Margaret Ezra Zhang
[kenophobia]
1. One image I can’t get over is of Bojack Horseman staring into his wine bottle and seeing, in place of the wine, a starry expanse of outer space. Of course we could say, generically, that for him his draw to alcohol was its capacity for escape, the way it represented the space beyond the outlines of his body, his corporeal confines. And maybe partially that’s still what I’m talking about. But more specifically, I am thinking about that starry liquid depth as a way of looking inward rather than outward, like a night light in a toddler’s extraterrestrially themed bedroom, or the glowing plastic stars I so envied about my childhood best friend’s ceiling. There’s a specific family-owned motel I remember staying at with my parents when I was young—the Shooting Star Inn. I don’t remember anymore where we were driving, whether it was toward or away from home, but what I do remember is the long stretch of road, a sky that was amber on the edges and the color of dust in the center, trees that were somehow monochrome in color. The road didn’t diminish at the horizon but became larger and wider somehow, as if it would open up to something as large as the ocean if we kept going, and we would spill into it, my parents and
I, three specks of dust that would expand away from each other at an exponential rate, lost from each other forever. Losing terrified me because it was synonymous to being lost. Kenophobia: a fear of wide-open spaces, of their vastness, of their emptiness. So when the lonely motel appeared on the side of the road, an overwhelming sense of relief came over me. At least we would be kept inside—at least in a building there would be no possibility, if just for a couple of hours, that we would float away. And you know what our bedroom contained when we finally checked in, aside from its king bed and its carpet that resembled the fur of a gray cat? Plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, lining the ceiling. My parents laughed awkwardly, embarrassed by the childlike design that they would never seek out intentionally, but I like to think we were all comforted—I like to think that they welcomed the longness of the night ahead of us that had forced us into this family-owned motel, basically a baby crib. That they loved the feeling of not being able to leave that night, even if they wanted to. That the motel said, Breathe. You’re not going anywhere.
2. I loved Simon’s home for the way the sink overflowed with dishes, for how the living room spilled with people I’d never seen in my life. For a brief time, the kitchen contained new batches of beer brews every time I went over; Simon would crack open these beers as if he hadn’t bottled them himself the night before. What do you taste? he’d ask. Grapefruit and peaches and almonds, I’d reply, my blunt taste palette reaching formlessly for anything it could hold onto. Good, he’d say, that’s what I was going for, as if I had verbalized his intentions verbatim. Simon made many things himself—it was something I really admired about him, something a lot of people really admired about him, even when his imposter syndrome acted up. He made his own beer, his own kombucha, his own bread, his own kimchi stew. Despite all that, our time spent together was defined by something he didn’t make himself—wine. It was a ritual: me making the three block trek to his house, stopping first at Acme for a bottle, wedged between our houses as if it had been placed for our convenience. We’d start around eight or nine and drink until we were slurring
our words, until we had talked until four in the morning about the same things we’d talked about the previous week. Simon and I drank every weekend. We drank every time something went wrong; we drank every time something went right. We drank when nothing happened at all. For a long time I thought of our drinking as outward-looking, as a way to abandon our lives if just for a couple of hours. But in retrospect, our drinking was a tether, a way to remind ourselves of the smell of the earth. The cheapest wine contained the most earthly undertones—that’s what we liked to tell ourselves at least. Assigning a flavor, a representation, a metaphor to cheap wine was how we liked to justify our exclusive consumption of it—it made it so that we were more than just two college students in a microcosm, that we were adults making our own choices because we were capable of it.
His living room was big, and for the most part, we’d lounge on opposing couches, not physically touching. But sometimes, if it was late and I was tired, he would ask if I wanted to stay over, and we’d curl into each other, or sometimes sleep back-to-back, until the sun was white on our naked bodies. Only then would I know it was time to return to my life. I loved Simon’s home. Wine was a tether. I couldn’t have made it through the year without it. Simon tethered me to the year. Do you understand what I am saying?
3. There are times, of course, that wine felt more like an ocean than a tether—like the first time I tried alcohol, like really tried it, not counting the negligible sips I’d taken from my dad’s beer bottles growing up when he wanted to watch my face clench. It was at my high school prom after party; I remember my mystification as I watched a girl down a brown liquid from a red solo cup the size of a shot glass. At the time, I had no idea what a shot glass was, much less why a cup that small would exist. My high school best friend had been hesitant to invite me—“I don’t think it’s your scene,” she’d said, referring to house parties in general, and my lack of experience with them; how funny that was in retrospect, considering that first experience with alcohol was what defined my relationship with partying and with the substance itself for the next few years. By the time she arrived, I was three wine glasses and three cups of water deep (I was a cautious drinker that first time). My head was a balloon, lofty and adrift, like it had no place on this earth. “DUDE!” I screamed across the house, inviting the stares of several of my classmates. “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”
Or the time when Beverly and I, returning to our college campus as students for the last time, went to an Italian BYOB restaurant in South Philly to celebrate this finality. She asked me to bring alcohol, but instead of the logical wine pairing, I brought a giant handle of New Amsterdam lemon vodka, and our waiter, believing it to be wine, poured wine portions of the liquid into our wine glasses, giving us a smile and tiny nod to top it off. Beverly and I stared at each other from across the table, stifling what would’ve been shrieklaughs if we weren’t in public. Sipping our could’ve-been-wines that were definitely too white to be any kind of wine, we ended the meal with little memory of our conversation.
Or the time when, after bar hopping on our first date, a man took me to the roof of his apartment, where he asked me, “What is something you would like to change about the world?” Even then, I could tell that his dating style was more performative than earnest, and I was in love. As we passed a wine bottle back and forth, one I’d picked out from the fancy wine rack in his dining room, the few Brooklyn stars I could make out felt like they were expanding away from me at an exponential rate, not at all like the comforting decorations of a dim room. I understood then that a chase had begun, that he wouldn’t text me in the morning unless I texted him first, that I would never find out what he wanted from me no matter how many times I asked. It was a race, and someone had already blown the whistle.
4. Studying in London for a spring was one of the loveliest and loneliest seasons of my life. It was easy to feel far away from the city despite living in it, and not so easy to feel at ease in my body and its unyielding persistence through time. I was antsy in my twin size bed; antsy in the communal kitchen in which I, too cheap to buy a pan for the two months I’d be there, stored only tangerines and instant ramen; antsy in nightclubs that left my ears ringing and muffled. But flights out of London were dirt cheap, and my homework for that entire semester consisted of eight essays I could write anywhere, so with all of that antsy energy, I often found myself in a different country. In Budapest one weekend, I tried an expensive wine for the first time. At an outdoor restaurant at which one might normally spend upwards of $100 in the US, I spent a total of $20 on a four course meal and wine. The wine was ethereal! One sip and my mouth was watering uncontrollably; I couldn’t believe all the wine I’d had, thinking that was all wine ever could be. If only Simon were here, I thought. All of the wine we’d shared, where the flowery descriptions on the labels were nowhere close to the actual taste, and here I was,
drinking something that made me want to write its description. And with that singular glass of wine, I was tethered again, against all odds, against the confusing coexistence of misery and joy. Suddenly I was on a couch in Philly, lounging across from a presence so familiar I could go to sleep in its warmth.
5. Recently, upon telling a friend about my mystical encounter with the Shooting Star Inn, she looked it up, intrigued by its history, and informed me that the inn had since closed down, and that the owners had gone on to buy a vineyard. In other words: a vast and open field. In other words: a place of winemaking. Vineyards fascinate me for many reasons, but especially for how they hold the vastness of a field and the usually tethering effect of wine in the same belly, even if it is all just in my head. How can a field simultaneously contain and release? What does it mean to be drifting away and to be contained at once? Kenophobia: that I might lose myself without physical markers to guide me. Kenophobia: that I might lose everything I know in the world’s inconceivable vastness. But what did I have to ground myself in that outdoor restaurant in Budapest, surrounded by unfamiliar lamps and shadows, besides the warmth of memory? These days, when I am in an open field, I close my eyes and imagine a spruce on the block of my old Philly home, a hairpin from my mother’s dresser, a bottle of wine in that tight space between two people. And that split second of imagery is all I need to open my eyes again.
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