patterns and rituals and a new notion of home

If I could go back, just a few months, I’d say to myself, do not to take the Greenwich Village Apartment. The air just outside will smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke. Always, it will. Within two months you’ll have bed bugs. And within four, your hands will shake when you reach the landing of the second floor. Your impulse will be to make yourself small, to take up the least amount of space as possible--just to get through it. But the last time you did this you were eighteen and went on to lose the next six years of your life to an eating disorder. So you’ll be on guard against this thought--these thoughts.You’ll do what you can to navigate a small and silent apartment, while still asserting your basic needs. A clean bathroom. A clean kitchen. A place to wash your dishes and cook your dinner. You will have to navigate what to ask for and what to let go of and none of this will be easy. At the beginning of July the person you live with will skillfully un-invite you from something and you’ll let her.You’ll both know what is happening, but neither will discuss it and resentment will grow like a weed between you. You will learn that time reveals a person--and finding yourself knee-deep in shit tends to accelerate this process. By the end of August you will have had the sort of fight from which two people do not, cannot recover--the sort of fight you enter into only when you know the friendship is already done. It will be a silly thing that begins it, as it always is. And that silly thing will serve as an excuse to say everything else. The everything else will be ugly. You will say the unkindest things you have ever said to another person. You will fight brutally, but honestly--and when all is said and done there will be some solace in that. That you were honest with yourself, honest with the other person, honest with your failings and well as her’s. She will tack hanging “but”s onto the end of her apologies and you will learn what it is to argue through mirrors and refraction and teeth-baring lies. She will say to you the very things you fear are true and not good. And that will hurt. And then you will remember that we all have an emotional landscape to trudge through. And to pretend one doesn’t is self-deception of the highest order. People are not better, nor superior or smarter because they’ve suffered less.

Home, as an idea, will transform in the wake of this. It will not be the tiny apartment you now fear returning to. You will take long walks. And drink more wine. Out, at bars, with friends. You will accept the kindness of those who invite you in. And you will escape on the weekends just as much as you can. You will listen to more music. Remembering that it’s somehow sweeter, more redemptive with external forces pressing in harder. And you’ll wake a few minutes early each morning. You’ll take the long walk to the subway. Go to the coffee shop that’s just out of the way because you like the light and you like the records and you like the benches just outside the windows. And you will sit there. For ten minutes, twenty. Sometimes only two. And this will be the ritual of how you begin your day. And home will have a new working definition--one of patterns and rituals and daily traditions. The 7:55 train. Fifth avenue before the tourists. The curve of Christopher Street. The patterned blocks and stone-white-facades of Park Avenue.

And fall will come. And with it, the sense that New York is almost bearable--cool winds coming in off the Hudson, as they are. And you will give thanks for the nearness of winter. For the shortening days. For the enclosing darkness. Because you know that come the end of April, with the changing light and return of warmth, you will move out. And on. That this winter is, for you, both a reality and a metaphor and the only thing to be done is let it be both. And to let both change you.

the pretending is over, now

  If someone were to come up to me and say, you have to do this year again, I'd side-eye them, back away as slowly and carefully as possible, and then take off running in the opposite direction.

I wouldn't do it. No way.

And this is of note because there are like three whole years of my life that I can't even remember--that's how bad they were.

It’s also of note because there are, in fact, specific moments from this last year, that given the opportunity, I'd absolutely do differently--and like to, at that. I’d give a yes instead of a no. More easily extend invitations. Stay a month longer. Refuse to be seduced by the low rent. Use those damn vacation days.

But I think, that as awful as this year has been (because I do in fact feel like a lightning rod of unfortunate events), it had to happen just as it did.

I had to leave Brooklyn. Had to land in the apartment from hell. Had to leave one job I really loved to begin another--had to take that risk. Had to have that knock-down-drag-out-fight. Had to stand there with a glass of water in my hand and very rationally talk myself out of throwing it. Had to say the terrible words and feel what it was to say them--to be the person who says them, and who is okay with saying them. Had to witness as a very many people sidestepped the truth because it was both inconvenient and uncomfortable. Had to see cruelty up close.

This year has been steep learning curve after steep learning curve.

But it had to happen just as it did.

So I could learn to trust myself more, protect myself more, defend myself more.

So I could speak what was true with a bit less fear and bit more volume.

I may not understand the logic of the universe, but I’m starting to give over to it. Or in to it.

Because in the face of a very many bad things, there are good things too. And the good things are sweeter. And clearer.

And small kindesses do make a difference.

I’ve been emailing back and forth with Laura these last few months. Revealing secrets and hopes--a sort of pillow-talk between friends who’ve never actually met, but hold true the same values. Namely, honesty and the pursuit of pleasure.

And in our last exchange, in explaining a particular sort of heartache--and the particular moment of breaking--she described how immediately after, her very dearest friend leant down to her and said, the pretending is over, now.

Such brutal words, said with so much love, which makes them--I think--breathtaking.

The pretending is over now. The pretending is over now.

This year has been brutal. Miserable. Awful. But the pretending is over, now. And that has been the point.

Because the thing about breaking, being broken, breaking open--well, it’s not such a bad thing. It feels like hell (God, does it feel like hell), but it reveals us. Distills us. Makes us more ourselves. But in order for that to happen, we have to turn and face ourselves, experience the full weight of who we are, and that--well that, is not an easy thing to do.

But that’s our job. Because empathy is our human charge. But empathy without understanding of one’s self is like a tree without roots--in the face of strong winds, incredibly dangerous.

And so, the pretending is over, now.

It has to be.

And let us give thanks for that. If nothing else, let us give thanks for that.

the next nine months

  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I am a woman possessed by the notion of home.

I think of it so often. Crave it so desperately. Like a person without food who dreams of little else, I think in paint chips and thick rugs and hanging frames. Toilet paper dispensers and dishwashers and a front yard. But more than that,  I think of roots. And of how I feel rootless.

How I am a woman without a home. Desperate to dig my hands into the soil and plant a flag. And how, much as I want it to, my life will not yield to this desire.

In fact, the more I want it, the more elusive it becomes.

Leaving Brooklyn felt like a really bad breakup. The sort where you’re still in love with the person, but that love is no longer viable or feasible or even good. And so you must go.

So into the city I moved. Into a particular tangle of streets that I find overwhelming and oppressive and in many ways untenable. But the apartment is quiet and there is some solace in that.

Sometimes I think of how I’ll describe this moment in my life, when I am fortunate enough to look back.

I’ll say that in some ways I was scared of my own shadow. That the city was suddenly dirty in a way it had never before been for me.

I’ll say that men in fine linens ferried bottles of wine between a windowless restaurant and an unmarked apartment. And how, for me, their quiet parade was the very best thing about living on that particular street, in that particular apartment, in that particular neighborhood, at that particular moment.

And I’ll say that low rents and a central location made a very many things bearable.

But that New York was dying to me. And I knew it.

You’ve got to learn to leave the table, when love’s no longer being served.

Nina Simone said that. Or sang that, really.

I’ve had it on repeat for days now—not the song, but the thought, circling and spinning and making a bit of a mess in the order of my thoughts.

You’ve got to leave the table, when love’s no longer being served.

I’m in my first Saturn return.

I offer this up because, for me, it seems to be the only reasonable explanation for the events of this last year.

It’s been a really, really crummy year. Remarkably so. And, unfortunately, I can’t figure out a way to write about it and make it okay.

It’s not okay.

It’s really not.

And yet it has to be.

Saturn return is the period during which the planet Saturn returns to the place in the sky it was at the time of your birth. It’s a rotation takes 29.4 years. And the effects, supposedly, are felt most intensely from the ages of twenty-eight to to thirty.

It’s a time of extreme reckoning.

A harsh look at the reality of one’s life.

A paring away of fat. A dismantling of everything that is no-longer-good-enough.

Going through it—the best way I can think to describe it—it’s the process by which we figure out where love is being served. And where it is not.

Which is to say, when to get up from the table and when to stay.

The irony is, the process demands a willingness to sit down.

Which means you have to show up. Again and again and again. And again. Despite how hard it is. Despite the difficulty of the reckoning. Despite the acute pain that very often accompanies great growth.

And the process, while occasionally thrilling, is mostly brutal.

A guy I know from work, and who often laughs at me when in the company kitchen, told me to reveal nothing of what’s happened in this last year, if ever I find myself on a date.

Why not, I asked?

Because he’ll think you’re cursed, was his swift and complete response.

From the reading I’ve done (yes, I’ve actually researched this  astrological event), the point of it is total honesty with one’s self. And the result of that honesty, faith.

Faith in one’s self. In mistakes and missteps. Faith in a larger, ordered grace—messy as it mostly is.

It’s not lost on me that, in the events of this last year, there has a been the common refrain, by people on the other side of a few different issues:  Is this really an issue, or are you making it up?

And as someone who was told, for years, by medical professionals that I was imagining my own illness, I am particularly sensitive to this line of attack.

But this is the point of Saturn’s return. You resolve the problems you’ve already resolved. But you resolve them differently. With more grace. And dare I say, grit. You keep your head up when everything threatens to pull you under, and you hook into faith even when when a very large part of you feels like but-what’s-the-point.

You age. You take things less personally. You move on.

And you calmly and quietly keep on.

Yes, years from now I’ll talk about the crummy apartment, and I’ll talk about how I felt lonely in a new way that was very often alarming,  but I’ll also say, that on a day in early August, just when it felt like everything was falling apart, a very dear friend asked me what I could do, each day, to make things a little bit better.

And how it was but one word that wetted my lips: write.

To write.

An active thing. A reaching thing. A reckoning.

And how this friend then pointed out that an apartment in which I feel displaced, and a relatively solitary existence, may actually be the very things a person needs to answer the call and write the book. To finish the book.

There’s a new Liz Gilbert Ted talk. It’s short. To the point. She speaks of life in the wake of enormous success. And how such success can feel very much like failure, in that it is alienating and corruptive and often overwhelming. And so, to survive, she went home. Which is to say, she wrote.

For her, home was—is—writing.

Turns out I do have some roots.. The paint chips will wait. They have to, I have a book to write.

this is just to say. (on dressing up and first dates).

Not terribly long ago it struck me that it’s been about a year since I’ve gone on a proper date.

I should clarify, a proper first date.

There are so many reasons for this.

Most deeply personal—not understood by even my closest confidantes.

But a year goes by. And a boy kisses you. And it feels so good.

I mean, the thing is, I forgot how a kiss can be so simple and easy and fun. And satisfying.

Mostly because the kisses this year have been anything but.

Which should have been a clue.

But we learn how we learn.

So, should a first date come along, I think I might say yes.

I think I might want to say yes.

But I want to wear a dress.

And I want it to be fancy—almost inappropriately so. Inappropriate because no one ever dresses up for anything anymore, and how terribly disappointing that is.

Let the man wear a suit. A nice one. (Tie optional).

Let us, middle of July, dress like it’s New Years Eve. And drink like it’s a new beginning. (Or a very good end).

I want the restaurant to be just cold enough that he has to offer me his jacket. Has to drape it over my shoulders. And do that thing, that men do, where they stand behind you and ever-so-inexpertly rub your arms.

It won't matter where we choose to eat. It could be McDonald’s. Or the Corner Bistro. (In fact, I’m partial to burgers).

I just want, for a single night, to feel young and foolish and exquisitely beautiful.

Just for a night I’d like to be the sort of couple that other people look at—wistfully, longingly, knowingly. That other people regard with a sort of fondness, remembering their own youth—remembering that time the future rolled out before them like an invitation.

image via. 

tuesday morning, the 22nd of July (an exercise in being just where I am)

  I’m feeling a little bit sad this morning.

But in that way that is mostly sweet.

Like I’m just about to turn a corner and my body already knows and it’s scary and good but ripe with loss.

Because once that corner is turned, it cannot be unturned.

Like I’m shuffling towards something really important, but don’t yet know what it is.

And I don’t yet know if it’ll be enough.

And that makes me a little sad.

But good sad.

Because I think it might be.

And so I lick my lips and taste my own sadness and give thanks for its peculiar flavor.