Going Cowgirl Copper As The World Ends

The Eagles are undefeated and I need a coffee cardinally. (“I think you mean ‘carnally,'” someone corrects me.

I double down:”I don’t. I mean, like, fundamentally, I need a coffee.”

“Yeah, ‘carnally’ is related to appetite. That’s what you’re trying to say.”

“We can literally use language however we want, leave me alone.”)

It’s one o’clock in the afternoon. 

We go to brunch, half-alive, my best friend, Tania, and I; our Sunday tradition. Last night we wore silk shirts and ripped jeans at The Beach Bars until Tavern played “Closing Time” twice. I have a crush on one of the bar backs though he’s younger than I am, and insufferable about it, and covered in cartoon-strip tattoos he’s too-proud of.

The diner, divey and crumbling in a way that feels like home, is lively. Tania and I know all of the waitresses. She always gets a waffle, and I always get eggs with homefries, and we split our plates.

“Honest-tuh-Gahd!” A perpetual punchline. I vow, hand in the air, finishing a story, and she laughs.

We have a twin sense of humor, dumb and dry. Sometimes I think we could be the only two people in the world and we’d never notice. Where I end and she starts, who’s to say?

We come home and rot under blankets watching Desperate Housewives reruns. I find unopened bottles of hair dye in the bathroom and she paints every strand on my head, red. Later I line my eyes with green because we’ll watch the game at the bar. Red hair and green eyeliner, just like Christmas, but it’s October.

I kind-of like it. 

It kind-of looks like shit. 

How wasteful these years are. A beautiful waste.

I spend money, gain weight.

Date and impress and become borderline obsessed with wholesome-faced, hazel-eyed locals who’s indifference I miscalculate as playful banter, girls who have BPD and absent moms, guys that aren’t feminists but still ask to split the bill.

My LSAT textbooks taunt me from their perpetual place under the coffee table, occasional coasters, untouched, for a while now. 

Longer than I’d like to admit. 

“I’m studying to get into law school,” I’ve said it three hundred times, probably, these past few months. It’s a harder thing to actually do.  

My mother calls. I call back and get her voicemail. 

I stitch friendship bracelets on the couch, make a pot of coffee. 

It’s that gray feeling, mid-day and hazy and sad, before the hair of the dog as we’re getting ready to watch The Eagles play at a Philly-centered bar in Jax Beach. Two drinks tops, we say. (Although we end up Ubering home.) 

We’ll be 6-0, can you believe that? Our eyes are bright, refreshed now from the breakfast and the hope and the hype and the High Noons that we sip, a wonder. 6-0! The people around us are “from Philly”-technically New Jersey but five minutes over the bridge-too, buy us shots. 

I double-text the guy that I’m not supposed to, Nico; another Sunday tradition Nico is nine years older than I am, and gorgeous, and wholly uninterested in me, and for these reasons alone I am halfway to being in love with him.

Really, truly, in love with him. 

I shift in the bar stool, hopeful, uneasy.

Bombs rain down on Gaza whether he texts me back or not.

We had this moment, on his couch, a few weeks back. It was awful. We were trying to watch a movie, an older one in black and white, and just as dull as he is. I kept complaining in little chirps, and he’d readjust next to me, sigh, turn the volume up.

“You’re so chatty,” He’d said, finally.

Chatty: a weapon.

He shifted to hold me closer, “like all girls.” He kissed my hair, my forehead, my cheekbones. I stilled. It was meant to illicit a reaction, a game we play, tit for tat. I’m usually better at it.

“You’re right, I’m sorry.” I smiled gently, humming.

It worked, in agitating him. Ha! I held my breath, so I didn’t oversell it. That wouldn’t piss him off, as much.

“I like you better temperamental,” He scrunched his nose, unamused.

We fell into a silence that carried a charged sort of warmth to it, peaceful and easy.

He looked at me, viciously, violently, tender,. An apparition, a curse.

I haven’t seen him since.

The Eagles lose to the Jets.

The fucking Jets. 

Work is emails and spreadsheets and meetings. Spreadsheets and meetings and emails. Busy season, I’d cry if my Prozac let me.

My boss is painstakingly likable. He talks like a politician with none of the shmuckiness: impossibly kind and overwhelmingly, exhaustingly inoffensive. Sometimes I try to bait him into shit-talking people who send “Fuck you” coded emails and he says ridiculous things like, “Ah, I don’t envy their job!”

I try and fail to do the kumbaya thing. I don’t get past lunch without offending somebody.

I go on dates, go up another jean size, scream into piles of clothes on the floor in my closet.

I give up drinking, melodramatically, after a friend declares in Lynches, “ ‘Just one more’ drink? More like just one more drink from every bar on the block,” and we all laugh.

I just as quickly pick it back up. We can’t all be alcoholics, saved by God and sobriety.

The Eagles beat the Chiefs, but barley. I mean, barely. The death toll in Palestine climbs. People don’t bring it up. “I don’t really get into all that stuff,” they shrug, when I do. Autumn spins on.

I tell Nico to stop calling me. I cut off all of my hair. “I’ll always have a soft spot for how you made me laugh,” He tells me, so strategically trivializing that I nearly admire him for it.

The praise is backhanded but, praise, nonetheless, rare and true, so I say it out loud, stuttering stra-te-te-te-gic and through triv-ví-vi-al-i-z—zing.

“I’m not sure what ‘trivializing’ means.” He lies. 

He is the epitome of my type: daddy’s money, pounding against a glass closet, drifting through a life that I’m white-knuckled, sick about getting right.

The kind of loser you marry. Love fiercely, all-encompassing, give the brightest years of your youth to, ‘till it gets boring, and crumbles down, and one of us (him) cheats, predictably, with a nineteen year old yoga instructor or, even less surprisingly, a man. A handful of good years burned down that, in hindsight, reek of a watered-down, reluctant kind of mediocrity.

Despite all the time that I didn’t waste, missing him is one caliber of pain softer than loving him. Just one. And I do love him, I realize, like I love haunted houses and the smell of gasoline and the first bone-cold weeks of Winter and all of the abandoned, wicked things you’re not supposed to have love for. That naive girls love anyway.

Maybe, I love him.

Maybe I have an all-encompassing imagination and bask in the familiarity of heartbreak, of being a victim of timing, of loss.

Probably, I think, I love him.

I light candles and prune in scented bubble baths in the dark and nap and eat cookie dough for breakfast and give clipped responses at work and don’t call my mother back and I go down on my Prozac by 10mg in an attempt to be able to cry again and I drink wine and I sulk.

Wide-eyed hand over my fragile, broken heart, I sulk

and I sulk 

and I sulk.

I am self-indulgent in my heart ache. I sleep in, give up, still I gain weight.

The Sunday that Philly loses to Dallas, Tania stands over the kitchen trash can and wraps an old knife in paper towels, cardboard, duct tape, paper towels again.

“It’s rusted,” She tells me. 

“Just throw it away,” I shrug, squeezing a sliced lemon into a can of Diet Coke.

“The bag’ll rip. Besides, I don’t want someone rummaging through the trash to knick themselves.”

I consider this. Think of Palestine. It gets dizzy for a second, the kitchen around us. There is Nico, and my hair bleeding maroon dye in the bathtub, and the god damned Eagles,

and there is the fact that we live in a world so casual in it’s callousness that we know if we throw sharp things away, we must safeguard them.

Because there will always be someone sifting through the trash. 

“There will always be a war,” my therapist tells me, matter-of-factly.

“It’s not a war, Adam,” I say, pinching my temple. I leave our session early.

On the way home, I ask the construction on the highway and the purple streaks in the sunset and the time on the dash, still wrong from Daylight’s saving’s,

Does luck have anything to do with it? Does God?

I try not to think too much, about God.

I stop praying.

The red fades out of my hair, as red does.

Palestine begs for a ceasefire. Kids write their names on their arms so when they’re killed, when and not if, they will be identified easier.

I call my local salon. The stylist is crass and says things I can only answer “Hmm,” to, similar to extended family dinners back home. 

Parents hold the corpses of their children in plastic bags on the internet, soot-covered, shattered.

I’m in the shampoo bowl too-long as my hair is silently panic-toned. It comes out dark brown, black almost. Not red. We’d agreed on a natural red. I stay silent.

The world sanctimoniously posts Instagram stories waving a flag of the wrong colors-blue and white. Boasts neutrality then finishes, “but pray for Israel.”

I get used to my hair, choppy and crooked above my shoulders. Shorter, not pretty. What a relief it is to accept you’re not pretty, and then to embrace it.

The crimes against humanity don’t stop, a world away from me, ugly or not, in love or out of it, copper hair, or copper-attempted-but-really-night-sky-black,

the strangest,

sickest

season.

Author’s Note: Explanation Kills Art, whatever, but most of the people who read what I write are my family and they don’t know what Going Cowgirl Copper means. It just means dying your hair red. There is a very niche group of 20-something-Tiktokkers on my For You Page who embolden “Going Cowgirl Copper” For Winter. The title was intentional. You have to be chronically online to clock the reference. And instead of simply “Dying My Hair Red,” there’s now this whole rhetoric on ridiculous hair colors like “Vanilla Almond Butter Bronde” and “Brownie Batter Brown (Base) (With Diluted Chocolate Milk Highlights)! .” It is overstated and superfluous and frivolous. Just like many factors of my day-to-day routine, right now. Anyway, I hope that landed. My heart is with Palestine.