Incomplete

I think the love one person gives another is no better or worse than the person giving the love.  We love as we live, as we are.  Selfishly.  Hopefully.  Lazily.  Stubbornly.  Beautifully.  Irrationally.  Romantically.  Fearfully.  Clumsily.  Zealously.  And, if we're lucky, completely.  

From September 2011:

I bought a postcard to send to you, just like I promised.  I just never sent it.  Perhaps that's because I didn't know what to write; or else because I knew a million things but nothing seemed quite right.  We had said that if one of us sent the other a postcard, the sender would write “I like you.”  But you already knew that.

So I kept the postcard I bought for you.  For a year it stayed tucked inside the back of my notebook – my travel notebook with the world inked on its cover and my world inked within.  That's where I kept your postcard, in the back of my world.  It came with me to England and to Scotland and to Turkey; and to the Czech Republic, Austria, and France. 

Finally, from Chicago I wrote to you about the postcard, about a place I'm not not from, even if I say otherwise.  The postcard was a picture of the letter “M” that had been shaped out of white rocks with lay upon a hillside with a small red barn nestled in the sprawling green-brown fields below.  When I was very little I little I believed the “M” to be for Molly.  When I got a little older, I learned the town was not for me. 

I bought the post card in a grocery store called Piggly Wiggly that used to be called Dicks.  I wrote that I bought it a year ago; the last time I was in my hometown.  I didn't write home, though.  That's wouldn't be quite right. 

I wrote that I have two younger brothers, one of whom writes songs the way I used to write songs.  When my mother was gone and I was young and my brother was younger, he and I would sing and dance for hours, day after day after day.  I'm not sure he even remembers that. 

It's funny the things a person can forget: the date, an appointment, why they're angry, the way, a word...

Then there things that stay with a person far longer than a paper postcard.  The things I can not forget are postcards made of Technicolor-terror-dreams, stamped into my mind's eye.

I didn't write to you that when I was young I thought the right person would know how to save me – that maybe that's what love would be: salvation.  (Maybe the next time I send you a post card I will write about how I saved myself.)

A Brief History of Love

There it was: my brief history of love.  There between us and my sheets on that mattress on the floor in the bedroom I still hadn’t furnished.  Every story I had ever told or heard or tried to write, every person I had ever cared for, my family, my friends, and a couple Facebook pictures.  All wrapped up in me telling you that for most of my life I had been too selfish to ever love anyone, that I had said the words but I hadn’t even known what they should mean, I had just known that I loved the way the other person I was saying those words to loved me.  And maybe it had been that way with you in the beginning, but at some point it changed and for the first time I loved someone.  I loved you, regardless of how you loved me.

Hold What You Have

These days, almost everything feels like tears.  I can feel tears in my throat.  Hot and tight.  I can feel them warm and wet in my eyes.  I can feel tears in the way I bite my lower lip to draw my mind’s attention to an easier pain.  I can feel them in my stomach after I swallow them down.  I can feel tears in the precise way my fingers move over the keyboard.  Movement as a kind of self-medication.  I can feel tears in their absence from my pillow when I wake at night and curl into the alone-ness that I tell myself is comfortable just because I like the way my blankets feel on my skin.  These days, almost everything feels like tears because I’m almost always holding some back and because some things aren’t as easy to hold onto as tears.

Rewriting: (Don't) Walk Away

In love and in New York, I began to learn what I want and what I have. I want people I love, people I share a happy history and inside jokes with. I want a favorite brunch place and a place to spend the holidays. And I learned the meaning of one of my favorite Joan Didion lines: You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.  [And I learned that you can’t always pick the people who walk away from you, no matter how much you want to.]

In love and in New York, I began to learn what I want and what I have. I want people I love, people I share a happy history and inside jokes with. I want a favorite brunch place and a place to spend the holidays. And I learned the meaning of one of my favorite Joan Didion lines: You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.  And you have to pick the people you let walk away from you.

I always left before I could get left.  I never wanted to stay in the same place long enough to discover how easy it was for someone else to leave me.

Dreamer

I cried in my sleep last night.  My dream fingers carefully wiped dream mascara streaks from around my dream eyes.  I cry in my sleep almost every night lately.  I cry big dream sobs.  My dream body shakes violent dream shakes.  And there’s so many warm wet dream tears.  Maybe something is really wrong.

I can cry when I’m awake, but not like that.  Not unabashed.  Not uncontrolled.  Not without telling myself to get over it and go to work or to the party or to class or to just to turn on the TV. 

I used to dream conversations, ask questions and finally get the answers I needed.  I used to dream kisses with men that I used to really know.  And when I felt like something –someone was lost— I found what I needed in my dreams and woke up feeling better.

Now, when I’m awake, I have real conversations with real people.  I wonder if I really know them.  I ask real questions but the answers fade faster than dreams.  And I share real kisses with a real man but it’s not real. And it’s not a dream come true. 

Something is lost and I can’t find what I need.

And someone once called me his dream girl.  We were both awake but dreaming.  But it wasn’t a dream come true.  Though, who would want that when it’s just as possible to cry in dreams?

Dark Blue

I like it when you look at me with hard, hopeful, hungry blue eyes.  I like it when you’re mean and beautiful and good.  I’d like to think I’m like that too.  And I like the way you kiss me when you mean it. You kiss me like the sky is falling.  And I think that if the sky fell and you were looking at me and I was looking at you, everything would be hopeful and mean and beautiful and blue.

Soda Pop

When we were very young, my brother and I used to ride our bikes along the sidewalk, over patches of weeds that grew between the cracks in the pavement.  We would press our bare feet hard into the peddles as we raised our bodies off the bike seats as we rode faster, laughing because it was summer and there wasn’t much else to do.  We would ride to the liquor store around the corner from our house; outside there was a vending machine where we could buy cans of pop for thirty five cents each.  We called it pop then.  I call it soda now.  And now, in that little town, there are still vending machines selling pop for fifty cents.  Such things don’t exist anywhere people call pop “soda.”

Back then, when soda sounded pretentious or old fashioned, my brother and I would count our nickels and dimes and slide them into the coin slot, awaiting the sound of the cans of Cherry Coke falling free from the machine, eager for the sweet cold taste of that very first sip. They were our little luxury. 
In the evenings we could go to the city park and buy bags of popcorn for seventy five cents.  The popcorn came in the same ACE Hardware bags as the nails and screws that I’d seen my mother purchase.  Ours was that kind of world.  Cheap and hard.  Where enough was the goal and in the meantime there had better be loose change and something to laugh about.  

Rewriting: It

He looked into me and said, “When you look at me like that, you really are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

I thought, later, that is why I could never date a writer – or even most men.  As a writer, I find I’m rarely sure if I actually mean what I say, or if I just like the way the words go together.  I think most men say things to a woman because they hope to fit their body – if only for a moment – with hers.  It’s all syntax. 

I smiled and almost told him he didn’t need to flatter me.  It was enough to be beautiful to him.  But he continued, “I mean, you always are, but I forget to notice sometimes and then you look at me like that and it’s all I can see.” 

I question my own aesthetic appeal almost everyday – my weight, my thighs, my skin, my teeth…  But I didn’t question whether or not he meant what he said in that moment because when I looked at him like that and when he looked back at me, there was no one else in the world.  [That’s what I meant when I told him he was it.]

Be Wrong for Me

My mother used to say, "I love your father.  I'll probably always love your father, but we're just not right for each other."
I used to keep their wedding photo album in my doll house when I was very young.  I haven't seen that album in years but I know the pictures by heart.  My mother in a knee length white dress and a wide brimmed white hat, standing with my father in their backyard, right where the grassy hill fell into the creek, beyond which woods stretched to the highway.  My father's mustache back when it was still thick and brown, not the gray stubble it is now.  Even though it was the late nineteen eighties, he looked like he was cut right out of an early seventies photograph --maybe a photograph from his first wedding.  My sister, from his first marriage, with tan lines showing above her strapless, pale pink dress.  My aunt, looking barely older than my sister, standing beside her in a matching dress.
These days I find myself thinking of the story my mother told me of taking off her shoes and walking home alone from their wedding reception.  She was wearing white silk stockings purchased at Bloomingdale's and by the time she got back to the house, they were ripped and gray.
It would be easy to say that the right man would not have let her walk home alone from her own wedding reception.  I think that's what my mother was saying when she told me the story.  I would say that people can't be right for each other until they're willing to admit all the ways they're wrong themselves.  Maybe you can't be good with anyone until you're good yourself.  And maybe you can't be better until you admit that you need to be.
My parents just couldn't figure out how to grow up.  I think that's how someone people get it right, after all.  They grow up.  My parents were like adult children.  They threw tantrums and objects and blame when they didn't get their way.  They said hurtful things just because they could. 
I think the couples that get it right are just made up of two people who are each grown up enough to know when they're wrong.  I think if you can say you'll always love someone, but they're just not right for you, then they might be right for you, but you just aren't grown up enough to be okay being the one who's wrong.
And maybe I'm wrong, but I'd be okay with that.  

I want leaving me to be the hardest thing you ever do.  Anything less is nothing at all.

Not About Loneliness

I'm not afraid of being alone.  I appreciate the small freedom of sleeping by myself, being able to toss and turn and get up and write and watch TV and have a snack and then go back to sleep.  I like shopping alone, taking walks alone, drinking coffee and reading alone.   I like traveling alone, losing myself in a new place and the same old thoughts.  I even enjoy going to bars alone, savoring the perfect cocktail and taking in the sound of other people's social lives.  And when I want to write, I need the resounding quiet of being entirely alone.
I am afraid of feeling alone but not being alone.   I am afraid of those moments when I am with someone --a boyfriend, friends-- and yet I feel like I am floating inside myself, a heart hovering inside a head, a mere idea of a person.
I am afraid of being alone but not feeling alone.  I dread those days when I walk by myself through parks and down city streets and find my head is filled with memories of the people I used to know, conversations we used to have.  I am afraid of feeling more present in the past than in the moment.  
I find it is the things I've let go that I come to know by heart.
And I am afraid of time, how it moves, how even loves that seemed right take turns for the worse or for something --someone-- else with the ever changing course of hearts and calendar pages.   I am afraid of the places I used to be, the people I used to be with, and the ideas I used to have of the person I would be.  Those are the very things I know by heart.  And yet somehow they all proved me wrong. 

This is me letting [   ]* go.

*insert yourself here

 

I've Got Them, Babe

Lately, when I'm drunk I want to hold hands.  I hold hands with my friends, with men I'm not romantically interested in, with other people's boyfriends that I don't even wish were mine, never with the man I'm interested in.  I think I even remember drunkenly holding hands with my co-workers.  
I like the contact of someone's palm against mine.  I think I need it as tangible proof that I'm not alone.  And I like the way someone else's fingers wrap around mine.  I like feeling like for a moment I don't have to be ok; someone else has got me.  
And I love these people I hold hands with on drunken nights.  I love them when I'm sober.  They're my family.  I've got them.  

You are not [here].

Syntax

He looked into me and said, “When you look at me like that, you really are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

I thought, later, that is why I could never date a writer – or even most men.  As a writer, I find I’m rarely sure if I actually mean what I say, or if I just like the way the words go together.  And I think most men say things to a woman because they hope to fit their body – if only for a moment – with hers.  It’s all syntax. 

I smiled and almost told him he didn’t need to flatter me.  It was enough to be beautiful to him.  But he continued, “I mean, you always are, but I forget to notice sometimes and then you look at me like that and it’s all I can see.” 

I question my own aesthetic appeal almost everyday – my weight, my thighs, my skin, my teeth…  But I didn’t question whether or not he meant what he said in that moment because when I looked at him like that and when he looked back at me, there was no one else in the world.

This is not black and white.

Without You

I found a picture that ___ took of me on Valentine’s Day, long after dinner and margaritas and a cosmopolitan that I had wanted to drink because it was pink and the champagne truffles that we [I] ate in bed.  In the picture my back is turned and I’m smiling at ___ over my bare shoulder.  The back of my dress hangs slightly open at the top.  It’s my little black dress that I wear for all those big hopeful days.  It wasn’t until I found that picture that I realized that I have a different smile for ___than I do for anyone else.  ___ asked me how I could be so certain that I wanted to be with ___.  I told ___ that I wasn’t always, but one day I noticed the difference between ___ and me and all the other possibilities.

Where I Live

My parents will not come to New York.  They won’t stroll with me through Central Park or join me at my favorite brunch place just a couple blocks from the Met.  They will not see me graduate with my MFA in the spring or see the office where I work on 38^th and Madison.  They will have gone six years without ever visiting any of the universities I attended.  They weren’t there when I was in the emergency room in Chicago or after I was raped or when I was sleeping in a bathroom in Paris because I couldn’t afford a room.  And in a way they are right when they say it is my fault.  I was too ambitious to ever truly run away from home so when I went to college, I went to Chicago, and they saw the three hour drive between their life in Wisconsin and me as the equivalent of the Atlantic Ocean that I would eventually intermittently put between us. 

But fault is the wrong word for the responsibility I take for being alone – or at least for being without a family.  Fault is the word I give them.  They gave me reasons.  I don’t think children run away from home because they hate their parents.  I think they run away because they hate what happened to them.  I hate what my parents did to me.  And that’s what I used to think I was running from.  I didn’t realize that time creates its own distance.  Nor did I realize that it is impossible to run from pain itself.  That’s why running became a pattern, a habit, and impulse.  The pain always found me whether I was in Chicago or London or Paris or Istanbul or New York City.  The pain of what had happened was always in me.  I couldn’t truly be anywhere because I didn’t want to be with myself.

In running from pain and from home, I came to feel homeless.  I had given up the only home I had ever had and I seemed incapable of making a new one for myself.  And I was ashamed of this, especially around the holidays, when everyone else around me was making plans to go home and to spend time with their family.  During that time of year, my stomach would be constantly sick with the question of where I would go and with whom and the possibility that I would have nowhere and no one.  I still have this question, this sick feeling in my stomach.  And this year I might have to face being entirely alone during the holidays for the first time.

However, I have realized that I do not need to go home to have one.  Though, I would not call it home.  I would call it the place where I am from.  Sitting at a bar in the East Village one night, I realized that where I am from is always with me.  The hard heat of the cracked, eroding pavement of my small Wisconsin town is in my words and tears alike.  I can experience by memory every season of the Midwest – every smell, every sound, and every quality of light.  And when I’m having trouble with a boyfriend or at work, I don’t walk on eggshells; I walk like a seven year old country girl barefoot on a gravel road: quick but careful, pained but with somewhere to go.  And when life comes at me with its fists raised, I stand and meets its gaze the way I met my mother’s– fire meeting fire – whenever she came at me with her open palm raised and ready to sear my cheek with its force, when her fingers dug into my flesh until I bled and my skin caked like mud beneath her fingernails.  And when I am in love, I put up my love like a good fight because I am from a place where you didn’t have anything unless you fought for it. 

The last place I ran to was New York City.  I had never been to New York, or anywhere else on the East Coast, until I landed at LaGuardia with two suitcases and the address of a graduate student dormitory.  Within days of arriving, I fell in love – though not with New York.  Through this particular turn of events, I found myself ushered into a social world of people who had been given more traditional love, support, and opportunities than I had ever experienced.  These people had families and they came from houses that they called homes and that they returned to for holidays.  And they had each other.  They had friends and inside jokes and shared happy histories – things that I had never stayed anywhere long enough to maintain since extricating myself from the place I was from six years earlier.  Witnessing their lives and feeling the contrast to my own brought all the pain I had been running from to the forefront of my daily life.  I was blindsided and I was blinded by the pain, so much so that there were days when all I could see was how much I hurt.  I couldn’t see that I had a man who loved me, a good education, new friends, and the very real possibility of things finally getting better.  Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that not only it is impossible to truly be anywhere until I want to be with myself, but it is also impossible to be with anyone.

However, I did eventually realize that I don’t want to be another example of the Woody Allen, Freudian, Groucho Max joke.  I want to be able to belong to a club that would accept someone like me as a member. 

I have now been in New York for fifteen months, which is the longest I have stayed anywhere in the past six years.  And I intend to remain.  Something began for me in New York.  It has its beginnings in romantic love but it goes beyond that.  In the beginning, I learned the routes of the subway by going to and from dates and I explored the Upper Eastside and the Upper Westside while someone held my hand.  And I can now differentiate the Williamsburg Bridge from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Queens Borough because I remember significant romantic moments that took place in view of each.  And now I have friends that I love and that make me feel like I have a family.  

In love and in New York, I began to learn what I want and what I have.  I want people I love, people I share a happy history and inside jokes with.  I want a favorite brunch place and a place to spend the holidays.  I learned the meaning of one of my favorite Joan Didion lines: You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.  And I learned that I have come from something and I am as proud of it as I am saddened by it.

And I have some things I did not have six years ago.  I have the ability to love and to choose to stop running away. It took me a while but I have finally gotten to a good place and I’m not going anywhere.  For the first time in my life, I have figured out how to live with myself. 

Holidays

I didn’t run away from home because I hated my family.  I ran away because I hated what happened to me.  Then something else happened: I grew up and realized no one was running after me; I was alone.

Rewriting II

As we left the store, you walked ahead of me, carrying our shopping bag.  I lagged behind, holding the pie box in my arms, making a point of memorizing everything about the store and the feeling.  Time was tangible.  I felt old but I wasn’t scared. From the doorway you looked back at me, “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?” 

[You had already read me.  Did that change everything?]

In Love

I am agnostic at best.

Disclaimer:

The point here is to be artful.

Rewriting

I wrote in my notebook: We are beautiful, broken things.  That’s how [I thought] we were then.  If we were in bed, you were on your laptop.  Sometimes I was on mine, sometimes I just sat there wishing you would close the screen and kiss me.  But each time you finally closed the laptop, you went to sleep and I would lay beside you in the dark, my body just barely touching yours.  But each time we went to sleep, I would lay beside you in the dark. When those nights first began to occur and then reoccur, I would align my body with the back of yours and wrap my arm around you, laying my hand over yours, just the way I knew you liked and I would hope that you loved it.  [If we were broken, our breaks complimented each other and we fit together.]

Winter is Hell

It’s November and I can smell winter in the air.  I can smell Christmas, Vermouth, snow, fresh linen, rape.  The cold catches in my throat like tears, like screams.  I can taste it as it whistles and whips in between my teeth – snow, puke, the word: no.  It’s winter again and I am almost lost again.  Lost inside the loneliness of nowhere to spend the holidays, the fear and self-loathing of being alone, and the image of finding my clothes on a stranger’s floor, snow outside his window.  Hell doesn’t freeze over.