Valentines Revisited

As soon as Duane Reade and CVS start stocking their shelves with red and pink paraphernalia I start feeling Valentine’s Day’s inevitable imminence in the winter wind that sweeps chills beneath the sleeves of my coat, up the skin of my arms, down my neck, beneath my scarf, down to the thin skin of my chest that my shirt leaves bare.  I contemplate Valentine’s Day even while January still clings to the calendar.  I used to dread it because I was perplexed by it.  Now I think I get it.

Since I started high school, I wondered what kind of people celebrate Valentine’s Day.  What kind of woman received flowers or jewelry or a heartfelt card and what kind of man gives such things?  What kind of couple goes to dinner in a candlelit restaurant or has particularly romantic sex that evening?  I wondered who these people are, why they celebrate this holiday and if it means anything. I thought maybe Valentine’s Day is a holiday for commonplace love, not the kind of love the French troubadours sang of in the lyrics of hope and tragedy, eroticism and intellectualism; not the kind of love I wanted.  But then I wondered if all love is paradoxically both rare and commonplace?

When I was a freshman in college I told my first boyfriend that I didn’t believe in celebrating Valentine’s Day.  I said that it’s tacky and superficial.  And I wished I meant it. I reminded myself of the fact that I don’t care for chocolate nor for the clichéd cards usually found near the pharmacy inside CVS.  But, really, I was just saying it for the same reason I always told anyone I ever dated that I didn’t need anything for Christmas or my birthday: I felt like loving me must be so much trouble that no one needed to go to any extra trouble just because it’s a holiday.

When I was little I unabashedly enjoyed Valentine’s Day.  I enjoyed eating boxes and boxes of Conversation Hearts, after first organizing the hearts by color and then by what they said so that I could save the best tasting, most romantic one for last. One year when I was very young, my grandmother came to my house with several boxes of art supplies and we spent the afternoon cutting and pasting and drawing and writing and glittering.  My grandmother made heart people out of paper and lace and Popsicle sticks and I wrote love poems on crepe paper that I had cut into heart shapes and then covered in glitter and pasted onto lace doilies.  It was a beautiful, lace-trimmed holiday that I enjoyed every time it came around for many youthful years.

Two years ago, after some turbulent teenage and early adulthood years of denying the holiday, I realized that Valentine’s Day is probably the perfect holiday for me.  After all, I love Love -- even as I grow increasingly wary of it over the years.  I love a truly great kiss – the kind of kiss that seems to touch every part of my body simultaneously while momentarily rendering me unable to move words from my mind to my lips.   And I love slipping my hand into the warm grasp of another’s at the end of a long day.  I love when love is new and feels as if any love that may have ever existed in my heart prior was lesser or just plain wrong as the new love sparks unfathomable, glittering brightness as my beloved and I walk together down the street or move together between bed sheets.  And I love when love has grown a bit and is happy to stay in bed on a Sunday, watching TV and reading the news.  And even though I don’t necessarily believe in happily ever after, I love the possibility that I might be proven wrong.  Sometimes it’s just nice to be in love with a possibility.

The truth is that in my heart of hearts, I believe in Valentine’s Day.  I believe it is important to celebrate love.  Love.  Love in the abstract and love in the tangible touch of someone you love and who loves you back.  Love as sex and love as sitting quietly together on a park bench.  I think it is good to be the people who give and receive flowers and heartfelt cards, the people who sit together in candlelit restaurants, who put a little extra effort into their appearance and pay a little extra attention to detail in bed that night.  I think it is important to show that in spite of the texts sometimes left unanswered and the many miscommunications, the silly arguments, the nights you slept on opposite ends of the bed, and all the times you were too tired or too preoccupied with something else that love still means something – still means everything.

And so, two years ago I celebrated my first Valentine’s Day with the first person I was head over heels in love with.  We had dinner and drinks at the same small taqueria on the Lower East Side where we had our first date.  He gave me a sweet, silly card and heart shaped box of champagne truffles from Teuscher.  I gave him a handmade card and a short story I had written.  After dinner we wandered the Lower East Side and decided to have cosmos (I wanted one because they’re pink) at a musty little pub called No Fun.  Sitting at the almost empty bar together, we were in what felt like it would be a happily ever after.  And by that I mean it felt right.  Valentine’s Day was what we made it and ours was like us – unplanned yet heartfelt, worth the trouble but willing to take it easy. We held hands at the bar and asked the bartender to take our photograph.  The picture came out bright blurry, the camera’s flash dances upon the bar lights and the streetlights behind our heads, a halo-like glow turns our faces gold.  We look happy.  It was love: paradoxically rare and commonplace. 

Maybe Valentine’s Day isn’t as important when you’re eighteen or twenty and in college, and your real world consists of studying and drinking and dreaming up all the possibilities that you’d like to fall in love with. But it is an important holiday when you’re even just a couple years older and in a relationship.  The truth is that the reservation you make for February 14^th, the words you write in the card, and the extra romance is all an effort you make to celebrate something that is the best thing that has ever happened to you, or at least something that is making you superbly happy.

And I know people say that Valentine’s Day makes people who aren’t in a relationship feel bad about themselves, but I don’t think that’s a reason not to celebrate it.  After all, there are more people than one might think who don’t have a family with whom to spend Christmas or Thanksgiving, or good friends with whom to celebrate their birthday.  And what about all the single people with no one to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve?  I think most holidays have the potential to make some people feel excluded, but I also think there is always reason to celebrate it you look for it.

Valentine’s Day is neither tacky nor superficial, at heart.  It is not an empty consumer driven holiday, not necessarily. At its best, Valentine’s Day is a celebration of the very thing that we are all most likely either longing for or taking for granted: love.

Eye for an Eye of the Storm

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As a blizzard whips over the city and New Yorkers settle into their apartments with wine, potato chips and bacon (well, at least this New Yorker) I find myself thinking about the things we live with.  The people.  The experiences.  The objects.  The regrets. 

I live with my boyfriend in a cramped but cozy one bedroom apartment facing East 99^th Street.  We live with the sounds of traffic and passersby coming in through our bedroom window at all hours of the day and night.  Sometimes sex feels like a threesome between us and the edges of Spanish Harlem.

In the three months since we moved in together, the apartment has become a collage of my boyfriend and myself—us.  Paintings I collected during my travels across Europe hang on the walls with his framed photographs.  My British monarchy magnets decorate our refrigerator alongside his corporate branded magnets.  I write in our bedroom at a desk that once belonged to his father and that now holds my notebooks and a model of the Eiffel Tower my mother gave me for Christmas was I was in high school. 

Moving in together was an experience—perhaps better termed a feat—that I was quite proud of.  The act was simple enough.  We loaded up my few belongings from the room I had been renting just twelve or so blocks south and drove them up.  It had been an unusually sunny late October day and we had finished the job so early that we had decided to have lunch at a Greek restaurant across from a gas station deeper in Spanish Harlem.  I sipped a beer and watched taxis fill up their tanks. 

The next weekend I invited a friend over to the apartment, made dinner and said, “Look what I’ve done.  Look how happy I am.”  And I was.

And I was not naïve.  I knew living with someone is not necessarily easy.  It is not romantic, like dating.  Living with someone is like life—messy, exhausting, ridiculous, surprising, infuriating, beautiful, and lucky.  All the things you couldn’t figure out how to be by yourself you now have to be with another person—like less stubborn or more organized.  And all the things you were by yourself you have to be with another person—like independent.  Like anything worth having, it’s hard. 

And the thing is, you don’t necessarily know what you’ll need to do until you’re in it and it’s asked of you.  I find this is true of relationships in general: you get into them and the most you can do is be yourself and be loving.  The rest, you figure out. 

And that brings me to the biggest most important thing we all have to live with: ourselves.  As the snow falls down outside my bedroom window and I think of the days that had recently past and the ones that lie ahead in the near future, I think that no matter how much you want to live with someone, you can’t make choices that make it hard to live with yourself.  Because just as I might be stuck inside this apartment for the next day or two, we are all stuck inside our own heads forever.  This is it.  We are all we get. 

And I learned recently, that no matter how much it hurt at the time, I don’t regret the loss of any past friends or boyfriends from my life.  I regret how hard I tried to hold on.  I regret determining not my worth, but my quality of character based on what other people said to me and how they treated me.  I regret letting people make me doubt if I liked myself. 

And I do.  I like myself.  I like that I am caustic and silly and introverted and too honest and awkward.  I like my weird alone time music and I like that I like taking care of people.  And if people don’t like me, I can live with it because I can live with myself.  And it looks like I’ll have to.  There are storms to weather ahead.

The Sensbile Thing

I always think to myself that I’ve been through enough, so nothing could ever possibly ever hurt me that badly again.  I always make the mistake of thinking that surviving past heartbreaks and hardships means that it won’t be that hard to go through more in the future.  And it’s true.  But it’s also wrong.  Nothing will ever hurt quite like that; it will hurt differently—not less.  It makes me think of the Scott Fitzgerald line, “There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.” There are all kinds of heartbreak in the world but never the same heartbreak twice.  It’s like a virus that mutates.  There is no immunity.  

And even as I’m crying and reminding myself that eventually it always gets better, that eventually you accept that the bed is not half empty but half full, eventually you get up and go out into the world and start to trust people again—even as I’m telling myself that, I wonder if it’s really any better or just different.

Downside Up

I know something is bothering me somewhere deep in my subconscious because I feel very conscious of the world being a globe floating, rotating in space.  I feel very aware of being in my bed with continents and magma beneath me.  I feel precarious. And I feel like the world could just fall, like it could stop orbiting and start plummeting into the universe.  I feel like gravity could give way and the world could fall down and I would fall up, up into the atmosphere until I exploded.  I think about how horrible it would be to fall up. 

And then

I woke up with a frantic need to find a poem I had seen projected onto the old Roman wall in Canterbury, England almost five years ago.  I had seen it there in white lettering on a late October night, after the high street shops had closed and the day’s tourists had retreated to their bed and breakfasts and I was walking back to campus, enjoying the echoing sounds of the town troubadour singing love songs in the square.  And then there was you. 

That was the last line of the poem.  It resonated with me so much that I would recall it upon occasion for the next five years.  And then there was you.  It’s not a line to live by, not a distinctly insightful reflection about the condition of being human.  Or perhaps it is.

I can’t sleep very well lately because I am haunted by ghosts of myself.  They are discontented specters, betrayed by time, betrayed by me.  They beg me, “What have you done?”  They cry, “You are not who I thought I would be.” 

Walking through Washington Square Park one night, I told a ghost, “Time moves on and I made choices.  I’m not saying they were right.  I don’t want to think about that.”

A rat scuttled in the bushes.  My ghost murmured, “Nothing’s changed.” 

Nothing changed even though everything did.  The heart remains unaltered.  I don’t go there because it would betray me to my present.  But there it is.  

“I think I might believe in God,” my ghost confided.

“Well, you know me,” I replied, “I consider myself agnostic.  Most days I don’t think there’s a God, but I’d like to be proven wrong.”  I shivered in the cold and then added, “But really I think there must be something more, otherwise how do we live with ourselves if this is it.”

A rat ran across our path.  “Must be the same rat we heard earlier,” my ghost remarked.

“Mhmmm.  So you know moral relativism?”

“Yeah sure,” my ghost nodded.

“Well sometimes what is good to do and what is right to do are different things.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t know…  I’m just elevating a real problem to philosophical idea.  I’m more comfortable with ideas.”

“Me too,” said my ghost.

I the early morning hours I lay awake in bed, wishing I’d had the courage to tell my ghost how I felt.  I think maybe what haunts us is a reminder of who are supposed to be.  There is no right and wrong in matters of the heart, only choices and what happens next.  And then there was you.  

:It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity

Yesterday I Googled programs for teaching English in France, having finally decided I wanted to throw whatever sense of security I have left to the wind.  Then I saw that application which required multiple letters of recommendation, test scores, proof of vaccinations, etc. was due in three days.  Four years ago I would have gone ahead and applied anyways, asked for an extension, begged for last minute letters of recommendations.  But the person I am today decided that such singled minded impulsiveness, which might even border on a sense of entitlement, was not the way to go.  The person I am toady decided that something life changing could wait another year.  It was the practical choice. 

I’m not sure it was the right choice. 

I rarely truly want anything.  Last winter there was a Kate Spade purse that I just had to have and a certain purple pair of Chloe sunglasses but in general, nothing really sparks my interest since I moved to New York.  I’ve had no interest, not to mention passion, in any of the jobs I’ve worked since moving here.  I was ambivalent about my MFA program and my romantic relationships alike.  I don’t feel that sense of possibility inside myself anymore.  Nothing feels kinetic. 

Since moving to New York, I often find myself feeling like an extra in someone else’s life.  My life feels passive.  I do work for other people in order to get paid.  I try to be the person they would like me to be.  In my relationships, I spend time with someone else’s family, someone else’s friends.  I smile and nod and try to be nice—and, more importantly, I try to be happy.  I spend a lot of time wondering why I can’t be happy, why being included in someone else’s life is not enough for me.  But all I can come up with is that it isn’t mine.  I haven’t seen my own family in a year and half.  Most of my friends live a plane ride away.  Too much of my life is for other people.  I’m not happy because I’m not doing enough things that make me happy. 

I’m not being self pitying.  Or at least I’m trying not to be.  I think it is necessary to be aware of one’s situation.  Sure, maybe I could have tried harder to make more new friends in New York.  Maybe I should have fought my natural urge to be antisocial and go out and mingle with fellow students when I had the chance.  Maybe I could learn to budget better and buy a plane ticket home.  And maybe I should remember that this was what I wanted.  I wanted to move to New York.  I knew I didn’t know anyone and that I’m too introverted for most social situations so making friends would be difficult.  I knew I wouldn’t like any of the office jobs I took, but I knew I needed the money and that I didn’t want to stand behind a cash register in a retail store all day.  I knew I didn’t really want an MFA; I just didn’t know what else to do. 

Every choice I’ve made since coming to New York was because I didn’t know what else to do.  Maybe that’s how most people live or maybe I’m alone in this mess.  That’s one more thing I don’t know.  But I wouldn’t call any of my choices mistakes.  There are only choices and what happens next.  And what I’ve learned is how quickly it can all spiral into a life you didn’t want.  I used to wonder how complacency happens.  I get it now.  I read Revolutionary Road when I was a freshman in college and I wondered how the main male character could willingly do a mindless office job.  In the book, he told everyone that he did it so that he could let his mind focus on more interesting, more important, more artful things but privately he admitted to himself that he liked shutting off his brain for eight hours a day.  I understand that too now. 

It’s terrifyingly easy to let life just happen to you because it feels like the practical thing to do.  You have responsibilities, rent, bills, commitments.  When you’re bored you go to dinner or a movie or a bar.  And if you’re me, you wonder why some part of you is still bored.  But boredom itself is easy, passive.  Changing your life is hard.  Caring about something is hard.  Being invested in yourself is hard.  I didn’t think so back when I was in undergrad and every possibility I desired felt like it was only ever a semester away, but making things happen for yourself is hard. 

I went on over fifty job interviews this summer.  All jobs I didn’t want.  And I eventually got one.  And someone congratulated me.  I wasn’t proud.  I’m not even sure I was relieved.  I was employed, which is no small thing.  My choice of employment was a product of not knowing what else to do.  I still don’t know for sure.  I know I was happiest when I was living and studying in France.  I know I elate in translating and conjugating verbs.  I think maybe I should find a way to live abroad again.  I’m not sure, but I made the choice not to choose yesterday so now I have a year to figure it out.  And now that’s what I’m choosing to do. 

In the meantime

I sat on the hardwood floor crying, talking, praying to God and to my dead relatives.  I don’t know if I believe in God or an afterlife.  And how can you in a world like this?  But also, how can you not?  What else is there? 

What else is there?  That’s a question that haunts me through jobs, relationships, lonely nights, crowded bars where I know no one.  I thought it was a good question to ask when I was very young, living in small town Wisconsin.   And I thought it was a fair question when I was in Chicago.  And I thought I was looking for the answer each time I moved, every time I travelled.  And in a way I was.  There is always somewhere new to go, to explore, to think about and to let change you.  But there is also always more of the same. 

“You have to find something to do in the meantime,” he told me.   And suddenly I was crying, “The trouble is the meantime becomes time.” That’s what happened.  I took jobs in the meantime.  I had some drinks in the meantime.  I got an MFA in the meantime.  I kissed men in the meantime.  And I forgot what else there was that I was killing time waiting for. 

Time is such a curious thing.  There is always too much or never enough.  And it’s never quite right.  And we’re running out of it, even as we try to kill some more.  We think we’re killing time with drugs and TV and sex and conversation but time is killing us.  We’re dying for something. “I liked the girl from the reading.  You’re not that girl anymore,” he explained.  But he must not have heard what I read because I am still that girl.  We fall in love with misconceptions and then feel let down by the truth.  It’s a kind of falling out. 

I’ve always been good at leaving.  There’s plenty of places to feel lonely.  On the hardwood floor crying, talking to God and to my dead relatives, I explained that I had gone off looking for a place I wouldn’t feel alone.  And all I found was myself. 

From the archive:

On our first date I told you that, at best, I consider myself agnostic. I don’t believe in god, but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong.  The candle on our table flickered and I thought about holding your hand, but I didn’t know if you wanted me too.  I looked into your eyes and saw the glowing golden light of the candle reflected back at me.  I thought about kissing you, but I didn’t because I didn’t know if you’d want me to.  Then, amid the candlelight and the Coronas, it came up that you wanted to live in an apartment with bookshelves wall to wall. Without thinking, I clasped my hands to my chest and exclaimed, “Me too!” as if it meant something, as if it was a sign – as if the small fact that you wanted one thing that I wanted meant that maybe you could want me, that maybe we could want and have something together. 

3

My words were drowned in the mid-evening clinking of voices and cocktail glasses. The candle on our table flickered. When change happens, it breaks you wide open. It felt so damn good to be broken.

2

I said, “You’re like a bad habit I want to break all over me.”  I want you to throw me against the wall.  Press into me.  I want to break and I want to cut myself on the sharp edges.  I want scars.

1

There’s a shirt in my suitcase that I keep meaning to burn but I'm afraid of fire.  I want to break something just to see if it’s everything it’s cracked up to be.  I wake up and tell myself that it can always get worse.  When I was little I thought success meant talking in a British accent.  I love you like I used to set my clocks—ten minutes ahead of time.

Indecent Exposure

“Molly was never one for modesty,” my mother assured the nurse during my first visit to the gynecologist, when the nurse suggested I might feel embarrassed about being nearly naked on the examining table, my ankles hoisted out in front of me in what were called stir-ups—a word which made me think of the horseback riding lessons I’d taken years earlier.  And my mother was right, I was not bothered about being naked—or nearly naked­—so much as I was bothered by her words that made me sound like something other than the eighteen year old virgin that I was.  My mother had been referring to the fact that I didn’t like to wear a bra under my clothes when I was home.  She did not feel the phrase: “in the comfort of one’s own home” was applicable to what she considered “common decency.”  I was always indecent, just ask my mother.  I talked about my menstrual cramps in mixed company, I complained loudly about the discomfort of bras, and I didn’t believe in keeping secrets.  Or, I should say, I didn’t understand the need for keeping the kind of secrets that she insisted that it was decent and proper to keep. 

Later, after that first gynecological exam, when I noticed my underwear soaking with blood, and I asked the nurse if this was normal, the nurse looked down at my once lime green now mostly dark red underwear and replied, “Pretty common.”  It was my mother who then responded, “Well if it’s so common, then why have I never heard of such a thing happening?”  The nurse didn’t look up from the form she was filling out as she said, “You know us women don’t tend to go around broadcasting our female problems.”

I felt rage in my blood and I felt blood in my underwear, soaking through to my jeans.  And I knew I was going to make a point of broadcasting what I felt. 

Two months later, a surgeon sliced through my hymen with a scalpel.  I woke up still bleeding, with fifteen plus stitches in my vagina. (That’s what they told me, fifteen plus, as if they had lost count.)  A nurse reminded me not to have sex for at least 24 hours after the surgery, which she had previously assured me wouldn’t be as bad a childbirth.  I felt like I was a product of a system no one was talking about.  And I was going to talk about it. 

I spent the following two years of my undergraduate creative writing courses talking about it, making all my classmates uncomfortable as I described nerve damage and numbing cream and sex that was mostly stubborn and also painful.  I talked about things that people wished I wouldn’t but they didn’t know how to ask me to be quiet because that would mean in some way addressing what I was saying.  And what I was saying was, “Why should I be quiet?” 

It surprises me now six years later when I read aloud among fellow writers about having casual sex once or twice during a sad spell in late winter and see my peers making snap judgments about the quality of my character.  It surprises me when I talk about being raped and I am told that people would prefer I didn’t talk about it, that I shouldn’t talk about it.  Recently someone suggested to me, “Maybe you should write something happy for once.  People don’t want to hear something that’s going to ruin their night.”  To which I responded that they should just go look at their Facebook newsfeed if they want a glossed over, reality TV version of life.  It hurts me in spite of how many times I tell myself that I shouldn’t let it bother me, when people dislike me because of what they’ve heard me write about.  And I feel compelled to point out that when someone is talking about me because they’ve heard me read about sex or rape or abuse and they’ve judged me for it, they should instead consider talking about why what I wrote made them uncomfortable.

If I have learned anything in the past year it is that people desperately want to cling to the belief that bad things do not happen to good people.  Somehow, the person deserved it.  Why do people want to believe that?  Because everyone wants to believe that he or she is a good person.  And they want that goodness to serve as a totem that will protect them from all evils of the world.  No one wants to have to address the fact that really nothing can save you.  There’s prayers, luck, and self-defense classes but at the end of the day things happen.

Really, I think if you believe in some arbitrary monotheistic heaven and hell type of line between good and bad, then you are setting yourself up to judge others and ultimately, you are building yourself a glass house in which sooner or later you’ll find you are throwing stones and the walls are breaking down all around you.

My point is that bad things don’t happen to bad people.  Bad things happen to people.  Children are abused.  Women are raped.  But I think people would prefer to think that abused children come from those kinds of homes.  As in: not good homes.  It is the same with rape.  I think people would prefer not just to think that a woman was raped because of what she was wearing but because of who she was.  Had she had a lot of sex in her past?  Was she known for being flirtatious?  Was she a bad person?  Molly was never one for modesty. 

Modesty in such a context seems to be defined as knowing what to keep to oneself, by being humble bordering on ashamed.  Such modesty could imply having a sense of what to keep private.  How many of us grew up with parents who called vaginas and penises “private parts?”  Private.  Secret.  Things that only exists in that common phrase “behind closed doors” or in the proverbial “comfort of one’s own home.”  But privacy is an odd thing and those are two very strange components of it.  My mother hated that my father kept pornography in his office on the second floor of our home—behind closed doors.­  Plenty of women dislike that their boyfriends watch pornography on the internet in the comfort of their own home, because it is freely available to them through a quick Google search. 

What I am saying is that it is contradictory to treat sex, genitalia, and etc. as private parts of one’s life when they really are not private at all. They are extremely public is mostly the wrong ways.  Unrealistic sex is in movies, TV shows, on gleaming on billboards over Houston Street.  I know far too many men who sit down to dinner and begin discussing women’s pubic hair among themselves. (They’d prefer it to be entirely absent from the picture, if you were wondering.  But they hate high maintenance bitches.)  And yet people don’t want to talk about the hard realities of sex. 

I believe in talking about hard things.  I believe in talking about sex and abuse, rape and drinking, depression and trauma and that secret, heavy loneliness that so many of us carry.  Say it in that average way in which people talk about the weather.  Because such matters are just as common place, except no one is acknowledging them. 

Two years ago, when my brother read a story I had written about our childhood he looked up at me with big troubled brown eyes and said, “Molly, who would read this? It’s so sad.”  In the past year, I’ve met more women than I can now count who say things to me like, “When I heard what you read about rape it made me feel like I didn’t have to be embarrassed to read my story.”  You have to talk about hard things because you are not alone and because other people deserve to know that they are not alone either.  No one should be made to feel as if who they are is shameful just because someone else is uncomfortable with what happened to them.  Asking people to not talk about being abused or raped or whatever else is asking them to keep a secret for the sake of “common decency” as if who they are is otherwise indecent. 

And so I would like to advocate for indecent exposure.  Talk about what you’ve been through, not as a matter of self-pity but as a truth and a component of the shared human experience.  Talk about depression.  Talk about drinking.  Talk about sex.  Talk about violence and rape and abuse.  Expose the many indecencies of life.  Expose yourself.  

Post-Thesis Re-Rewriting

Months passed and late into the summer I found myself sitting on a bar stool beside someone I loved saying, “The truth about depression and drinking is there is no such thing as rock bottom.  You have a particularly hard time, you wake up covered in your own vomit, blood mysteriously died and crusted between your toes, and you think you’ve hit the bottom this time but it can always get worse.  And it will.  You have to want to start climbing back up, that’s how it stops.  That’s how you get out.  And maybe you slip and fall, and maybe it hurts all over again from time to time but you get through it because you decide you want to.”  And I would say one more thing: there is no such thing as happily ever after, but there is after.

The Blue Pillow

For the first six months I had nothing but a mattress on the floor, two suitcases, and a cardboard box.  I made my first purchase for the place in November: a shelf for my books, because I kept spilling wine on them when they were just piled against the wall by my mattress.  In January I bought new sheets and I ordered a bed frame.  I had put off doing any such thing for so long because I hadn’t seen the point.  I didn’t want to be living in that room so why would I bother making it look like a place someone would want to live?  But in December I had become lonely in that quiet, maddening way that convinces you that no matter who says they love you—a friend, a boyfriend, your family—they can’t really mean it because love shouldn’t be selfish but people damned sure are—hell, I was.  But with that conviction, came a desperate urge to start over and since moving was out of the question, I signed up for an online dating site. 

That was where I got the idea to fix up my room.  The only person I met through the site was an actor who had just broken up with his girlfriend.  He told me about trying to feng shui his bedroom to attract good karma or something.  I think he eventually got back together with his girlfriend but I think he had the right idea.  And while I didn’t care to move my mattress around to whatever side of the room would attract good energies, it finally made sense to me to make the place nice.  It was going to be hard to feel happy if my room looked depressing and I would probably never have the hope of ever having someone to love and to share my bed with if it wasn’t a place I wanted to be.  So I bought blue sheets because I remembered my mother or Seventeen Magazine once saying that blue is supposed to be a calming bedroom color.  And when it arrived, I pushed the long, bed frame box up four flights of stairs and assembled it by myself, late at night while drinking a beer.  And I didn’t even spill the beer.  Then, one night, I walked thirty blocks in the snow to buy picture frames from a store I had noticed near Bloomingdales; I had nothing else to do and I figured a walk would do me good.  Lastly, I bought a second pillow.  Not that I needed one.  It was just in case.

Sure, I puked red wine all over my new sheets once or twice in January, because I was still lonely and drinking doesn’t fill any void no matter how much you do it.  But it was a start.  And that’s the thing: I think you have to be ready to have what you want before you can get it.  I knew I didn’t want to be going to bars by myself, making up lives and histories that weren’t my own and telling them like truth to the old men who sat beside me drinking Scotch while I sipped Prosecco.  I was just trying to pass the time and there was a certain comfort in the dim glow of a bar and the way the liquor bottles look like gemstones.  And besides, there are all sorts of ways to be alone.  You can go to the gym and to the movies.  And I did.  You can go to restaurants late at the night, after the dinner rush, and sit at the bar and learn to make cocktails by watching the bartender with the practiced, steadied gaze of someone who drinks alone.  And I did.  And you can smile politely and be friendly to people you don’t really like.  But I couldn’t.  Because no matter how lonely I was, I preferred being alone to being with people I didn’t care much for.  And I think that’s the best way to be alone.  Just do it until one day you find you don’t have to anymore.  In March, I needed the second pillow.  

What do you want me to say?

Is it going to be funny? If you’re going to write about so many tragic things, you’re going to have to have a sense of humor.

Do men care if you like having sex with them or do they just care if you care that they like having sex with you? Is reverse low self-esteem a thing?  Is it like reverse racism?

My bartender says he always remembers me because I’m so polite.  There’s a tip for you.

Everyone will disappoint you.  Accept this and it will be easier to love people. 

There are different kinds of cheating.  They all involve disloyalty.  Where do your loyalties lie?  What is the difference between lay and lie?

I knew love was hard when my mother came home drunk and mimed the way the only man I ever knew my grandmother to love, trying to drunkenly break into their house by chopping down the chimney.  She said he had an axe. 

No woman is easy.  But sex is.  And we all know this, we just don’t want to talk about it.  Sex requires nothing but a condom—at best.  And that’s really pushing it.

Sex is like drinking: I’d rather do it alone.

You’ll tell me I have a very dry sense of humor and on the one day of the month that I’m trying not to drink you’ll ask me to have few with you. 

I’ll give you anything you want, but I’ll have to put it on my credit card.

I don’t know if IT ever stops hurting.  After a while you just stop calling IT “Hurt” and start calling it “Me.” 

Come True

“We’re not young anymore,” I wanted to tell her as we sat drinking wine outside a café on Madison Avenue, watching white haired, high-collared women walk by.  Or maybe we’re still young, just not as hopeful.  All that hope we had for the world when we sat in that café on Printers Row in Chicago, talking about all the places I was soon to go—it stretched thin over the interim years.  Maybe we measure youth in hopefulness.

But we trade hope for something tangible.  Hope is a feeling.  You can’t touch it.  It’s not real.  An apartment in the east 90’s is real.  Coming home, doing the dishes, lighting a candle and reading while noodles boil on the stovetop is real.  And in some ways it’s more than what you hoped for.  Because who ever hopes to feel at peace?  I always hoped for adventure.  And I got it and it got me somewhere and I’m happy with that.  Did you ever imagine me saying, “I’m happy” with anything?  Of course, you have to maintain perspective.  You have to keep goals, remember to look at the stars and wish for something now and then.  There’s always California, London, Paris, Provence…  But right now there’s this.

I’m not saying to stop trying for more, to settle, to leave well enough alone.  But I’m saying it’s important to be in the moment, to run your fingers over whatever it is that you have to hold.  Be in love with your present, if you can.  Fall for the real thing because it’s the only thing that can catch you anyways.  

Moving

When Taylor and I moved into our apartment, the first thing I brought over was a box of framed pictures, which I took pride in carefully placing on the shelf the previous tenant had installed above the kitchen counter.  The smiling faces of everyone I loved looked so bright in the fresh, white painted room.

I wasn’t quite nineteen years old.  It was May and it was raining when we moved in. The apartment shook all day and night, as the train rattled by inches from our window every seven to twenty minutes.  The bathroom window looked out over elevated tracks and rows and rows of rooftops that made the city seem like an endless puzzle pieced together playground.  

Maybe we were poor but maybe that’s a good thing to be when you’re that young.  And anyways, I didn’t notice because I had enough money to buy flowers and angel food cake once a week from the grocery store in Little Vietnam.  We ate mostly canned soup, perhaps because that was what we could afford, perhaps because I was constantly nauseous—perhaps due to a lucky combination of the two.  One afternoon the floor in our closet caved into the downstairs apartment.  But we lived just three blocks from Lake Michigan in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood and we spent our evenings walking along the beach.   I loved the view of the downtown skyline jutting out and up over the water as the whole horizon turned pollution pastel pink at sunset.  Less than a year earlier I had seen Chicago only twice in my whole life and now I felt I owned it in the way that anyone who is young feels after they have moved to a city for the first time, learned the train routes, fallen in love, carried too heavy bags of groceries down too many blocks, discovered the best Chinese food, seen the downtown glimmer in the twilight and nearly forgotten how they used to marvel at stars on a dark country night.

My grandmother gave us old shelves from her basement and a box of white bone china and my mother drove a small red folding table down from Wisconsin.  I used to do the dishes in the afternoon while Taylor was at work and before I had to head downtown for class.  And I used to think of how my mother washed the dishes when I was young and she was tired and sad.  And I would think about the things we do out of love and the things we do out of necessity.  By Labor Day weekend, I was living alone in a new apartment, closer to the lake in Lincoln Park. 

Through the years and through ten different apartments, I’ve carried little more than two suitcases of belongings and a couple of carefully packed framed pictures and paintings.  In living I have learned how to leave things behind.  But I have also learned that what you will keep is very rarely ever what you intended.  What I have kept is moving.  

That first summer in that first apartment in Chicago and for several years to follow, I believed so easily in words and promises and longevity.  I took risks without really believing that they were actually risks at all.  And I jumped heart first and headstrong into experiences that would leave me crying on the floor.   Lately, I find myself thinking that if I had known how happy I’d one day be, I wouldn’t have cried half as hard over the bad days and bad boyfriends or put with nearly as much as I did.  But really, I think it was all worth it because now I don’t take risks; I make choices.  I know the personal price of things.  The price of believing someone.  The price of heartbreak.  I don’t still naively believe that bad luck and brokenheartedness is a cross for someone else to bear.  But I think living is about momentum.  Choices keep us moving.

Fine, Thanks.

I hate Mondays.  And Tuesdays.  And Wednesdays.  And Thursdays.  And most of Fridays.  I hate everyone.  Of course, I don’t actually hate everyone.  But also, I do.  

Every weekday morning I wake up, feel around in the dark for my phone, check the time and see 5:30a.m. glaring back at me.  I roll over and go back to sleep.  At about 6a.m. I will wake up and check my phone again.  And then again.  And then again. Until it is 10 to 8—just about the time that I should be waking up and slumping into the shower.  Instead, I reset my alarm from 7:55 to 8:20.  I am convinced that 25 minutes of sleep will change everything.  That extra 25 minutes of sleep will make me feel excited about my job, it will inspire me to eat a salad for lunch, it will give me the energy to do some writing when I get home, maybe I’ll even eat a salad for dinner instead of French fries and a bottle of wine.  In the dark, moderate comfort of my bed I tell myself that I don’t need to shower or put on fresh make-up or find an outfit that I haven’t already worn to work at least once a week for the past month.  In reality, that extra 25 minutes of sleep changes nothing but the amount of minutes I will be late to work and just how gross and depressed I will feel all day. 

If I do shower, I will first pour myself a glass of orange juice, which I will bring into the shower with me and drink while the fluctuating hot and cold water beats against my back.  Then I will reach out of the shower, grab my toothbrush from the sink and brush my teeth while I stand, half awake.  And I will never blow dry my hair.  I will pull it, still dripping wet, into a tight bun and I will glance at myself in the mirror just long enough to notice the faint wrinkles forming around my eyes.  Thoughts of age and the mathematics of years start to float to my mind’s surface, but I push them back down—I don’t have time for getting old.

As I stand impatiently in the subway station I will notice women wearing eye liner, with freshly blow-dryed hair and pretty painted faces.  And when the train finally arrives I will squeeze my body against theirs and many—too many—other bodies and I will stand, scowling behind my oversized sunglasses as the train creeps from 96^th Street to 59^th.  I hate everyone.  And I hate days when it’s too gray or rainy to justify wearing sunglasses because then I have to be really careful not to role my eyes as I repeatedly glance around the train car.  When the train stops at 59^th I will silently curse at every single person who walks in front of me because they are all too slow and seem not to know that I woke up 25 minutes late and –in fact—have only been awake for 40 whole minutes and I have neither the time nor the patience they seem to have as they climb the steps out of the station. 

Once outside, I race the traffic lights one avenue and two blocks to my office, flash my ID and settle myself down in my cubicle, where I will remain for the next eight to nine hours.  I am least ten minutes late, sometimes 15 minutes, but I will never be anything less—anything close to on time because every morning as I run down the sidewalk, narrowly avoiding being hit by an early bird taxi looking for a pedestrian worm, I am struck by the ridiculousness of running to sit.  Rushing to wait for the day to be over.  Hurrying up only to count down the hours. 

In my cubicle, I drink bad coffee and eat yogurt and I answer the phone and I thank you for calling and I’m doing very well, thanks and one moment please and have a nice day and I pride myself every time I sound genuinely happy because after years of practice, I have learned that if I smile when I talk, then I sound like I mean it. 

Throughout the day I hate everyone.  I hate the noises that the people who sit in the cubicles near mine make.  I hate their prissy laughs and their prep school preening voices.  I sneeze several times a day because the woman who used to sit at my desk had so many cats that she tracked their hair anywhere she went.  No matter how much I scrub, cat hair clings to the cubicle walls, the keyboard, the files…  And so I blow my nose into a paper towel and I do office things with fancy titles like Presentations and Proposals and I sit and I wait and I count down and  I’m doing very well, thanks.  

I think that in order to be satisfied with one’s job, a person must either be making a lot of money or doing something that they are extremely passionate about.  Anything in between is hell.  Because it is empty.  Money buys things that look an awful lot like happiness and passion invigorates the soul.   Both are things to believe in, as any good American citizen knows.  Everything else is a lie.  I try to lie to myself, to convince myself that what I am doing matters, because it does matter that I keep my job and earn a paycheck and survive.   I try to reason with myself that I need to care about something.  Maybe all those people I hate—people who look pretty and well groomed and more calm than I ever am—for some reason care about what they do, they certainly look like they do.  I look like I’d like to go back to bed.  And I would. 

But I do still care about things in the same abstract, liberal arts way that I always have.  I read the news every day and I care about what is going on in the world.  On weekends I get drunk and rant about feminism because I care about gender equality.  And I say, “I love you” and I sure do care about that.  And I call my brother every now and then because I care about how his life is going and I really do hope he has a nice day.  And sometimes I do take the time to sit in front of my computer and write because I even if I don’t care for my life, I still care about a good story.  

On Love and Faith, On the Subway

I was wearing knee high black leather high heeled boots that I had bought on Madison Avenue for an unreasonable amount of money last December, when I spent Christmas drinking alone.  I stared at them in order to avoid eye contact with a woman who was hobbling up and down the subway car.  I could see her feet—she was wearing dirty lime green Crocs and even dirtier yellow socks with big holes in the heels.  Her sweatpants hung in ripped, fraying strands around her ankles.  I instantly felt stupid for being all dressed up--wearing a black silk dress with lace sleeves, my lips painted pink.  I wasn’t going anywhere special, just out to drink at a dive bar in the East Village.  Since moving to New York, I either feel incredibly silly for putting effort into my appearance while there’s people begging for food and spare change all around me or else I feel ashamed for not trying harder when I see women in nicely pressed blouses and pencil skirts and pretty patent flats. 

The woman’s feet were nearing mine.  I squinted my eyes closed as if I was in pain.  She was singing.  “Love lifted me up.  Love lifted me up.”  Her voice was crackly.  She was carrying two large black trash bags.  “Love lifted me up.”  I wondered if she had ever been in love.  I wondered if she had ever laid her head down on someone’s chest at night in bed, slept with her legs entwined with another’s, smiled in her sleep at the feel of the warmth beside her body under the covers.  I wondered if when a person doesn’t have a home or a job or enough to eat, if they still long for something like being loved.  Probably.  Good love is like a bowl of warm, creamy mashed potatoes—it fills you up and warms your soul. 

I was wearing the same outfit that I had worn on a first date seven months ago.

“Love lifted me up.  One more time.”  She yawned.  “Love lifted me up.”

All day I had been in a good mood, feeling pleasantly secure in my relationship and my new job and nurturing a renewed sense of purpose in my writing.  I squinted my eyes shut again.  I was mad at this woman—maybe for reminding me that it is always possible to loose what you think you can keep.
  

She was walking the subway car once again, this time stopping in front of each rider. “May love lift you too, sister,” she said to me.  I stared at the stains on her socks.  At least she wasn’t going on about God.  So many people plague the subways with fiery talk of one god and hell or another.    

I thought about God on my walk from the subway to the bar.  If someone asked me right now, if I believe in God, I’d say, “I believe that the past happened.”  I believe that I was home in Wisconsin three years ago, driving down the highway with my brother singing “Halleluiah” and the air-conditioning in the car was broken so we had rolled down the windows to let the dusty air whips our wet skin and it smelled like gasoline and cornfields and sun warmed blacktop and hay.  And I loved it all in some way that would haunt me for years because you’re not supposed to love the place that taught you how to break.  But you do because it’s beautiful—like how a former boyfriend once told me I looked pretty when I cried, mascara rolling rivers down my cheeks.  And I don’t know about forgiveness or absolution but I know what it feels like to be in hell, drinking in the company of your memories, unable to love anyone because the first people who were supposed to love you also hurt you.  And I’ve learned that you have to let go of the hurt you’ve been hanging onto in order to grab hold of some happiness.

And I let it go.  And I’m happy.  I don’t know if love lifts a person up.  I think you lift yourself up and maybe sometimes you get lucky and there’s someone standing next to you holding your hand.  These days I’m lucky.

In the past seven months, I went through four different jobs, I had a first date and a second and eventually lost count, I graduated my MFA program, I lost some friends and made some new ones, and life changed.  And that’s what I believe in.  Things change for the better and for the worse and just for the hell of it and you get through it not because you fall in love or fall into some good luck; you get through it because time pushes ever forward and you must too.  And sometime maybe you will be standing in a crowded bar and you will see a dear familiar face across the room and everything will feel warm and beautiful and right.  And you can hold that happy feeling in your heart for a while because you let the rest of it go.