Louisa is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between September 26, 2025 and September 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "You shouldn't pretend to be our Louisa, Louisa's parents say... We hope that someday, our Louisa comes home". It most often appears alongside Aimee Goguen, Amelia, American Academy of Arts and Letters.
- Mention count
- 1
- Issue count
- 1
- First seen
- September 26, 2025
- Last seen
- September 26, 2025
Source context
WHAT I DID Monday, September 15 Joe and Darby drove me back all the way from Washington DC to New York City yesterday. Me, nauseous sort of hungover laid flat in the back seat, shoes pressed up against the already smudged glass window and the September sun reflecting off the highway and the hood of the car and the tar black pavement turning everything so warm inside. A long warm drive where time passed somewhere between not at all and all at once. Too lethargic to really notice. We turned on a tape. The Shirley Jackson story based on all those girls wearing distinct raincoats that were disappearing into the woods around Bennington, Vermont in the 40s and 50s. In the story, nineteen year old Louisa Tether runs away from her beautiful old white wood Massachusetts home and nice-enough family on account of mostly a sense of ambient contempt and a desire for a whole new life. As it turns out, one can get a whole new life without too much trouble. All it takes is swapping out your nice blue jacket for your old rain jacket and retreating to a town that is not too-big but still-big-enough. Three years later, Louisa Tether is Lois Taylor. In the story, Lois Taylor tries very hard to act in accordance to the stories she is telling herself. This, Lois Taylor learns quickly, is what it takes to be a good liar or maybe just a new person, the two are kind of the same in this case. I doze in and out of sleep, but the sound of the audio-book is nice and I am curious what will happen when Louisa decides to come home. “Louisa Please Come Home”, the story is called. It ends with a chance encounter, a change in whims after three years, and the realization, too, that it is just too late. By that point, it is just too late. A three-years-older Louisa washes up at her three-years-older family home and her three-years-older parents and sister look into her just slightly aged face and irrevocably changed eyes. It’s just been too many years of playing pretend. You shouldn’t pretend to be our Louisa, Louisa’s parents say. You have a family who loves you, and you should go home to them. We hope that someday, our Louisa comes home, like you should go home to your parents. Our Louisa was younger than you, Lousia’s father explains. In my own small and strange apartment things are still a bit cluttered but at least nothing is sterile. I made a call and I imagined a big white Massachusetts home. A stone patio in the back and still-green trees and hobby horses in the front. Windows that I could stare in and a door that I could still walk through because I have never run away. An old car and quiet roads and little red berries that crunch underfoot this time of year. Three years is quite some time. This part of the story made me uneasy. The emphasis on how much older all these should-be happy and youthful people look after only three long years. New York City is still so steaming hot. I weigh my options, and decide to stay for a while. Tuesday, September 16 In my life where I am staying for a while, Celia sends me mantras in the night. Today is a good day to become harder to kill and easier to love, Celia says. I have already seen this mantra on Health Gossip, but I appreciate it all the same. I wake up in a room that is small now, and so it is easy to take quick stock of things. The light and the white bedspread and a little gold swan and gold watch and gold cross and black Orca stone of Protection clustered on the edge of the table. Celia is joking I presume, but most things do come down to energy and integrity. Volatility is what emerges when there is energy without integrity. So; I am working on things. In the morning, there are mantras from Celia and there is sludge and dirty water seeping through my ceilings from the bathroom of my always-yelling-upstairs-neighbors. This is not so much a thing of patterns and symbols everywhere for those with eyes to see, and more an indicator that people who are very loud often also live kind of disgusting lives. One kicks into gear. Call the people one should call. Say thank you very much and the anonymity of these things still feels strange. I am very easy to kill like most people are and I don’t really believe in quantifying or even speaking on things like easy to love. There is lymphatic drainage and athletic resistance and pyrogenics and snake oil face tape and blue multi peptide serums and red light therapy and real sort of detox incoming because yes, there needs to be one of those soon. I sat at Dr. Clarke’s with snake venom filled saki and martini and free champagne til late enough last night to say goodbye to friends who come and go in and out in this city and then I wandered home through the remnants of the never-ending-San-Gennaro fair, where teens were scrambling on the ferris wheel and a nice seeming man was shilling free fried oreos. I sat at The Odeon which is really just the perfect restaurant til almost sunset tonight, perched at the bar alone for a while waiting for Celia to arrive, old school vibe, pink and green glowing clock, men walking in straight from the plane carrying luggage. I ran into an architect and an editor and there was talk about throwing a party. Celia arrived full of stories about design and plans that made me full of energy and a night and life that could stretch endlessly if I could find it in me to not flee shortly after dinner. Are we going to an after party, Celia asked me. I presume I’m un-invited because of an incident where I was acting hard to love and easy to kill, I told Celia. That’s ok, Celia told me. We went to a reading instead, where the lamps were stained glass and the stories were about people who are too bored to cook but still need to eat. We went to a party then, too, which is always how these things go and then I wandered home through quiet streets of the Financial District and up a ways and it was too late for anyone to still be out shilling anything or too quiet for me to stop if they were, regardless. The windows were left open at my new and strange apartment and I counted the turtles in the clean water in the pond outside and back inside the water had stopped dripping through the floors of my horrible neighbor’s disgusting and loud apartment. Dirty water, clean water, everything dripping out all over the floor and the pavement and then someone cut the supply and so; the cycles repeated nine million times. The cycles repeated and then they grinded to a halt. Wednesday, September 17 There was the idea of thinking about oneself until one invented an entirely new self. There was the idea of finding the place between past and future which of course logically concludes with present but, definitionally becomes hard to sort out. Something like wading through mud which these rooms often seem to be full of these days. I am reading a story about the Organ Donor Registry and why one should remove oneself at my party on Saturday. You will know you are ready to have a child when you are tired of taking care of yourself, Veronica says, in the story, and she said it to someone else in real life, because this part of the story is true, though it is not a true story. One can think about nostalgia and how to fill a day and right from wrong and if one is sincere or not and how to tell based on things like your own sense of your own soul and the cadence of your voice and often based on things you can kind of just see in the faces of yourself and others. I realized a long time ago that I live a life that people are interested in reading about, K said on the Internet. How to fill a day? I could have been far more voyeuristic about all of it. Instead, I talk about how to fill a day. I could have been far more interesting. If I am going to think about something besides myself it should be something fun like art not physics, Amelia says. I am going to think about: buy a Sony camera and make some flat-lay videos and join Raena Health to figure out the root of things and become very strong from all the climbing and write the story about Gnosticism or what happens when people seek meaning in signs and symbols when it’s all just randomness and is it a form of nihilism to turn towards religion if you are really still not sure? I am skeptical when people are very certain about things, Iris says. You’ve been learning to withhold your opinions but I hope it’s not just because you have none, Celia says. At the party - another party - everyone is very well dressed in things like linen, and I fit right in by coincidence because I am wearing a blue linen shirt. Are you bored yet because I am, Rose says. I am endlessly entertained, I tell Rose. But there were other problems too. Thursday, September 18 You don’t need anything but this, the waiter tells me at 9 Orchard. It is 2pm and hot. He brings me a Tequila espresso martini listed simply on the menu under; Day Drinking. He brings me a salad that is chock full of thin gray hairs so he removes it from the bill. Saoirse joins me. We are here to write in the Blue Room, but both our laptops are dead on arrival which is evidence, really, that neither of us were really here to write at all. We are here to hang, Saoirse keeps on saying. It is productive, really, because there were many things that had to be said at some point, and if a task necessitated completion at some point, well, now is as good a time as any. The bar at Nine Orchard is full of business people and weekday leisure. Wearing sunglasses. Drinking diet coke. I’ve been trying to be less gluttonous about it. Everyone is hoping to take advantage of the last dredges of sun, and so Saoirse gives me a hotel tour and then suggests we go outside. New ownership at the hotels around here. New blazing hot fires in the blue rooms at the hotels where the shades are pulled shut against the still blazing hot autumn resistant summer heat. We do cartwheels in the ballroom. We aren’t asked to leave. Before there was Dimes Square, there was The Metrograph, a German walking tour guide is saying, back on the street. No way that is real, I am saying to Saoirse. I see them all the time, Saoirse is saying to me. We walk to Le Dive. The hours tick onwards and so today is the last day of it. Last days of gluttony. My second-to-last-day in my-gluttenous-life. Saoirse is showing me a free library web application. Saoirse is showing me a free web application to read The Bible a little bit each day and then all at once in one year. Saoirse wants to sit outside. Saorise wants to drink wine. Saoirse wants to remind me how much better my life is now and I want to say; I’m not sure if I agree, I can’t drink sulfates, I am kinder now certainly, I am happy in this moment, I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry. I am so sorry for how I used to be and how I’ve been. I walk home as the sun fades. Plans for self improvement. Plans to revel in solitude (the thing I hate most). Plans to stay for a while. I don’t want to, really. I have been talking about how the apartment is clean but I still won’t let anyone else come inside. I imagine a winter where I was the happiest I’d ever been. You will be that happy again, Saoirse says. It’s ok if I’m not, I say. I imagine it is just one life all at once. I imagine what I think about when I pray. I imagine somewhere else. A place full of wind and desert and proverbial change that wouldn’t come. So, there is nowhere else but here. I decide to stay again. I decide this every day. Friday, September 19 An Aristotelian tragedy requires the tragic figure to be a hero, which is why it is particularly disappointing to suffer while you are feeling irredeemable. Apocalyptic ideation is when you’re thinking about how good you’d be at the apocalypse. Relentless optimism is when you’re challenging your friends just to see if they challenge you back. I wear a black dress to go ballroom dancing. I eat meatballs and gem salad and drink sparkling water at home. What are you doing today, Iris asks. Throwing a party, I respond. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Friday, September 26 From 7pm at EARTH — Patrick McGraw, JT LeRoy and Meg Superstar Princess open for Laura Albert.