the season of gratitude

(Bright lipstick for skating confidence).

(Sometimes it's the littlest things I love: dried flowers, lit candles, homemade banners. Sometimes it's the little things that remind me who I am).

(The corner nursery is now suddenly full of trees and wreaths and the whole neighborhood smells of the holidays).

(Brooklyn Flea Market find)

(NOTE: that leg FELT as though it was much higher than it appears in these photos).

(Lots of giddy smiles and laughs).

My new job is more traditional in that I always have my weekends off and I cannot tell you how miraculous and special this feels (it's the simple things right? But after so many years of that not being the case, a normal schedule is anything but simple). Of course there are errands to run, but I do them with my Canon in my purse and a bit of adventure in my heart. I am always attempting to make a vacation of the ordinary. I bring the latte and I take the long-scenic-route-of-a-walk and I give in to the girlfriends who suggest that we do the most touristy of things on a Saturday night: ice skating in Rockefeller Center. Living in New York is hard--I'll be the first to say this, but it is upon occasion, unparalleled. And to enjoy it for all that it can be, you have to do the off-the-beaten-path-things and then temper those things with the most renowned, like  ice-skating in one of the world's most famous venues.

Thanksgiving is without a doubt my very favorite holiday. And everywhere I look right now I see things to offer up gratitude for:  a good job, and a beautiful flat, and Saturday mornings with nothing to do. Old friends and new, the ability and willingness to forgive, white wine and truffle fries, words, words, words, small and meaningful flirtations. Long walks, good books, deep laughs, the ability to dance and try again. And again.

Life is one delicious event of unfolding and circling back--finding that part of yourself that straps on a pair of skates and remembers what it is to laugh in a way that belongs to cold weather and ice rinks. And very good friends

regrets + wishes

We spoke of regrets one night, having dinner at the Wythe.

I said how I mostly only regret small things—frozen moments. That time last January when a man squeezed my hand and I didn’t squeeze his back. Or when I was seven and didn’t crawl into my grandmother’s lap—how sad that made her and how there wasn’t time enough to go again because life ends at different times for different people. Or when at twenty I was sad in a way that knew no words and I couldn’t muster just one—yes, when asked.

Sitting at a small table, wine between us, and not enough light, he said he would have regretted not saying hello.

But I regret that he did. Regret everything that followed after. Which is untrue of course. But there is a solace in this particular lie. And so I tell it to myself and for a moment everything is easier.

I was wrong about him. Which is a truth that is hard to sit with.

I was wrong. I say those words again and again. I feel how they sit in my mouth, how they taste, and I learn to get comfortable with them.

He wore sadness like it was a distancing thing. And spoke of attachment as though it was a fool’s errand. He lived in a perpetual state of preparation for the next-worst-thing—holding everything and everyone at arm’s length, thinking he could outsmart sadness, as though it had anything to do with thought.

Lying in bed one night I asked him a question and in the silence preceding his answer I could feel his mind working so very hard—sorting through the muck and mess. And in the space before his words all I could think was, I’m too well. I’m too well for this particular man’s particular muck…and well…fuck.

Because I so liked the way his soft curls clung to his head.

I am a person who believes in change. Personal change. On every level I believe in it—on an intellectual level and an emotional level and a cellular level. I am not the person I was eight years ago. Nor six years. Not five nor three. I’m barely the person I was a month ago, which isn’t quite true, but is true enough. And hell if I haven’t seen some of the very best people I know change—watched as they’ve struggled and stumbled and grown in the shadows of the low-hanging-trees-of-heartache. And in the space of who they once were and who they are now is a story of tremendous resilience and desire—a story of what lies-on-the-other-side—a story of what it is to be human, which isn’t an altogether easy endeavor, but a really worthy one.

I say again and again that I got out of a very dark hole with nothing but desire and the length of my fingernails. I clawed my way to a better life—grit and a wish between my teeth.

Did you know that the term cliff-hanger comes from Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers?* He was writing a serial novel and the first chapter ended with a man hanging off of a cliff by the length of his too-long-for-everything-else-but-not-this-fingernails. I think often of that image—the absurdity of it. But the truth of it too. The truth lying somewhere in the man's desire.

I hung on by my fingernails, simply because I wanted to--wanted to so badly that that want became a need and the need made possible what was anything but.

If my story is remarkable, it is remarkable only in that I wanted to change—wanted a life bigger than sadness, which of course meant that sadness would have to be a part of it.

I believe we are made by what breaks us. We are forged by the dark and rocky terrain of moving-forward. And I think there’s something holy about the trudge of it—the slow movement, the body’s ability to continue on when every bit of it feels cold and still and tired.

It’s the difficulty of the journey that gives it meaning and shape.

But the genesis is in the wish, which isn’t so flimsy a thing as we think.

But you can't give that wish to a person. You can wish something for them, but you cannot wish it upon them. And you cannot get close to--or be intimate--or fall in love with a person who is so mired in their own shit that they'll do anything they can to pretend there's not a stink about it.

You can only wish them well, and walk away, when walking away is all there is to do.

*There is a chance I made this up, but I vividly recall a seventh grade lecture that explained all of this. However, the internet yielded no information that would validate this claim in any way.

words and what needs to be said

  I just keep thinking about that dinner table. The smooth green of the glass. The accumulation of dirty dishes and empty bottles. How startlingly sober I felt as I sat there. How his body was turned in, facing another woman. How in the end there were only four of us and how very much I felt apart. How when this other girl told a joke he laughed in a way that he only ever, upon occasion, laughed for me. And how when that happened I sort of caught my breath and thought, oh, well, there’s that.

I think back now and wonder if I should have gotten up and left. Gathered my jacket and bag and quietly slipped out; hidden in the stairwell. Instead I went to the bathroom, studied my reflection, listened as they whispered--not able to hear what was being said, knowing I wasn’t meant to.

When the night ended, as it always does, we climbed into bed, side by side.

He slept. I did not.

The next morning, riding the train to work, I quietly wept. I could feel the woman across from me watching. I let her.

Running into an old friend this week I gave her a really cursory run down on what’s been happening of late and the most recent guy and in the middle of a quite a bit of nonsense, I looked up at her and said, I just don’t want to be that girl—that high maintenance girl who asks too much.

And this very dear friend who’s known me for quite a lot of time looked at me and said, Meg, high maintenance is throwing a fit when the guy is a few minutes late. Asking for what you need, saying how you feel, those things do not high maintenance make.

She said it in this way that was so no-nonsense, so very matter-of-fact, that all I could think was, how did I not know this before?

It was an Oprah ah-ha moment in the most embarrassing sort of way.

But asking for what one needs, giving voice to that, well, that’s a vulnerable thing. And hell if vulnerability doesn’t feel like standing naked on the edge of a cliff as a great gust of wind barrels towards you like a freight train.

The violence of articulation. I had a teacher in school who used that phrase and I’ll never forget it. The violence. Of. Articulation. How nearly impossible it is to say some things out loud. How catapulting them out of the mouth is part pyrotechnics, part gymnastics, and one hell of a leap of faith. And how some words, no matter how they are said, leave cuts and stains and scratch the mouth.

But I’ve been choking on I-don’t-knows for nearly a month now, so you pick your battles.

Why is it easier to say the cruel things? Why do those words slip out, slick as oil, so tremendously seductive and so incredibly damaging? It’s so hard to speak from a place of generosity. To say, I am sad and I am hurt, and this can’t go on, but I am nonetheless in awe of you. To say you deserve my respect—my kindness, even as I am so completely and maddeningly frustrated with you—hurt by you.

Because the thing is, it’s not just about the words and the difficulty of getting them out—it’s about figuring out where truth and generosity meet. It’s about speaking from the largest part of yourself—that part that continuously reaches for a bigger life, that says I want more and if you can’t give it to me, I forgive you that—not your fault, but time to go. That part willing to risk a little bit of lonely. That part that makes a practice of faith and thinks well hell if I’m not lucky that I get to feel this, hard as it is. That part that goes to the edge of the cliff again and again and again.

I’m so angry with him. In a completely and totally and ridiculously unfair way I am so absolutely angry with him. For not being the person I wanted him to be (I know). For not falling in love with me (Yes, I know). For not being courageous enough to fight for the thing. For not knowing he’s worth fighting for the thing. For that one time on the subway platform that he didn’t ask me to dance when the busker sang Isn’t She Lovely. For occasionally being so ridiculously great. And occasionally being so ridiculously not. For those moments when the light would slant just so and I would look at him and see that he’d be a fucking giant-of-a-man if he would just rise to the occasion. For lacking the courage and foresight and necessary grit. Or choosing not to recognize that he is already all the things he needs to be. And more.

He wasn’t the right guy. For me. He wasn’t the right guy, for me. And he certainly never looked at me like I was the right girl for him. And I am a girl who wants to be looked at like that.

I didn’t trust him. Which was my failing, not his. I didn’t trust that he cared for me. And god it must have been hard for him to constantly come up against that—to have to wade through my small and cutting comments that I paraded about as humor, when they were anything but. And that’s on me.

Because the thing about that dinner table is yes the glass was green and yes there were stacked plates and empty bottles, butI don’t know if he was flirting with the girl next to him or if he was just having a very good time with this very lovely person who was so very much attached to someone else. I don’t know because he’d had too much wine and I’d had not enough and perception is a funny, fickle son-of-a-bitch.

He was a tremendous lesson. Which wasn’t what I was looking for, but a blessing, nonetheless.

And we go again to the cliff. Different people than before. But I think that’s the point: You go again. You face the wind and you ask, what’s next?

my new york: window boxes, fall shadows, and halloween

I'm gonna level with you. I am tired. Really, really tired. Between starting a new job, taking the GRE this past Saturday, and particularly sweet set of growing-pains, I am bone tired.

Waking up this past Sunday with the test behind me, I went for a long walk with only my camera in hand. I wanted to see fall--fall in New York, fall in my small and perfect neighborhood. I wanted to see how the sunlight cuts through the trees and creates a sort of lattice-work against the brick. Wanted to smell that thing that means the in-between of the seasons.

I went in search of fall and then treated myself to brunch. (I sat at the bar reading an Aurelio Zen mystery as I ate--some version of heaven, for sure).

When the time came for me to get onto the train to head into Manhattan, it was only upon sitting that the full weight of exhaustion hit. This is the in-between season of my own life. This is the I-don't-know. And that is both grounding and terrifying. The train is going somewhere, I just don't know where. But I suppose I'd take movement over the alternative, always.

not your train, not your guy.

  There's something about shift and turmoil and the end of relationships that stirs the silt of all those that came before. In fact, I think of a particularly poignant phrase by one Ms. Cheryl Strayed, "understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again."

Sitting in Tom's office last week I brought up one such man--a man I've resolved again and again. And again. And for reasons I won't go into here, he's been on my mind of late.

I remember a few years ago, somewhere in the west village, just past midnight, getting into a fight with one of my best girlfriends. I just want you to move past him, she said.

You don't get to dictate that timeline, was my response. You don't know him. You don't get to pass judgement on him. 

And then we both started to cry. 

There's something about your good friends passing judgement on the people you love--the people you've loved. It always feels like an insult, because the thing is, you loved them. So for someone to say how crummy and awful and not-worth-it they are, well, it somehow feels like a judgement on you. For not just liking, but loving, someone so obviously awful.

But there's something to objectivity.

And friends often have it. (Sometimes not. And so you have to suss out who to listen to, but it's worth attempting to suss).

When I brought up one such so-not-worth-it-guy a few weeks ago, Tom said to me (man, Tom's good): That is a train you do not want to be hitched to. You just don't want to go where that train's going.

And what's so genius about this expression is that it moves the objective judgment from the man to the life he has and the choices he's made and all the things that make him him, which sort of demystifies affection in a way that makes someone's necessary objectivity far more palatable.

Does this make sense?

Because as I think back on what Tom said, I realize it is the best, kindest, most wonderful way to say, that guy is the pits. The worst. Not. your. guy. (And yes, of course, all men are worthy in some way and no person is as small as the small choices he's before made, but that's not a discussion I plan on having here today).

It's just, there are things I know I want for my life. And love is not always the whole of the story. And so that is a train I do no want to be hitched to.