such a generic range of flavor profiles. 

then we have what i think might be my all-time favorite brand, Wild Basin. when i moved back to austin, i saw these EVERYWHERE and when i realized how dope their flavor combinations were, i picked up a variety pack. there’s the classic lime flavor, which is nothing to write home about necessarily, but out of every brand’s lime offering, theirs is definitely the best. however, the cucumber peach and melon basil flavors are absolutely STUNNING. this was the first time i’d seen a brand experimenting with combinations in such an exciting way. truly had started offering some more unique options by this point, but they weren’t as great as wild basin. she has everything i look for, 0g of sugar, unique but still versatile flavors, and as a side note, great customer service. as i mentioned earlier, i love to send companies my review, and i sent wild basin my glowing thoughts on their seltzer, and they were quick to respond and send me some merch for being a fan. they sent a few stickers, a fanny pack, a tank top, and a cap which was a super nice thing of them to do. they’re the only brand that’s responded to my fan mail. 

when she’s around, wild basin is my go-to. the gold standard for seltzers. 

they’ve recently released some new flavors which i have not tried yet, but i’m very much looking forward to. 

then i revisited Spiked Seltzer, they eventually rebranded themselves as Bon & Viv and i was hesitant for a very long time to try the new recipe out, because of how much i absolutely abhorred the original recipe. (side note: i think they’ve actually rebranded again as just Bon Viv but i digress) i didn’t want to waste my money on getting an entire variety pack, so i waited until the day i came across a single one i could buy- and i tried the pear elderflower flavor. i love elderflower, and i love pear so i was actually excited about this combo. 

i was surprised that i didn’t hate it. however, i have never thought about or drank another product from them since trying that one flavor. it was a very disappointing experience. the new recipe has less sugar, which i appreciate- and it just tastes better generally. the original was almost intolerable to drink if the seltzer wasn’t ice cold, this one i finished slowly- but still finished.

then the big beer names started pushing out seltzers. i’ve actually only tried the Natty Light seltzer in the catalina lime mixer flavor, and i’ll be honest with you- i didn’t hate it. i definitely would not categorize it as a hard seltzer though. in my tipsy review that i sent to natty light, i specified that it tastes like “a natty light, but for women,” and i stand by that. it would make a good Drink for Floating The River or a nice Drink To Watch Sports With, but i will never pick one up again. 

i haven’t tried the bud light seltzer yet, but i’m sure i’ll have the same feelings. 

i love to support local businesses, so obviously i tried the Eastciders seltzer when it came out in the black cherry flavor. it had everything i look for, not sugary, a good non-chemically flavor. i’ve picked it up a couple of times since trying it, but it’s not one i ever actively seek out. she’s nice to pair with dinner, as an enjoyable seltzer with an unobtrusive but decent flavor. the other flavors they offer are on the exact same level as the black cherry- unobtrusive but decent. 

finally, most recently, i’ve tried Blue Norther, also a local brand, but more disappointing than eastciders. while i would definitely re-purchase eastciders, i can’t say the same for blue norther. they currently offer three flavors, agave lime, wild blackberry and prickly pear. agave lime smells like sunscreen, and tastes like an incredibly generic lime flavor. i’d rank it higher than white claw’s lime, but that’s not saying a lot considering how mediocre white claw’s lime is. i found myself taking an incredibly long time to drink it, which isn’t a good thing because the second it starts to get warm, it becomes almost undrinkable. i almost want to categorize it with the Beer Brands That Make Seltzers because it has the same vibe as natty light’s seltzer. it would make a great River Day drink, but that’s the only time i would choose to drink it. 

the blackberry flavor was also nothing to write home about. it smelled more like artificial blueberry and absolutely does not hold a candle to the wild basin blackberry flavor. the blackberry flavor doesn’t even have the redeeming quality of having a good River Day vibe- it’s just unremarkable. 

for next time:

i have a list of who’s up next: i’m looking to try the rest of the Beer Brand seltzers (corona, bud light, shiner), i’ve also been seeing a lot of advertisements for vizzy, so she’ll be coming up. in addition to continue trying the flavors that wild basin and bon viv have to offer. 

i’m putting this out into the universe: i would love to get my hands on polar seltzer’s hard seltzer. if you remember, polar’s regular seltzer is my one true love, the end-all-be-all to sparkling water in my heart. 

update: putting it out into the universe proved to be beneficial to me- i realized that the total wine by my work sells Arctic Chill so i’ve just picked it up…and she is…literally everything i’ve dreamed of. she is dangerous. she tastes exactly like my all time favorite seltzer, cranberry lime, except with alcohol. i’m scared to try the clementine flavor because i do think i’m going to have war flashbacks to my time in NYC when i would mix clementine with whipped cream flavored vodka (don’t ever buy 6 handles of Wave Vodka let me tell you) but now i am desperate to get my hands on the ginger lime flavor, to compare it to my second all-time favorite seltzer- polar’s ginger lime mule. 

so far, wild basin is definitely my top pick, but you can’t go wrong with arctic chill if it’s being made with polar seltzer.

[stephhannes]

two years

nathan has been dead for as long as we were together.  

every person that i’ve talked to, every book that i’ve read, every sign that i’ve seen has pointed to “the second year after losing a partner is the hardest.”

this year wasn’t easy- but at least it made sense (for a little bit). in all honesty, i didn’t think i’d see the second year. the first year was so draining. i was so directionless. at least this year, i dug my heels in somewhere and gave it my best shot. i moved out of my mom’s house, i got three jobs, i lost fifty pounds, i took some genuine steps forward.

it didn’t always feel like progress, though.

it hasn’t felt like progress until now, when i’m sitting down trying to collect all my thoughts from the year. this year has felt rocky. every step forward came with two steps backward- i moved out of my mom’s house, and then a couple of weeks later accidentally ran over a dog and had to deal with not having a car for a little over a month. i started consistently going to the gym, and then i majorly sprained my ankle when i fell down a flight of stairs at work, which left me unable to work out for a couple of months, (and then when i started going back, i re-sprained the ankle while literally just walking down a sidewalk). i was depressed, stressed, but surprisingly well-dressed (aka i got my first professional haircut in 6 years and discovered the joy of a wide-legged pant).

and then, of course a pandemic hit and i gained ten pounds back, moved back into my mom’s house and started making more money on unemployment than i could have ever even dreamed of from physically working my three jobs.

there are some days where i’m proud of myself for doing what i’ve done this year- but every time i find myself positive for an extended amount of time, the voice in the back of my head is there, ready to make me feel like it’s all for nothing. i’ve said it a million times- i’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and i don’t want it. not without nathan. it all feels empty.

i’m trying though, and as someone said one time- “it’s the thought that counts.”

+++

i wanted to keep those last couple of paragraphs in, because they’re also how i feel- but the other day i had a moment of clarity. i was reflecting on what august 3rd, 2018 looked like. and i remembered how proud nathan was of me for doing so many things that seem like the bare minimum to me now. i did all of my errands in one day without taking a week to accomplish a few tasks, i read a book, i cooked dinner, i showered. he was proud of me, because at that time, accomplishing those things was a major feat for me.

the version of myself i am now, in august 2020 has no issue doing those things. i find it very easy to set out on a list of action items and get them done within a day. i consistently cook dinner for myself, and actually really enjoy it now. i still maybe don’t shower as often as i should, but that’s just who i am at the core of my being, honestly. i’ve read 23 books so far this year, literally before writing this blog i sat down and read an entire novel. it’s hard to imagine that the period of time between moving to philly and nathan’s death was probably my rock bottom, but it really was. even on my worst days, in the middle of the worst weeks in the last two years, i haven’t been as dangerously depressed as i was back then.  

+++

i keep accidentally telling people that i’m 23 years old when they ask my age. i think it’s because these last two years haven’t felt real. it’s weird, because the two years that nathan and i were together flew by so quickly. when he first moved to new york, we were dreading having to spend 9 months long-distance. we thought it would go by painfully slow, but it flew by.

and then our year in new york flew by.

we accomplished so much in those two years- three degrees between the two of us, living in three different states, undoing years of trauma, the usual.

time has seemed to stand still since he died. i laid in bed for a year, and then upgraded to laying in bed for only 16 hours a day for the second year.

i still haven’t figured out what i want to do, where i want to be, who i’m trying to become- and i think that’s contributing to the stagnation i’ve been feeling.

for years, being able to take care of nathan was a huge percentage of what i felt was my purpose. when we were in high school, my life revolved around dropping everything that was going on with me to be able to be there for him when he was struggling, on occasion he’d return the gesture.

when we were in college, and weren’t actively in each others’ lives, i grew up a lot. i discovered self-esteem, and learned how to be emotionally self-sufficient. as a child, i grew up lonely, and had always been pretty independent- in high school i let a little bit of that guard down to let nathan in, but in college i cemented my inability to accept help from other people. when nathan and i first started seriously talking again, i remember him trying to tiptoe around my feelings, and i was like “dude, i’m really not as sensitive as i was back in high school, you don’t have to treat me like a china doll, i can handle whatever you’re trying to say,” and i remember him responding with “you’re right. you’ve come a long way from that girl i met ten years ago.”

when we started dating, i resigned aspects of my personality. i tried to be more vulnerable. i tried to be less combative and defensive. when we got together, i changed my entire life for our relationship. i already had a job lined up for after graduation,  but when we got together, i immediately gave it up to commit to move to new york after i graduated- to be with nathan and support him through grad school. i remember the day he told me that he wouldn’t do the same thing for me. and it hurt. realistically, i know that it made sense for us to base our life around his career- obviously, i could have found a job anywhere, and no matter where it was, i wouldn’t have made any money. obviously, it made sense for both of us to invest in his success over mine- but it was hard to recognize that i so easily gave up everything to support his goals, when he wouldn’t have done the same thing for me, and he was so easily able to say that to me. this came up a lot when we were talking about our plans for the future. when we moved to philly, i got an opportunity to interview for a dream job, and while i was so excited about it- nathan discouraged me from pursuing it- because it was in theatre, which meant working nights and weekends, which meant that our schedules would become incompatible and we would never see each other.

it was a valid point, so we compromised. i’d go into the second interview for the job, but negotiate different hours and if that didn’t pan out, i wouldn’t take the job. nathan died a couple of days before the interview so i guess that problem resolved itself.

it would be unfair for me to sit here and paint a picture of him never doing anything for me though, that’s not the truth. i remember being shocked when he decided to not move forward with pursuing a phd. it was partially because that was the way the cookie crumbled, but a huge part of that decision was because he wanted to be able to spend time with me, and he wouldn’t have been able to if he was in a phd program.

i don’t regret setting my goals aside for him, it made sense. but more importantly, that’s what i wanted to do. i wanted to do whatever i could to make sure he had everything he wanted. he deserved it.

but it’s been weird to recognize all the things i subconsciously stopped doing throughout our relationship. i used to dye my hair once a week- but i didn’t dye my hair the entire time we were in nyc. additionally, my hair was the longest it’d ever been since like 2007 while we were together.  i used to have a quirky sense of style, but my outfits in nyc were pretty boring, even more boring once we moved to philly.  i think part of that was influenced by the fact that when i moved to nyc i was only able to take one suitcase of clothes, and focused on basics that would be easily multipurposed, and i couldn’t afford to upkeep haircut/color myself anymore, but i think part of it was influenced by this inherent desire to not be unattractive to nathan. a few months ago, i got my nose pierced, which was something that was definitely not on the table when nathan and i were together- and now i think my only personality trait is having a pierced nose, i can’t imagine my face without it. a few weeks ago i straight up shaved off half of my hair. and like, yeah it looks stupid, but it’s so freeing to be able to look stupid without worrying about what anyone else has to say about it. i’ve never cared what people think about my style, which is obvious in the way that i wore cat sweaters to school every day senior year of high school, and literally just everything i did between the years of 2005 and 2009- but i did always care about what nathan thought.

it’s been strange re-discovering these things. it’s felt weird to rebuild my personality, my interests, my goals without nathan in the picture.

+++

i’m not saying that i’m a person that believes that ‘everything happens for a reason’ (mostly because i think that’s a cop-out. it’s easy to justify anything as ‘happening for a reason’ when there’s enough distance between the event and the outcomes) but hypothetically, if i were, it would make a lot of our relationship make sense.

i’ve always been thankful that we never dated in high school- we would have straight up destroyed each others’ lives. we were both super toxic, and immature, and it wouldn’t have ended well. of course, when i was 16 and things weren’t working out, i thought it was the end of the world- but in retrospect, the people that we were in high school weren’t romantically compatible. i think it’s really special that we were able to have a successful relationship after the 10 years of drama. i think that it’s really special that when we were apart, we grew up into two markedly different puzzle pieces that ended up  fitting together perfectly. i think it’s really special that no matter what happened, no matter what city we were in, we always came back to each other periodically. no matter what.

when we got together, the timing wasn’t ideal- but it was the right time. we both knew that we would end up together at some point- i don’t think either of us would have been able to rest until it happened, and i think it’s really special that when we decided to take that chance, we didn’t know if things would work out, necessarily- but they did.

if i were to hypothetically believe that everything happens for a reason, i think it was a gift to me to be with someone that had already lost a partner. i learned a lot about differentiating between aspects of his personality that were genuinely who he was, and what was learned as a coping mechanism. i learned a lot about giving him space to grieve, how to be gentle with certain feelings and emotions. i learned a lot about how to push him to overcome trauma, but not push too far. all of that has given me a framework for what to expect and need from a partner in the future when i start seriously dating again.

if i thought that everything happened for a reason, the reason for our relationship was to teach me something. the difference between nathan and i was that he was a serial monogamist, constantly in a long-term relationship, and i was the exact opposite. by the time we got together, he’d been through the motions of dealing with someone for an extended period of time. and for me, our relationship was like a crash course in monogamy. moved in together as soon as we could, engaged on our 2nd anniversary. with the way that things panned out, i’m glad that we never took a break, that we moved quickly. i learned a lot about the importance of consistency and commitment.

but more importantly, i think our relationship was for him. it is infinitely heartbreaking to recognize that there are so many things that he will never get the chance to accomplish, so many things he’ll never see- but on the other hand of that, i watched him have a full character arc. it’s sad that he didn’t get to exist in this reality of being genuinely happy for longer, but i’m so grateful that he was able to rest there for a little while, at least. i’ll never forget all of the moments where he was so touched by me showing him what i thought of as just the bare minimum of human decency. there was one night that i stayed on the phone with him for 6 hours because he was having a bad night, and the next day he was so emotional because that was “the most loving thing” anyone’s ever done for him, but to me it was a no-brainer, of course i’m going to stay on the phone with you when you’re having a bad night, that’s what i’m here for. at the beginning of our relationship, he was nervous to be vulnerable around me, and every time he was scared to talk about something i’d have to remind him, “you’ve known me for 11 years, i’ve seen a lot, you’ve told me a lot, have i ever shamed you for anything you’d told me?” and he’d remember that, no, i’ve always been level-headed and understanding- and eventually we were able to work through things in a much more productive way.

i think a lot about all the things he was scared to talk to me about, and the thing i think about the most is that he was scared because someone in the past had given him reason to feel ashamed. i hate that for years, he felt like he had to compartmentalize himself.

and i remember after years of showing him this grace, of giving him all the space in the world to be exactly who he was- the day when i finally started seeing him sharing these parts of himself with people that weren’t me. i eventually started to see the walls he had built coming down, a brick at the time, but coming down nonetheless. and i was so proud.

it’s hard for me to let go of our relationship. i miss nathan every day- but i also have to keep reminding myself that i served my purpose. i did what i was supposed to do. i was a good, consistent partner. i loved him, and supported him, and gave him everything i could. the point of marriage is to stand by someone’s side until they die, and that’s exactly what i did. there’s nothing else i can do. our relationship was good, and it was short, but it was full of excitement and love and growth. it was everything that i dreamt of when i was 15 years old and had no idea what a relationship should look like. it was everything that i dreamt of when nathan and i were hesitant about trying to pursue a relationship.

it was everything.

+++

at a work training last year, we did an icebreaker where we paired up and randomly selected one question from a stack of prompts to answer and talk about with your partner. the question i got was “what’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done?”

prior to nathan’s death, i don’t think i’ve ever been brave. i’ve always been timid, bravery was never an outward expression for me- maybe there were moments where i was quietly brave, but i would have never described anything i’d done as brave.

my answer to the question was “oh, i guess probably when i had to give nathan cpr”

here’s the thing, honestly when i think about that day, and the subsequent weeks, i’m in shock at how capable i was. for the first time in my life, in the midst of a literal crisis, i was calm, and solution-oriented. that’s not who i am, i love to catastrophize about the tiniest things.

i wouldn’t have been able to do it without nathan. without his endless patience. without his ability to be both firm with me when i was letting my anxiety get ahold of me, yet gentle enough to not hurt my feelings. without the years of him believing in me, even when i didn’t believe in myself. we set each other up for success.

+++

i feel like there’s been a lot of negativity in this blog, which isn’t the impression i’m trying to leave. i’m gonna be honest with y’all- with all this free time in quarantine, i’ve found myself out here revisiting stages of grief that i left behind months ago just for funsies. except nothing about it is what i would describe as funsies. it’s been a lot of anger, and i think that’s why there’s this underlying bitterness in what i’ve been saying.

it’s easier to get angry, to try to distance myself from the relationship, to make it seem like things weren’t great because it’s infinitely harder to remember how much i loved nathan and how much love i have left within me to give to him.

i’ve found myself awake in the middle of the night, revisiting old arguments, thinking of all the things i wish i’d said, revisiting moments where i’d wished i’d shown a little more backbone, revisiting moments where i wish i’d been gentler, or quicker to apologize. the problem is that i’m a lot more emotionally intelligent now- but obviously it’s easy to be a genius when you have two years to reflect on things, to dive in, to unpack everything and analyze it.

when i spend time thinking about these shortcomings, obviously they find their way into my writing. that’s just the reality of trying to be a reliable narrator. not every character is perfect.

the only way i know how to keep nathan close to me, to keep him around is writing about the time we spent together. and the reality of it is, that time was tumultuous for a solid 7 years. it’s been weird trying to navigate the line of “what are things that i want to keep just for us, and what are things i’m ok with sharing publicly?” i have an enormous online footprint. i’ve been a public figure online for like 10 years. i’ve always been on social media. i’m fine with that for myself- but my relationship with nathan was private, especially once we actually started dating. when it came to our relationship, neither of us publicly shared much. for awhile after he died, part of me wanted to keep everything for myself- not let anyone in. but then i remembered this sentiment that nathan shared with me time and time again- “i just want everyone to know that i’m yours.”

the other day i was looking through old instagram posts, and the one i made for our engagement literally just said “y’all ever uhhhh...get engaged?” and that was it. and that felt completely appropriate. i’ve always been skeeved out when couples post overly romantic garbage on social media. what are you trying to prove? why is it so important to you for people who barely know you to read a post and know how ~madly in love~ you are? performativity in relationships makes me so uncomfortable, and i’m really thankful that neither nathan nor i were interested in that at all- people that didn’t know us didn’t get to make conclusions about our relationship, and the people that did know us were able to make their own conclusions based on how they saw us interacting with each other, or how we’d talk about each other to our friends when we weren’t in the same room together. all of that time that others spend on taking a good picture for instagram, or writing a perfect caption, or whatever was time that nathan and i got to have just for ourselves. we spent as much time together as we could. 

my disdain of performativity runs even deeper than that, though. i’m even a little uncomfortable when a couples’ public wedding vows are too intimate. i always had two sets. there was the one that i read at nathan’s funeral- that was what i had planned on saying publicly at our wedding, but there was also another much more extensive letter that i was going to give to him privately. 

i feel like when i made that engagement post on instagram and facebook, a lot of people were like “wow that seems sudden!” but everyone that really knew us was like “oh hell yeah, i’m surprised it took this long” my coworkers literally predicted my engagement before i had even considered that it was going to happen. when i left work early for our anniversary someone straight up was like “if you don’t come back on tuesday with a ring on your finger i’m sending you back home.” because they’d heard the way i talked about nathan, they’d seen us interact with each other. it made sense.

we made it a point to not actively talk shit about each other to anyone else. which i think was really helpful for me specifically, a person who loves to hold a grudge- every time he did something that mildly annoyed me, i wouldn’t just pop off and vent to whoever, i’d just talk to him about it and the issue would resolve itself. on bigger issues, i would talk to my close friends about it but never in a “my boyfriend sucks” kind of way, just in a “this is an issue i’ve been having and idk the best way to resolve it, what are your thoughts?” kind of way.

for some reason, it’s always surprised me when i realized that nathan actually talked about me when i wasn’t in the room. like, obviously he would, but it was always surprising to me. when i first met his friends, a couple of people were like “oh!!! we’ve heard so much about you.” and i was just like wow i didn’t think that you’d even know that i existed. sometimes when i’d show up to a party someone would be like “so i heard that (celebrity) showed up at your work the other day, how was that?” and i would be like how do you know these things about me, and then i’d remember that nathan was talking about me and it was always super heartwarming.

after nathan died, a few people mentioned some particularly nice things he’d said about me when i wasn’t in the room, and every time someone would mention something, i’d be like “wow! i can’t believe this man that obviously loves me also loves me when i’m not around!” it’s like i’m a baby that still hasn’t learned about object permanence.

+++

i feel bad for not writing more this year. excluding this blog, i’ve only posted twice since last august. a big reason for that is every time i sit down to try to write something, whether it be a facebook post on a significant anniversary, or a full-length blog, i get discouraged because for right now, i feel like i’ve said everything i can say. i feel like the first year after nathan died, i was great at being poignant and sharing these little insights and as more time passes, as these anniversaries come again, i don’t have a better way to say what i’ve already said.

the core of every post is the same- i miss nathan. i love nathan. and for as long as i can find ways to say it, i will.

most days, missing nathan feels the same. it’s a dull ache that’s always there, but that i’ve grown accustomed to, that i’ve grown to live with. on occasion, it’s a more acute pain. the other night, i cried because i had the thought, “i wonder if my cats miss nathan,” i think they do, but for some reason, that thought made missing him hurt a little more that day.

i still mostly only sleep on my side of the bed, but the other day i got upset because i realized that my full-sized mattress seemed small. it’s never felt like that before.

the first year of our relationship, we shared twin sized beds, and it never seemed too small, not even with the two of us. when we upgraded to a full, it felt huge, it seemed like there was so much space between us when we were on our respective sides- by the morning we always ended up on the same side, literally attached to each other. the other night i found myself not understanding how i’d lived with a twin sized mattress my entire life, i felt claustrophobic with just myself and my laptop in the bed. it was just another physical reminder of how different things are, how different my perspective is now that nathan is gone.

the world feels a lot smaller without nathan in it.

[stephhannes]

i love you so much: a goodbye to the city i keep coming back to

things looked a lot different a year ago. 

a year ago, i was scared. i spent all my time from august 2018 to june 2019 trying to run away from myself- i was straight up feral. i didn’t go into public by myself, i didn’t interact with anyone that i hadn’t already known for at least 5 years, i was a real-life mountain troll. toward the end of my 9 month break, i was finally feeling restless. here’s the thing, abilene is an alright place to be if you don’t have the mental capacity to be a human, but as soon as i started regaining consciousness i knew i needed to get out. 

and what do you know? my roommate from college stayed in our same apartment after i left, just got a new roommate- and at the time i was trying to leave abilene, her roommate was moving out. so i literally just moved right back into the room that i was in during undergrad. 

it was the logical best next move for me, austin was familiar, i already had a support system, and i wouldn’t have to be living alone, or with a random roommate. i was moving back in with my best friend, thank god.

when i moved back in, i felt like a ghost haunting my own home. i put in so much care to make sure the room looked and felt different, but it was impossible to forget everything that happened there. 

i moved into that apartment the first time in 2015, a month after my dad died. i bought furniture for the first time- literally just two bookshelves and a nightstand from ikea. i brought my twin sized mattress from abilene, complete with a broken frame that i never bothered to fix. i slept on a sagging mattress for two years straight and honestly i think i have irreparable neck problems because of it. 

i filled my walmart picture collage frame with pictures from high school and freshman year of undergrad. nothing really matched, but it was my first time really living on my own- for the first time, not in a dorm, or sharing a tiny space with four other roommates. 

a few months after moving into that apartment was when nathan came back into my life in a more consistent way. we’d reconnected in march of 2015, and after not talking to each other for 9 months after that, we finally started talking regularly in november. 

november 2015 through march 2016 was a markedly terrible time in my life. i was finally allowing myself to feel the grief i’d been bottling for months over my father’s death. i remember crying in front of my mirror in the dim glow of my $5 target lamp at 4am every night, hoping my roommate wouldn’t hear me from across the apartment. 

february 2016, i remember the night i realized that nathan had a girlfriend that i hadn’t necessarily been told about yet- i remember getting taco bell, drinking a bottle of peach moscato, throwing up on my balcony, and then laying in bed and crying to the new 1975 album that had just come out. that album really hit every emotional achilles i had at the time. 

like, ‘somebody else’ hit me right in the “it’s been seven years and i am still playing a game that i can never get first place in” achilles.

every time i start to believe in anything you’re saying i’m reminded that i should be gettin’ over it. i’m looking through you while you’re looking through your phone and leaving with somebody else. 

and nana hit me right in the “your dad just died” achilles. 

but i’m bereft you see, i think you can tell- i haven’t been doing too well.  

my first spring break in my apartment was a wild time. it was march 2016 and i’d invited my best friend to stay with me for the week- we were heavily participating in sxsw. by that, i mean, i was experiencing open bars for the first time in my life and was fully taking advantage. it was nice to have a home to return to at the end of the night though, because the last time i’d tried to participate in sxsw and stay in austin during spring break, i was living in a dorm that some nights straight up wouldn’t let me in, so i had to sleep in my car sometimes. 

this was also the time when things with nathan were taking a different turn than i’d expected. after i found out he had a girlfriend, and my friends saw how heartbroken i was, we were all on our “help steph move on” bullshit. but at this point, nathan was was aggressively pursuing me, and we ended up growing a lot closer by the end of spring break. 

at the end of march, nathan made a playlist for me, and that was all i listened to for a couple of weeks. when i play it nowadays all i can think of are the nights i’d spent laying in my bed and staring at my ceiling listening to it, wishing things would work out for us. 

i remember laying in bed, unable to sleep, and getting a text at 4am on april 8th that said “hopefully you’re asleep, don’t like freak out because i don’t expect anything back. i really am in love with you, and i’m really happy about it. i just needed to tell you that, holding it in was killing me.” and i remember laying in bed for 5 hours after that wrestling with the fact that i was definitely catching feelings again, and knowing that pursuing anything would put me back in that position i’d been in so many times before- us being in love with each other but him having a girlfriend and not making any real attempts to be with me. 

and finally, sending the “i love you too,” text and going to sleep at 9am. 

and then we start getting into the events that, when i eventually moved back into my apartment in 2019, i was unable to shake, that i was constantly reminded of. 

nathan came to see me for the first time in that apartment toward the end of april 2016. he was getting over a cold, so instead of going out, we mostly stayed in- which was fine. it’s so strange to look back and see how quickly things progressed between us, considering the instance in mid-march when i was at his apartment in abilene, and he got sick, and all i wanted to do was comfort him, but i didn’t, because i was like “oh that would be weird, wouldn’t it? that’s too intimate.” and i went home instead. compared to this visit in mid-april where we were sharing my twin-sized bed and i was like “oh i’m in love with this person,” as he was snoring next to me. 

and what had once been a home that held all of my heartbreak and anguish became the place where the foundation of our relationship was built. 

we got together at a very hectic time in our lives, it was finals for both of us, and also his undergrad graduation. so while we did spend a little bit of time together then, we didn’t really get to spend quality time with each other until june 2016, when he came to stay with me in austin for a couple weeks. 

this was the first time he met all of my friends, at the apartment. this was the first time that we cooked dinner together. this was when i taught him about my favorite pastime, the wine bath. this was the first time we talked about getting married. this was when we got into one of our first, and only fights. this was the first time we spent a lot of time together, consistently. something we were both a little nervous about- considering both of our introvert tendencies. but this was the first time that we realized that we loved being around each other constantly. 

when nathan moved to new york, i mentally moved out of my apartment. physically, my body was there, but i was constantly daydreaming about where i knew i’d be in a few months. every time nathan and i talked, it was about our plans for the future in nyc. sometimes when i look through old texts, i can remember exactly where i was standing in the apartment when i received them. 

january 2017.  (stephanie, sitting on bedroom floor, surrounded by papers, studying for a spanish quiz) nathan: can i just marry you now? i’m reading through old letters again and it was so hard not to ask for two weeks. i don’t know how i’m going to be able to wait until what i have planned.

september 2016.  (stephanie, laying in bed, listening to the rain fall through her half-cracked window) nathan: i love you and i miss you and i can’t wait until we’re asleep together again. even when i’m stressed out from moving and completely on my own you make it all better. stephanie, i am so very lucky to be yours and i can’t wait to propose to you and have a wedding and do all those things i never wanted to do because i love doing stuff like that with you. at the end of the day, knowing that i’m coming home to you and getting to go to bed together at the end of a bad day is the best thing in the world because you’re all i need. 

october 2016.  (stephanie, after spending the hours between 1am and 8am having a nervous breakdown while nathan was asleep, finally passes out) 9am. nathan: i know you had a bad night, so here’s a bodega cat to cheer you up

may 2017. (stephanie, sitting in front of full-length mirror, begrudgingly putting on makeup to get ready for a class trip to the roller derby) nathan: can i see? i miss your face. you’re pretty enough that i would go to roller derby with you 

jan 2017. (stephanie, very drunk on balcony with sarah) nathan: i’m so lucky you fell in love with me again baby, i was talking to anu about you tonight and it makes me happier than anything to think about spending every day with you. i love you so much and can’t wait until you’re here.

march 2017. 5am.  (stephanie, very asleep) nathan: baby, i miss you so much. i just don’t feel okay being apart from you because it feels like i’m never whole. it was a big mistake to watch les mis tonight because every song just reminds me of driving away from austin and it makes me so sad that we’re so perfect for each other but keep getting separated for so long. i love you so much and i never want to be apart again.

i was so excited to get out, to leave that apartment, to move on with my life, and leave austin. i never thought i would think about that room again. but of course, after nathan died, i thought about it again. 

when i was living in abilene after nathan died, i’d come to austin to visit sarah and i’d sleep on the couch in the apartment that i used to live in. i was a visitor in the home i used to love, taking an ambien force myself asleep on the same couch that i used to accidentally fall asleep on, only for nathan to wake me up a respectable amount of time later because i cannot be trusted to responsibly nap. 

when i moved back in officially, one year ago, it felt empty. i filled the room with new furniture, but i could never sleep, because i was plagued with the memory of everything that room used to hold. a space that nathan used to occupy, but now only exists in in the pile of his shirts i kept in the closet. instead of waking up and seeing his face next to mine, i had my walmart picture collage frame that i had updated with pictures from undergrad and nyc. 

here’s the thing- it was tough, emotionally, to be living there again. but looking back now, it’s definitely been tougher to pack everything up and distance myself from yet another thing that kept me tied to nathan. at this point, i have very few things left that were ours, and every time i lose another tie, it takes a toll on me. 

everyone that used to know us seems concerned- but if they knew that when you went through my mind i’m full of your love that illuminated our house for all those years. 

+++

so, one year ago i was finally out on my own again. i was employed for the first time since nathan died, and i was so nervous to have to interact with new people for the first time. i’ve never been a social butterfly, but after becoming a recluse, i knew i was even more inept. i didn’t realize how much i’d changed after nathan died until i was forced to learn how to be a human again. 

my worst qualities were right back at the forefront. my reluctance to be a decision-maker, my anxiety, my quietness. these were all traits that i had distanced myself from in nyc- in nyc i was bold, annoying, independent, sometimes even the life of the party. in austin, i was timid, unfocused, and unsure of myself. 

however, i think the biggest culture shock was realizing what it feels like to not absolutely loathe your job. at my core, i enjoy being a house manager- but oh my god the DRT sucked the soul straight out of my body in a way i didn’t even recognize until i was gone. it was a strange adjustment to be somewhere where i didn’t feel like i had to be on defense at all times. 

it was wild to be in a workplace where all i had to do was come to work and go home and not hate my life. when i was in nyc, i would spend an hour just being miserable while getting ready for work, and then suffer through a 40 minute subway commute to land in union square and surround myself with people that didn’t give a shit about me, work in unsafe conditions, and get harassed by patrons- only to come home unable to shake whatever bullshit i dealt with at work. nathan and i had a block of time in our schedule that was dedicated to me passionately complaining about my day while he played video games and vaguely ignored me, because i wasn’t looking for any logical solutions, i just wanted to vent for awhile. 

so yeah, i showed up to work in austin a little broken and weird- but no one ever made me feel that way. everyone just adapted to the weird energy i brought to the table and accepted it. which is exactly what i needed. 

i can’t pinpoint specifically when it happened, but at one point, everything clicked and i was finally becoming a functional human again. i stopped having days where i felt foggy at work, i stopped stumbling over my words so much, i got comfortable with decision-making. i’d like to go on record to say that i only cried at work two times- once when the bar played a song that was played at nathan’s funeral and once when a patron smelled like the shampoo nathan used in high school. which for me, is pretty impressive. 

i was just re-reading the blog i wrote when i first moved back to austin, and it’s hilarious how deeply committed to “faking it until you make it” i was. i wrote about how i was “finally becoming myself again,” and in retrospect, i definitely wasn’t going back to myself. when i first started back to work, i was on a high- finally socializing again, actually using my brain and body to problem-solve and contribute to society. but as soon as i came off of that high, i was left feeling guilty for moving forward with my life, and feeling unsure of who i was and what i was capable of. 

i think the most important lesson i’ve learned this year is that it’s okay to just feel the way i’m feeling. i don’t always have to glean some deeper meaning from every emotion, i don’t have to question myself and wonder if i’m wrong, or if i’m progressing normally. i spent so much time hypothesizing how to get out of uncomfortable situations that i never even ended up experiencing. my biggest issue is the way i overthink everything, and lately i’ve been trying to not do that as much. 

i’ve pretty consistently felt lonely since nathan died. i still feel that emptiness, no matter where i am, or what i’m doing. i still haven’t found the right thing, or combination of things to fill that void. sometimes i feel a little closer than others, but it’s always there. 

after nathan died, if i needed something to immediately make me cry, i’d listen to the song we planned to use for our first dance. and then i decided that wasn’t healthy, so i didn’t listen to it for like 6 months. the other night, i was drunk and it came up on shuffle, and did i maybe slow dance with myself and cry for the whole three minutes and fifty seconds? yeah, maybe. 

remember when i lived in tennessee, and you came to visit- slept next to me. we shared a wooden bed not meant for two, and i told you i loved you- and i still do. but i’m tired of talking, let’s go to bed- cause i just need to get out of my head. i’ve been trying to keep our burdens light- i just wasn’t made for these times. i’ll stay as long as you will have me, and i’ll follow if you want to lead. and i’ll share the load that gets so heavy- wherever you take me, home i will be. i think that maybe i lost myself on a year of trying to be someone else. now i’m scared, and sad, and feeling stuck- but i ain’t ever gonna give you up. wherever you take me, home i will be. 

+++

the other day, i made a joke about how i was going to write a linkedin article called “what tortellini taught me about professional development” 

because for the first time in my life, i was able to delegate tasks to minimize my own workload. 

i’ve made it pretty clear that i suffer from an inability to accept help from anyone, no matter what the situation is. but, while cooking dinner for jose and dan, i actually allowed jose to be in the kitchen with me, and help me cook dinner. 

i’m gonna be honest, i don’t like giving up the control, but i guess it was nice to not have to do everything by myself for once. 

i never thought of myself as a control freak, and maybe i was less of one in the past, but after nathan’s death, the thought of not being in charge of every situation is incredibly stressful to me, so it’s a miracle that my anxiety allowed me to at least try to accept help. 

+++

now that theatre is cancelled for the foreseeable future, i’ve been trying to figure out what i’m going to do with my life and my very niche set of skills. i never thought i’d be someone that missed their job, but my job was my only stepping stone to the outside world and i’ve definitely been verging on becoming feral again. 

with no structure, i can’t manage a sleep schedule. last month, i looked at myself in the mirror and was straight up disgusted- i hadn’t been outside in so long that i was looking sickly. 

after that, i’ve been trying to make a genuine effort to like…go outside once a day and wake up before 9pm which has been working out alright, but who knows how long i can manage that. 

i’m back in abilene for the moment, while i figure out what my next move is going to be. it might be saving up for a couple of months and moving back to austin but i’m gonna be honest with y’all, every time i have a singular alcohol in my system all i can think about is moving back to NYC so…..who knows…anything is possible considering nothing is real anymore. 

[stephhannes]

new year, who dis

what would be the use in becoming a symbol of walking desolation? awash in multiple griefs, elaborating on anguish. even if i never get to see you again, i’ll know that when we collided we both broke each other open. 

                                                   -mount eerie, love without possession 

i guess it’s been four months since i’ve sat down to write an actual blog. i figured i should at least try to get something out before the new year. 

i’ve tried to write an update a few times over the last couple of months, but every time i tried to write something, it’s just aggressively sad. like that one st. vincent lyric— i try to write you a love song, but it comes out a lament. and while an aggressively sad tone is appropriate to how i’ve been feeling, i’ve been trying to bring less sad energy to the table. (a surprise to everyone, because sad energy is my entire brand). 

I planned to get this blog up by january 1st. and then i kept putting it off. hence why this starts off saying things like, “i guess it’s been four months,” and “i figured i should at least try to get something out before the new year.” today is february 4th, which means it’s officially been a year and a half since nathan died. 

in the last few weeks, i’ve been under a lot of stress. i’m juggling three jobs right now, and somehow still don’t make enough money to survive. i’m sure that at this point, i’ve described to you my bona-fide money saving technique. it’s called “i only eat three days a week because it’s too expensive to feed myself every day,” sometimes, i get lucky, and get the scraps from events at work, and that’s literally like the one (1) thing i look forward to. 

i’m still out here searching for a salary (and health insurance) and hopefully, by my birthday, i’ll have that. but we’ll see, the job search has been uhhh…..abysmal to say the least. 

anyways, in the midst of being stressed, i’ve realized that i really don’t think about nathan all the time like i used to. sometimes i’ll go like two days before i’m reminded of him. the other day, i was like “am i a bad person because of this?” and like, logically, i know that it’s totally normal, but on the other hand, i can’t help but feel guilty because of it sometimes. i feel a sense of responsibility to exist as a reminder of “hey, this person existed, and they mattered,” and while i realize that’s a huge weight to put onto myself, i feel like if i don’t, then who will? 

last night, i was reading house of leaves (which, despite owning a copy since high school, i’ve actually never read it before) and i found nathan’s bookmark (a ticket from a baseball game he went to right after he moved to new york) in it, from when i let him take a few of my books when he moved to nyc. i got weirdly emotional and was like “wow what a fun coincidence to find this item of nathan’s that i’ve never seen before in my life on the 1.5 year anniversary of him dying.” i’m not saying i’m superstitious, but maybe i am a little stitious. 

+++

since the last time i wrote a blog, i’ve kept notes on my phone every time something happens that i feel holds some sort of importance- so here’s what’s been in my notes since august 4th. 

august 24, 2019. 4:17am

when i went into work on august 5th, a coworker of mine asked how i was doing. i was doing alright. the anniversary of nathan’s death really didn’t hit me too hard. i assumed i would have a huge nervous breakdown, and i didn’t. 

then my coworker, who’d also lost a partner, told me, “i hate to sound negative and be the one to tell you this but the second year is a lot harder than the first.”

that’s what i’d been reading online for months, but to hear someone say it to my face i was just like… oh shit. 

and so far, the second year has been harder. 

i’ve officially been out on my own for a month now. 

the best part about having depression is that no matter where you are, you still have depression. i don’t know why i was expecting moving to just alleviate all of my sadness when i know that i’ll always find a way to be miserable wherever i am. 

it’s nice to be out of abilene and at least have the option of opportunity, but i basically just spend all of my free time asleep or crying. 

as the ancient oracle, britney spears, once said- “my loneliness is killing me.”

now that i’ve started getting into a routine, i’m starting to feel that hole in my life again. 

i’m on the same schedule that i was when i lived in new york, almost. 

when we lived in new york, i would leave for work around 4, i’d get home around 11:30, and then nathan and i would hang out until around 4am, and then go to bed. the next day, he’d usually wake me up at a normal time, (or at least 2 hours before i had to be at work). 

and now i have to leave for work around 4:30, i get home around 11, and when i come home i’m just alone. and i lay in bed until i’m finally exhausted enough to fall asleep, usually around 5am. and then i wake up ten minutes before i have to go to work. 

i have been feeling this deep, existential sadness for awhile now. every night, i lay in bed and think about all of the conversations i wish i could revisit with nathan. all of the things i wish i’d said. i relive all of my favorite moments of ours. i am still so desperate to feel close to him again. 

i cannot remember a time in my life when i was excited to wake up. i cannot remember a time when i looked forward to my future. in fact, when i think about my mental health as a child, the only thing i remember is one time when i was 12, my dad bought me tickets to see my favorite band. i was obviously so incredibly excited, and expressed the human emotion of joy, and my mother accused me of being on drugs because she’d “never seen me act like that before.” it was so surprising to her to see me happy that she literally thought i was on drugs.

i’ve been like this for as long as i can remember, except for the two years that nathan and i were together. i was still so depressed when we lived together, but for the first time, i was looking forward to the future. for the first time, dealing with my depression seemed worth it. for the first time, putting effort into getting better made sense.  

for the first time in my life, i didn’t feel alone. 

and it took a lot of effort on nathan’s part to make sure that i didn’t feel alone. the loneliness i’ve always felt is like a self-fulfilling prophecy. i actively choose to retreat from friendships and relationships. i stop responding to texts. i hide away and cancel plans. it’s my fault that i feel isolated- because i isolate myself. and nathan refused to let me do that. when i get stressed, i internalize everything and take it all on my own- and nathan would recognize when i was doing that and beg me to let him help. and i wouldn’t let him help. but he would still do it, because he knew what i needed without me asking and would just quietly provide it for me so that i wouldn’t lose my mind. and a lot of the time the help was just him actively sitting me down and reminding me that i’m in fact, not alone. i’ll never forget when i was so stressed after moving to new york because i was so poor, and nathan telling me that “it’ll be okay. we’ll figure it out.” i never asked him for money, or for help, because i have too much pride for that. but even when i was working, i was struggling to make ends meet for myself, and he would sneakily do things like go to the grocery store and be like “oh hey, i was at the store today and just picked up some chicken for you so you don’t have to go yourself.” there were a few times when i asked him to pick up something from the halal cart for me because i didn’t want to get out of bed and i’d be like “there’s cash in my wallet just grab it” but instead of taking the money from my wallet, he’d just get the food for me, and put the change he had leftover in my wallet for me to have.

but even past that, just emotionally, he’d always reassure me that i wasn’t alone. as soon as he started to sense me doing the thing where i try to isolate myself, he’d just cling to me even harder. 

here’s the thing: i’m too tired to fight for myself, and i don’t have anyone that’ll fight for me the way that nathan did. 

august 29th, 2019. 5:32pm

so here’s the tea: i went on a date for the first time since nathan died. i went out last night, got drunk, got on bumble and agreed to go on a date this morning. so yeah, i was aggressively hungover, which is maybe not the best version of me for someone to meet- but it’s the version i brought to the table nonetheless. and like, it was fine. well, up until the point he was trying to relate to me and my career in theatre and told me that his favorite musical is CATS. his favorite cat is the rum tum tugger, and he can’t wait to see the movie in december. 

it’s not going to work out. CATS is an abomination and i refuse to spend time with anyone who disagrees with that statement. 

on a more serious note: i realized that i definitely don’t have the emotional capacity to date. i just can’t bring myself to care about anything anyone has to tell me about themselves. you have two sisters, your parents divorced when you were 8 and and you love CATS? zzzzz….sorry, that was me blacking out for 7 minutes. 

y’know, i’m unsure about a lot of things in my life. like, don’t try to ask me what i want for dinner because i refuse to make a decision about anything. don’t ask me what my favorite movie is, or my favorite book. i have no idea, dude, sorry. BUT the one thing i have incredible clarity about is what i deserve in a relationship. i had impossibly high standards before nathan and i were together and now they’re even higher- but that’s fine when you don’t have the emotional capacity to deal with scrubs to begin with. 

the other day, i found my journal that i kept in college. it starts in august of 2015, with the eulogy i wrote for my dad’s funeral. an excerpt: “despite me acting like an awful teen at times, he always was on my side. i think that’s what i’ll miss the most. i’ll miss having someone who had my back 100%. i’ll miss having someone who was always making sure i was happy…” and after reading that, i realized why my relationship with nathan was so successful. i’ve always heard that “girls always end up marrying someone like their dad” thing, and for the most part always chalked it up to weird patriarchal bullshit, but maybe there’s a little truth in it. because i definitely see some of my favorite things about my dad reflected in my favorite things about nathan. 

september 30, 2019. 1:09am

sometimes the saddest things must be sung. 

every time i try to write, it’s impossible to say anything that’s not just “i’m sad.” i haven’t been feeling great lately. i just feel trapped in this infinite loop of sadness and it’s so exhausting. i don’t like being like this. nathan would always get so frustrated with me when my depression was really bad, and i’d always be like do you think this is fun for me??? do you think i like being like this??? do you think i wake up and want to be a goblin??? newsflash my dude, i don’t. 

here’s the thing: when nathan first died, i was sad all the time. but it made sense. i had a reason to be sad all of the time. 

but i’m still sad all of the time. i wake up, i’m sad for 10 hours and then i go to bed. and then i wake up, maybe go to work, come home and be sad until bedtime. it’s a constant loop of sadness and i am so tired. 

nothing i do fulfills me. nothing satisfies me. i have neither purpose nor direction. i’m tired. and i’m sad. 

october 2nd, 2019. 7:34pm

i went to urgent care today- turns out i don’t have depression, i just have a torn ligament in my ankle. 

for context: i fell down the stairs at work the other day, crunched my ankle like it was an empty ozarka water bottle, and just wrecked my shit. i think this injury has me sadness spiraling a lot more than i normally do. now i get why nathan used to get so depressed whenever he’d injure himself.

the first time i got really sick after nathan died, i was so sad. this is my first ever really bad physical injury- i’ve never broken a bone or torn anything before, and i’m really feeling the loss of nathan right now. like how am i supposed to feed myself when i can barely walk to the kitchen? who’s supposed to remind me to take my ibuprofen every few hours? 

senior year of college, i kept getting strep, and the only reason i didn’t die is because every 12 hours nathan would call me to make sure i took my antibiotics, even when i had to take them at 2am. i only have two voicemails from him saved on my phone and literally one of them is from 3am and he’s like “hello wake up, your penicillin is calling, i’m gonna keep calling you until you wake up.” 

even though spraining my ankle was a nightmare, it could’ve been worse. just think, if i was a framing device in an emily bronte novel, i would have just had to live at work for five weeks until it healed.

october 11th, 2019. 5:37pm

i haven’t been sleeping lately, and last night i fell asleep around 6am. the cold front had just blown in and it was raining and i finally fell asleep. before i went to bed, i cracked my windows open for the first time this year and when i woke up this morning it was chilly in my room. i woke up in a little cocoon of all of my blankets and pillows and for a moment, before i completely opened my eyes, it felt like i was back in new york, waking up with nathan on a fall wednesday morning. it’s the little things.

october 25th, 2019. 2:19am

i keep thinking about all the things that have returned to me. all of the things that i gave to nathan that are back in my possession, tucked away in my room. like the grey ut shirt that was 3 sizes too big for me- so i gave it to him as a christmas present our first year together. he had been in new york for a semester, and he surprised me by coming to austin for new year’s- we hadn’t talked about christmas gifts or anything, but we ended up giving each other almost the exact same gift. he had gotten me a columbia sweater, and he slept in it for a few days before giving it to me, so it smelled like him. i did the exact same thing with that grey shirt. we couldn’t stop laughing when we exchanged the gifts because we were so amused that we’d gotten the same thing for each other. 

after he died, that shirt was one of the few that i kept of his, he slept in it all the time when we lived together. it still smells like him. 

i don’t wear my rings anymore, but when i see them in the bottom of my jewelry box, i think about the day that i gave him the engagement ring. he was so afraid of me saying no if he were to propose to me, so i told him that when i knew i’d say yes- i’d give him the ring i wanted him to use. on our first anniversary, i was visiting him in new york, right before i flew back to texas, i left a letter on his desk, with the ring attached. it returned to me a year after that, on our second anniversary when he proposed.

the day after nathan died, i went through all of his stuff. mostly because i knew i was about to fly back to texas and i didn’t know when i’d return to our apartment, so i wanted to collect all of his important documents that i didn’t want to lose. social security card, IDs, cards, passport, etc. but when i was digging through his backpack, i found a folder, where he’d kept all of the letters and cards i’d given to him throughout the years.

my personal favorite was an envelope that had two things in it: a sample size of the perfume that i’ve always worn, and a letter that just said “for when you miss me.” i gave that to him before we were even together. it was during that weird ambiguous era of our relationship where we were too afraid to commit, but were definitely in too deep to not commit. every time i would leave his apartment, he’d comment on how his pillows smelled like me, and how he missed me- right after he made his decision to go to columbia, we assumed we would never see each other again, so i gave him that letter. 

i was surprised to see all of those letters because that meant that he moved them from his apartment in abilene, to new york, to our apartment in new york, back to texas, and then to philly. 

so in turn, i moved them from philly, back to abilene, and now they’re with me in a box in austin. 

and i hope that one day all of the love that i gave to nathan will return to me. 

november 4th, 2019. 12:31am

in the deepest, blackest night of despair if you can get just one pinhole of light, all of grace rushes in.

november 19th, 2019. 2:20am

i’ve started taking up space again.

december 20th, 2019. 1:41pm

y’know, i’ve been doing pretty well for myself lately, and by that i mean that i haven’t had any major meltdowns. well, except for a couple of days ago. it was a christmas party, and as we all know- i’m not great at being social. but i also never turn down an invitation, which is a strange combination of things that happen to exist at the core of my being. but luckily, i got a plus one. see, with a plus one, i have a buffer there. i can bring one of my more interesting friends to carry conversations for me and then by proxy i become more able to socialize because i have to expend less energy by having that buffer there. anyways the person i was bringing as my plus one cancelled two hours before the event which meant that i had no time to try to get someone else to come with me. and this threw me into a major breakdown. i didn’t even want to go to the party at this point, but i had spent so much money on an outfit that if i didn’t go i would have wasted like 60 dollars. and i sat there trying to put makeup on to go but i kept crying and ruining it and then i chugged three white claws before even showing up at the party and i didn’t eat beforehand because there was supposed to be food there but by the time i was done crying and arrived, there was nothing left and then i drank 5 glasses of wine because it was free and i have social anxiety, and somehow i made it through the night without making a fool of myself, which is a miracle. 

the thing is, i really don’t get upset about a lot of things. but if someone cancels or changes plans on me, especially plans that we’d had set for at least a month in advance, i lose my god damn mind. there is historically nothing that upsets me more. 

but this time around, i realized that it really hurt me because it was the first time that i was confronted with the fact that i no longer have anyone in my life that prioritizes me. like, if nathan was begrudgingly my plus one to an event, he can’t get out of it- it’s non-negotiable. but like, i don’t hold that level of importance in anyone else’s life- there’s always something more important to them and uhhhhh that feeling sucks. 

+++

and that was the last note i wrote in 2019. which brings us to january 2020. when i think about my relationship with nathan, i feel like january always ended up being a special month for us. in 2016, january was the first time i ever spent the night with nathan. in 2017, nathan came back to texas to see me for the new year, after we’d been long-distance for five months. at the end of 2017, he went out of town for like three weeks, and i was miserable and all alone for the holidays, but in january 2018, his last day of vacation back home in abilene coincided with my first day of vacation back in abilene so we got to see each other for a little bit instead of having to go an entire month apart during the holidays. 

so i always end up getting weird and do a lot of reminiscing in january- but i feel like that’s kind of universal. 

like the #1 thing that everyone does is get all existential and contemplative when the new year hits. 

+++

in 2018, i never stopped moving. like a shark, i would have died if i stayed in one place for too long. and there i was in 2019, finally staying in one place.

it was a lot easier to ask for help when i had a reason to be sad. but now enough time has passed since nathan died that i feel like a burden when i’m not doing well. 

in my blog post wrapping up 2018, i said that my goal was to be kinder to myself. i also said that 2019 was going to be for starting a new life.

and while i’ve been no kinder to myself, at least i’ve made strides in living in this new phase of my life. in 2019 i moved out of my mother’s house, and back into my best friend’s apartment in austin. i got 3 jobs. i cut off all of my hair and pierced my nose. i started taking up space again. 

a few weeks ago, a coworker of mine told me that she had also lost a partner before. but what stuck with me was when she said, “you will never be the same. you’ll be happy again, and you’ll fall in love again- but you’ll never be the same person again”

and i’m realizing how true that is. 

i think one of the scariest scenarios is waking up one day and not remembering who you are. and that’s exactly what happened to me in 2018. i woke up one day without nathan and couldn’t remember who i was. 

one thing everyone’s been talking about lately is how this is the end of the decade, and i realized that nathan was in my life for the entire decade. he was in my life before the decade even started. and then when he died, i lost such a huge part of my identity. there’s a bear’s den lyric that’s like “i don’t want to know who i am without you,” and that’s what 2019 was for me.

kintsugi is the japanese art of fixing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with a lacquer mixed with powdered gold. i’ve always been a vase held by shaky hands, constantly on the precipice of shattering- and in 2018 i was dropped. in 2019, i’ve been finding tiny pieces of myself and trying to piece them back together to form a whole person again. 

recently, i’ve been realizing all of the little pieces of me that are missing. like the part of me that used to be good at holding conversations with people. and the part of me that had the ability to be a person for more than like 3 hours a day. and the part of me that showed excitement about things. i don’t even know what things excite me anymore? do i have interests or hobbies? not really. one time, i described myself as a robot that powers off if i am not at work, and wow, what an apt description.

the other day, one of my friends called me out about how she can never tell if i’m actually excited about something or not. my language is always very vague and even when i’m really stoked about something, i rarely show excitement about it. 

+++

so now it’s february 2020. it’s been a year and a half since nathan died. i’m feeling better. the other day, i came to the realization that i think my emotions have finally leveled off. i’m back to my normal amount of unstable, rather than that really virulent level that i was at for awhile at the end of last year. it feels good to finally have a little bit of control back over my life. i’ve finally really settled in at work, and i’m starting to feel more confident in my capabilities. 

so what are my goals for 2020? i think the biggest thing is to find something that i care about. honestly, probably a big part of the reason why i’ve been having such a hard time finding a Big Girl Job to settle into is because there’s just nothing that i’m 100% passionate about. it’s hard for me to find an answer other than “i’m just trying to not die,” whenever i get asked “so why do you want this job?” i really want to find lasting stability this year. i’m tired of not being able to enjoy anything because i don’t have money. whoever said money can’t buy happiness obviously was never poor because let me tell you, i’d be a lot happier if i could afford to go out with my friends more often. or if i could like…….eat 3 meals a day without feeling guilty for wasting food because i know i can live on just one meal a day. 

i also started doing a skincare routine that involves like 4 different serums and i’ve been doing really well keeping up with doing it twice a day and if i could carry that energy through the rest of the year that’d be dope. i would make a comment about how i’ve been going to the gym every day and how i’m trying to have a 2020 glo-up but i was going to the gym every day for awhile but i haven’t been in like two weeks. 

also my chemical romance just reunited so i guess my other 2020 goal is to see them on this reunion tour.

[stephhannes]

america’s next top sparkling water pt. 2

two years ago i was lost. i was in new york city with no money, no family, no prospects for a good la croix replacement. if you remember, i wrote a blog chronicling my journey in finding a suitable substitute. and i found the answer to all my prayers in polar’s seltzer. 

if i had a dollar for every liter of polar i crushed, i’d be able to pay for all the seltzer i drank. i say that because it only cost a dollar per liter. i was living the dream. 

and now here i am, back in texas- far away from where the polar flows. i tried returning to la croix but it’s just not the same, honestly. 

one day i found myself in a central market in austin, texas. and as i walked in the doors, i saw it. a display for polar seltzer. they only had two flavors available- ginger lime mule (my favorite) and blueberry clementine. i grabbed as many 6 packs as i could carry and quite literally cried with joy while i did the rest of my grocery shopping. i actually think that moment was the happiest i have been since my fiancé died. 

then, something even more miraculous happened. i found love in a hopeless place (i found polar in abilene, texas). the grocery store had cans of cranberry lime (my second favorite flavor). i stocked up like i was a doomsday prepper. 

and thank god i did, because doomsday did come, eventually. it’s basically impossible to find polar in texas now. 

which means i am back to square one, except instead of trying to fill the la croix shaped hole in my heart nyc created for me i now have to fill the polar shaped hole in my heart that texas has given me. 

***

my search for stephanie’s top sparkling water begins in an airbnb in july. my hosts had left a handful of drinks in the mini fridge for me. one of which was a waterloo water, in the original “flavor.” here’s the thing: i get kind of creeped out by plain seltzer water, but waterloo had a certain je ne sais quoi that i liked, even in the plain flavor. i made a mental note to revisit it later. 

at my first trip to HEB after moving to austin, i bought the HEB brand of sparkling water. lime flavor. and i didn’t hate it…at first. until i got a taste of something better. my mother had left me with a couple of la croixs and i drank one, and then followed it up with an HEB seltzer and wow…..she was lacking in flavor. and what she lacked in flavor she didn’t even make up for in carbonation. a disgrace. 

the next avenue i ventured down was bubly. here’s the thing: i respect bubly because they have a great selection of flavors. but i just wasn’t wowed. there was nothing special about bubly. like sure, if someone offered me one at a children’s birthday party i wouldn’t be angry, i would happily use it to make a vodka soda, but i want my seltzer to make me feel special. i want to be excited about it. i’m not excited about bubly. 

spindrift. all i have to say is fuck spindrift. there are few things i hate less in this world than a seltzer with a lil bit of fruit juice in it. an abomination. 

so, remember how i mentioned that i was going to revisit waterloo? i revisited waterloo. i returned to my favorite aisle in HEB and picked out the black cherry flavor. there was this black cherry soda that i used to love as a child, and i thought that maybe it would bring back fond memories of childhood. 

i got home, and cracked open a cold one. and wow. waterloo hits the mark in all of my grading points (flavor, carbonation, personal enjoyment). my favorite thing is when drinks are so carbonated that it feels like they’re mad at you when you drink them- and waterloo provides. the flavor was exactly what i wanted, black cherry reminded me of the soda i loved as a kid, but with the perk of not being a soda. sometimes cherry flavors err on the side of tasting too fake, but this was perfect. it even tastes great when it goes flat- sometimes la croix flavors get a little weird after sitting, forgotten, on a bedside table for a few days. 

waterloo is absolutely my new seltzer of choice. mostly because it’s dope but also because i love to support a local brand. especially a brand that provides me with the product i am most passionate about. when i finally get a second job and can afford to actually eat again i look forward to trying out the other waterloo flavors.

nothing will ever truly replace polar in my heart, she was there for me when no one else was. but at least i’m not lonely and lost anymore. thanks, waterloo. 

[stephhannes]

one year.

“I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account.

Nor did I want to finish the year.

The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.

I look for resolution and find none.

I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen. My image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even “mudgy,” softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him. In fact this is already beginning to happen. All year I have been keeping time by last year’s calendar: what were we doing on this day last year, where did we have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honolulu after Quintana’s wedding, is it the day a year ago we flew back from Paris, is it the day. I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 31, 2003. John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead.”

—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

this day a year ago was august 4th, 2018. nathan did not see this day a year ago. nathan was dead. 

it doesn’t feel like it’s already been one year without nathan. it feels like just yesterday we were in philly together. 

the more i think about the last day we spent together, the more i feel like i was a make-a-wish child getting a trip to disneyworld. the last day we spent together was what i would consider to be a dream day in terms of what my favorite days with nathan looked like. 

any day that we actually spent time together after he got off work was a dream day. once he started work, we were still trying to get into a routine, so for the first few weeks, we really didn’t see each other that much. he would get home from work at 4, go to the gym, eat dinner, hang out by himself for a little bit and then come to bed- where we’d usually talk for 30 minutes before he fell asleep. for that period of time, those 30 minutes were basically all of the real quality time we’d get together. but finally, we settled into a routine that allowed for more time together. 

the week before nathan died, i was out of town pretty consistently. i was in stewartstown from july 27th to the 31st, and then i went to new york on the 1st & 2nd of august. i got home late on the 2nd, nathan picked me up from the bus stop, and we immediately came home and went to bed. 

on august 3rd, nathan got to work from home for most of the day. i ran errands most of the morning and afternoon. i got home and he got done with work at basically the same time. he went to the gym, and i started cooking dinner. for some reason, this was the day that i was finally getting my life together after having a month-long nervous breakdown. i had gone to the grocery store earlier in the day and got things to cook something other than a “depression meal.” i’d also gone to the library, so i spent a lot of time that evening reading while sitting next to nathan as he was on the computer and eating dinner. 

we took a shower and then got into bed relatively early that night. i finished my book around 9:30 and we sat in bed and talked for a little bit. and then he fell asleep. i was on my laptop next to him for a little bit. the last time i touched him while he was alive was when i leaned over and kissed his shoulder when i noticed he was asleep next to me.

he was kinda half awake half asleep, and around 11 i was finally ready for bed. so i closed my laptop, and walked around the bed and closed his laptop for him, sat it down on the floor, and then went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. 

and that’s when it happened.

it all happened so quickly. i thought he was just sick. i didn’t realize he was dying. and then he stopped breathing. and i called 911. and he was dead. and they tried to revive him. and he was dead. and i couldn’t get in contact with anyone. and he was dead. and they took him to the hospital, and i followed behind the ambulance. and i got to the hospital and i waited in line at the ER because that’s what you’re supposed to do in the ER. and they told me they had no record of him. and i knew that meant that he was dead. and they told me to wait. and i waited. and tried to call people. i was so scared and so alone. and i sat in that waiting room on the phone with cody and i told her everything that had just happened and i wasn’t crying yet. not yet. 

and finally they took me to a consultation room. and finally a doctor told me that he was dead. 

and they let me see him. and i sat next to him for 30 minutes. the time they put on his death certificate as the time of death was actually a time when i was sitting in that room. i knew he had been dead for a couple of hours at that point. but bureaucracy runs slowly. he was dead at 11:08pm on august 3rd, but according to the certificate it was 1 something on the 4th. at 1 something i was crying in a chair next to his hospital bed, i was crying because they wouldn’t let me touch him. all i wanted to do was hold his hand.  

i finally left the hospital at 2am. 

i got home shortly after.

our apartment had never felt more empty, and just six weeks beforehand we hadn’t moved any furniture in yet. 

i walked in and every single light was on. earlier that night nathan had literally gotten on to me about my habit of leaving lights on. our bedroom was a still-life of what had happened a few hours before. one of our grey towels was on the floor, where they had laid him down to do cpr. the blankets were all on the floor, where they’d been thrown off when nathan collapsed out of bed. the fan was still running, laying on the bed, where i’d put it after nathan knocked it down on top of himself when he fell. 

i cleaned up the vomit. i picked up all of the scattered plastic that littered our rug from everything the paramedics had unwrapped. i grabbed one of nathan’s t-shirts that i knew smelled like him. i crawled into bed. i didn’t sleep.

no one else knew that nathan was dead until august 4th. just like every other big event in our relationship, there was a period of time where it was just ours. when we started dating, we didn’t tell anyone for a couple of days because we wanted to have it to ourselves for a little bit, and when we got engaged we waited a day to tell everyone because we wanted to keep it just for us for a few hours. and even when he died, it was just ours for a couple of hours.

i didn’t sleep for two days after nathan died. 

i haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep since nathan died. 

i still remember the first thing i ate after nathan died. on august 7th i ate one biscoff cookie, the ones they give you on american airlines flights. i was flying back to texas and was so weak that i had to eat something. i remember forcing myself to eat again a few days later. i wasn’t even hungry, but i knew that i had to eat something. 

+++

one of the very first things i did after nathan died was write a eulogy. i never intended on actually verbalizing it, i just had a lot of feelings that i wanted to write down. i sat and wrote it when i came home that morning after the hospital, and a very un-edited version of it ended up being what i read at his funeral. 

i thought that maybe this one year post would be as effortless to write, but it’s been hard trying to decide what i think is the most important thing to say. 

i wish that i could sit here and say that i’m doing great and i’m coping well, but that’s just not the case. i still miss nathan so much every single day. i still wake up every morning weighed down by such an insane amount of guilt that i’m the one that gets to wake up every morning instead of him. 

i think a lot about the time that nathan told me that i’ve “never needed him for anything,” and how i also believed that to an extent for a long time. i’ve been such an independent person for my entire life, and when nathan and i got together, i relinquished a lot of that independence- even if it didn’t really seem like it to either of us. now that he’s gone, i can’t help but notice this gaping hole in my life. i’m really realizing how much i did rely on him, mostly for emotional support. the hardest part about losing nathan is knowing that the one person who knows how to make me feel better is him, and now there’s no one that gets me like he did. 

one time when nathan and i were apart for a few weeks, he said “i just haven’t learned how to get by without you yet,” to me, and that’s exactly how i feel. i just don’t know how to get by without him yet. 

i still haven’t learned how to cook for just one person. every night when i come home from work, i feel this weird emptiness because i don’t have anyone to tell about my day. i get that i’m 24 years old and i should know how to self-soothe at this point but it’s been hard not having anyone to talk me down from my weird breakdowns at 3am. and it’s been hard not having someone to force me to get out of bed on my days off. i still can’t fathom my life without nathan in it, because he’s so intwined in how i exist from day-to-day. 

i still don’t know who i am without nathan. it feels like such a huge part of my identity revolved around him for more than half of my life. i’ve been having a hard time finding a purpose. when i was in high school, everything i did circled around taking care of nathan, being there for him when he was upset or stressed. when we started dating, it was the same thing. all the decisions i made for myself revolved around how i could best support nathan. now that i’m out here actually making decisions for myself and myself only, i don’t know what i want. nathan was the artist and the scientist and the athlete and i was the loyal sidekick. it feels weird to have my own identity now. to be more than the puppy at nathan’s feet. 

+++

i always think of this line from the letter nathan wrote me right before he moved to nyc- “It doesn’t feel fair at all that we could somehow find the one person in the universe that we truly want to be with, only to have to be separated again.” it still feels so unfair that we’re separated again. i still can’t believe that this is my life now. i can’t believe that i have to do this for the rest of my life. 

+++

the question i get the most now is “so what brought you to austin from new york?” and i’ve stopped doing that thing where i try to skirt around the truth. i tell the story the exact same way every time. “after i graduated from UT, i moved to new york because my fiancé was finishing up his master’s at columbia. when he graduated we moved to philly because that was where he got a job. then he died. now i’m here.” but even that story still doesn’t cover the entire last year of my life. 

when people ask what i did for the last year, i usually just say “i was on sabbatical.” i’m thankful that i got the opportunity to spend the last year doing whatever i wanted to do. for the first time in my life, i had a little bit of freedom. for the first time, i was able to travel and see my friends that i hadn’t seen in years, and go back home to nyc, and be there without worrying about if i was going to starve or be able to afford rent. i was able to lay in bed for like 6 months without the pressure of having to get a job. 

there are some days where i feel like i’ve made no progress. but i have to remember that i spent the first few months after nathan died literally thinking i was going to die from being so sad. 

i still cry a lot, but at least i feel like a human again. i’ll never forget how awful i felt after nathan died. 

for awhile, i thought i was going to get out of this without any sort of lasting ptsd or trauma, but boy was i wrong! lately i’ve found myself with more anxiety than i’ve ever had before. i’ve been having these consistent nightmares of everyone that i care about dying, and even in my waking life i’ve started having a lot of anxiety over the concept that “oh, everyone i know is going to die and knowing my luck it’s all going to happen very soon.” i’ve gotten more obsessive over small things- i’ve been having a hard time coming to terms with my lack of control. until nathan died, i felt relatively in control of everything in my life, but i lost so much control when nathan died and now i’ve just realized that i have no grasp on anything and it’s been a lot to cope with. 

anyways hopefully i’ll get a job with health insurance soon so i can go to therapy but until then i guess i’ll just be crazy, whatever. 

+++

i spend a lot of time thinking about what this year would have looked like if nathan hadn’t died. we would have been married by now. we would probably have a dog (or at least 2 cats) by now. we would probably be packing up to move a little further into the suburbs. we would have survived our first PA winter, i’m sure it would have been 3 months of him not letting me turn the heater on. i would have been even more in love with his dumb face than i already was. 

this last year wasn’t how i imagined it would be, but it was better than it could have been. i’m thankful for everyone that’s let me sleep on their couch, and everyone that’s checked in on me periodically, and everyone that’s spent time with me over the last year. i’m thankful for the new relationships i’ve built with people from nathan’s life that have now come into mine. part of the reason that i was so excited to marry nathan was an excitement for finally being a part of a family- and when he died i was so afraid that i was going to lose all of that. i’m glad that hasn’t been the case. 

from what i’ve read, the general consensus seems to be that the 2nd year is the hardest as a widow. so uhhhhh cool, can’t wait. 

[stephhannes]

in this kingdom by the sea

i thought that i understood longing. i spent ten years wishing for nothing more than to be nathan’s girlfriend. i sat on the sidelines through a handful of his relationships. i watched him celebrate, and hurt, and all i ever wanted to do was to be by his side. to cheer on his celebrations, to hold him when things weren’t good. and i had to wait ten years for that. i thought that i understood longing when we were finally together, but had to be long distance for a year.

i thought that i understood longing.

but nothing, no ten years, no 1743 miles, no other girlfriend, will ever compare to sitting with him in that hospital room, and not being able to hold his hand.

when the doctor asked me if i wanted to see him after she had told me he was dead, the caveat was that i couldn’t touch him. i sat a cordial distance away. i remember looking at his face. i wanted to kiss the bruise that had formed on the right side of his forehead. i wanted to whisper “i love you” directly into his ear, the one with the cartilage piercing. i wanted to hold his hand and do that thing i do where i aggressively rub my thumb against his when i’m anxious. i wanted to crawl into his bed, and lay with my head on his chest for as long as they’d let me.

but i couldn’t.

i sat a cordial distance away and i looked at his half-opened eyes. i just kept whispering “i’m so sorry” over and over and over and over until i had done that for 20 minutes and thought it was time for me to leave.

i remember in eighth grade, we read edgar allen poe’s annabel lee, and i remember the moment when everyone in class had a moment of realization- oh, he sleeps next to her dead body every night. and i remember the disgust that swept across the room. we all felt it.

i get so emotional when i think about the night nathan died. not necessarily because of the obvious reason but because it’s finally set in just how powerful it is to love someone til death do you part.

i remember once, nathan said to me “i’m so vulnerable around you, and for the longest time that scared me. but you’ve protected and cared for everything i’ve given you for so long that i trust you with all of me.” and that was a huge moment in our relationship, because i know how guarded of a person he is. it’s a feat to crack him. it’s nearly impossible to get into his head or his heart, and somehow- i’d done it.

there is nothing more vulnerable than dying. and i am so thankful that i was there for him when he died.

there was a night that i was over at nathan’s apartment in abilene, before we started dating, and he got sick. and i remember him lying in bed next to me, feeling terrible, and all i wanted to do was hold him, rub his back, until he fell asleep. but i didn’t do any of that, i just went home. because i was afraid of overstepping a boundary- for some reason, doing those things seemed too intimate, like i shouldn’t do them.

when nathan was dying, i didn’t know that he was dying. i just thought he was incredibly ill, but in that moment, i held him on our bedroom floor. i was rubbing his back, and just kept quietly alternating between saying “it’s gonna be okay” and “hey, i love you”

and i kept saying “it’s gonna be okay,” when i realized that he wasn’t breathing. and i kept saying “it’s going to be okay” when i was doing cpr.

it’s easy to promise to love someone until they die- until you get to the actual dying part. when you make that promise- you think that there are an infinite amount of years until you get to the death part. it’s hard to look death in the face and accept defeat. i’ll never forget watching paramedics work on nathan for 30 minutes. i’ll never forget the seasick feeling i had in my stomach. i’ll never forget the moment when i thought to myself, “i hope they don’t bring him back.”

i think the hardest part of loving someone until they die is knowing when to let them die. i knew that after he had been dead for 40 minutes, if they managed to revive him, he would have been forced to live a life he wouldn’t have wanted. i would have been by his side for all of it, but i know that he wouldn’t be alive under circumstances that he would be okay with.

the paramedics took him to the hospital. i met them there. a doctor told me that he was dead. she asked if i wanted to see him. i said yes. i wasn’t allowed to touch him, because they were going to do an autopsy.

and i’ve never felt more useless in my life, sitting in a chair next to his bed. i know he was already dead, but i had never felt an ache so deep, all i wanted to do was comfort him. and i couldn’t.

i wanted nothing more than to feel his skin on my skin one last time, before he was taken away and dissected by a medical examiner, and harvested by an organ donation company, and embalmed by a funeral director.

in eighth grade, i was disgusted by annabel lee, but that night, i got it. i would have laid in that hospital bed all god damn night if i could have.

up until that point, i was the only person that knew him completely. his head, his heart. i hate that now a medical examiner also knows those things, magnified through a microscope.

i thought that i understood longing after that.

i was excited to see him again at the funeral home. all i wanted was to hold his hand one last time.

and then our funeral director called. the organ donation people had taken too much. nathan was young, and healthy, so they harvested as much as they could, justifiably so. but because of the lack of bones, and skin, and ligaments he was unable to be dressed. they wrapped him in a blanket for the viewing. we were advised to not look underneath it. especially not the hands.

sometimes when i think of nathan, i think of how cold and hard his face felt on my fingertips.

a lot of the time, i think of how i wish i could hold his hand.

[stephhannes]

fireworks that went off too soon

i guess i haven’t really written anything since i was in new york back in may, and i promise i have a great excuse: i was sad. 

when i got back from new york, i spent basically the entire month in bed. i really don’t remember anything i did, other than hope i’d get hit by a car. 

i finally hit my breaking point of living in abilene. it was good for awhile, but there’s nothing for me here. the only thing that made living here for a year tolerable was being able to travel out of state every few weeks. i absolutely needed the time i spent in abilene to recuperate. i spent 10 months feeling like i had all the breath knocked out of me, but finally i started to feel like myself again. once i started to feel like myself again, i felt stagnant in abilene, almost claustrophobic- that’s when i knew it was time for me to start moving on. when nathan died, i was so afraid that when i came back to abilene i’d just be stuck here forever. i’ve never once felt like i belonged here, and when i got drawn back after i had been gone for five years i felt like a failure and like i’d never get an opportunity to escape. and then i got the opportunity:

at the end of june i did two things: drove to colorado to gone girl myself and just be off the grid for a few days, and got hired as a house manager at the paramount in austin. 

my first day at work was on july 4th, i was super nervous- but for once in my life, i just walked into the room and confidently pretended like i knew what i was doing, like i was actually qualified to do something. after my first day, i realized that i’m definitely qualified to do something. 

my favorite thing about house managing is that there’s a hot 45 minutes of action before the show starts, but as soon as the show goes up, everything is calm. there’s something comforting in knowing that no matter how terrible and hectic pre-show is, there’s going to be a break eventually. 

after my first day, i kept texting everyone saying “i feel so powerful, someone needs to collect me, i think someone made a mistake giving me this much power.” i think most of my power comes from the shoes i bought for work that clack really loudly when i walk on tile, the other 10% comes from how confident i am in decision-making and being a leader now. which is weird, because i’ve never made a decision in my entire life. 

my least favorite thing about house managing is the poverty that comes along with it. that being said, i’m out here looking for a second job so if anyone has any leads, hit me up. i’ve been so stressed for the last two weeks over buying furniture for my new apartment. look, i’m a taurus, so my home space is very important to me. every place i’ve lived in, i’ve had a clear way i want it to look and i can’t rest until it’s exactly representative of my vision. i’m moving back into the same apartment that i lived in during undergrad, literally the exact same bedroom, with my exact same roommate. some of my old furniture is still there, and i realize that i could just re-use all of it and have the same bedroom i had when i previously lived there. but i honestly don’t think my heart can handle it. i lived in austin for 12 years without nathan in my life, but no matter where i go here, i just see him. it’s hard enough driving down the street in between work and home and remembering the time we went to the taco bell cantina and then walked around campus, or the thai place that i took him the first time he ever visited me, or the apartment complex i lived in the first time he visited me. the other day, i was in a kerbey lane location that i don’t normally go to, but i had gone with nathan once, and andrew mcmahon started playing over the speakers and i almost lost my shit. sometimes even being back in the apartment itself is hard for me to handle, the first time i visited my old roommate after nathan died, i spent the night on the couch, and all i could think about was the time we’d both fallen asleep on the couch watching star wars back when he tried to make me watch all the movies. 

the point of all of this being: i’m back on my bullshit and i have a new vision for how i want my bedroom to look- a complete 180 from what it used to be, but i can’t afford it and i’m about to be so anxious until i can get it to what i want. 

it feels really good to be back in society, but it’s been weird meeting new people. for the first time since nathan died, i’m interacting with people who have no idea of who i am, no clue of where i’ve been or what i’ve done, and i’ve been having a hard time figuring out how much to tell people, and when to tell them, and how i want to present myself to people. there are some people that know my fiancé died, but there are some people that have asked me if i was married and i responded with “nah, but i was previously engaged” and left it at that. i hate when people ask me “what brought you to texas from new york?” i’ve completely omitted my time in philly. i don’t mention it on my resume, or in conversation because i hate that time in my life so incredibly much. i usually deflect, and say, “oh, well i was born in austin so i came back!” which doesn’t really answer the question, but it answers a question. sometimes i feel like i seem shady when i have to do these weird conversational navigations but like…. i don’t know what i’m doing. i’ve never had to do this before! 

the other day at work, the coworker that’s been training me introduced me to someone as, “this is stephanie. she used to work at the daryl roth in new york city, and she’s really fucking good! i barely have to tell her how to do anything, she just knows how to be a house manager.”

and it’s true, i’m really fucking good at my job. 

and i’m having a hard time accepting that i’m doing well. 

when i got hired, i was so sad. i was so sad because it feels like accomplishments mean nothing without nathan by my side to celebrate with me. i remember how proud he was of me last year when i had managed to get a bunch of theatre job interviews lined up in philly, and i remember how supportive he was of me back in new york when i struggled to find a job- and i miss it so much. i feel guilty for doing well without nathan in my life. i feel guilty that in the last week, i’ve been so stressed with starting a new job and trying to pack and move i haven’t really thought about him much.

but i think that what upsets me now, is that i get it. i get the guilt that he felt so strongly back when he graduated from acu and managed to move out of abilene. at the time, i was so confused as to why he wasn’t proud of himself, as to why he felt unable to celebrate his accomplishments- but i understand now. and it’s hard for me to be able to understand exactly how he felt with all of the guilt he had after high school. i’ve started to notice lately that a lot of my reactions and thought processes have been reflecting the same ones i saw in nathan, and i’ve felt so heavy knowing that he felt like this too. 

a year ago, i remember being so excited to start my new life with nathan. today, i still feel excitement to start again and to really start rebuilding my life- i’ll just always wish it was with nathan. 

returning to myself has felt so weird lately. i’ve started to notice characteristics of mine pop back up, every time it happens, i ask myself “wow where is this behavior coming from?” and then i remember, oh right, this is who i am. for example, lately after work i’ve found myself with a ton of energy- i want to come home and socialize with people, which is not something i’ve felt in a long time, and i was confused as to where all of this energy was coming from. and then i remembered how one of my favorite parts of the day was when i’d get home from work and then, incredibly enthusiastically, tell nathan about everything that had happened at work. i’d come home and get so worked up while recanting my night that i couldn’t fall asleep, but i was cool with it because that was when i got to spend quality time with nathan. 

long story short: i’m doing well, and i’m feeling bad about it. 

the next time i write anything will probably be next month, and i’m dreading it already. i’ve got a lot of feelings now that we’re approaching the one year anniversary. it’s going to be a hard day. 

for almost eight months, every single day, i would spend like an hour just running through that night’s events, reliving it. i don’t do that as often now, i haven’t thought about it in awhile, but i know that i’m going to be a total disaster on the anniversary. i’ve got a terrible memory, but i’m really good at remembering incredibly specific details of some days: i remember the shirt i was wearing, and that lady gaga’s “just dance,” was playing the day that nathan and i first kissed in 2011. i remember the way nathan’s hair smelled on that one day in english class sophomore year that our teacher let us sit and read wherever we wanted in the classroom, and nathan laid his head on my shoulder to read when we sat against the back wall together. (speaking of, the other day at work, a patron came in that smelled like nathan did in high school and i a) cried at work but b) kept scanning tickets because i’m not a little bitch). and unfortunately, i still remember, in incredible detail the night that he died.

we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. 

ps: there was nowhere to naturally fit this into the blog post, but while we’re on the subject of the fourth of july- i was reminded of one of my favorite memories with nathan. the first time he met my family, (grandma, cousins, etc) was two months after we’d started dating. the best part about having a boyfriend is having a plus one to all the things you don’t want to be at by yourself and the first time i played that card was to get him to come with me to the family fourth of july function. at one point, my cousin asked me to hold her baby and i was like “yeah ok, i’ll do it, but if i break your kid don’t get mad at me” because i have no idea how to interact with children. so i was holding this baby, and jokingly i asked nathan how he felt about it and he was like “i literally don’t think i’ve ever been less attracted to you,” and i was like “oh hell yeah we both hate kids thank god, this is gonna work out.”

[stephhannes]

internet deadtiquette

i only keep up with a couple of podcasts, one of them being reply all, and the most recent episode resonated with me. in the episode, they speak with a dad who lost his son to an aneurism, and he goes on to talk about how technology has been entwined in his grief. and i found myself a) feeling less alone in the way that i’ve been grieving, but b) asking myself- how has the internet played a part in my recovery?

i never thought about it, but technology has been such an intrinsic part of my grieving process. so much so, that it’s felt natural and normal- even though looking in on it, there’s something hard and unnatural about it. how do i balance broadcasting my grief in a way that’s palatable in 240 characters but not compromising my truth? (spoiler: i’m very bad at this). 

things were simpler when my dad died, because i didn’t once have to consider things like: “what statement will i make on social media?” “how do i respond to messages from people  haven’t talked to since i graduated from high school?” “how sad is ‘too sad’ to appear online?”

from the beginning, since nathan’s died, technology has been right there. the day that it happened, while we were still making phone calls to family and close friends, i was thinking about what my “official” public statement would be. how do i concisely convey that the love of my life is dead when i haven’t slept in hours and barely know how to say a full sentence? i posted a picture of that one entry in teddy roosevelt’s journal from the day his wife and mother died. “the light has gone out of my life.” 

that was the only thought i could conjure up that day. i accompanied it with a few short sentences- “the last day, my brain has been on a constant loop of thinking about that quote from teddy roosevelt’s journal after his wife died- “the light has gone out of my life.” yesterday, i lost the light of my life. my best friend, my brilliant, incredible, kind, adjectives fiancé has passed away.” 

speaking of the whole ‘contacting family and friends’ thing, do you know how awkward it is to send a facebook message to someone you’ve never talked to asking for their boss’s phone number? at some point in the contacting phase, i realized that nathan wouldn’t be at work on monday and that people would have questions as to where he was, so i had to do some gymnastics to figure that out. the company that nathan worked for had a very generic name, so finding the correct office phone number was kind of off the table. i couldn’t find his boss on facebook- but i happened to remember the full name of one of nathan’s coworkers- so i found her on facebook and messaged her. “hi, this is out of the blue and i’m sorry, but i’m stephanie, nathan’s fiancee. nathan passed away this weekend and we’d like to get in contact with your boss. could you please pass along a phone number or other contact information so we can? thanks in advance.” imagine waking up one day and getting that message from a stranger. 

when it came to contacting people, i only needed to tell my mom and the four friends i have. but when it came to nathan’s friends i wasn’t sure who all to contact. how do you decide who gets to know before a public facebook statement? will there be people that are angry that i excluded them? 

and then after the announcement came the condolences. i hate that i live a life where i’m easily accessible by people i haven’t talked to in years. but still, i got messages from people i graduated with and got texts from numbers i had deleted years ago. 

i’ve always been skeeved out by the concept of people writing on the facebook wall of someone who’s died. thankfully, only a couple of people did it- but i hated almost all of it. i think the thing i hate about this sort of public display of grief is that it’s so transparent, but here’s a life tip: not everything has to be about you. when people post these outward, shallow reflections on facebook, it’s to become a grief vampire, to get a pat on the back for “doing a good deed.” 

i also hate that i had to watch people speculate, publicly what had happened to nathan. someone who we went to high school with made some sentimental post about him and someone commented asking “holy shit. what happened to him???” someone else made a post asking people to pray for our family and rip. once again, someone else commented asking what happened. i get that this is a pretty innocuous exchange, but seeing it written out in a facebook post, being discussed by people who don’t know us well just felt like i was watching two people whispering about me right in front of my face.

the worst part was seeing a comment that said “RIP. at least he’s with (his dead ex from high school) now.” 

when i first saw it, i was so upset that someone would say that…in public…where i can see it. i was almost angry, but i didn’t have the energy to respond, since i was busy planning nathan’s funeral at that time. i told my friends about it, and one of them confronted the girl instead: 

“hey, your comment about nathan was pretty disrespectful and it upset his fiancee a lot. would you please delete it?”

“actually, what’s disrespectful is you messaging me. i didn’t even know he had a fiancee and she just lost someone so she’s going to take offense to anything and everything. i didn’t say anything wrong. besides, everyone knows that (his ex) was his first love and if it wasn’t for what she did they would still be together.” 

not only is she shitty in public, apparently she’s also shitty in private. 

it was so apparent to me that she literally knew nothing about nathan and was just trying to cash in on some brownie points to look like a good person to everyone else- but i was so deeply offended. 

my friend had to contact the person who made the original post to just delete the girl’s comment and that was the end of it. 

the one post on his wall that i didn’t hate was from one of his friends. i had never met her before, but i knew of her, solely because she used to send nathan snaps of her cat all the time and subsequently, nathan would show me the snaps and we were both in love with her cat. she made a sweet post on his wall, and i sent her a message telling her that i appreciate her words and also that we loved seeing her cat. she offered to add me on snapchat and continue to send me pictures occasionally, and that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s done for me.

you know what i didn’t realize would happen? the first time i posted a selfie after nathan died, a few people made “it’s nice to see you smiling!” comments. i’ve never been conscious of my instagram feed, but after realizing that people were trying to use my posts as barometers to my happiness- i felt a lot more claustrophobic when it came to my feed.

+++

when my dad died, the grieving process looked fairly linear. i was sad for awhile, and with time, it got easier. his death isn’t something that plagues me anymore, and it stopped consuming me pretty quickly. part of that was because i was pretty removed from my home at that time- he died right before school started so i was living on my own, pre-occupied with not flunking out of undergrad, not surrounded by pieces of my father. the only digital footprint of my dad was a handful of selfies we’d taken together, but other than that, there was no facebook profile, no online connection to any of his friends. if i wanted to access my dad, i had to work for it.

though nathan was fairly private and didn’t have an instagram or twitter that he actively used, there was still facebook, and still vague traces of him across the internet. 

i can’t stop doing things that hurt me, and the internet provides more things that hurt me. when my dad died, the only things i could do that would really pain me were listen to voicemails, and listen to songs that made me think of him. with nathan’s death, i can sit and read through all of our texts. or read through all of our facebook messages. or check snapchat and have it tell me that it’s been 45 weeks since i last received a snap from him. or have a facebook “on this day” memory pop up with a post he made on my wall ten years ago. 

i have these moments where i am so desperate to feel close to nathan again. and i try to scrap together every trace of him i have. physically, there isn’t much. i have some of his old clothes, and a couple of tshirts that smell like him- but digitally i have years of things he’s said to me, i have pictures- ones of us together, ones i took of him sleeping, ones other people have taken of him- i have two voicemails, i have one video. 

there’s something about having digital access to nathan that brought out a desperation in me. 

when i got back to our apartment from the hospital after nathan died, my brain was shattered into a million pieces, each piece trying to answer a different question. however, at one point in the hours after his death, i got fixated on one thing: where the fuck was his phone? i tore the sheets from the bed and scoured every inch of the apartment and it was nowhere to be found. i don’t know why i wanted it so badly, but when i realized that it was gone i was so stressed out. the phone must have been in his pocket when he died, it must have gone to the hospital. it’s probably gone. i finally fell asleep, my brain reset by the time i woke up and the missing phone was no longer on my radar. eventually, i just resolved that i wouldn’t ever see it again and that was that. a couple of weeks later, his parents and i went back to philadelphia to clean out our apartment and his mom decided to follow the phone trail again. the hospital didn’t have it- they said the organ donation people probably have it- the organ donation people didn’t have it- they said the medical examiner probably has it- and finally we got a bag of nathan’s belongings from the medical examiner: complete with phone, drivers license, and one earring.

here’s the problem with a phone that’s been dead for two weeks: you need the passcode to turn it back on. i’m pretty sure my fingerprint unlocked his phone, but i had no idea what his passcode was. 

here’s the second problem: his passcode was at least 6 characters long. the only thing i knew about it was that it was more than four characters, and i know that makes it exponentially harder to try to guess or use a program to guess the passcode.

there wasn’t necessarily anything i knew i wanted off of his phone, but i wanted answers as to why he died, and i think part of me thought i could get answers from his phone. but a bigger part of me knew that i wouldn’t get any answers, so i gave up. 

i factory reset his phone. it’s no longer in my possession. 

cracking the phone case wasn’t the only technological rabbit hole i went down. the day i finally got into nathan’s laptop, i remember texting one of my friends, exclaiming “I DID IT! I HACKED INTO THE MAINFRAME!”

nathan had two computers, a laptop for personal use and a desktop that he used for work and gaming. 

once again, in my pursuit of trying to find answers, i thought that maybe his laptop would tell me something. i don’t know exactly what answers i thought his browsing history could illuminate, but maybe there would be something there. however, i had very low expectations as to what i’d find- nathan browsed the internet in a very strange way. he’d do this thing where pretty much every link he clicked on or everything he did he’d do in an incognito window. inherently i knew his chrome history would be pretty bare. nevertheless, i was determined to get in.

much like his phone password, i also didn’t know his laptop password. the only thing i knew was that his password hint was the same for both his laptop and his desktop. after setting this mystery to the side for a week, it hit me. the summer i moved to nyc he went away for a week, and when he left, he gave me the password to his desktop so i could use the big monitor to watch netflix or game to entertain myself while he was gone. 

i had to go through old SMS messages that had been saved on my macbook to find the text with the password. and i found it. and if the password hint was the same for both of his computers, then the password had to be the same, right? right.

i did it. i hacked into the mainframe. 

and like i suspected, i found nothing. nothing suspicious in his search history, no shady messages on reddit, no word documents, no weird facebook correspondences. 

the only thing i found was a snapshot of the last moments before he died. the last webpage he’d opened that night was at 11:02pm. i called 911 at 11:11pm. for some reason, gaining that perspective fucked with me. 

+++

i started this blog as a way to vent. i wanted to keep a record of what was going on in my life and how i was coping. i am a container of stories about nathan, and i wanted to make sure that i wasn’t forgetting things. i spent so much time in the months immediately following nathan’s death forgetting. i forgot what his laugh sounds like. i forgot exactly what his hair smelled like. i wanted to try to forget as little as possible, and by having a written record of the thoughts and memories i have of him i felt like i was gaining a little bit of control over the situation. but now that i have this audience, sometimes i find myself trying to make sure that i filter myself appropriately. i have to discern what memories i want to keep for just the two of us, and which ones i want to share. 

pretty shortly after nathan died, i started a note on my phone called “things that are too fucked up to tweet right now, but maybe revisit in a few months?” 

the list included such hits as: 

sarah just got me a “promoted to fiancee shirt,” do they make “downgraded to widow” ones?

y’all ever go from planning a wedding to planning a funeral? 

my fiance being dead means i now have two urns to take holiday pictures with

GREAT, now i have to change my emergency contact AGAIN

i used to have a ‘segment’ on this blog where i’d post the messages i had been sending to nathan’s facebook- and eventually i had to stop. mostly because i realized that the messages were truly just this very honest and raw expression of my deepest grief- i usually only send him messages when i’m feeling the most upset. that’s one of those things that needed to be kept for just us.

+++ 

it’s strange, the way the internet has become one of the biggest coping mechanisms for me. even though it’s introduced a whole shitload of inconveniences, it’s given me a lot as well. one of my favorite things that happened was a handful of his friends sending me facebook messages with either pictures of him, or a memory of him, that’s the one instance where i’m glad to be easily accessible. my favorite thing about having the internet on my side this time around is feeling less lonely. when i listened to that episode of reply all, i heard so many little things about someone else’s grief that i was also experiencing. sometimes you ask yourself if you’re grieving properly, if what you’re doing is weird, or okay- and hearing that i’m not the only one processing things in the way that i do gives me that little bit of reassurance that i’m doing alright. 

+++

you wanna know the worst thing my iphone has done to me? i was scrolling through my camera roll, and i accidentally swiped up on one of the pictures. apparently photos will now show you “related photos” to the one you swipe up- and for some reason the algorithm decided one of the photos related to the one i swiped up on was a picture i had taken of nathan at his wake. i can’t believe steve jobs’ ghost would blindside me like that honestly. 

[stephhannes]

212.

one year ago, we left new york.

a week before we moved out of our apartment, i started cleaning. our kitchen was a straight-up disaster zone. when we first moved in, the AC unit in the kitchen was leaking underneath the tiles so everything was just….moist for awhile. for whatever reason, nathan refused to call maintenance whenever something was broken in the apartment so we lived with a wet floor for months until it started leaking in the apartment below us and they fixed it one day when i was at work.

because of that, there were weird remnants of amazon boxes that had melted and become a frankentile with the flooring. and we put off cleaning that for….the entire time we lived there. nathan’s whole concept of cleaning was “we can put it off until right before we move, it’ll be fine, we’ll still get our security deposit back.” i, however, could not live in a scum palace, so i would clean up once a week, but a lot of it slipped through the cracks. so the week before we left, there i was, cleaning all the cracks in the kitchen. i sat and scrubbed the kitchen floor for hours, painstakingly scraping up weird sticky spots and cardboard. there was a drawer that just had loose rice in it from a broken bag, and cleaning that was surprisingly tricky. i lysol’d the chicken shelf. i completely dismembered our stove to scrub underneath the burners. i swept up all of the onion skin and coffee grounds that had fallen in the crevice between the counters and the fridge. and then i moved onto the bathroom. while i wish i could have taken a match to the room, i just poured fabuloso all over the entire space, which is basically the same thing. my favorite part was when nathan came home one day and was like “wow, the bathroom looks so nice….why did you clean it?” and i was just like…..because, you idiot, we’re moving in a week and i’m trying to get a security deposit back. the only thing worse than having to clean all of the hair out of the sink was the period of time that our bathtub wouldn’t drain and i had to take a bath with every shower i took.

i’m a person who likes to be over-prepared. especially when it comes to things like traveling, or moving. i make lists, i get all my ducks in a row ahead of time and count them twice. nathan is the exact opposite. we left nyc on the morning of may 23rd, and i couldn’t quit work until may 21st, because i couldn’t afford to take any more days than that off. in my head, i anticipated that on the 22nd we would have been doing the final touches on cleaning and packing. we would have all our furniture out, all of the floors swept, everything we were taking back to texas in suitcases. the only thing we’d have out is the mattress so that we could go to bed at a decent time and be well-rested for our flight the next morning, the only thing we’d have to do in the morning is toss our mattress on the streets and leave.

but of course, that’s not how it panned out. the week leading up to moving, nathan did absolutely nothing in regards to packing. the only thing that got done was the prior cleaning i had accomplished. on may 21st, i got very drunk at my going-away party at work, came home at some stupid hour and fell asleep. i woke up at like 2pm on the 22nd, and nathan still hadn’t started anything. i had to go run an errand downtown, so i picked up the halal guys on my way back uptown. when i got back, we ate and then he went to the gym and then i was like uhhh ok i guess i should start getting shit together. so while he was at the gym i packed up all of my clothes. then, when i moved onto packing up the kitchen, i realized there was a lot of alcohol still left, and me, being a certified poor person, didn’t want to waste the money i had spent on it, so i started drinking while cleaning. when he got back from the gym, we accomplished my favorite part of moving- we slam dunked his nasty basketball shoes right into the dumpster.

we took turns throwing trash out into the hall, and leaving furniture down in the lobby. and eventually, around 4am, we had most of our garbage cleaned out of the apartment. also by this point, i had sobered up from drinking earlier in the night and was feeling dehydrated and terrible. all i wanted to do was sleep, but we still had so much to get done. by this point, i was getting stressed because we definitely were not close to finishing on time.

my breaking point was when we were trying to re-assemble our smoke detector. we disassembled it at some point early in our time living there because it would go off even if we were just boiling water. nathan struggled to put it back together for like 10 minutes and called me into the hallway to advise. me, being a person who’s done this before suggested, “oh so you have to flip that latch and then put the battery on top of it, then screw on the top,” and of course, immediately, nathan was like “no, that’s not right that doesn’t make any sense,” and after struggling for five more minutes i pushed him out of the way and was like, “oh my god let me do this” and i re-assembled it on my first try. because i was right.

we watched the sun rise over the GWB one last time.

our flight was leaving in 3 hours. we still had a couch, and a bed, and a table in the apartment. i had a headache. we hadn’t eaten in hours. so while nathan ran out to get bagels i cried for a solid 15 minutes out of exhaustion and stress.

i moved to new york with two suitcases. one for all my clothes/shoes, and one for towels, linens and pillows. somehow i thought i’d be able to leave new york with two suitcases, despite having accumulating even more stuff. i was shocked when i was actually able to fit everything that i owned and wanted to keep into one suitcase, my second one was basically just dedicated to nathan’s shoes and winter clothes.

when we were leaving for the airport i remember mentioning, “hey we should probably call an uber because i doubt all of our suitcases are going to fit into a taxi,” but nathan refused, so we walked two blocks to get a taxi and then had to spend a stupid amount of time playing jenga to get our suitcases into aforementioned taxi. two fit in the trunk, one was in the front seat, one was in my lap.

my suitcase was 10lbs overweight and southwest charges $75 for an overweight bag. so of course i lost my god damn mind and started crying and flung myself to the floor and started throwing things out of my bag and trying to shuffle things around to get it underweight. i was an airport goblin. here’s the thing: i’m actually very good at traveling. i’ve gotten my personal travel down to a science and i love flying and am usually very collected. but i was so stressed, i hadn’t slept in a day, and it truly brought out the worst in me.

once we made it onto the plane nathan told me that he never wanted to travel with me again because i am a disaster, and i promised that i’m not usually like that, but he definitely didn’t believe me- i’m so glad i made a good first impression. whenever we got to our parents’ houses back in texas i sent him a very nice text apologizing for being the human equivalent of a hurricane and he was just like, “it’s fine, you’re lucky i love you and also that i know exactly who you are.” which is true, i’m lucky that he knew and accepted exactly what kind of gremlin he was about to spend the rest of his life with.

despite paying a disgusting amount of money in rent, that was a dope little apartment. we had more space than we knew what to do with, literally half of our furniture in the living room was just a pile of nathan’s clothes because we needed something to take up some space. it was nice to have a doorman, even though there were a handful of times when i got stopped on my way into the building. my favorite time was when i rolled in at 3am after drinking with coworkers, and i had left my columbia ID in the apartment. usually this wasn’t an issue, but the person at the front desk stopped me for once and wouldn’t let me go upstairs without it. when you’re an actual columbia student, it’s not an issue because you can just give your student ID number to get in, but i was like “uhhhhh i don’t have one, i don’t go here, my husband does, please just let me into my home i want to be in my bed i am so drunk” and they were like “ok well he can bring your ID or he can sign you in,” and i was like “I PAY SO MUCH MONEY IN RENT HERE. MY ID IS UPSTAIRS, IN THE APARTMENT THAT I PAY RENT FOR, I CAN GO UPSTAIRS, TO THE APARTMENT I LIVE IN, AND BRING MY ID AND SHOW IT TO YOU” at this point, the doorman was DONE with me and was like, “well if i let you upstairs to get your ID, i’d still be letting you into the building without an ID and i can’t do that,” and i stood corrected, yeah ok touché, and then i had to call nathan to bring down my ID. luckily he was still awake, and since i was very drunk and love drama when i get stressed i started crying in the lobby while i was waiting for nathan to come downstairs. i would say this was my NYC rock bottom, but my NYC rock bottom was obviously the night i threw up in a mcdonald’s and 3 subway stations and lost my phone.

even though i was constantly stressed living in NYC, it was nice being able to come home to an apartment that wasn’t tiny, had a ton of natural light, and never had a rat (or carpenter bee) problem. i’m also so glad we got to avoid having roommates. we never really “moved into” our apartment- all of our furniture was trash we collected off of the streets, i never decorated anything, or even hung up all of my clothes. we knew we were going to be leaving new york after that year, so we tried to invest as little money as possible into the apartment. in fact, we invested so little money in the apartment that i didn’t have a mirror the entire time we lived there- we also had no overhead lighting. we found one lamp, so our bedroom got a lamp. if we wanted light in the living room, instead of just buying two lamps, we’d have to decide which room needed the light more and move the lamp accordingly.

when we moved to philly, even though all of our furniture was the cheapest we could find at walmart, we still actually spent money on buying matching furniture. pretty much all of our decor came from my old apartment in austin, but at least we tried to do some decorating. even though we put effort into having a kind of put-together home, it still felt less like home than 60 haven avenue did.

here’s a few pictures of our old apartment. first, the living room- where you can see “the pile” in its full glory. instead of folding and putting clothes away, nathan just dumped all of his clothing in a pile in the living room, partially because he didn’t care about organization and partially to just fill up some dead space. second, a corner of our bedroom- we fit a full mattress and still had a ton of space in the room. the window looked out at the GWB, which was my favorite part of the apartment. third, the bathroom- the only reason the shower curtain and bath mat look coordinated is because i brought them with me from my austin apartment. (the only reason we have a shower curtain is because i brought it. nathan didn’t think we needed one, and literally didn’t have one for a few weeks before i moved in). finally, the kitchen- it was pretty small but it did the job. this is a terrible picture of it, but you can see the amazon boxes that got fused to the floor when the floor started to leak. also pictured is a broom and dustpan, two items that sat in plain sight in the kitchen the entire time we lived there, but that nathan was still shocked to learn that we owned the first time he saw me sweeping the floors.