This Year Was A Scatter Plot
a year end review
My favourite chart is the scatter plot: spotty blemishes forming arcs that tell stories. Dots that connect. I’m no different; someone once told me I tend to think of my life as a story. Whenever something bad happens, I tell myself it’s the sad part of the story before things get good. When things go well, I become preoccupied that the other shoe is about to drop to keep the plot interesting. But most of life doesn’t make narrative sense. And neither do the best stories.
The plots of a year can look indecipherable and illegible. The artist in all of us seeks to connect the dots and turn its bizarre blots into a Jackson Pollock. Perhaps, it’s a coping mechanism or just magical thinking. A way to find meaning in the mundane and extract use in every moment. To make the pain productive. When I think of the past twelve months, the main points of the year glint like a LiteBrite, offering constellations — large and small. Sometimes the stars fail to connect. But other times they do.
***
In the spring, I developed an addiction to gelato. A serious kind of affliction that forced me to have a scoop three to four times a week, rotating across three different shops to avoid humiliation. The air frequently tasted of ash then, and the voices on the news swelled with dialogue about the war and who was to blame.
Those days, we pictured the end. Or maybe it was the beginning that we imagined. I lay idle in the park, without a tack of sunscreen, as strawberry fennel gelato leaked through the vents of my fist. When I think back to that time, I think rarely of the softness and almost always of the noise. The clatter of opinions, the rattling of trains, and the whirlpool of thoughts that meandered through my mind.
Later, as we forgot about the genocide, I began to wonder if the year meant anything. If the imprint it left on me, on you, was to tell us something. To shepherd a new way of thinking – of living. But when I try to grasp those feelings and replay their sounds, a formless haze emerges. It’s there but it’s not. My hands clasp over themselves, sticky from the sweet treat, and my empty palms open to catch the answer: maybe we've learned nothing at all.
***
The whole year people are using old words in new ways. An innovation of language that’s truly remarkable. We say things like “demure” and “brain rot” and “cooked” and “clean girl aesthetic” and then just stop. It’s, like, really fun. New languages bloom and are put to bed every other week. I ask a friend, “Hey, remember when we used to say things like confuzzled and derp and bromance and yeet” and she, rightfully, stares at me like I just asked if I could see her pet lemur.
She says “What are you talking about?” and I don’t answer. But I remember it. I know you do too.
***
At a wedding, I’m on my second oyster when someone tells me that there has been an assassination attempt on Donald Trump. We are on the balcony of a yacht club somewhere on Long Island and I don’t know many people. My phone is in my pocket so I slurp down the oyster so I can have a free hand to check what’s the tea.
Three memes have already been sent to my group chat. I save the one that has a bloody Donald Trump overlayed on top of Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! album cover. At the wedding, we bounce from group to group, sharing what we have discovered in our respective group chats. I have another oyster, I make some friends.
It’s time for dinner and the assassination attempt evaporates from our minds. The bride’s father speaks, and the band plays impressively. When I drive home the following morning, the group chat has already moved onto another meme.
***
Construction begins across the street from my building, right in front of a church. It’s not the noise that bothers me; it’s the height of the apartment being built that pisses me off. Each day or so, a new floor is added, obstructing my view of the church, and partially blocking the sun from the south. The building ascends and my world gets darker.
When I first decided to move into the apartment, it was the view that impressed me. Not because I planning on going to the church but because it felt like a sign or something or a dot to connect. To the right of the church is a McDonald’s. If I press my nose against the window in my bedroom, my wet breath creating a condensation of fog against the glass, I can see it just fine. Golden arches at heaven’s gates.
I finger a smiley face in the fog and then smudge it all out.
***
Everyone becomes obsessed with directions. Everyone was either Left or Right or Alt-Right or Left of Center or so Left that they eventually became Right. We became so obsessed with the directions that we became dizzy. And now no one knows where we are going.
***
The whole year is saturated with stories of angry men but we only realize the pattern too late. A failure to connect the plots.
There is a stretch of weeks where everyone is scared to take the subway. I hear stories of people getting stabbed on the train, and trains halting for hours to locate armed gentlemen. Women are getting punched in the face by wild boys on the street and film TikToks of themselves crying as evidence.
Before we sit down for Thai food, a couple hours before seeing a play, a friend of mine gets punched in the face by a stranger. He is not a woman so we mostly ignore it. He laughs it off and we gather around pad sew ew. The food is mid and we break for the play.
Months later, a man breaks into my building for a few weeks and hides in the stairwell with a knife and gun. I never take the stairs so I’m not sure how he does this. The building group chat informs me that he’s waiting for his ex-girlfriend. He wants to somehow win her back over with his knife and gun. “Everything is romantic,” an unknown number in the group chat explains.
One evening I see him, wedged in between the double entry doorways. He knocks on the door for me to let him in and I see that he is holding something against his chest. Concealed underneath his jacket, close to his beating heart.
A week ago, the friend who got punched sends me a screenshot of a news headline of a man setting a woman on fire on a train I take. I thumb through the internet to find out that she was sleeping when he set her on fire. Against my better judgement, I hit play on a video to watch as the man watches as the woman burns. A blurred-out, pixelated fire dances behind the windows of a train while a man sits parallel on the subway bench. The quality of the video is bad and I stare as a fire emoji of a woman withers and then disappears from my screen completely.
***
I reshare a post that says: What am I going to wear to the civil uprising1? It's a comedy. It's a tragedy. I scroll on SSENSE and add a Martine Rose sweater to my cart and wait for the ‘end of the world’ sale.
***
The year is full of transformations. A tennis movie becomes a hit. A wall becomes chartreuse. A submarine becomes a wreck. A convict becomes president. A cop becomes a loser. A pop star becomes a witch. A valedictorian becomes an assassin.
A photo of myself from two years ago resurfaces on my Google Home Display and I look exactly the same. It’s like I’m in a look-a-like contest with myself.
***
My neighbour tells me that he is trying to teach his parrot to say “Bumpin’ that” when he plays Charli xcx. I tell him it’s a worthy cause and head to the elevator, placing an AirPod in my ear so he’ll stop talking to me.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a bird as a pet but, one day, he asks me to water his plants while he’s gone for the week and refill the bird feed. That Wednesday, I walk into his apartment to check on things. As I enter the doorway, I hear the song 365 and realize he’s left it on repeat for the bird. The bird is green and is called Montgomery and doesn’t sing along at all.
Months later, he and his bird move out. I suspect it has something to do with the intruder but I’m not sure.
I stay up late to listen to the BRAT remix album. I hear a tap tap tap through my old neighbour’s side of the wall as I play the music. The tapping is on beat but I turn the music down anyways. When I go to brush my teeth, I discover a collection of small green feathers tucked into the sink drain. I pull them out one by one, each stem covered in toothpaste and saliva. I trash them and go to sleep.
Later in the week, when I remember the strange occurrence, I ask the doorman who has moved into the unit next to me but he tells me the unit has been empty for months. The next week, Charli xcx performs on Saturday Night Live against a bright green screen and the tapping against my wall begins again.
***
One day, on my way to the gelato stand, I see a guy roll out his hoodie on the pavement like a yoga mat. He is my age-ish, and he mounts his flattened hoodie with both knees. His toes curl into his feet with submission and his forehead kisses the floor, his skull pointing to where he believes is Mecca.
I look in the direction where his crown faces and I see a brick wall. I squint for signs of God but then remember it's rude to stare.
The months pass and we watch important competitions like the Paris Olympics, Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson, and the latest season of Survivor. I look across and notice that the view of the church across from me has become even more obstructed and I wonder if there is anyone left to watch over me.
***
Everyone is stanning Gypsy Rose Blanchard despite wanting her behind bars years prior. Everyone is dunking on JLo despite rooting for her during her Hustlers/Super Bowl era. Everyone still hates Blake Lively and Chappell Roan is pissed off the entire year. I've always hated Moo Deng so it somehow feels like a badge of honour when she’s outed for being a fascist pig.
On my birthday in Paris, the Girl, so confusing remix drops and it says more about our spineless relationship with women than anything else.
***
By Thanksgiving, I’m throwing gang signs in Amagansett, crip walking to squabble up instead of helping set the table. As a Canadian, I know where my allegiance is supposed to be but I like both rappers and don’t want to have to choose.
When I arrive in Toronto for the holidays, I go to a popular Chinese buffet spot. They are playing Drake to test me. I fill my plate up three times and have a healthy serving of that red sweet and sour sauce. I crack a fortune cookie and it says “the plum you're going to eat next summer doesn't exist yet.” I think: “But, I don’t eat plums.”
Syria’s president abdicates and martial law is imposed in South Korea for a hot second. On my way out of the buffet, I toss a penny in the pond and watch as a koi fish glides upwards, belly first.
***
One day in the winter, I decide to go to a screening hosted by a fellow writer who I have never met in person but am “friendly with online.” I go alone and take the train with headphones in my ear but no music is playing. As I enter the auditorium, I am waved down by a woman whose face I do not recognize. I pretend that I know her anyway, and take the seat next to her as everyone in the room seems vaguely familiar with each other, and, throughout the conversation — which consists of her talking and me nodding — pick up that her name is Amina.
Amina is adamant on playing the ‘name game,’ asking me if I know Harley or Mark or Trevor or Angus or Lindsey. The film is on and I’m only half listening, dividing my attention between Amina’s game, the screen, and my Cherry Vanilla Coke. I’m sleepwalking but I’m sitting, not really clued in until the gentleman in the seat directly in front of me lifts a big white picket sign and the room erupts in protest.
It takes me too long to realize that the police have interrupted the screening. I think it is some planned intermission but I’m too flustered, too full on soda pop and Amina’s anecdotes to understand what is going on. The burly gentleman with the sign begins to scream at the cop in the aisle next to us. I notice that the officer has dark hair and a porno mustache and I can see a tattoo of a wrench peeking out from under his sleeve. The gentleman with the sign lifts his sign at the policeman to draw greater attention to its message but I have no idea what he is protesting. I can’t see the sign. I have no dots to connect.
Amina’s murmurs only quiet when the policeman strikes the sign down and it folds behind the gentleman to whack me deep into my chair. The theater is old but has seats that recline like a La-Z boy and I’m spread like jam. The gentleman lifts the sign from me to thrust it in the police officer’s face and the officer slams it once more, the sign pushing me horizontal. Popcorn is at my feet, the floor is moist with cola and I begin to think it’s time to become an AMC A-List member. I push the sign off and the officer, now noticing that I’m suppressed under it, pushes it again and I garble out a “what the fuckkkkkk?” I shove the sign off me, still clueless as to what it says and the sign flicks up, puncturing the officer in the face.
The officer tears the sign from my chest and replaces it with his gun.
The whole theater goes silent as I hold my breath. I cover my chest with my hands as if to protect my beating heart. Then, I shift my body into a T, my left arm branching into the aisle and my right crossing over to Amina’s lap, and open my palms as if receiving stigmata. The gun remains on my chest as I lock eyes with the officer. He contemplates. A beat passes and I wonder if this is where my chart ends. There is the sound of someone crying but I’m pretty sure it’s just from the movie.
When I open my eyes again I’m in my childhood bed. It’s three days until Christmas. I sniff for the smell of smoke and see that I’ve been spared.
***
It’s today. I’m almost back home when a car howls past me, blasting that Lorde song Kanye West remixed for the Hunger Games soundtrack where she says something like “I never count the stars, there’s so much down here.”
The rain that has assaulted the city has left miniature crystals all around, bejeweled and wet. The worms have begun to poke their heads through the muddy vents of the sidewalk when I get a text from my friend. It’s a screenshot from her Co-Star app. I forgot my password for the app and so I live vicariously through other people’s horoscopes, trying them on like ill-fitting sweaters. Her app says “If you stop narrating your own life, it’ll go on anyway.”
I ask her if it means to stop or start narrating and she writes back “I think it means life is happening right now. Regardless of the story we’re telling ourselves.”
On the internet, I type in what the fortune cookie once told me and it brings up a longer poem. “The plum you’re going to eat next summer doesn’t exist yet; its potential lives inside a tree you’ll never see in an orchard you’ll never see, will be touched by a certain number of water droplets before it reaches you2…” It goes on like this. When I first read it, I don’t feel anything but then I do. It makes me hopeful for the future, for the plots that have yet to come into focus.
By now, the new building has fully blocked out the church and towers over the sky and its stars. I can’t even see the McDonald’s. It’s all out of sight but I know that they are still there and I relinquish the desire to connect them. I don’t really eat plums but I do eat strawberry fennel gelato. I check and discover that strawberries are in season a few months from now. I only need to wait until the new year.
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Source: Gayle Brandeis.
Absolutely beautiful read as always
New visitor—this was such a beautiful read. Imagine my delight when I read my mentor’s words I’ve savored so many times about a “plum.” Anyway, even if that wasn’t there—you have a new fan in me. 💛