Post Malone’s new album came out on a Friday in midwestern June, the new spring feeling expansive and ready. I pulled on my headphones to walk to the mega grocery store down the street and had barely reached the sidewalk before the lyrics started to hit.
My ex-husband and I were divorced one week and one day and not speaking, our separate ways finally separate.
I got a reputation that I can’t deny, trilled my personal friend Post Malone.
I cried and walked, listened and cried and walked.
All that spring, I took long baths and obsessively watched Tiktoks from Post Malone’s account. In them, he floated through the world with a sense of ease, unconcerned, buyoed by joy. He tasted wine, rode up on a motorcycle, offered a rose to the camera, asked groups of grown men if they had a bedtime, or a thigh gap, or a beauty serum. They just made me so happy!!!
I saved my favorites, and they lived tucked into the magpie nest of my camera roll: other Tiktoks with positive affirmations, screen recordings of Marco Polos from my girlfriends giving me advice and pep talks from their cars.
And an album of me crying, labeled heartbreak. Photos of my swollen post-cry faces in the old house, or videos of myself monologuing all my feelings and weeping on a weekday morning during our separation.
Did you hear the thing about how tears of sadness are more viscous than other types, roll more slowly down the face, begging to be seen? I was learning to be my own witness.
And the date and time stamps reminded me how quickly the strongest feelings passed. A video of me sobbing at 8am would seem incomprehensible to me by 3pm, a different person. Whoever she was.
Joining dating apps required me to figure out how to describe myself to new people (deeply humiliating!!!) and I referred to myself as a Cancer more than ever before.
I’m a classic Cancer, I’d say, as shorthand for saying I take it to heart, I take three-hour baths, for saying I feel it all.
I’m a water sign, I said to a Sagittarius. He wiped my tears, incredulous.
The Sagittarius and I were figuring out what we were together.
I was transfixed by him, his liminality. He sent me metal songs, he housed amphetamines and sugar, he cried at the movie theater, he stroked my hair.
I sent him the thigh gap Tiktok, the beauty serum one, the bedtime one.
Me, he said.
<3, I affirmed.
In the coming weeks, months, summer, we’d text memes, send nudes and more heart-reacts, take road trips, fuck in Airbnb bunk beds. We exchanged baby pictures, shared ice cream and party punch and a little baggie of shrooms, watched horror movies with the lights off, took selfies and sang karaoke and canoed so far out front of his-becoming-our friends on a high Missouri river that for a while we just floated and whispered about all the beauty around us.
Flip grief on its back and its underbelly is joy, expansion, deeper knowing.
Do you guys have a bedtime? Post Malone asks, lighting a cigarette, grinning like a little kid.
Back on that June mid-morning, finishing the new album and putting my groceries away in my apartment, wearing athleisure and feeling every feeling, I said Alexa— to the robot who lives in my place.
The zodiac sign of Post Malone is Cancer, she said.
Austin Post was born on July 4, 1995.
I made myself a huge breakfast sandwich, pillowy egg and cheese on a bagel, creamy avocado slices.
I’m gonna burn it down and grow me something better, he sang.
I took a selfie, the sheen of tears still on my cheeks.
I know I could be hard, but I want to stay soft.
Courtney asked for a Post Malone primer playlist over sushi on Friday night and idk, here we all are now