Thesis Writing 8

We went to a Jay-Z concert at the newly constructed Barclay Center in Brooklyn and after the concert, we went to a bar where a DJ was spinning and bass was pumping and the crowd was bigger than I’d ever seen in any bar.  Everyone was dancing and there was a song shouting, “If you got $100 put your hands up…”  And I had next to nothing, but I had a new dress and I had a man who said he loved me and he was looking at me like I was something worth holding onto and I figured that was enough.  So I let him grab my ass and I put my hands up like the rest of the crowd. New York had begun for me.

Thesis Writing: Potential Last Line

--> I looked back at him and felt an easy happiness unlike any I had ever experienced.  And the only thing that scared me was how I wasn’t afraid.

Last Lines

I had looked back at him and felt an easy happiness unlike any I had ever experienced.  And the only thing that scared me was how I wasn’t afraid.

Thesis Writing 7

People’s faces look different when you kiss them – softer, maybe.  I like kissing.  I like the feeling of the warm, stubbled skin of the back of man’s neck against the palm of my hand.  I like how hands can think for themselves.  I like men who have slept with a lot of women because they’ve learned how to use their hands. They’ve lost their timidity.  Or maybe they never had much in the first place and that’s how they came to sleep with so many women.  I like the sides of men.  I like the natural way my hands slip under a man’s shirt when we’re kissing, the way they rest on the smooth skin that covers thick muscle that could take a punch – or a woman. 

I was sitting on a barstool, staring into my gin and tonic that I didn’t really feel like drinking, ignoring the man sitting to my right who kept trying to talk to me.  He reeked of strong, smoky scotch and the smell of him was making me sick.  Suddenly I felt lips on mine.  I felt my head clasped by the strong grip of wide hands.  The kiss was so smooth, it had slipped into my mouth before I knew what was happening and before I could decide if I liked it.  I opened my eyes and saw the face of the Irish bartender, though at first I didn’t recognize him.  He had been nothing special to look at when I had ordered my drink thirty minutes earlier.  Now he was soft and somewhat lovely – or his kiss was.  Or maybe I had softened. 

“I’m saving you,” he said to me in a thick Irish accent, still holding my head between his hands, nodding discreetly towards the eager man on my right.  The bartender kissed me again.  I wanted to tell him that I didn’t need his help.  I was good at being alone and I was certainly sober enough to know how to extricate myself from a drunk guy at a bar who was hitting on me.  I liked to consider myself wise to most of the moves and lines men use to pick up women.  I also liked to consider myself more skilled in the art of pick-up and seduction than most men.  I figured that, “I’m saving you,” was probably a pretty handy line for an Irish bartender to through out time and again to catch a sad, single woman at his bar, but I felt that because I was aware of this, it didn’t count if I played along and allowed myself to be caught.  And it was the first kiss I’d had since the hard breakup with the man I had loved.  I gave myself up to it, letting my brain turn to viscous matter as all of me slid into the kiss and the low lighting of the bar and the pleasant strangeness of it all.

My Liminal Terminal Degree

I’m about to graduate with an MFA.  I’m told it’s terminal – though I hear there are some experimental PhD programs in places like California that could extend my student life expectancy.  But basically, I went out into the world and got a degree that’s like a disease no sane person would ever want to catch.  But I wanted to.  As several people in a writing workshop class I took once commented, I tend to be a bit morbid.  And that’s precisely why I wanted to get an MFA.  I have a certain inclination towards morbidity – and also hyperbole.  I like to dissect relationships.  I like to cut them open, rip through the sinew that held them together, see where the heart is, find out if they bleed. 

A terminal degree also appealed to me because I like endings.  Well, I should say, I like writing about them.  Things are easier to write about if you know how the story ends.  [It ended when he said, “But why would you want me?” and she realized that she had run out of ways to try to help him understand. They both gave up on him.]  Endings are also nice because they can often have a palatable combination of melancholy hope and perspective that is quite palatable to the page.  It makes for delectable discourse when articulated alongside the raw heart and meaty parts of the severed relationship. 

I really like writing about how things end.  I even like to read the last page of a book before I decide if I’m going to commit to reading the whole thing.  I don’t want to go on the emotional journey of turning through page after page in my bed at night, if it’s going to leave me sad or confused or somehow dissatisfied.  Sex partners are for faking it; I want to be real with my books.  I want closure and I want to feel like I learned something by opening that book and opening myself up to the experience of reading it. 

And then there’s poems.  Poems are great because they’re short, so you know they’re going to end soon and you usually don’t get bored or have unrealistic expectations of them.  Poems are like a literary fling.  Sometimes I cheat on my memoir with a poem.  That’s how much I like endings.  I like to flirt with them.  I like to start something just to finish it.  I like the way time bleeds out on the page. 

I wanted an MFA because I wanted to write about everything that had ever happened to me.  I wanted to put my past on the page and leave it there to die, while I went on with my life – healthy and happy and loved.  I wanted to say: This is how that ended.  And now look at how I’ll finally begin. 

I wanted an MFA because I thought that if I cut open my life, I would find the sinew and bones that held me together and I would finally be able to get to the heart of what’s the matter with me.  And I had hoped maybe I could perform some sort of transplant so my heart wouldn’t be my problem anymore.   But I couldn’t perform the transplant.  I got an MFA.  I’m not a doctor.

Thesis Writing 7

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After a winter so long that it made me doubtful that there was really such a thing as seasons or change or hope, spring finally returned to New York.  And with the return of spring came the rebirth of my belief in people and possibilities.  On the first evening warm enough to only require a light jean jacket, I sat my favorite piano bar with a man I had somewhat accidentally started dating and was finally starting to take quite seriously.  That day we had walked through Central Park that afternoon, where there were daffodils poking up between the brown patches of earth and pink magnolia trees bursting into bloom.  Then we had returned to my Upper East Side neighborhood and I had led him to that bar, which had become my favorite place in the New York.  The paint on its walls and tables were chipping.  Everything about it had lost the loveliness it must have once had, but it was the most genuinely alive establishment I had found in the city.  Its staff was all older singers who had never made it big but who filled the small bar with their larger than life voices every night until 4a.m.  And the drinks were cheap and strong.

I loved it and I knew my mother would have loved it too.  I could picture her and drinking and joining the piano player in off-pitch harmony on a hearty ballad.  And I could imagine my grandmother there with the man I had always thought she should marry when I was young, who would be drinking whiskey the way I was drinking whiskey.  I could hear their deep, ever-on-point voices soaring like his had when he yodeled for me at The Hotel in Wisconsin.  And I knew my brother would have loved it because he had always loved anything I loved, especially music.  And I felt sure the man I had dated and loved when I first moved to New York would have loved it too – he would have loved how the bar felt like something out of a black and white movie about old New York and he would have mouthed all the words when the piano player sang Frank Sinatra songs.  The piano bar was a place that brought back to me everyone I had lost.  And it was good to see them again. 

The long months of winter had taught me forgiveness – something I had never really understood before.  My whole life I had run from what had happened to me and when I had discovered that it is impossible to run from pain itself, I had tried to kill it with sex and drinking. I had never understood when people talked about forgiving and letting go.  And the truth was that I couldn’t let any of it go because in spite of everything, there was love.  But I had learned that I could forgive by accepting people for precisely who they were and for the ways they were able to love me.  And I could love them back.  And I really meant it.  I loved them.  Not in spite of anything.  I just loved them.

I sipping my whiskey sour and my date was holding my hand under our table when I heard the first verses of the song.  It was my grandmother’s song.  I sat up straight and leaned my body over the table, towards the piano player, who was singing “The Rose,” a Bette Midler song.  I remember riding in her car, cigarette smoke stale and thick all around me, her voice clear and strong as she sang the song over and over again.  I was eleven years old when I wrote the words she was singing in my notebook because it had felt important.  I lost that notebook but I didn’t forget. 

Something Found

Where do you go when you’re sad?  I get lost inside myself.  I dive into a wine bottle and go swimming through all the old memories that I thought I had left on the tarmac in Chicago.  And now I’m at baggage claim.  I’m mixing metaphors like liquors.  Blacking out like I wish the past would.  But I know better.  I know I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been there.  I’m tough like the times I come from.  But I forget to be cautious when I’m sad and drinking.  I drown in lost things.  Lost loves.  Bruises in the shape of handprints.  My family.  Love.  God, what is love?  And who has some I can borrow?  Next round is on me.  And I keep hearing the feeling ALONE.  ALONE is a feeling that echoes.  And then it’s not a feeling; it’s headlights and I’m in it.  ALONE.  Cheers!  I’m good, I swear.  This is just a moment in time.  Come find me on a Sunday, happy with the way sunlight caresses me in the morning.  Listen to me laugh at a passage in a good book in bed on a lazy evening.  Watch me weave stories for you to dress me in.  I don’t want to wear any of those secondhand words, offhanded remarks that the world gives me.  Fall for the way I eat an apple as I tiptoe naked across the floor.  But maybe you’re afraid of falling, the way I’m afraid of falling.  So just come when you’re ready.  I’ll be someone found.