Grief But Make It Fashion
Weeping in a turtleneck onesie on Bowery on a cold blue day.
*Prefer to listen? I GOT you. No creepy AI voice! Narrated by me!
I’m in New York City and seeking unhealthy comfort in the form of a puff coat.
When I’m in a vulnerable place I become jarringly obsessed with puff coats and can’t seem to peel them off my limbs, no matter the temperature.
I’ll wear them fireside dining, writing in an oven-warm coffee shop, traipsing through a department store mid-winter radiator cranked up to scorching—and if I’m in a particularly unsavory season of life? To bed, covers pulled up to the cheekbones.
But let’s keep that last dark nugget between you, me, and the family.
Right now, my puff coat of choice is by designer Rachel Antonoff—sister of Jack Antonoff—who produced Lana’s last album—“Did You Know There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd?” (Among many other albums of note).
Though their mediums differ, the Antonoff siblings are experts in catering to the sensibilities of quirky downtown girls going through shit.
Which means I’m their target audience.
The puff coat is warm chestnut brown and has little disposable coffee cups with greek emblems printed all over it—the kind of coffee cups native to New York delis.
(Fun Fact: this coffee cup was designed in 1963 by a broad named “Leslie Buck,” and was intended to appeal to the surplus of Greek deli owners in the city. It’s since become one of the most widely recognized symbols of New York in the cultural Zeitgeist).
The puff coat reminds me of my brother, who died three weeks ago today.
Blake is a typical Manhattan guy—an un-showered intellect who’s never set foot in a Starbucks. A classic iteration of Jew Yorker, ordering an egg and cheese on a Kaiser roll at the no-frills bodega down the block slushing it down with drip coffee served in the Greek cup as seen on my Rachel Antonoff puffer.
I do realize that I just referred to my brother in the present tense as if he’s still alive and we’re about to meet up for a breakfast sandwich later this afternoon—it’s just that I’m not ready to write about him in the past tense.
Which is probably why I’m particularly codependent with this puff coat—the coffee cups make me feel close to him.
And all I want to do is feel close to him.
I’d trade a thousand days on earth just to watch him suck cigarettes and pound shitty deli coffee with his hands in his pockets, his dumb art-school glasses fogging up from the brisk fall air, one last time.
The reality that I will never see him speed walk through the streets in dirty black denim and hoodie, ever again—it’s too much for me to handle.
I feel more alone than anything.
I’ve never felt alone in the world before, it’s as foreign as Sanskrit.
I’ve thought I’d felt alone before.
Like, you know—the handful of times I’ve been sick with the flu fresh out of a breakup. We’ve all been there.
Your roommates might knock on your door a few times to check in—but no one is stroking your forehead and making you grilled cheese and suddenly it becomes blazingly apparent that No One Is Coming™, literally and figuratively.
You shiver and have masturbatory thoughts about how cruel and cold the world is. You get in character and play the part of the barren Soviet widow shoveling matzoh ball soup into your mouth.
If you were me in my twenties—maybe in a moment of weakness you’d send a bitchy passive-aggressive text to your ex—something like “thanks for caring that I’m SICK”—which you’d inevitably regret two days later, when you’re feeling shiny again and oops oh shit that interaction just kicked back up something that wasn’t meant to be kicked back up, ever, sorry.
Those pity parties—as hard as they were at the time—were kind of fun. You knew you weren’t really alone, deep down—and at least you got to escape yourself for a few days—sniffle out the window longingly, a main character in a period piece.
But now I’m *actually* alone.
And it’s still a party.
It’s just not a pity party. It’s a pain party I never wanted to attend.
And there is no calling an Uber and getting on with it three days later, trust me I tried, but no cars available, not even a Honda Civic.
You’re stuck here until further notice.
And the worst part is—the pain party follows you everywhere you go—but you’re the only one in attendance. She follows you everywhere you go, and the rest of the people in your life have no choice but to watch the shit show from the sidelines.
By which, I mean, I showed up to brunch this Sunday, weeping in a turtleneck onesie. I was meeting Sam and Rocky at Gemma on Bowery, with my girlfriend. I love them all.
I know myself enough to know that not everyone is worthy of being privy to this pain party—which is why I hardly told anyone I was in New York.
Only the sacred few I trust in my bone marrow.
I was clutching my girlfriend’s hand and Sephora bag, tightly, when I showed up at the table. It was a cold blue day, my favorite.
Rocky and I are new friends—but old new friends if you know what I mean. Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve shared some heavy generational trauma two lifetimes ago. I see myself in her big soft eyes, teeming with grit and sensitivity; creativity, and the type of hyper-vigilance that’s been learned through hardship.
“Ohhh, you got goodies from Sephora?” Rocky crooned affectionately, her big soft eyes cozy and milky-brown like a Hershey’s kiss.
“Sorry, I’m not okay,” I choked, heavy black mascara tears making railroad tracks down my sunken yellow cheeks.
“If you were okay, I’d be worried about you,” Sam dead-panned, lowering her plush dark eyebrows, her lesbian peacoat buttoned all the way. “Though you are looking a little thin.”
Sam is an Ashkenazi Jew like me and she’s been one of my most revered best friends for a decade plus—and while I don’t know if we share the same war-torn generational trauma I experienced with Rocky—we’ve been through shit together, shit beyond this life.
I imagine in a past life we were childhood best friends on the harrowing excursion from Poland to Ellis Island sometime about 1914 and subsequently came of age in the same crummy tenement on the Lower East Side.
I snotted into my untouched cheeseburger and my girlfriend just looked at me, her big topaz eyes burning like a fever dream.
Like all of us, she’s of Jewish lineage but unlike us she’s Israeli, so her skin is olive and buttery soft and she doesn’t feel the need to fill the air with words.
She can let the pain hang heavy.
It balances out our need collective need to fix and snatch feelings and make sense of them in a cerebral way.
My girlfriend and I are very connected but I don’t think we’ve had past life trauma together—we don’t have the worn familiarity that I share with Rocky and Sam. We’re hot and curious for each other. It feels like a new-beginning that is both necessary and refreshing.
We order wine and I teeter between laughing and crying at the pain party and all I want to do is text Blake and tell him about the coffee cup puff coat.
My people don’t make fun of the pain party or don’t act like I’m not raving in it.
They let me thrash in the hurt, but watch me close enough to make sure I don’t fall on my face.
A thought flashes through my brain. Maybe I’m not alone.
Maybe I’m just in the awkward adolescence of finding what it means to exist without my brother bear.
That’s all I’ve got for now.