the next five years

We sit across from one another, a small table between us, coats and bags at our feet. It is cold out and the requisite clothing, now off, is spilling over toward the next table. I sip on white wine. He tells me it’s not good for me. He drinks water. Carbs too, he says. He orders meat. I ask for the pasta.

And because I know he cares for me, I let him ask the hard questions. What is the future? Have you decided to go back to school? What will your life look like in five years? What will you bring to the table? How will you make money?

And my stomach twists in an uncomfortable knot. Because the truth is, I don’t know.

And he sounds like my father.

I only know there is a small seed of self-belief. And a faith that I am moving toward something. The shape and depth of which has yet to reveal itself.

But for a linear mind these are not answers enough. It’s hardly enough for my mind, which moves in many directions and all at once.

It’s hard to say, wait, just wait. It’s coming. When I can’t be sure what it is.

How much I want to make it all tangible, for others, as well as myself.

But I’m learning--I think what I’m learning is, the answers--or any semblance of an answer--lie on the other side of returning home each night, sitting before the computer, and writing.

Which is a relatively solitary existence. Occasionally lonely, but mostly not.

To write.

To write more.

To write relentlessly and persistently and ruthlessly.

To revel in those few hours each night. In the honor of the fight. To celebrate the commitment. Because not everyone gets to spin air into magic. And at this moment in my life, I get to try.

We speak different languages. Literally and metaphorically. His hard questions are met by my own. About love. And what it means. And doesn’t he think he should hold out for the real thing? He thinks my version of the real thing doesn’t exist. And we sit in silence wondering who is right. And living with the possibility that, in this context, right is beside the point.

Because there are so many shades to the thing. And we all make our own choices.

English is not his native tongue. He will complement my photographs, but never my words. He hasn’t a clue if I’m any good. And most days, I don’t know either. But I go back to the words of Brian Doyle--again and again:

...It's what I do, and what I love to do, and no one else can do it quite like I do.

Better, perhaps--but not with my particular flavor and music, and somehow, in a way I do not wholly understand, that is important, and in a very real sense miraculous, and necessary.

How I wish he could hear the music of my particular voice.

How I wish I could give him the answers.

But it is for this reason--and so many others--that our affection begins and ends with dinners and hard questions and a kiss goodnight. And with him walking away.

So I drink my wine. Because I believe in a glass with dinner. And I order the pasta, because I believe in carbs, too. And I let him kiss my neck and I pull on the collar of his coat and then I go home and I write.

And sit with my questions.

And do my best to suss out answers . And make peace with the terror of not-knowing.

And I remind myself: Wait, just wait. It’s coming.

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home

I let go of it. The notion of home. I stopped dreaming of thick rugs and hardwood floors. Of hanging pots and a countertop. Clean white walls and molding tracing the bones of a place. I let go of the idea of permanency and roots and what-comes-next. Began to dream of travel. Of leaving. Of letting go and moving on.

I don’t own a bed. Or a dresser. There is no bookshelf or coffee table or couch. When I left the apartment on Christopher Street I left behind so much. The steamer trunk, my grandmother’s table that I’d promised my father I’d care for. Instead I clung to photos. To candlesticks and bowls. Mugs. I carefully wrapped my few framed prints and tucked them away in a garage in New Jersey.  I have one piece of furniture to my name. A small reading chair that my parents bought me when I turned twenty-five, two months after we all watched as the familiar stormclouds rolled in. They passed quickly. But we didn’t know that then. It’s a tricky business, predicting storms.

The idea of home, in any physical sense, became as small as a glass jar filled with coffee beans and two winter coats: one for everyday use, the other for evenings out. To allow myself to dream of anything else was to be crushed by all that I did not have.

And yet there is so much.

Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.*

To try to write about home without writing about the events of this last year is a nearly impossible task. It would be to write around the sadness. And the more I write around it, the unrulier it grows. It is a story of unkindness. That is as much sense as I can make of it. Before the words are out, that’s all I have.

I’ll write it eventually. Because I write to unpack stories. And then pack them away.

But not tonight. Tonight as I sit on the floor next to the fire, a glass of wine beside me, music playing softly, I’ll write about this hundred year old brownstone. This house with a stoop and an iron gate and tiled entry way. This house on the corner, at the end of a park. This home that is always alive with noise and movement--the television left on, a set of hands on the piano, the shuffle of footsteps. The music of everyday life--full and good and deceptively mundane.

Tonight I will write about how I answered an ad. And how because of that, a small room on the second floor of a hundred year old house is, for a moment, my own. Filled with furniture that belongs not to a person, but a place.  

Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.

It is so different that I imagined. And yet here it is.

There are four of us here. Two who sit often at the piano. Two who trade in the written word. All of us spinning stories in the best and truest ways we know how.

How lucky we are. How imperfect it all is, and how lucky we are.

How in this place our lives abut and fold over and involve the others. Except when they don’t, which is much of the time.

But when panic sets in after I tumble down a whole set of stairs, a door will open and someone will come to see that I am alright.

And it’s nice to have others look after you. Sometimes it’s exhausting doing everything on your own.

I didn’t want to live with others. Certainly not strangers. How long I avoided this very situation. And yet here I am--in a Dickensian-boarding-house as my girlfriend Alisha has dubbed it, and how good it is. I say that without an ounce of irony or pretense.

I let go of the notion of home, and here I am. In a house. Waking early each day, for the first time in months, to make my morning latte.

Occasionally I’ll catch myself looking sideways at the situation. How did I get here? This isn’t what I dreamt of. But god it’s good. Odd, but so, so lovely.

And how much I have.

Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.

*Walt Whitman, of course. 

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I Bought a Plant

I bought myself a plant after work today. A beautiful green and pink and leafy thing.

Plants are having a moment in my life right now. They have a way of making a home of a place. Not to mention they suck toxins right out of the air. Which is to say, superpowers.

So just after work I purchased a lovely, leafy plant and toted it across the whole of central park south. And that short walk was long enough, and cold enough, to kill it.

I’m hopeful that it might yet come back to life. I mean, not too terribly hopeful, but hopeful enough. The pink is gone and the leaves, cold to the touch, have folded in on themselves, but things are cyclical--plants, especially. And I’m willing to invest a little a bit of time to see how this plays out. And to practice hope, even when it doesn’t feel reasonable. Or rational.

I am investing in radical self-love right now.

Which is what the plant was all about.

Remembering that occasionally, I’m the idiot, in the dead of winter, toting a plant across the belly of New York.

Even if it kills the plant. Even if it kills me.

Because things are cyclical--life, especially.

It took me a very many years to untangle the mess of all the many things I felt. A giant ball of yarn. A thousand small threads that I called one thing.

And now a spade is a spade.

Sadness is a thing. But happiness, too.

The latter shaped almost entirely by the former.

Which is a nearly impossible thing to try and explain to someone who hasn’t lived through it.

There’s a quote that I’ve been searching for for months--MONTHS, I tell you. Something like, only the nearly-drowned-man can understand the person who stands on the shore laughing just because there’s air in his lungs.

I have bastardized these words. Someone else said them much better, and to much greater effect, but as I can’t find them, I offer up my poorer version.

When I was living in that shoebox of an apartment in Greenwich Village there was a night when I turned to the girl I was living with and read her a set of words, not my own, and she looked at me, head half turned, and said, But what do they mean? And in that moment I knew we’d never be friends, not really. Because we spoke different languages. A before and an after of words.

I long ago gave up wondering what words mean. I’ll wonder about gestures and events and the idiosyncrasies of almost anything, but never words. Far more concerned, as I am, with what they feel like.

You can’t explain suffering someone to someone. You cannot tell them of the beauty that exists inside of that very dark place. You can only wrestle with the warring feelings of not wanting a person fail, and knowing that they need to.

Plants die and they come back to life.

And hope in the face of ridiculous things is important. Even if it is absurd.

Sadness is a part of my life. Because it needs to be. Because it is important and good and telling. Because it shapes who I am.

Because it is one hell of an educator.

And it reminds me to buy the plants and hang the banner and sit in the tub with the mud mask smeared thick on my face.

Because sadness rears its head and says, fight for yourself, motherfucker. And I know enough now to listen.

 

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a new year

I remember feeling on the edge of so very much at this time last year. The very physical sensation that things were just beginning. Some yet-unnamed critical shift having taken place--or taking place. And the feeling that sense was about to sweep in and create an order out of chaos.  

On the last night of the year, I wore a white dress and gold shoes and went to a very fancy, very large party. But the hotel was crowded and messy and before long I was covered in champagne, watching small fights break out, suddenly craving the comfort of home.

 Three weeks later a-man-who-would-never-love-me left me at the airport. It is the story I tell more than any other. Because with its perfect narrative arc, and extreme circumstances, it makes for very good, very easy storytelling. But it is not the story. Not really. What I don’t talk about is how eleven days before, on the sixth day of the new year, I was unkind to the one person I actually adored--a man who looked at me like no one ever had before. It was a self-preservation-thing. But we never really recovered. It was a fleeting, fragmented moment. And yet it is my greatest regret of this last, terrible, mess of a year.

2014 swept in, a tidal wave of chaos. The year itself a vociferous declaration that it be heard, and I be changed. But nothing changed me more than that moment, right at the start--that very quiet moment when kindness was offered and I wasn’t courageous enough to take it. How differently it all might have gone.

But we learn how we learn.

Now, of course, I’d reach out with both hands--open, sweaty palms facing up. Because his kindness was worth my reveal.

 …

This last year was a thing.

Uncomfortable and messy and at moments nearly unbearable, but important. Even as it was happening, I knew it was important.

But I couldn’t say how. Couldn’t round my lips around any set of words that made any good sense of the whole thing.

But then two days into this new new year I wrote in an email to Laura:

I'm letting go Laura. Letting go of the desire for stability. For the known. Making peace with the grey and the murk and what is so clearly unclear. And you know what? The very action of doing that...well, suddenly I feel more secure. More like I'm solidly on my own axis. A stability that emanates from my very core. And holy shit, it feels good. Because it enables risks. And risks are good, too. It's like skiing--the more control you give up, the more you have.

So the lesson of this last year?

I don’t know.

Oh gosh, sorry--that’s unclear.

Not that I don’t know the lesson of this last year, but rather I don’t know anything. I don’t know what’s coming or where I’m going or what’s around the corner. And so the sense will wait. And maybe the point of the chaos isn’t for it to be ordered and explained, but for it to simply be.

 I. Don’t. Know.

 I don’t know, and yet I’m okay.

 I don’t know, but no rush.

 I don’t know, but I don’t need to.

At a bar one night, late in November, a good friend accused me of chapter-titling my life.

You’re writing the titles to your story, labeling what they are and how they’ll go before they even happen. Stop it.

Immediately I knew she was right. I knew because she is smarter than me and cooler than me and never flinches when telling the truth.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. | Rainer Maria Rilke

Finally, more than ten years after reading these words for the first time, I understand them. Not because I have lived my way into the answers, but because I have lived my way into the questions. Which somehow feels more important.

 I’m still learning that very rarely do we know what’s coming, even--and most especially--when we think we do, and happiness has a remarkable way of catching us unaware.

 Not that happiness is the point. But certainly it is a part of it--and a very good part, at that.

I don’t know what’s around the corner, but something is--because such is the inevitability of life.

2014 made me sturdier. Which actually means softer. Which actually means clearer and less afraid.

And letting go of the desire to make things known has much to do with letting go of expectations and attachments, which means I am more adept, and more sure of who I am.

So here I am on the brink of more unknown, but with hands open, palms exposed, willing to try again.

And again.

And again.

how are you

I dressed last night in my best black dress. Was out the door in fifteen minutes and into a cab.

Because when your dear friend messages to say, wine and steak and get here now, you oblige. Because you’ll never again be this young and you’ll never again be this untethered and something about seizing life by the throat--isn't that what they say?

But as the night ended and her lovely boyfriend asked how I was doing, my breath caught between my teeth, my hand paused on the collar of my coat.

It’s a question, that when asked without pretense or obligation, always catches me off guard.

You can think one thing, expect one thing, tote around certain truths so as to get through the day, but in the face of that question, something else arises that you can’t quite place. So you sit quietly and your eyes fill with water and you know that if you say anything you’ll lose it, but you’re not entirely sure why.

Something about the feeling that this is life now. And youth and freedom is but one chapter.

There’s a Harold Pinter play in which two of the characters who haven’t seen each other in a very many years ask one another that same question again and again. And again.

How are you?

Several times over the course of that first scene--over the course of only a few pages.

How are you?

How are you how are you how are you?

And even at nineteen, I read that scene and had the sense of two people wielding those words like scythes through very tall grass. That what they were asking had nothing to do with what they were asking. How those questions really meant do-you-love-me, have-you-missed-me, are-you-happy? And how each time they asked they were circling closer. Because some things are too hard or too dangerous to ask out right. And so we make them smaller. Simpler. Distill them down to three words that we ask again and again.

How are you?

Which is to say, I see you.

... 

I've spent much of this year living in a perpetual state of low-level-terror. A sort of hum of unease.

I've said again and again that it has been the worst year of my life. Which is untrue and short-sighted and frankly, a little flippant. And that’s not particularly fair.

Not the worst, just quite, quite difficult.

And me riding the wave.

Which is better than treading water.

Victory be degrees.

…

To think you can love God without being changed by Him, is to think you can jump into the ocean and not get wet. To really love Him, you must understand that your life is going to be wrecked by Him, and built again into something beautiful, something lasting. T.B. LaBerge

Laura pointed out: “Perhaps you can just as well substitute the word God with life. And I think she has a point.

 ...

Sitting on the worn gray couch in the office that Tom only occasionally inhabits, I listened as he told me there’s no such thing as a right decision.

That life is hard because it’s a series of wrong choices

If in the world of probability and numbers and hypotheticals, if in that world, you were able to do something 1,000 times and it worked 800 out of those 1,000 times, there would still be 200 times when it didn't.  And since you can’t do it 1,000 times, since you can only do it once, it carries with it the possibility that it won’t. Which means, all decisions are inherently--in some way-- wrong. Flawed. Imperfect.

And so the best you can do--the best anyone can do--is make the choice that most aligns with who you are. Which is very often the hardest choice to make, laced as it is with fear. Fear being a thing that indicates worth.

To make the choice that most aligns with who we are.

Twenty-nine and just now hearing this.

…

When life was such that I was very slowly, very carefully, learning to gather myself up and lumber towards safety--happiness, by another name--I remember my father saying, I’m not going to change. I’m too old to change.

But slowly he did. Of course he did.  And my mother, too. And what a miraculous thing it was, all of us changing at the same time--not necessarily together, but alongside one another.  My desperate need for it, brought on by the universe’s vociferous declaration that I must, which gave way to their realization that to change—and to change with me—was not only a necessity, but a gift.

"Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation." Elizabeth Gilbert

The way I see it, there are two types of people in the world. There are the people who sort of wordlessly go, Here I am, imperfect, a work-in-progress, flaws and all. And then there’s the sort who, while willing to admit flaws, do so only to a point—in so far as they get to control how those flaws are perceived. These people mostly posture as fully-formed, and indelibly so.

I don’t have much time for these people.

Because I’ve found, that these are the people who aren't terribly keen on facing themselves, afraid as they are that they’ll not like what they see.

But there is power in the recognition of both flaws and failures. Power in the small, and often private declaration that oh-hey-something’s-gotta-change-here. And holy is the man (or woman) who doesn't need life to pull the rug out from under them in order to begin that process.

I needed the rug pulled out from under me--of course I needed the rug pulled out from under me. And so it was. And so here I am. Not perfect, but better.

I've found that the people who really and true like themselves, haven’t always. But no one really talks about that, do they?

…

The weather changed the first weekend of November. Cool winds rushing in.

These two months.

I love these two months in New York.

When the chilly air carries the promise of cold and the grey skies still feel new and the leaves fall like music--a swan song for the year.

When things feel possible again.

The cool air came in the first weekend of November and with it the sense that the worst has passed.

Andrew Solomon describes the acute phase of his depression as “the sensation you have if you slip or trip, that experience you have when the ground is rushing up at you before you land.”

For me--and it’s taken me years to figure this out--but for me, it is the very physical sensation that I cannot bear to be in my body a moment longer.

David Levithan once said, “I never felt the urge to jump off a bridge, but there are times I have wanted to jump out of my life, out of my skin.”

How long I confused that feeling with hating my body.

People used to ask if it was the chicken or the egg. Turns out, it was both.

…

In one of our more recent emails Laura wrote to me about a young group of students, “They are open and kind and honest and willing, and quite at odds with, say, the class of 17 year-olds I had this week. They have, by that age, learned to quieten down some. Observe others before deciding how to proceed. Understand that kindness can be a type of vulnerability, and so best to stay clear of it, lest a fool be made of ourselves. It has made me think of all the things we "learn" as we age, the rules that get tighter, more constraining, as we get older, and that the difference between being child-like and childish might make all the difference to my days.”

Not long after Tom said to me, You must be willing to risk looking like a fool.

But I have. Really, I have, I responded.

Then you must be willing to risk looking like a fool once more than you are willing. 

A perpetual once-more, as it turns out.

But, this is what no one tells you: kindness, the sort that is wholly honest and transparent...well, there’s nothing foolish about it. And no one can ever fault you for it. The penultimate vulnerability isn’t actually vulnerable, it only feels like it is. It is quiet and simple and powerful beyond measure. Because the success is in the action itself--the revelation, not the response.

…

Instead of describing this year as the most difficult, I've begun to talk about it as the most formative.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn't do it again. I mean, really, please don’t ask me to do it again. But it was necessary. And even now, still in it, I know that.

I’m smarter now. More aware. I learned how to fight, and fight well. How to speak up and trade in truths. I learned that forgiveness is the only way any of us moves forward. And that when a friendship is done, the unkind words aren't worth it.

And I've come to realize I’m still young enough to fail in a particular way, but old enough to know that that window is closing, and closing quickly.

Life isn't terribly long. And wasting time is too costly.

But it had to happen just as it did, of this I am sure. And for this I am grateful.

Everything is a moving target. Wrong decisions occasionally giving way to very good things.

And so, how am I? Sometimes good. Sometimes not. But wholly myself. And pretty okay with that.