less. (thoughts on surrounding yourself with only those things you really love)

I live in a small room, in a house--an actual house. This is a relatively odd situation to be in by New York standards. But it works for me, I like it. 

I don't own a lot. None of the furniture is mine. There is a desk and a bookshelf and a dresser and I've painted them all, adding a fine gloss atop (which has yellowed, much to my consternation). There is a bed on top of which I've placed one of those three-inch-foam-topper-thing-a-majigs that sometimes wakes me up in the middle of the night because I've sunk so far into it that I cannot turn over. I changed the dresser knobs and have painted the cheap planters that the succulents come in black--no need to buy proper pots for them. 

There is no closet, which is probably my biggest complaint, but it means I keep my wardrobe neat and whittled on the small rack just to the right of the desk. 

I got rid of so much last year and I am so, so, so very glad that I did. But if I'm really honest I'm deeply ashamed of how much I accumulated in the first place. I think about those things still. I do not miss them--it's not that I miss them, it's that I worry about where they are now. I wonder who went into goodwill and purchased them and I hope plenty of people did, but I am more upset by how much I surely added to a landfill somewhere in the world. And as global warming is one of those things that I think about when that three-inch-foam-thing-a-majig wakes me up at night, well...I don't ever want to accumulate so much again. 

More is not more. More as an ill that I'm no longer interested in. And let me level with you, once you've had bedbugs to the extent that your life is upended and you are faced with the overwhelming task of getting rid of them (the laundry and the cleaning that then ensues), well, you look at your stuff differently. You think...do I love this? Is this worth all the work of ensuring it is absent of those impossible critters? So now I stand in stores before I buy a thing and I think, if I found myself in that situation again, would this be worth the work (and money) of saving it? And that question is an incredible litmus test. I now have only three pairs of flats I love. I wear them in rotation. I have one pair of fancy high-heels that I think go with everything and will be worn to all weddings from here until the end of time. And a pair of solid tennis shoes. That's enough. 

I have two pillows on my bed. Both are for sleeping. I went quite a while with only one, but broke down in recent months and bought one for a guy. Turns out he doesn't need it, but it's probably good to have. There is nothing decorative on my bed. 

Plants and nice candles with recyclable glass jars and artwork. That's how I'm building my small home these days. Investing in things that will not end up in a landfill. Investing in things that don't weight me down--things that when I look at I am reminded of who I am and what I believe and what I love. Small things that fill me with great joy. 

Less is as it turns out quite a bit more. 

**(this is a lovely read about this very idea)**

the point

It was a day or two after our second date that I rode the subway home in a panic. 

And it was a really good second date. 

He had a walked into the bar--all 6 feet, three inches of him, wearing a smart navy sweater--and I thought, Yeah, okay, this guy. 

But two days later, riding the subway home, I was in a panic. Maybe he’s not the guy. Maybe...yeah, no, I don’t know. What if I don’t fall in love with him--what if I’m not able to fall  in love with him? What does it say about me if I’m unable to fall in love with a person who is so clearly good and kind?

I was unsure from the start. Totally perplexed as to what I was feeling and what I might feel and what I would eventually feel and all the unanswered questions were crushing. 

And yes, spoiler alert, that early in, there should be that many unanswered questions.

But I had never known a slow-growing affection.

So two days after our second date, I was in a panic of unease at the discomfort of not-knowing.

The muddled middle. The gray. The great, gaping unknown.

With anyone else, at any previous point in my life, I would have jumped ship immediately. The in-between being so uncomfortable as to be avoided altogether.

But for that small voice this go-round that said, keep going.

You see, of all the men I have felt tremendous affection for (a whopping two of them) there was a sense, when looking at them, that I had known them before. They were, somehow, from the very start, not strangers--they never felt like strangers.

But he was. I didn’t recognize his face. There wasn’t some cosmic awareness of a history. He was totally new new to me.

I wrote that the point of our small mess was his goodness. Which is true. But his goodness was only part of the point. And frankly, the guy before him was good, too, so I’m getting closer.

I sat in that unknown until it passed. Or rather, until my discomfort in relation to it, passed. I grew comfortable with the not-knowing. I made space for affection to grow. And it did. Slowly, it did. And I came to regard his deep brown eyes as very lovely things to be beheld by. He’d take off his glasses, take a deep breath, and smile as if he was just catching up to himself, and I’d think him so handsome.

Not-knowing doesn’t mean no, it just means not-knowing. Which is an important distinction.

The ability to grow comfortable with discomfort. That was the point. And a very good point, at that. 

ten years. two books.

At the start of Simon Van Booy’s The Secret Lives of People in Love, which is one of the finest, loveliest things I have ever read, he talks about two books he keeps under his bed. I think it must be in the preface or the introduction and perhaps I’m misremembering this--my copy of the book is stored away somewhere after last year's moving debacle--but he speaks of two books he has written that will never be published. Those two books--flawed and imperfect, and perhaps even unfinished--made him the writer he is. Those two books birthed his future books.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all that has happened in this city. I have never known an adult life anywhere else. It is easy to think my time in New York has been for naught. The hardest years of my life happened here, painful and incomplete and full of false-starts. It is here that I let go of dreams, said goodbye to more than one man I loved, got very, very ill, and worked very, very hard to get well. But I can’t help but think these ten years might just be my two under-the-bed books.

They had to happen so that everything else might.

And well, okay. I’m okay with that.

untitled.

You are a good person. And I am in awe of this immediately. It makes me nervous. How kind you are, and how honest. How pure-of-heart, as they say.

There was no white horse, no dazzling suit of armor, just your soft voice and quiet footsteps. Your kind eyes and slow, deliberate smile. I spent those first few months just watching you, wondering what to make of you. Suspended in a thick, buoyant tangle of my own bewilderment.