#1: What is it to be Hot and Goth?

I have a taser attached to my Taylor Swift Pop Socket

If you want to transcend…

A Hot Girl’s Reckoning

The morning that I left my lil farm in Texas for the big city about a month ago, my dad was suuuper drunk (dads are so glamorous! how do they do it) and he kept yelling at me that he knew I was on Ritalin. I should say: I am not on Ritalin!!!!! My mania is au naturel. Even still, this was really exciting news to me for two reasons.

Number one: Ritalin is an upper that youths did in the 80s, so my father’s suspicion must indicate that my personality transported him to a simpler time <3. Rad.

Number two: Ritalin is something that PARTY GIRLS did, so to be assumed a part of this group was the final reckoning I needed to own something about myself that I have forced down. I am a hot girl.

I sped away from my dad and my lil farm as fast as, well, someone on Ritalin, but I was not on Ritalin!!!! I was high on something much stronger: being a hot girl moving to New York City. Or maybe not even that, exactly. I was high on being a hot girl who was leaving.

Leaving is a spiritual experience for me. I would get married just to get divorced. I would entrap myself on a bad date, in a toxic friendship, probably in a barrel sinking to the bottom of the sea if I knew I could free myself and leave in the middle of it. Leaving that stupid FARM (bugs!!!) and all the messy horrors of family (even worse than bugs!!!) was intoxicating enough to make me seem drugged.

Okay, one time I was seeing a play with this boy, let’s call him Juan.

Google image result for “Juan”

I thought this chilly February night would be the perfect night to see a play with Juan. Not only because I had already cancelled on him three times, but because I’d had the stomach flu for like 60 hours at this point and was absolutely malnourished looking, so I was a little stunning. I weakly hobbled to his car (delicate vibes), made it through the front door of the theater, and arrived in my seat with a heavy suspicion that I was about to ruin my own life.

As soon as the play begins, I realize, oh god I’m gonna vomit on everyone here and they’re going to have to stop the show to literally deal with something that is not only so disgusting and base and human but also my fault and it’s going to ruin my acting career and my reputation. But suddenly, it’s intermission, and I shake myself from a stupor of fear and I haven’t vomited. I haven’t yet vomited. I pull myself together to say to Juan: “I’m going to go to the bathroom really quick!!!” and I take myself out of the theater, into the cold midwestern winter air, down the street, and into an Uber. I do not alert Juan that I have left.

This is what feminism has done for me. Before this moment, I never understood why women needed to have their own money. JK. But now I really know. Because leaving this boy without a text or a clue and vanishing into my own chariot on that icy February night is the sweetest and hardest joy I’ve ever felt. I say sweet because it felt like the embrace of a loving god, and hard because it slammed into me as if I had just driven into a brick wall.

In these glorious moments where I am going, where I am gone, where I am goth, I feel like I am a self-sustaining organism. I could live in a tower away from the world for my whole life and never lack. I don’t need support and I don’t need romance. I am an unmarried woman with an Uber account! I am whole!

Photo under the dictionary definition of “whole”. See also “transcendent” and “immortal”.

But this isolating wholeness is not enough.

You cannot escape into the icy sweetness of an Uber if you’re not escaping from something. You can’t know the purity of solitude if you don’t know the filthiness of being touched. You cannot leave a boy if you did not first make the decision to see the boy (you WHORE!). It is not just the leaving that is important. First, you must arrive.

Welcome to Hot Girl Gothic.

Pictured: the author, “FUCK ME” written in Sharpie on her one precious human body.

And arrive we do.

We pretend that we do not have needs, that we are whole, that we are above that person or that party, but we arrive anyway and we instantly become a mess of wants and tears and flaws and inconsistencies with “FUCK ME” written on our limbs because that is the only truth that hot girls know.

And then the next morning we r like, “haha I was just bein’ dumb”. But we were not being dumb.

We were being HOT.

We are self-sustaining organisms who need to chase constant conditional affection to LIVE!!! We have one wild and precious life and we will spend years of it just running around in circles trying to get people to look at us like little sexy circus clowns!!!

To be going, to be gone, to be goth, you must first arrive, ruin your life, and be hot.

hot girl (noun) /'hawt 'gurl/: a genderless, universal, and extremely exclusive term that applies to anyone who is absolutely whole and disgustingly and deliciously porous. And rly hot!!!

Welcome to the Hot Girl Gothic newsletter. Please leave a comment and tell me a secret. Especially if that secret is that you think I’m small.

Let’s arrive.

Maison 🖤

P.S. Does anyone know where I can find some Ritalin?

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