i wished i had a field.
the notes from my admirers fill my dashboard just the same
I wished I had a field. This was before I knew who Joni Mitchell was otherwise I probably would’ve wished for a river. I wished for a field instead.
I was seventeen and summer was ending and the only people I talked to were Andrew and Jill. There were a few weeks left of break before senior year. I had broken up with Sarah early in the summer and I stopped texting back my St. Anthony’s friends. Reinvention, I imagined it.
I just started my part-time job at the ice rink at the start of August. This was the only summer I hadn’t worked, and I guess, near the tail-end of it, my parents realized I hadn’t really left the house much. So I got a job picking weeds, shoveling dirt, cleaning toilets, and sneaking out to get Blimey Limeys and quesadillas from Tropical Smoothie Cafe with Andrew.
I wished I had a field.
The major events of that summer for me were getting a new laptop and going to LA on a family vacation. I spent the entire trip photographing every stranger I saw on the street with a blonde undercut and a dog because Miley was in her Bangerz era and I couldn’t be too careful.
It was the summer of Royals by Lorde, Diane Young by Vampire Weekend and the backlash to Blurred Lines by everyone. I had started shopping at Urban Outfitters (read: Pac Sun) and painted my room grey and yellow (yellow because I always loved how Leslie in The Bridge to Terabithia painted her living room gold so that when the sun hit it in the afternoon the whole room lit up). I didn’t go anywhere (bedroom, kitchen, backyard) without my laptop. I had never been more online and I wished I had a field.
I went to a few parties that summer where I could’ve drank but instead I pretended to on Instagram. Instagram was still a new frontier: likes and followers didn’t matter the way they did in the late 2010s, filters were preset and creamy, usernames were formatted like AIM screen names. It was one of the few public-facing social media profiles where I didn’t feel I had to explain myself as much. Like Tumblr but less of this:
Instagram felt like the first time I could position myself more as the person I wanted to be rather than the person I was at the moment. I went to block parties and took blurry pictures of solo cups and posed with my eyes half-closed because smoking weed was still subversive. I’d get pit tickets to indie concerts and post videos of the performances to add distance between the awkward kid I was and the edgy teen I wanted to be. I’d join my dad on drives to his office in Lower Manhattan to take pictures of every street sign I passed. I imagined kids in my homeroom asking each other:“what is Joe Hegyes doing in the city all the time?” I imagined people thinking about me. I imagined myself famous. And I imagined a field.
When I read The Bling Ring, I instantly loved Alexis Neiers. It could’ve been because Emma Watson was playing her in the Sofia Coppola movie or maybe it was her little brown bebe shoes, but Alexis felt like a hero to me. Not because of the robberies (at seventeen, I would turn myself in for shoplifting gum), but because of her ambition. Alexis was just like me. She wanted money, she wanted fame, she wanted access to every room she could imagine, and she wanted it now. It wasn’t enough for her to orbit the stars, she had to become the sun.
On Tumblr, my Ask Box had never been more active. I was posting at the same rate I was thinking and spent most nights scrolling endlessly on a feed of movie gifs and grainy nudes and suicide notes. I liked that Tumblr didn’t reveal your follower count to anyone. I pretended to have a couple thousand more followers that I really did. I felt famous.
That summer, in a Barnes & Noble, a girl my age and her mother followed me and my mother around the store as I browsed the YA section for something gay but not obviously gay. My mom, never afraid of confrontation, turned to the pair after about ten minutes of this had gone on.
“Do you have something you want to ask us?” She chimed.
“Do you have a Tumblr?” The girl asked.
The room spun. My heart dropped. I imagined this moment my entire life. After years of walking through halls as an unfamiliar face, finally someone recognized me. Of course it happened in a Barnes & Noble. Of course I was wearing my The Great Gatsby t-shirt and Toms. Of course my mom was the catalyst.
I tell her that I do have a Tumblr and she tells me she follows me. I tell myself to remember that feeling. I do.
I had my first taste of fame in a strip mall on Long Island and the next few years of my life would be spent fighting for another.
With my burgeoning knowledge of pop culture alongside the methodical rise of a thousand MagCon boys like Shawn Mendes, I knew hotness was a verified shortcut to attention on the internet. Vine made it seem like any boy with a jawline and fluffy hair was guaranteed to get a music contract.
I started learning my angles: turning my head a bit to the left and raising my eyebrows softly to lower the height of my hairline and lift my hooded eyelids. I contorted my body to appear slimmer and doubled up on the constrictive tanks (shapewear) I wore almost every day. I posted selfies to Tumblr and watched notes come in. I started hearing phrases like “glow-up” for the first time. I began talking about my “transformation” and posted fatphobic side-by-sides of my old self next to the new me. More praise lit up my notifications.
Nothing about my weight, habits, or life had changed from the before photos.
I had always hyperfixated on my appearance, but for the first time I had quantitive data to inform me where I was landing aesthetically. I was way too young to understand that being hot was derived from individuality, not conformity. The more I turned myself into someone else, the more attention I got, the worse I felt about myself.
The only person who really ever saw me was Andrew. I felt cool because I had skinny jeans and he didn’t and I wore Doc Martens and he wore Sperrys. He had friends and a social life and things to do and I had my laptop.
On my seventeenth birthday, I wished I had a field.
Me and Jill video chatted almost every night until 3am that summer. We lived on opposite sides of Long Island. I was on the South Shore of Nassau County and she was on the North Shore of Suffolk. We met through a friend.
I would wait all night for her to finish her shift scooping ice cream so we could stare our screens together for hours on end. We talked about normal things like Glee and which Kardashian we were, but my favorite thing to talk to Jill about was the future.
We were going to move away from Long Island and get hot and become stars. We wrote fanfiction about our lives, imagining ourselves at 25 with money and marriages and bleach blonde hair.
In the future, we were The Scooby Gang. We were The Rich and Famous Club. We were pioneers. We were the sun.
“I wish I had a field,” I told Jill.
I was seventeen and summer was ending and the only people I talked to were moving away in a year. My walls were grey and yellow. Social media had finished taking its wobbly first steps and began learning to run. The shadows on the cave wall started playing in 4K.
Life as I knew it was about to end.
love this
so well written and nostalgic <3