Dave’s House

For two and a half years I lived in a house with Ariel on the West Side of Olympia. It was the nicest house I’d lived in yet, with wood floors and blue tile in the bathroom. The house was $1050 to rent. That felt expensive but split two ways it was just cheap enough for us to afford at the time. A man named Dave owned the house and it was on Milroy Street. He was an energetic and talkative middle-aged man with white hair. When he came by to do repairs, he held us in excessively lengthy conversations about the going-on’s of town in order to demonstrate his friendliness, and then later sent us lengthy emails about his frustrations with the yard, which we had appropriated as the site of an overly-ambitious garden. He was a man who knew how to fix things and had high standards regarding the manner in which a house ought to be tended. We were well-intentioned but less educated in property ownership. We preferred for him to be an absent as much as possible, like some phantom of owning-class authority we would lament while practicing land stewardship in his backyard.

I met Ariel in the context of moving into this house and we quickly formed an understated friendship. It was Ariel and myself, and at times our boyfriends Pete and Ethan lived there too. We began to make plans for our garden while confessing of low expectations for collaborative projects. Ariel told me in a dry tone that she didn’t want to mess around with a chore rotation because it would inevitably fall by the wayside. She’d be responsible for her plants, and I could have my own plants to be responsible for, but all produce would happily be shared. It was a comfortable arrangement. We dug up a giant plot in the middle of that suburban-feeling manor and grew unusual vegetables — shungiku chrysanthemum, scarlet runner beans, bora king purple daikon, cascadia snap peas. Inside the house, our aesthetic was anarchist pastoral. We had a cactus collection, stones for fermentation, dried mushrooms, straw, and seeds. There was a majestic spaciousness and something I pretended was exhibit-like about our residence there, like we were conceptual art about subculture—there was a sense of remove and distance in pretending to be on display. It felt both indulgent and healthy to occupy open space. I put down gymnastics mats down in the garage. On good days, I pranced around in the living room in a leotard.

Ariel’s rich experiential background in permaculture gardening, which had been honed during several years of living semi-transiently on land projects and gardening at rental properties, shone through on our small patch of arable land. She generally seemed like someone who was happier with plants than with people. In comparison, I was a novice gardener. I spread myself too thin between creative projects (upon which I projected tremendous urgency) and the garden plot which more tangibly demonstrated the consequences of my neglect. It wilted and flagged. But in Ariel’s presence, I felt a complete lack of shame about my imperfections and the ways I struggled with my ambitions. There were mornings she barely left her room, and days when I sat at my desk buzzing with anxiety. Showing up broken didn’t imply a request to be fixed or an invitation to intervene in each others’ difficulties. This naturalization of our emotional distress provided me with rare respite. I took comfort in the ways Ariel approached the cyclical nature of both gardening and her extreme depression, ceding that there were simply things that lay beyond her control. Some of the seeds didn’t make it into the ground; I expressed disappointment. “But there’s always next summer,” Ariel said. In our various anti-social idiosyncrasies, we sank together into an impromptu, temporary semblance of familial life, cultivating the house and the garden as a project which provided some beneficial structure to the general sense of ambiguity in our lives.

Mired in hopelessness and an emotional pain that often accompanies environmental idealism, these homesteading practices felt like optimistic anomalies within the general listlessness of Pete and Ariel’s dispositions. They did amazing things in the backyard, like establish a bee colony and a 4’x4’ native prairie restoration plot after Pete performed a controlled burn by Dave’s Japanese Maple tree with a blow torch. For me, even the suggestion of self-sufficiency and bioremediation was daunting. I felt discouraged by the climate in general—the fluctuations of moisture, temperature, and other inevitabilities of the elements one encounters through cultivation and husbandry in an uncontrolled environment. Even in the spring the damp air of the Pacific Northwest weighed upon me. I’d grown up in Minnesota where the winters were sharp and dangerous, but I found the slow, mediocre grind of Olympia’s cold season difficult to power through. Not being able to weather the weather felt like not being able to love life itself or just generally harboring this kind of flaccid listlessness of receiving industrially fabricated survival, desperately hungry for electric heat. Still, I felt strongly I should overcome the fear that knowing to survive was too overwhelming for me, or that without electricity winter would totally kill me, or something like that.

This brittle aversion to cold and even to effort itself is something that I would later correlate with a medical diagnosis I received shortly after moving out of Dave’s house. By our second winter together, I found myself nodding off on the gold couch, desperately clutching a blanket to stay warm; my jittery energy was heavily coated in a sleepy, listless fatigue. I felt I was losing the battle against despair. Even through this escalation, or at least a continuation, of the personal dilemmas which Ariel and I had spoken of early in our friendship, I still look back on my time in Dave’s house as the peak of my life in Olympia. No place felt so much like home, so marked with a sense of familiarity and kinship, so influential upon my domestic ideals. At the same time, our arrangement felt ephemeral, destined to disassemble itself. I think this explicit temporality may account for the ways we readily pooled our resources into a cohesive whole.

Part of why we all four bonded so readily was our experiences and disaffected inner conflict with anarchist subculture. We had progressed beyond anti-social primitivism and actually Pete was finishing up a grueling degree in environmental science. It was no longer forbidden for us to consider the benefits of ingenuity and innovation though we retained skepticism for “human progress” as something that could be correlated to the passage of historical time. In one conversation, Ariel and Pete had even posed the hypothetical possibility of an ecologically beneficial use of genetic engineering, divorced from its industrial context. Like, what if you could grow coconuts in the Pacific Northwest instead of importing them from Thailand? Would that be better, and by what standard?

There was this utopian conjugation of science but they readily spoke of a racist techno-apocalypse. This situation was more than immanent, it was already here. We shared a disgust (perhaps reactionary and vestigial) with contemporary domestic aspirations as a sterilized, subtle hell of isolation, something that pitted individuals’ needs against each other. We and everyone were rapidly being out-priced of ordinary existence and each day it seemed another hole was opening up in the atmosphere. The earth was in peril and rather than work towards its repair, economic momentum mandated an increase in productivity and luxury consumption. Amidst this precarity we imagined ourselves surrounded by an absurd spectacle of spiritual salvations. If we were not completely immune to them, at least we carried bittersweet skepticism for the desperately false optimism capitalism was counter-posed with. There was a lot of intellectual pain regarding our survival and the lightheartedness to which we aspired. Against this backdrop, planting peas, herbs, and arugula in the yard we’d padded with mushroom compost felt like symbolic gestures; they were tentative, surface-level expressions of a much deeper and unflagging hope.

We subsidized this harvest with store-bought junk food and in fact going to the Grocery Outlet was one of my favorite past-times, both as a customer and in my capacity of doing “research.” Grocery Outlet was one of the most fun places in Olympia but it was also one of the shittiest, full of misery and rejected products. There was something primally satisfying about living off of this easy bounty. And besides I was going through a period of unconsummated pseudo-anorexia in my deliberations about what form my emotional transformation ought to take. It was difficult to eat meals, easier to subsist on snacks. Who I was and where I was headed was frustratingly insufficient. Wandering through Grocery Outlet was cathartic in the way of entering into a wound, but sort of parasitically.

Sometimes Ariel went without eating in this intermittent abstinence from existence. At one point during our first August together, I saw Ariel holding her bedroom door open. I thought, “My, how thin her shoulder has grown.” It was just a bone in a ball socket with no definition. She smiled at me before shutting herself back in the room. The wood and plaster in the house was cooking in the dry summer heat, all of which stifled our conversation. It was a desperate time full of grocery shopping as recreation, filling the kitchen with chips and salsa we got at Grocery Outlet or Trader Joe’s like reassuring gifts to our submerged childhood selves, or whatever part of us still took pleasure in small delights. I was discarding adherence to a grain-free diet so eating corn felt delightfully transgressive; I feigned not giving a fuck about what I ate. Eating snacks with Ariel was a trepidatious experiment in irreverence about physical purity, like flushing all of my conviction down the toilet in favor of some new, frightening freeness with my body. There were colonial implications of eating a tortilla chip but chips were also very symbolic of finding wholeness within fragmentation. The oil and salt awoke something ancient within me, a hunger that perpetuated itself indulgently like a dam breaking. It was not about hedonism, but rather about recovery. I would cook diligently but wrangled with urges to not eat. Eating meals felt like postponing perfectionism in a bad way—it was so consummate, so solid and sturdy.

When it started to get cold again but was still bright and sunny after our first summer together, the fan above the stove developed a drip. Grease-stained brass accruing condensation would release little drops of water like a runny nose overhead onto the carbonized glass-top stove where we stored our cast iron pans. In the morning the sun would stream into the kitchen window, and we would take turns loitering in our bedrooms and utilizing the kitchen to make breakfast, sometimes crossing paths and getting hooked in conversation.

Because it was a time period of emotional despair, it was also one of artistic despair. I had an idea for an exhibit (a full-on immersive space made through textile, collage, and sculptural artifacts), and wanted to write another novel too, but instead I got stuck picking away at my research about “culture,” particularly around health and lifestyle fads. It was a pleasant intellectual fallacy, yet also sort of excruciating, to pretend that I was an anthropologist examining phenomena which had no grasp upon me. “I’m studying the ways that the body is understood as a producer of positive affect,” I’d say, hoping to emerge from the depths of my own sadness with clarity about the differences and similarities between physical and psychic pain. In some ways that was a historical question regarding the Enlightenment and of course, colonization. Sometimes Pete and I would talk about my objects of research while I cooked beneath the dripping fan. I made a lot of mashy things on a cast iron—kale and sweet potatoes or whatever, eaten with butter and sometimes meat. Sometimes I told Pete things just to demonstrate that I was still “down” after distancing myself from anarchist subculture—that I could have critiques of social toxicity and capitalism at the same time. Or that I could prioritize health as I did while also making jokes at the expense of certain lifestyle bloggers and their apparent, default classism. “I’ve been reading a book by this, like, designer who went to nutritionist school and lives in Denmark now,” I told him. She was an elegant yet approachable woman with a thick blonde braid who provided creative ideas about mostly vegan home cooking, iterations of dishes I felt like I’d already seen before. I wondered how people could make a living off of such repetition—quinoa salads, chia seed puddings. We laughed about some argument she made about the intrinsic wisdom of nature: “Nature provides us with cooling cucumbers in the summer, and dense pumpkins and beets in the winter.” I looked online and discovered that according to the USDA both were mostly water anyways. Yeah right, dummy, I was thinking, unfortunately the macronutrients “naturally” available in the winter were to be found in meat. We resented not vegetable eating but this feigned innocence that there was some right or natural way of eating.

It was funny how that always seemed to fall on one pole or another, either veganism or copious meat-eating. I, too, housed these polar perceptions of veganism as treading lightly upon the earth, and some sense of having poor health that necessitated a diet of overcooked meats and bone broth. It’s a debate which Grocery Outlet always felt psychedelically emblematic of, with its aisles of nearly expired superfood smoothie additives and dried out, vacuum-sealed meat “energy” chunks. I felt exposed to many reminders of these contradictory relationships to healthy eating, whether at the specialty coffee-shop where I worked or within the janky health food vibe which constituted Olympia more broadly. Even Pete was experimenting with protein shake veganism, keeping canisters of powder stored on the counter.  It was like a landscape blanketed over by unanswered questions which nonetheless presented these attractive, fad-like solutions that stimulated my enthusiasm for being perfectly energetic. I had a plaguing nervousness about spanning the length of experience, which for whatever reason has often formed a dialectic with weight-gain, as though losing weight is the clarification of experience and gaining weight is the acquisition of more things to work through. I wanted to expel whatever was clogging me up. I figured whenever it happened I would weigh at least five pounds less. Then I would know I’d freed myself from the same malaise that made it hard to make art or to focus, and made simple efforts seem unfeasible or excessively symbolic.

///

Ariel loved coffee and weed. She had a wonderfully flat voice that sometimes erupted from the sardonic valley of flat stoner affect into peals of laughter. She didn’t profess competency when it came to being an adult, but I found the deliberate nature of her vices inspiration because it belied her maturity and a functional steadiness that she had established through these psychoactive agents. Every morning she would make coffee, and stir half-and-half into it with a little spoon before disappearing into her bedroom for a while, usually wrapped in one of her cream-colored sweaters, with her elderly beagle named Daisy tagging along arthritically. Most evenings Ariel smoked weed from a small, dirty bong which lived on the wooden mantle above the fireplace. Having put the garden to rest under a bed of straw for the season Ariel had decided to start drawing again. She bought a big sketchbook and drew plants, faces, flowers, and characters who swirled in a sea of emptiness. This was another activity often reserved for the evening, and sometimes I joined her, drawing vampires, treadmills, and caricatures of health bloggers in my own large sketchbook, exorcising my fitness demons.

One night when neither Pete nor Ethan was around, Ariel and I got stoned together at the dining room table. We sat in a warm glow, eating popcorn from a large red bowl. In the warp, reality transferred into a more lurid version of itself and I felt myself drift off into an overwhelmingly metaphysical examination of my surroundings. The house felt animate. I thought about Ariel’s relationship to plants—her purple daikon, her edible flowers, the collection of cacti she diligently fed artificial life. She’d grown up going to Waldorf school, and I had gone to herb school, so during our year together we’d made a lot of jokes about the proto-fascism of certain sects of new age thinking or alternately, its idealistic naïvety. But there was something we’d never explicitly talked about. Putting a piece of popcorn into my mouth, I decided to pop the question:

“Do you believe in magic?”

“No.”

She didn’t hesitate at all. Then she said, “I don’t really know what I believe in. I guess I believe in evolution.”

Evolution meant there was a functional explanation as to why, physically, things were as they are. She was too much of a skeptic to indulge the notion that we were intended stewards of the “natural world” and its fantastical landscapes. But there was also nothing more psychedelic I could think of than evolution and the morphing of physical bodies throughout the impossible expanse of pre-history. She might not have said or meant this but it was my optimistic deduction from evolution’s realness that we were, nonetheless, included within “nature.” We had our own methods of survival, even aesthetic ones. We curated little fragments of the wild on the kitchen windowsill. There were geodes, pieces of honeycomb, purple mineral crystals that formed on the corks of some wine bottles we had gotten at Grocery Outlet, vintage 1990’s from a defunct winery called Giuseppe. What it meant to be a part of nature was not without feeling, not without a certain beauty.

Then Ariel returned the question, asking me, “Do you believe in magic?”

I paused, and sort of lied, saying, “Um, I don’t know.”

In actuality, the whole time I’d lived in that house I’d been secretly vexed about this very question. Admitting that there was neither magic nor destiny would mean accepting that I’d spent a solid five months, the spring and summer before I’d moved in with Ariel, in a delusion of artistic grandeur. I’d been working on a novel, and had found myself suddenly swept up in an unexpectedly crushing and monumental joyfulness, something I’d never experienced with creative work before. This levity gave way to a heavy lethargy I hadn’t yet been able to shake. Acknowledging that experience as something other than magical would also bring me closer to accepting that I lacked psychic powers to pull my younger brother out of the precarity which his own psychosis generated. He’d been hospitalized a handful of times by that autumn, and would soon be living on the streets of Minneapolis. He was a gifted rapper in the underground hip-hop scene, and I refused to accept that his psychic instability was heralding the closure of his precocious creative success. It felt too coincidental that the closure of my own spell of inspiration coincided with his first major hospitalization. I felt our conditions were conjoined, like his pain was referring back to me, or the other way around.

I’d been playing around with the possibility that the overlap between my experiences and those my brother was just that—a logical overlap due to our similar genetic coding—as opposed to a testament to our mutual upsetting of some hidden balance. I’d toy around with embracing this reason, but then take a hair-pin turn back towards magic, casting a spell for happiness again—happiness that I hoped would come in the form of gigantic creative success. I sorely missed my manic reverie, and I lacked more rational means to persuade my brother into a stable situation. I interpreted my own anxious depression as evidence that I had somehow disappointed whatever force had once filled me with ecstatic joy. I had been employing all kinds of efforts to slip back into that militant belief in art, though none of it was catching. There were only splinters and sparks.

Haltingly, I described this dilemma to Ariel. Whether the absence of the hyper-confidence I’d felt before was something to mourn, or a sign that I’d returned to the state of equanimity within what was generally accepted as reality. I wondered whether inhabiting the perennial sense of incompletion we filled Dave’s house with was someplace I could actually call home, or if there was some more transcendental place to which I was hoping to arrive. Whether I more properly belonged to the work of growing a garden or searching for metaphysical forest lit up with electric light. Surely the latter would be a place where the symptoms and side-effects of psychosis was absolved by a spiritual saturation and where all of our imperfections and instabilities were no cause for alarm. “Bataille’s definition of sunshine,” I thought, regarding that absurd excess of energy we are gifted with, the one he referred to in relation to the “solar anus,” and mumbled something to Ariel about the aesthetics of otherworldliness. It might not be magic, but I was sure there was a force in the world and that it had something to do with art—both in its more literal sense and also in the sense of the healing arts. I’d fallen away from the practice of taking tinctures and making herbal tea, and struggled to follow through on my creative ambitions. Both art and herbalism seemed founded on the belief that the world was both beautiful and capable of regenerating itself. I felt impossibly far away from that faithfulness that evening but took some comfort in the eternal nature of regeneration. I hoped that someday soon I might feel capable of growing something and that I might be able to find contentment in the smallest possible scale.

________

Siloh Radovsky writes personal essays, experimental prose and prose poems, and fiction. She currently resides in San Diego, where she is an MFA student at the University of California. Siloh received an interdisciplinary B.A. from the Evergreen State College. Her writing has appeared in Teen Vogue, Entropy, Inkwell, and Sundae Theory. More of her work can be found at silohradovsky.net or through @essence_of_toast.