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Isabel

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Isabel

Article

Isabel is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 06, 2025 and March 18, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “was Isabel who screamed first and so I did snap then”; “it was Isabel who screamed first and so I did snap then”; “Isabel sends over Life Studies by manic depressive poet Robert Lowell”. It most often appears alongside Amelia, Confessions, Iris.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: July 06, 2025
  • Last seen: March 18, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Bad Luck Spot
July 06, 2025 · Original source
Sunday, July 6 Summer storm of the nicest kind outside, and I think I’ll leave the lights off. I don't have so much to say about the time back in New York. I came back to the ocean because, of course, this is the sort of place where summer storms are nicer. And I have spent a while, so long really, quivering in this assurance that it would be ok; cling onto this one thing so tightly and then it will be ok, for the sake of this, to lose everything else. Well, there was a two-year-life and now there is everything else. It is not so much that I value peace. I value many, though not all, things before peace. It is not so much that I am gracious or really even care to be. I am being opaque. I was a guest there, for a lot of it. My old life, I mean. And it is not so much that I was too gentle for things like wild dogs and self surveillance. It is just, there were things that were mine first too. Summer storms and lace curtains on the edge of the bed. I did not always view things as possessed in this way though, I realize, now - it's been a few months, at least, of starting to think in terms of what belongs to me. "It is funny when you two talk about raising children on gray rocky shores, because you sure have no problem creating rocky shores," Rose told me in Miami. We'd been up all night,. Poured the liquor from the mini fridge down the drain and stood barefoot in the hotel hallway with a coconut juice, short quick breath. A baseball team had marched down the corridor at sunrise, and it was strange, even then, to watch myself become so shameless. My father video called me from New York, after. His hands made a downhill slope, steep then level, then steep and dropping and; “at a certain point you will not be able to stay,” he had told me. “At a certain point he will deem you problem no matter how determined you are to remain some sort of martyr.” At the end of the world there is a warplane over the graduation and a psychic in Rhode Island and he is screaming about cocks and his mother at a wedding in Michigan and he is screaming because I am opening my own doors at the hotel in South Beach and he is screaming at me in the apartment, later, it did all blur together. He was taking the art. He was taking his ShitCoin passkeys. He was taking his copy of Generative Energy and I was taking cigarettes, a sweater. I was trying not to be so voyeuristic about it. He was trying to use fewer slurs on the phone. I was doing front flips on the bed at the Holiday Inn and yelling: I can’t wait for our dry wedding, dry wedding, dry wedding. And he was saying that he drinks with the intention to forget and so it wouldn't come to all of that. Bad habits, strip mall parking lot and Rose was saying my denial was as deep as his was though, there had always been this thing of performance art. I want to party beautifully until we die, he used to tell me. I want to live like Match Point (2005), After Hours (1985), Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Later, we were walking up spring green hills and he was saying it would be easier, all of it, getting better, getting kinder, getting sober, getting bored, getting pregnant, if I stayed for a while. He wore gym shorts to the airport and returned in a rage. Later, on the floor, tuck my knees close to my chest by the open window and say I love you but my life is so much better when you are not in it and then he'd said how could you. Lie on the floor and he would say I orbit you. Summer storm and I'm texting him like I'm sorry. Because there were many letters and they kept on getting worse. Summer storm in early July and I was texting him even now like, I orbited you too. Iris came over in the afternoon in Miami. I picked her up in the lobby. I dove for his lost coral in the pool downstairs. The skin on my chest burned easily. I lay on the deck of the pool on the roof with a bloody mary that he bought me and that South Beach vibe, sunglasses, beady eyes. Ok intense girl, he said. How are you doing, Iris said. I didn't like the way he was holding you at dinner after everything he did, Iris said. In Rhode Island, last summer, we'd still been talking about things like soulmates last summer and we'd been driving in the rain. There had been a quaker church house, red Talbot sweater, a copper pot that we'd hang in New York but not till later and a little old lady. “You were a soldier wounded in the war in a past life,” the little old lady had told him. She had grabbed my shoulders, all shivering. “And it is a beautiful journey for you and him,” she had told me. “If you are ever pulled apart it will be a difficult and dark journey, but it is a beautiful journey for you and him.” “And so you cannot leave him,” Iris said in Miami. We liked hotels because of anonymity and aesthetic cohesion. He liked me because of blue eyes and devotion. He liked Miami because everyone was packing heat and I liked symbolism, numerology, gnosticism. “I like when things are fun,” I wrote him. “I like when things are fun and sweet.” And I showed up late to some basement apartment back in New York. The funny thing is, I had begged him not to go to that final party. I had begged him not to beg me to come. “My wife should think it's hot if I fight someone at a party,” he said later. “I want to get sober and treat you with the affection you deserve,” he had said, first, a few weeks before all of that. Once, we lived in a glass apartment in the sky. Central air conditioning but the greenhouse roof still made things boil and we'd call it the Boat House like some sort of joke, because floors slanted and careened and because of course, it was the only house. But so quickly, I am taken in as if I’m some sort of orphan. So quickly there are other houses. "He called and sounds like a horror movie, so you should get the fuck out of the apartment," Rose said in the aftermath. And it was Isabel who screamed first and so I did snap then. He is not a horror movie, just a shark or an orca whale or mostly a boy who is not here. Get out if you want to act scared. And so we did take some things and get out. And I did drive down the coastline because I still just could not stay put. It had always been a thing of kind of here, there, everywhere with us. High spring humid heat and there'd been no crocodiles in the river, no liquor at the hacker house, just warm beer and tall trees and broken glass and, “I'm looking forward to being very sweet to each other.” he had said. In the end, it wasn't me who lost my mind. So you were speaking as you two in one when you said you had the real sort of breakdown, the other party goers said, at that last party. I nodded. The party goers patted my shoulders. The party goers wanted no part. The texts were warm and made me ill. They took him out. They took me home. Blue paisley sheets at the home where I grew up and I remind him, for the first time, of the parts of it that were first all mine. Pull the blinds shut tight. Thunder and acid rain. He never bought into ideas of living forever in quite the way his friends did and, “your ideas of eternity become quite juvenile,” he says. Staring at cinched shut cream white shades and, “I’m looking at the ocean right now,” I say. “Don't you want to look at that ocean again?” The rot hits all at once. It smells like sickness and cruelty I did not know could be true. Lying on the bathroom floor - not my bathroom, I have been taken in like I am some sort of orphan, though I feel strangely less orphaned than ever before. I said I will not leave the party with him and so he said he will not ever come home again. There was discretion and bringing in reinforcement and he’d call first, before anyone else, stilted voice, some sort of laugh, he would like to be the one to break the latest news. He would like to be the one to make me guess. “Everyone heard you say that when she was your age you were nine,” he tells me on the phone, later. “That is because when she was my age, I was nine," I tell him on the phone, too. I talk a lot about decadence and gluttony and our no-beliefs-but-pleasure dumb lives but; for me it has not always been rotten. For me it was the opposite or; I could always see all the rot just drifting around in piles of money and provocation and drugs and alcohol and I do think there were the years of just floating, I've been floating alongside all of this rot and shock of all shocks it got sick. For me it has not always been rotten, though. It is very important that I make that clear. I did feel I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in a way. I did sit on the floor by an open window and I did lie in the rain in the night on the terrace. I remember laughing very quietly on the terrace. I remember trying to laugh as quietly as we could. At the end of the world I am working on ontology. Because you always did like to ontologize things, he is laughing on the phone. Because I think six hours in the future and you think in terms of forever, he is saying on the phone. The end of the world is something like an extinction event, abandon your whole entire life, chinook fighter plane carrier streaking over the graduation and, after the quaker church burned down I decided to get out of town. There were other things too. I threw up lobster and vodka after dinner. The dog bit the neighbor. He called because I asked him to and also to say; he missed the dog, and my family, and a little bit me. Psychosis felt like dancing, he tells me on the phone. And you felt like tells me what to do and she feels like take it to the internet, he never had a problem, kicked out of the bar, and then it’s have another baby while there's still precious time. Once, it all felt like lie on a Japanese floor mattress, white arched doorway and we wanted to remember it here and, “I wish I could start it all over before you,” he said. You wake up in the middle of the night in a hotel in the midwest to the sense that you are on the seven hundredth floor and there is no air left. You wake up. But you were already awake then, weren't you? You go to the bathroom, a normal bathroom, normal for a hotel like this. Small, compact, gray, windowless. You close the door, press your back hard against its now steady frame. You imagine that if you opened it again, you would be met with another bathroom just like this. You imagine a million identical bathrooms extending beyond every wall. In the car the next day, you tell him that it’s opposite day. On opposite day, you ask him if he loves you over and over again. You revel in hearing him say no. The charade is comforting. He’s driving recklessly. You drive for hours. The land is flat, his hand is on your thigh, he’s saying things he doesn’t mean and then he’s smirking because you're both in on the joke. He tells you to take her feet off the dash. In case there’s a wreck, he says. You tell him that opposite day is over. “Do you love me?” you ask. “Yes,” he says. “Is it opposite day,” you ask? “No,” he says. “But if it was you’d never know because no means yes and yes means no and…” He finishes explaining the word play. He explains it well. You get it. “Do you get it,” he asks. “Yes,” you say. You don't like these new rules. You are driving too fast, through a field of sunflowers. You think about how you could ask if the sky is blue and if he said yes then she could know that today was a day for telling the truth. You think about what you left behind. “I did not mean to leave those drawings behind at the apartment,” I am saying. The cartoons that he made me and I de-magnetized the fridge on accident and could the drawings be for me, and, “that's ok,” he says. Storm out of another party. He threw cash at me at dinner. Tip over his chair and say the issue is perhaps he never cared and so, it becomes good I was an archivist all along. It is good that nothing bad has ever really happened. He and I walked to the park. The fountain was spraying droplets mixed with rain. The air was sheened rainbow. The bench was covered in packets of ketchup that he was pushing off and down to the ground. He cleared me a seat. We were sitting not in silence, but in conversation that I did not recall even as it happened. “He keeps on taking really somber videos of me like he's already eulogizing me as his Dead Wife," I told Rose on the phone. "Do you know how we could make this even worse?" I asked him. Walk to a circle of wet chalk on the wet pavement. Bad Luck Spot, the writing on the ground says. Plant my feet firmly in the middle, and I wait for the curse to hit. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Sunday, July 6 From 7pm at KGB Bar — I will be reading at Confessions along with Mara Stoner, Sarah Fradkin, John Padula, Cassidy Grady, Annabel Boardman, and more.
Inline links: Confessions
Things I do like here
July 18, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, July 14 Dream Reflection - I was buying vintage workout wear and advancing down a very long corridor. Sweet summer heat. It is not too sticky or slow. There is a lot that begins all at once and so I: sleep til the afternoon and I decide that I'll still bear it. About to do something subversive could you call the police if you don’t hear from me in like four hours thanks, Amelia texts, an hour after Very Late Wake Up. Yes of course, I respond. I do follow up but it's the sort of thing where one probably shouldn't. An album a film a story a day and the letters are to my family now and clarity seems like the only thing that will probably become truly essential, though I do feel bored, going on in this way. The books at Sunlife Smoothie Shop do leave me feeling kind of repulsed - Think and Grow RICH and The Forrest Gump of Addiction Stories and, I would like to haul my blue and white and already kind of festering concoction to the street and up the stairs and home only, it's turning to sludge in even the flicker of daylight I've allowed it to meet. Lions main, spiralina, none of these words mean anything. I will remember how to write and read and confess my sins regarding flash floods and apocalyptic ideation, but for now, none of these words mean anything. Amelia comes over and we sit on the couch in mostly silence until it’s dark. Sorry for making you come over and sit in the dark, I tell Re. I used to have a lot of hobbies, Amelia tells me. Tuesday, July 15 Lie on the floor and dream about it. An illness came in the night and then faded by the afternoon. You should still reflect on it more, I was told. You should be less navel-gazing about it, I was told, later, a little bit after that. To recollect a life there is: red light therapy and lymphatic drainage, bone broth and dandelion tea in the morning. There are splotches of solitude in between, and now, I am trying not to fill it all up with slop. I pick up the laundry from the spot where the laundry man is always glowering or all smiles and never anything in between. I buy a water flosser, four gently used white linen dresses, a smoothie bowl that is too big and bright blue and I ponder how anyone could possibly consume the whole thing of something like that and then I finish it all in one go. What I Do In A Day In New York City. I vow to consume nothing ever again. Isabel sends over Life Studies by manic depressive poet Robert Lowell and some other writings by his wife that she thinks might correlate with My Situation. Saunter over to an awful summer show at a gallery that I feel bad to name and anyways my judgement is probably just a result of my messed up spirits. I shower at home now, not in the bright hallways of my weird-and-off-putting gym. I keep it dark inside for the sake of energy conservation and spiritual fortitude. Downtown, Bacaro is packed and the bald man at the table over is reluctant to tell his date his name. We light paper straws on fire at Bar Belly. SUBURBIA, the book above me is called. WAVES, says the next book over. The scene is dead, my friends are saying. Everyone is fat and happy. The subway is flooded. And you shouldn't have to self destruct in order to conjure up something interesting to say, but if you can successfully tow the line, well..... Everyone is smirking. The key of it though, is the towing of the line. So, I will go home and transcribe more platitudes. Your will to create beauty shapes your time. Wednesday, July 16 Air conditioner whirring at two in the morning and I have come to life again for the first time in my five-week-life. Thursday, July 17 They are perched inside the fountain in Washington Square Park painting blue hour landscapes on canvas behind the sheen of the fountain, and so of course the water is speckling the paint. I imagine the damage will settle in a nice sort of way. They are playing wind chimes and wearing micro shorts. Claudette is still closed for the season. They are stringing bungee cords across the street at West 10th. On the phone, I hold my breath. Did you go to the party, I am asked. No. Me neither. Iced mint tea in a hotel lobby that is kind of Scandinavian and cheerful in spirit. Back in the park; Where will I go, I could ask the tarot reader. Hopefully somewhere that is not here, the tarot reader could say. Staring down, embarrassing, out of it, but I still avoid walking into the incoming traffic. There are things I do like here: iced mint tea
West-side-highway-dog-park
March 18, 2026 · Original source
Plagiarized images of spring Saturday Everything in my room was quiet in a way that was a little bit like heaven and a little bit like hell. I lay down in bed with a Spring-2024 copy of American Affairs Magazine and I tried to read over an article about Tech Clusters and Stagnation but I ended up in AI psychosis instead. Affirm affirm affirm, my computer said. Your life seems to have solidified, my computer said. The point of it all isn’t really to be that pretty or even that kind, my computer said. The point of life isn’t love or hate, but understanding. The cycles repeat until they flip, and then they rarely return. You shouldn’t really try to understand yourself that well. You should try to resist the compulsion to share the mundanities of your everyday life and certainly of your rich-inner-world. I was supposed to shut my computer around six-pm, but the call came at five-fifty instead. The West Village was like l’heure bleue. The West Village was humid and sweet and warm and lovely. The trees were like silver skeletons, and Washington Square Park was full of teens hosting vigils for deceased foreign leaders and lookalike contests for girls with borderline-personality-disorder and presidential men. You’re in your spring coat, Max said. He had never heard that word before me. Some coats are heavy, and other coats are light, I explained. The outside of Babbo is somewhat unassuming, and the inside of Babbo is burgundy and warm and old school and sweet. The host stand is set back from the entryway and the bar is lively even at six. The whole place is basically windowless, which makes me feel like I am in a cave or on a ship or at a private party or in a nineteen-fifties-film or an architectural-dream. The menus come in small leather binders and a line drawing of a black cartoon jester carrying a bottle of wine is sketched on the first page. I am somewhat unable to typecast the demographic of the clientele here, which is interesting and somewhat rare. Everyone is quite well dressed but unassuming and of various ages though leaning-older. It is impossible to eavesdrop inside Babbo, which goes against my usual sensibilities, and aligns exactly with my dinner-sensibilities. The hostess was an older lady, because all the best restaurants have older-waitstaff-mostly. I’ll let you sit at a table and I won’t make you move, the hostess said. Everybody laughed politely and was very pleased. In the center of Babbo, there is a velvety staircase. This would be a good place for a private party, I said. The hostess led us up the velvet stairs. In the upstairs of Babbo, there is a burgundy room and a big bar and white-table-cloths and the waiter poured city-water out of metal-watering-pails and into glass-cups. The specialty martini is made very-dry. Can you make it very-dirty, I asked. We can do anything you want, the waiter said. The waiter was an old Italian man. He wrote down the martini order and our names on a napkin. MARTINI ORDER, the napkin read. You’ve been here before, the waiter said. Once, I said. You look familiar, he said. I’m not, I said. The waiter told a story about the time that all the old French restaurants closed and never returned. Only the Italian restaurant remained, he explained. You come as a child then perhaps on a date at eighteen then with family then a wedding, he said. Coming back and coming back and coming back over and over again. Anytime the water glass would run low, the waiter would appear with the metal watering pale, and the glass would be filled up. The bread came with ricotta and fresh olive oil and sea salt. Squid ink pasta and branzino and broccoli. Two martinis and a cappuccino after dinner and I melted the sugar cubes on the surface of the coffee and then I ate them with a spoon. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, all the staff said, when we left. The theme of the magazine launch was print revival and kosher pickle martinis. There were girls scout cookies on the counter, and the vibe was one of general mystique, though all I could make out when the editor spoke was something about “fiction” and “Elon Musk.” Saoirse and Olivia were behind the bar, and they were looking like angels wearing white and being kind. The late winter hadn’t really felt like real life, so it was nice and quite affirming to make eye contact with my friends. You’re the best contract employee in the world, the girls assured each other. You’re the best girlfriend ever. You’re the sweetest girl to ever walk this Earth. The magazine was free and so I helped myself and left by midnight. I can psyop myself, and then I can do whatever I want. My process is I write everything that happened and then I filter it into obfuscation one-million-times. My process is to invent my own school of movement and adopt a moral code. My process is totally against religious iconography as vague gestures towards false meaning, but totally pro iconography when one’s belief in something is complete. My self psyop sometimes looks like self experimentation, or bandaid-solution, or destruction and construction and being social-chair. I tread very lightly, and when I act according to things I hate or things I miss, it goes about exactly how you’d expect it to. Here is something: call up my parents and I read my diaries aloud on my phone. Everything seems like the end of the world in dizzy night, and: The boys hands were bloody in the morning, and; I ordered coffee and milkshake and breakfast sandwich in, and: everyone seems so fragile in the sunshine, and: One thing about being here, hazy in the sun is I feel less aggressive. In New York, the sun keeps coming back and going away and I love it when my friends and I talk about the weather. I order green juice and cold brew in the morning, and it’s quiet and cold-again. I order chopped-green-goddess-sandwhich and I seek intellectual-stimulation and I wear a brown-leather-jacket to the west-side-highway-dog-park. My process is everything-beautiful-all-the-time and iphone photography and whenever my perspective is called into question I can call up Amelia who can affirm how happy I really was all the time, there, and sometimes now. She’s totally straight-edge, and she always has a good sense of the way things were and are and are heading. Sunday Sitting on the couch in an empty apartment watching the gray sky turn light in the courtyard and listening to the garbage trucks fire up on the somewhat distant street. It feels like waking up in New York as a child, right now. Awake too early. Jet lagged, almost. At a magazine launch during evening fading night in a white house with framed art and long french windows and yellow trim, a man was telling me that the only good thing about not growing up in New York City is that you get to experience the thing that it is to understand the city for the first time and to let it consume you. If you grow up in New York, then you understand the city all along and this is mostly a great thing, he was saying, but what about that feeling when you arrive and you’re older and you understand a place like this for the very first time. There were daffodils all throughout the apartment, and carpeted floors over wood that stretched back into room after room like a maze. Everyone was calling each other “dear” and there was a sense of things as generally boisterous but not overblown. I like older people who love New York. I like people that are sober-minded, fun, and rarely cynical. The people at the party wore pearls and black and ballet flats and lived uptown and they kept on asking me about New York. Do you love New York, they kept on asking. And I said yes and I meant it and they seemed pleased The air conditioner is running. The sky is gray and sweet. I always am very aware of causation, and I know how to understand what makes something bad and what makes something good. I don’t think it’s narcissistic to try to understand your own intentions but one shouldn’t go too much deeper than that. I would never betray anyone I love. I want ginger beer for breakfast lunch and dinner. I want hydrangeas in the apartment. I want to fall asleep in a room sized bed and be airlifted into daylight and clothed in blue sweaters. I want to be dosed with soylent but not lobotomized. Last night, at the magazine launch, a man was telling me about the story of his life. I lived across from Jeffrey Epstein, he said. I’m a lawyer, he said. I know hundreds of people, he explained. Do you know any secrets, I asked. The girls never looked underage to me, he shrugged. Isabel pulled me away. We walked down the long and wooden hallway and we stood by open windows. The figures across the street looked almost cartoonish, running like shadowy stick figures down the paths in hazy dusk in Central Park. So winter is great until March comes around, and I am not so ready for spring equinox and abandon-interiority and things moving faster and faster and faster. Everything material feels kind of cartoonishly good. Everything on my computer feels kind of cartoonishly evil. Cassandra and I bought big blue books full of curses, and now we are going to open them on the floor of an apartment on the Upper West Side and wear cable-knit sweaters and assume invincibility until proven otherwise. Since Darby gave me a blue heart-shaped bowl and an evil-eye bracelet that I haven’t taken off since, I’ve realized that I need to hold my cards closer to my chest. I put myself to sleep at dusk tonight because there are colors flashing in front of my open eyes like hallucinations and signs of delirium. I wake up on the couch shivering under my spring coat. Little white dried flowers all around me. A new wooden toothbrush propped on one clean shelf in an otherwise crowded cabinet. I wait for midnight so the new day can begin, and then at twelve-oh-one I say thank you to God one million times. I go outside for a walk in humid winter air. I go inside, and I’m alone again. I go to a building that looks “new” in Tribeca, and I go to a building that looks “old”. I interrupted a meeting, and I was given plastic bottles of fireball behind the bar. My friends were all talking about picking up new hobbies. A boy outside told me about adult gymnastics. I told the girls about rock climbing. I considered aerial silks. I considered French lessons and online shopping and recommending books-to-buy-boys-who-are-just-getting-into-reading. I watched a video essay about how not to let the moon affect your moods. I watched a video essay about undersea cables. So, February was fine. Cold and a little bit dreary and Iris keeps on telling me that above all she considers herself to be pragmatic, which seems to be working out for her and so I’m taking notes. I keep on deciding to just become nihilistic about it, but even when I don’t set alarms, I always wake up in time to do the things I should. DIRECTORY Wednesday, March 18 from 4:45pm at Metrograph —El Sur (1983, Victor Erice) screens. I have a special fondness for the landscapes of Northern Spain and the only beer I like is estrella, per, my Galician friend Rebecca. This film is not about spanish beer, but rather a spanish girl by the same name. “it’s half a film that contains a whole world of wonders.” Thursday, March 19 evening plans: MANHATTAN: From 7:30pm at Night Club 101 — Lubov says THE INTERNET MADE ME DO IT. A night of readings and music with Ada Donnelly, Alex Bienstock, Marble Index, Kyle Sullivan Dobbs, Lorry Kikta, Melissa Seward, Angel Money, and Yuri NYC. | RSVP here
Inline links: Metrograph, El Sur, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j-tT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0957633a-b82a-41e1-80ef-d921967efdf4_1512x1008.png, Night Club 101, Lubov, here

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