"if I didn't have to kill myself doing it, maybe I wouldn't think so much of you"

[Fuck you. Yeah, you. You are the voice that stops me from saying what I want to say, making me delete and repeat, so fuck you. I don't know how you became such a nemesis of mine, but I will tell you this, I don't miss you and I never really did, do you understand? I know you don't understand why (because you are the opposite of me, because you hate everything for no good reason and I just couldn't do that too). I know it burns you up and pisses you off that I not only lived my life, but I didn't miss you in the process, well, I'm sorry about that.]

As I learn to undo the bindings I imposed on myself, one of them, a big one, a difficult one is saying no to offers of friendship that just don't suit me. I said yes for so many reasons, I didn't want to say no, I didn't know how to say no, I thought, meh, why not? I didn't have a lot of friends. I didn't know what friendship was. As you get older, your tastes get more nuanced, and your hopes for complete understanding begin to fade. At least mine did.

So along the last seven or eight years, as I was learning what I liked and didn't like, what I cared for and what I didn't, I realized I had acquired friends that didn't really suit me, but I still tried to keep them on, like an ill fitting item of clothing, out of some deference to their liking me, out of some strange obligatory feeling, despite the fact that my initial reaction was one of repulsion. I suppose it is so rare that I immediately like someone and get along with them that I tend to discredit my intuition. Every so often, it does turn out that I was wrong about a person. Usually it gets muddled as it grows more intimate, so it is harder for me to really say how I feel about someone.

Lately, time is reconciling the balance of these tiresome relationships in my life; it seems every year after that initial massacre of my friendships (three close friends hacked out of my life in one summer), then came the serial killings (a calculating measure of everyone and gone were two of my good friends), and lastly, there was the perfunctory expulsion of some people who I never really understood why we had friendships in the first place (sometimes being a raft means I get boarded by desperate drowners). The pace was abruptly halted from its steadily declining maliciousness (I may have turned into an absentee friend or faded from consciousness like normal people end friendships) because of that shock, in which I have spent the last two years endeavoring not to hurt anyone the way he had hurt me.

Except in not saying no to people who have run the gamut of wasting my time, stressing me out over unnecessary things, making me feel shitty for not being whatever it is they thought I was (despite my protests and attempts to be exactly who I am), I am finding myself in the misery of not having trusted my instincts.

Some of them are huge drains (they decried my assessments of her and time has told me that I was not wrong, yet daily I am forced to be offended by her in one way or another), others are slight annoyances (she still likes me, oh praise the lord, I didn't know how I was going to get to sleep without her affections validating me; me, the woman who is ten years her senior and twice as experienced in life), while still others are tangled in intimacy and the threat of love (he claims, but never settles over me; he is here, but is vacant; he is a joy and a delight, but he scares me sometimes with his needs).

Strangely, fending them off, especially backed with a rap sheet as long as my legs (so many emotional crimes I've committed against them), they have resisted so mightily that twice I've been forced to question myself, something I haven't done in a while because I was fairly settled back then. I long for those days when I kept resolute and firm, despite the anger it provoked. With them, I cannot be so sure, because I don't know if I can trust myself about them.

Those rest who have stood with me now for years and years, they are mine and I am theirs. I see in them gladness at my arrival, pleasure in our company, a smile rests on our lips and the conversations between us are both languishing and accelerated, a magical feat I realize has more to do with who they are rather than how I view them. My eyes may be shrewd and observant. My tongue may be critical and lacking tact. They are people who can withstand me because they have no guilt, no shame, no worries. Rather than inspire queries, they inspire awe. I find that the more time I spend with them, the less I need those who confound me.

present

Summer

the curly mane is coming back

It's been so long since I had them that people don't even remember them. I thought they were memorable, they seemed to be so big and took up so much space. I mean, sometimes, it felt like my curls wore me.

When I cut them, they weren't too long, but I didn't want them anymore. The curls required a lot of work and get this: they still didn't look good. I had to use a smelly stupid icky hair product and my closet is full of the rejected gels and potions that never tamed my hair the way I'd hoped. I then forced myself follow an elaborate overnight scheme (suffice it to say there was a lot of thought put into those curls and the hair in general) that still resulted in what I derisively called "clown hair," "the mop," and "cousin it."

I charmed the babies with the hair. They loved playing peek a boo in that mane, in my arms, their faces buried so close to mine, but lost in my hair. Otherwise, it was a tool of defense; it cloaked me from prying eyes.

When I sat there, in front of her, she teasingly suggesting that she could do a makeover hairstyle for me, that she could give me a haircut that was drastically different, I had no hesitation in saying, yes, chop it off. No one understands except those who have reached a point of no return with their hair (she cut hers off in desperation, those long blonde locks and her shorn head a stunning sight, to learn her anew, a face, details, her body no longer the ultimate silhouette of womanhood and beauty; another had hers taken by accident and it also brought her into focus, a dazzling wit, a sparkling conversationalist, a brain of such staggering depth, intelligence and a moral compass so pure, I trust her judgment above all; and me, nothing could be worse than being shorn so short as a boy in fourth grade when I was already such a struggling wobbling mess of a person.). I was tired of it, it was too much to deal with. So I promised I wouldn't cry to assure her suddenly doubting mask and she tore into my hair, and in the end I had something even more startling, a hairstyle that did not match me even more than that big poufy hair. It wasn't a bad haircut, you see, it was just not the right haircut for my wardrobe, my job or my life.

She took all the curls, cut my hair into a bob and straightened what was left. My hair touched the edges of my cheeks and for the first time in a long time, my neck was open to the world, she cut the curls all the way to the roots and left jagged sharp bristles behind.

I don't think I went through the same sharpening upon having new hair. I had had haircuts before that didn't suit me, but this one was so well styled that no matter how easy it would have been for me to muss it up, I couldn't. It actually was easier than the curls, I learned slowly and with a yawning surprise. I didn't need any products. I ironed my hair with a flat iron to make it straight. My somewhat chiding inner environmentalist lectured, Sure the energy from the flat iron was a part of my footprint, but as least the physical by-product of using electricity compared to the "recycled" bottles was lower. It may not have suited me across the board, but it definitely looked good on me.

For the first year of the two years of pretending to have straight hair, I allowed my hair to be cut short and the curls at the nape of my neck removed. The second year I grew bored of the hair, spurned by photos of me wearing what looked like a wig but was in fact my own hair and began the tedious process of letting my hair grow out.

After a year of growing and one setback haircut in that time (she didn't listen to just a trim and took about five inches off. I had to start all over) the curls are slowly crawling out of my scalp, they wrestle each other at night and when I look in the mirror in the morning I don't see what I used to see (the bad things), I see the hair that is mine that I am scared to wear outside.

A wild tumble of big loose curls that do not allow for timidity, hiding or shielding me from the world. To wear those curls, my real hair, I would have to learn how to look past the stares again. So I began to tell them, as a warning about the curls. They scoffed and swore no memory of the mass that only two years prior had begun to feel like it was alive and growing and gaining on me and I needed to exorcise it. I told them that I was ready to have curly hair again, outside in public (I have been practicing at home with the curls, feeling them, pulling them into ponytails and shaping them into giant curls tumbled into pastries at the nape of my neck; my curls have a tendency to hold any shape under little coercion it is thick, rope like, there is a lot of it, it feels like a blanket across my arm.).

Somehow, it seems strange to say that accepting my curls, letting go of what anyone else thinks or wondering what they think behind those blank dead staring eyes, rather than getting my hair cut to remove the veil, I need to accept my hair, curly gray and wild to return to my natural womanhood, to allow the beauty I have been hiding these past two years (from that shock and so many other things); she will emerge, and then I will be truly sharpened into who I am and have always been.

"cold hard knot of hate"

It sits at my throat, where the words come out. It is a talisman, a reminder, a symbol (that I would burn into my skin if I could, if I had the guts for it), my scarlet letter.

How it can be all of those things, and beautiful, and belong to me is incredible.

It almost makes me feel bad, the cost of it, both ways. It came with a huge struggle, a decision that every so often I still wonder about, but don't regret. That's not what this is about. What's done is done.

Instead, let's say the years had gone by and the memories were fading and I had reached a dead part of my life, in which I had burned off all that I could and stood back looking at the charred remains of my life (it was the second time; the first being connected to the thing that woke me up, that made me alive and the diamond I wear at the base of my neck).

The paper was gone, all gone. The trinkets, the things, they disappeared to taste and time. The day to day stuff was gone in a poof, almost like when you push a pin into a very full balloon it doesn't deflate slowly, it pops with a surprise from the pressure. The last thing left was a white box with a cheesy satin-esque fabric (despite its highbrow upbringings, it had some issues with classiness). It lasted three or four moves, it sat in the same spot after each move, temporarily in a box, then it resumed its spot in the lower left hand of my topmost dresser drawer. Every time I opened the drawer, I saw it, and pulled it close to me and then pushed it away.

I had an idea, to take the diamond out.

At first, it was suggested that I get another to match it and make earrings. Even though part of me flushed a little at the idea of my wearing diamonds atop posts in my ears (to be poor, really really poor, there are certain things you imagine you'll never see and that is one of mine), so I demurred, besides, I didn't want to buy another diamond. I wanted to make the one I had something else, was all.

After some pondering, it was newly suggested that it could be flanked by a red gold circle and the thinnest and most delicate of red gold chains and meet at the nape of my neck in a clasp. Initially it seemed ironic that I could adore something that was so not me, and be such an obvious symbol of being chained, which is exactly what I could not stomach of it in the first place. It was almost so repulsive that I hated it for a time. I instantly hated it. Any chain on my neck shouldn't be delicate, I insisted, and it made the diamond look too big.

The diamond, it amuses me. When I met it for the first time, inside the ring, it seemed so small. It was, in comparison to what usually lands on the left hand ring finger. And yet, the more I got used to it, I realized it was perfect. It suited me just fine. I didn't want to be like anyone else with a giant rock, I could go for a tiny rock and be satisfied. Even now that it has belonged to me (before it was just a thing I wore) it seems to be what I would have chosen all along, despite the charred ruins of my life.

Because it wasn't accepting the size that turned me into won me over, even though that seems likely, it was another thing that emerged in changing it to something else, a surprising thing; because I was informed, I was chided, that the diamond had been chipped somehow, during the years it rested on my finger, amid the trials and tribulations of the cafe, but it could've happened anywhere knowing me (it would be gorgeous if it happened on a keyboard while I was typing frantically away, to him especially, but any of that, really). And then it belonged to me and I belonged to it.

Well before then, they had gifted me the red gold earrings I wear everyday. A similar reaction occurred, and one might step back and look into a mirror of mirrors and see that inside each decision I make from hate, I have always honored more purely than that made from love. I learned I secretly love all that I abhor. The day that I am able to love without limits, to love without justification, to love without reasons, I will have found transcendence.

With the earrings, the necklace is whole. It makes sense with them. Strange, when I received them, that was the last time I saw him, I think, or what I remember. More importantly, it was a point in my life when the old and new met and clashed, and I saw the truth of things, and I grew up with a strange realization, despite who I had been and where I came from, I could wear pretty things, I could be beautiful, and I could be happy.

[any man would be lucky to be in your bed]

It began this way: a simple exchange of two people who needed the joy of another person's appreciation and nothing more. It ended after a couple years with a million words between us, but we both knew all along that we weren't the one for each other, just the person we needed right then. I taught him that he could be loved. He taught me how to relax.

When I lost those words to a careless oversight, I figured, that is okay, I don't need to see them again. No need to retrace the steps of our dance, the movements ingrained in my heart, the moments we shared still erupt in my mind periodically. He was that huge in my life, a cosmic occurrence; I held the moon sometimes in my hands is what it felt like to go up those winding wooden stairs to his place, to sit in his room and let him show me his stuff, to exist with him.

I had to let him go.

It is hard to let someone go. Being in a relationship is a strange magic, a walking of so many lines, a crossing of the street for the other person, even when you like your side just fine. It is even stranger when the person pushes you away and pulls you toward them (yes, love is sometimes loving the unloved, love is sometimes braving the balance of yin and yang, he would not have been so alluring with all cheerful encouragements, but he never lied about the rest of it, that it wasn't me and he couldn't make any promises, I wouldn't listen.)

When I heard about them, I had to chuckle; I was part of the reason they became one, I was partly responsible for opening their eyes to each other, which I don't resent, somehow, because I see that they are good together.

Every so often, in our innocuous attempt to stay in touch, that thrill we shared in each other despite our best judgment prevails and we are buoyant and delighted. He worries about it, and wipes things away. I understand. I know what it looks like to everyone and I know it is hard to explain that just because you find someone attractive doesn't mean you want to steal them away.

He hated doing that to me and I would hate to do it to him.

So it was with a strong note of caution in my mind and a careful tone in my words that I responded to him, to that breach in our world, despite the circumstances (he was simply making sure I got what I paid for), because that is how it began, oh so long ago, and I don't want it to begin again.

missives from the drunk tank

I've spent the last two weeks mostly sober (I fell for the "just one," joke for like the thousandth time last Saturday afternoon and plunged into daytime drinking on the patio at the dirty bird, which was quite pleasant and lovely until three hours later when I was drunk and hungry from not eating lunch and received an instant hangover; wallop!).

Imagine that you spent your life feeling personally assaulted by everything unkind people did (such as a piece of litter, a cigarette butt on the beach, a plastic bag stuck on the limbs of a tree) and there was a solution to your extreme sensitivity, but in solving it with alcohol and wasting time with people and trying to search for someone who understood exactly what you meant to the depth that you meant it, you made yourself numb to the world at large. Ah, alcohol. How does that saying go? The solution to and cause of all of life's problems.

I never liked drinking much. It took me a long time to warm up to the idea. I was a fairly active teetotaler until I was twenty-six or so, even back then it took a while for me to adjust to a houseful of heavy drinkers. I practiced drinking in moderation. If I wasn't hanging out with him [the love of my lifetime] I didn't drink at all. It was under the guidance of his functioning alcoholism that I learned to drink to the point of puking (the night I woke up in a pond of my own red-from-cranberry-juice vomit was particularly frightening; I could have died! from drinking!), drinking to excess and sleeping until absolutely necessary to roll out of bed and get to work.

I remember the day I realized that he had a problem, it was a day I worked early at the cafe and arrived home to him, on his day off, in his robe, smoking cigarettes and drinking a strong mixed cocktail at noon, like it was no big deal. And I better not make a big deal out it, I could tell. And I began to notice the first thing he wanted after work or after anything was a drink. Two to make him normal and cheerful, six to make him belligerent and mean, eight to make him pass out and forget the world.

I tried to keep up with him. I don't know why. I can romanticize it and say that it was because I loved him so completely I wanted to support him and be there for him, I wanted to know what he was experiencing, I wanted to understand him. I never did understand him. I tried.

I got sucked into the vacuum of daily binge drinking. It was very innocuous, you see, there was always something to celebrate or surrender to, and we never counted the days, it was just that day, getting through that day, we lived for that day, we survived that day. It always seemed like a surprise when another one began.

When we finally broke up, I noticed that I did not have the same thirst, especially not at home, alone, but I found cohorts who enjoyed drinking to the point of drunkenness to fill his space. Or they found me.

Because I am a big girl, I can drink a lot. And when I met them, I was still wound a bit too tight, still didn't trust them or anyone, so it took a lot for me to get drunk. Often, they would be wasted and I was just slightly tipsy. It was under their tutelage that I discovered drinking until blacking out. We spent several nights a week forgetting the world, reveling in each other's thoughts and ideas, and most importantly, drinking. The first time I blacked out, I'd passed out on someone's bed in someone's apartment. I remember being woken up to leave, but after that, I don't remember the elevator ride or walking the two blocks until I came out of it.

The next time was my birthday and it was a bad one; I drank to forget. We had a bottle of whiskey we drank outside the bar during cigarette breaks. I was holding my own and doing well until a friend who is the most boring man to talk to on earth showed up and I lost about two hours of time. There are pictures of me and I am smiling and interacting, but I don't remember any of it. I do remember stumbling out of the bar in the arms of my friends and sloshing into a cab.

These were the most damaging parts of my drinking career, despite the heavy drinking I did with him (he often passed out early into the evening, which means I would give up and drag myself to bed). With these cohorts, they never wanted to stop, because stopping meant facing the prospect of being alone with themselves and they had to drink until they were going to pass out so they wouldn't have to see that face.

So on top of being hungover, I began to spend my days sleep deprived as well. And, not to mention, I was drinking like a twenty something when I had just crossed the line of being a thirty something. Something had to give.

Except, then he came back into my life and it was like a dream.

So I drank again with him, this time more skilled at longer bouts of drinking, often out-drinking him and his friends, wanting more, being used to staying up late and drinking it all, until it was time for the bar to close and them to yell, get out! go home!

I tried to prove him wrong for a whole year and I drank myself into a stupor nearly every night of that year, barring nights with the kid (and still sometimes I drank around him or after he went to bed) and three weeks I spent in London. I drank to forget all the checks against me, I drank to forget all the laziness he exhibited and he did the same. Eventually, he drank himself into the arms of another woman.

After that shock, I kept up a pace of three times a week with the cohorts, some drinking at home by myself, finding it harder and harder to miss any more days of work or find any sympathy from my employers about my physical exhaustion. In short, I was a mess.

What saved me was moving away, our bar closing and one of my cohorts moving on to other people, and then I only had my buddy to contend with, who could still wile me into "just one more" more times than I can count. I feel some strange allegiance to him; as well as being the last one standing and knowing how everything ended, knowing the ending seemed very important then. Lately, he has moved on to being drinking buddies with someone else and I see that it's possible that I might not be one of those people who drinks to get drunk, I could actually have a normal and healthy drinking habit, for the pleasure of it and not the head bashing, brain cell murdering numbness.

the emptiness of perfection

When I encountered him, the physical being I have come to know as perfection, I was busy, busy being happy, busy not caring about anything; I walked in and owned the place, arms flung out in greeting, joy and liveliness bursting from me. I was a flower, he was drawn to me, he searched me with his eyes and words before he approached me, and I tolerated him the way a flower would allow a bee to explore its parts, I didn't resist or put up a fight, which had little to do with his perfection, or our interaction, it just felt right. When his eyes stared into mine, I felt no spirit, no connection, nothing, just emptiness, just the clang of two beings doing what nature had decreed.

And there is him, the intellectual being I have come to know as perfection, and in his exploratory and drowsy circles above me, I felt the flutter of his wings, I feel the way he bends the air with his existence, he makes me as alert as the sun, I flush into crispness. I have nothing much to give but he takes it all. I had previously been floundering in a lazy gauzy fallow time, feeling content, even happy with all around me, a lovely complacency. And somehow, in his insistence that I was important to him, I felt nothing, not a glimmer of hope or joy, but a confusion that I cannot shake.

In their perfection, they lack the necessary humbleness I look for in any and every person, the moments when the mask falls and the truth tumbles from their lips; they should hurt and have humanness spewing from them, instead it only glints across their solid form.

The one least likely [the antidote/my centaur] somehow manages for fleeting moments to impact me (physically, intellectually, emotionally). I wonder sometimes how he seems to fumble so mightily, but so often get it right when so many others have failed at me. He may be a new bee, but he keeps trying and when I look into his eyes, I see pain, sadness, vulnerability and happiness. Even when we are off and out of it, he is still pleased at the chance to explore me.

A year ago, celibacy loomed in my life not like a punishment, but as a relief, a sturdy place to rest from the exertions that had been my relationships. I touched my toe to its surface the way one tests water, and I took slow gulps of it, feeling it out, considering how much of it to impose on myself. It happened that my declaration didn't hold up against many different circumstances (the centaur, for one, has turned touch into an art form; and some I will never see again), but in the end, it has helped me further define just what it is I need and want. In finding pleasure in [my centaur] his arms (strong branches, he has), feeling the hot tickle of joy from his knowing and wanting me and our idle talking on the phone for hours, I found my law of threes.

I want to be with someone that has a complete mastery of the law of threes. Until then, I will tolerate them, parceling myself out, always wondering.

the final nail

Oh what a burial it has been. It began over a year ago:

I was in the shitty apartment that I enjoyed, despite the fact that I kept denying it was shitty (nothing really worked, things broke down and stayed broke, it was small and cramped and I slept on the floor, heard my neighbors' conversations and hoped they heard mine, felt for the first time that I not only lived like I was in a hotel, I lived like I was in a men's residence). I don't remember when it was exactly, because those months after that shock were a zombiefied blur (it could have been November or January), but there was a point when I excavated all the things he gave me over the years, the things I hadn't even thrown out the first time we broke up (because yes, I am a sentimental fool and I cherished them even though we were broken up) and I made the first tiny steps to a recovery. Gathered around me were the remnants of the life I used to live, squished up on me like I was riding in a cramped subway car and there were boxes everywhere, my stuff was all over, jutting, scraping, pushing against me. I couldn't take it anymore, I had to start living there, even if I didn't feel alive.

So I emptied a big black garbage bag I had either been using in lieu of a dresser or had been too vacant to empty and began filling it with all the items that had his mark on them, his childish scrawl across a paper for "Valetine's Day," the first year, that good year, when he gave me a record of a band I liked (happily, I cannot recall which band), scraps of papers, folded over papers, letters, cards--all perused thoroughly with a sense of mockery (love me forever, my ass!), and a heap of detritus that held some significance at some point, a rock for skipping from the cape, a ticket stub for Bright Eyes, a silver quarter he found.

When I was done, I considered burning the thing so that I would not rifle through the trash bin behind the apartment building the next day in hopes of retrieving the bag. I chided myself for being silly and fell asleep, emotionally burned out, the way he always predicted I'd be, but I never listened:

He said it in a poem that I wrote on the back of a photograph that he took of a beautiful white gerber daisy that had a purple iris and a dark purple bud for a pupil.

I pulled that picture out of the thousands he had in his vast collection of cast-offs (to be a good photographer, one must learn to take a thousand pictures and hope one hundred of them are decent; it is the ten percent rule) and immediately fell in love with how tender a man he was to stare at that particular flower and render it so beautifully; he managed to blur out the greenery and create a medallion out of it, each petal was a brilliant three dimensional feather, that plucked, looked like they would be wonderful to stroke against a cheek.

The poem itself is gone. I am trying to remember how it went, I remember the way it looked on the back of that photograph, because I studied it when I was sad about us, I used it as a bookmark so that I would see it and remember his ability to see the beauty in anything. It was short. Five lines. To not be able to remember is probably a good thing, so I will leave it at the essence or what I thought I understood it to be.

It was about a fight we had, early on in that first year, a fight that left us both worn out and exhausted, a fight that we didn't hold back on our feelings; like a fire raged between us, but in the end we were still standing.

Is it any wonder I fell head over heels for a guy who could take a fight and make poetry out of it? He managed to make the ten percent rule work in his behavior, for every thousand acts, a hundred of them burned brightly and brilliantly for me.

Except maybe he meant that the passion between us would burn us out until all that was left was the somewhat shoddy foundation of our love (its shoddiness finally unearthed by that last thing, the shock), the hollowness was felt down to the earth.

So the garbage bag was the beginning, and as I look back, it was the easiest thing, if you can imagine that, because those things are gone, and I can't ever get them back. Still, there are the memories of them, of him, of us.

Last week, at my mother's, going through photographs (in an attempt to rid her life of clutter) and I saw so many pictures of us that she had (because he was not just a part of my life, but a part of all of our lives). Next, it was seeing his coworker and wondering if she remembered me (she was there for some small fires, things that, at that time, happened so often that it took next to nothing to ignite us: a look, a word, a tone, a tenseness; he had me wired like a booby trap. Or as Fiona Apple once said it better, "He fondled my trigger then he blamed my gun," from the song "Limp.") and feeling the hot shame of public indiscretions and wanting to say sorry to her. Then it was while I was with a client, I came across an order he'd processed for her, and that same scrawl pierced my body, in one swoop I was turned inside out and realizing how he was still a part of my life, even in these little ways, that the roots of it had gone so far and so wide.

And yet, the girl in the photographs isn't me anymore. And the rest of it, it's been long enough. So I might occasionally encounter reminders of him, but I'm done mourning, it's time to throw away my memories and bury everything I knew.

Goodbye, to you the Burnham, Mr Burnham, Mr ______ Pants (an endless array of choices there were), then simply Pants. Thank you for playing.

pitcher

The words have been stuck in my fingers for months and I don't know how to get them out. I feel like my explanations are long-winded and whiny, so I abandon them after hearing jeering voices in my ears (somehow, even though he was once my most ardent supporter of my writing, he has the king's chair in my mental court; his voice is loudest above the rest).

So instead of trying to explain and present it all perfectly I am just going to tip the pitcher over. It is full of words and every drop forced more of it to seep out of the edges and go to waste. So let's waste it all.

There is a tug between what is good and bad in my life and strangely enough it exists in each object or person.

The pitcher is trying to hold the words in...I've erased my last three attempts at sentences, but I have to push it out, I need to say it...

This year has been a shitty mess and a lovely diaster.

There is no one reason for it, I am the only commonality and I feel like I change every day, pulled by the tides, set adrift at sea. I want so much but I toss my desires away like petals; they are white and float on the black surface of the deepened ocean like snowflakes, and I realize that letting go of everything I've ever had is the only way to get somewhere new.

She left me before the winter settled into the city and that was the beginning of the algidity, of the bone chilling cold that I could not shake off. She gave me so much warmth and fuel, I felt like I had never been more alive and more aware and more turned up than that. And it was so easy. The ease we shared was joyful and I was tickled by pleasure and thrilled by being known, fully known and appreciated by another human being. I ache for her presence, for her words, for her meandering verbal forests. Not a day goes by that some detail of her does not jar my whole life into a screeching halt, and then there is a sadness in remembering that she is gone.

The winter furthered my rigidness. Gone were my walks, my explorations of the park, the ambling outside just to be outside.

And then there was them, the vast array of failures and disappointments that should no longer bother me, but I still attempt to delineate the threads of what made those loves so painful, usually coming to the conclusion that it is a puzzle I can never solve.

I tried to lose myself in someone else, but naturally that only provides so fleeting an antidote. He tolerated me; in many ways he gave me things that will take a long time to unravel. His presence in my life is an enigma, one that I try hard not to destroy with words or thoughts or questions. He makes me feel not like a girl, a figure, an object, but like a woman. Strangely, I have never felt this way with any of them. I often wonder how cruel it was of the universe to deliver me a very beautiful person trapped under a mountain of insecurity and self-doubt, much as I used to be, and not have him be enough for me and not be able to be the one to save him.

And now, the Spring has finally arrived, and I am startled, absolutely startled by how enamored I am by every breath of life I encounter, each unfurling bunch of leaves on a branch, the growth of those leaves day by day, the vast array of colors they present as the air oxidizes their newness.

I don't know if it is the end of Winter or my new neighborhood, a rather quiet set of streets with the park outside my window, a vast array of landscaping that pleases my eye the way it never has before.

Aye. Well said Mr Kerouac.

immobilized

Between turning 33 (somehow more devastating than any other birthdays of this, my third decade, or any birthday, really), the demise of my constant (Siena, the cafe, that place I both loathe and love), and awakening from the stupor that was the love of my lifetime (a devastation in so so so many ways), a part of me, an unrecognizable new part of me (you might say something that could be defined as "adult") has decided that enough is enough.

The procrastination, the bullshit, the rut, the laziness justified with a mountain of excuses, the rise of dramageddon, the endless array of disliked characters in wait-til-you-hear-this! stories, the broken promises, the desires unfulfilled and ignored, the old constant negativity and whining, the dodging of people that had previously pleased me somehow back then, the not doing what I really want to be doing and instead feeling constantly gripped by guilt and concern that I missed the important phone call, message, opportunity to be a good daughter, sister, best friend, friend, lover, writing partner, employee, coworker, acquaintance, etc.

I'm not sure exactly when it all got to be too much. I look back on the last six months and I see how stifled I've been feeling, how suffocated and submerged life has become and I know I have no one to blame but myself. I want to do it all and I want to have it all and ironically, I end up with little scraps and remnants of nothing, piles of sand that disappear from my hands so quickly. At some point, I lost the focus I had, the focus that gave me discipline and a map to follow. In trying to figure out what the new approach to this unexpected life should be, I have dabbled in so many things and succeeded at none and constantly feel overwhelmed.

Last year in January, I did something which seemed to many a strange and horrific thing, but as I look back on the cleanse (also known as the lemonade diet)--in which I spent twenty one days free from the confines of consuming solid food, which led me to be unable to frolic about with most people I know, who gather around food and drink like they must have centuries ago, just to be together and feast, espousing all theories and ideas well into the night--I realize it gave me some focus outside of school or work that I had never experienced before.

I enjoyed that time for so many reasons, despite the obvious setbacks (my life and thoughts largely revolve around food), mostly because it was a giant pulling of the brake on my constant busyness. Without food as a agent in that machinery of mine, I had to alter how and when and who I did things with. I toy now with doing the cleanse not just for the health benefits (I know it's regarded as a silly quick fix diet heralded by celebrities, but people have been fasting for various reasons for a very long time), but to enjoy the serenity that comes from not being able to go anywhere or do anything that revolved around food or drinks (90% of my outings with friends, I'd say).

The benefits I experienced were plentiful: I quit smoking for a while, I started doing yoga on a daily basis, I began knitting and crafting things again; not to mention my liver from the future tried to get me sainted in gratitude. Also, I realized that my friends, my real friends were the ones who didn't care that I was doing some kooky fast and just wanted to spend time with me. Heck, even Walter was begging me to join him at the bar on the first day of breaking the fast, when I was only allowed to drink juice, I sipped on grapefruit juice until the bar closed and he seemed very happy to see me after so long.

To me the fast was like pressing a reset button. I could start anew on eating a vegan/vegetarian diet (which I've since become a vegetarian-at-large), I could commit to exercising via daily yoga (which, admittedly didn't last long with my crazy schedule), and most importantly, I managed to break that nasty smoking habit (at least for six months or so).

All I know is that right now, something has got to give or improve vastly in my life. I am tired of peeling myself out of bed every morning (perhaps the bed exchange is partly to blame), relying on my precious coffee to just be normal and not a giant grouch, feeling like everyone else is enjoying life and I'm stuck in the same old place. I am tired of washing away my woes or perceived woes in a glass of beer and getting high just to get fake happy. I am tired of feeling disconnected. I am sad that it seems like I never accomplish anything, yet I'm always busy. If it's my own damn fault I'm disappointed in life, then I need to try something else in the search for satisfaction.

Oh my!

encounters with yesterday's news:

Lifting the veil of hibernation has led to some eye opening perspective about the men in my life last year. The fire has remained on my periphery for whatever reason (he needs bodies to fill spaces sometimes and he knows how to ply me into a yes, I suspect is all it is) and this week I realized it has been a year, a whole entire year since I was first aware that there was some attraction between us. Whatever that attraction was based on (my surprising nature, a good hair day, a beautiful Spring afternoon) has long since expired, but for some reason we are bound to each other. Sometimes I wonder if it is to prove that our initial responses to each were genuine and not just a desire to be with someone.

Seeing him again, last week, last month, three months ago, four months ago, etc, there has been no residual wonder or hope for him; I had been so fully crushed in his wake, I could not resurrect my earnest affections. Imagine my horror then, when my good friend and often drunken truth teller, Walter, joined me for one of the fire's many events requiring bodies and began informing everyone around us and harassing me that the only reason I was there was because I still wanted him.

And it's odd, but I haven't questioned the fire and the light interactions we have, the sense of obligation I feel to filling up the open space in his events, or wondered about it all. I decided at some point that he had not been unkind to me during that awkward phase between men and women when they are first getting to know each other and wonder what might be. I also enjoyed his cheerful serenity, his hobbies and habits and his general sense of appreciation of me and the other bodies I brought with me over this past year. I am understanding that it is rare to meet people I actually like and admire, so I found it odd to discard him and his invitations simply from the spite of being overlooked.

I noticed, in addition to introducing me to people, that at one point early on after I arrived, he was raising eyebrows with some guy and looking at me (which I assume is guy code for are you seeing this girl?), he also seemed to be pushing this agenda he's pushed before with giving his friend information about me (while in the bathroom of all places) to get a conversation started between us, because his friend is interested in me. It gave me some small sense of pleasure that even though he is girlfriended, he finds me charming enough to get something going with his friends. It also made me realize that perhaps I was there for the wrong reason and I need to admit it's not my scene.

So eventually, that night, I had to admit that Walter's drunken assessment wasn't completely wrong. Except, for the first time in my adult life, I wasn't going to sit around and be mopey about not having what I want, because I know nothing is going to happen between us and I accept that. I wasn't allowing that attraction to govern me.

The same could not be said for the magnetic disc. I did nothing but torture myself about him, hating the torturing, but unable to stop it and this week I couldn't help myself, I opened up that wound and poured lye into it. I can't quite tell yet, but I think it helped. Now I have an idea what he was doing and saying to the people around him. And now I understand that it wasn't just me who wouldn't let go.

She was getting to that drunken point where her speech was slurring and I asked her about him. I could tell she had been bracing herself for it. Hell, I think they've all been bracing themselves for it, and interestingly enough, every time I ask them, the elephant in the room disappears in smoke and we are able to fully enjoy each other's company. That's part of what he did to me. He created an entire scenario that disrupted my friendships with people and convinced them of something that put distance and awkwardness in the space between us.

I knew something had happened, I could feel it, it was so frustrating, people coddling me, people acting like I was obsessed or stalking him, people watching me to see what I would do. I felt the hush of the bar every time I came in and he happened to already be there. It was maddening to me that people who had previously been so jovial treated me like it was a chore to speak to me.

I tried to stay away. The more that time passed between what happened and Fall made things better but I could still sense the tension of it, not as much as before, where sometimes, no matter how much I drank I could not get drunk or shake the feeling that I was experiencing a dramarama of high school lunchroom levels, complete with racing heartbeats, nervous and guilty behaviors and awkward eye contact and monologues on unfairness.

I was guilty, but not of much. I mean, on the surface, not much actually happened between us to cause the sort of scandal it seemed I was facing each time I walked in there. We kissed a couple times. We hung out once. Big fucking deal.

According to the sloshed informant, little did I know that he lied to me out of distress because he didn't want to date me, so he made up a story about being in love with his girlfriend back home and proceeded to insist we be friends and that he hoped it wouldn't be weird for me to continue to go to the bar--to which I replied, not at all and took my hands, dirty and grimy from the handling of men, excavating the good ones from deep mines only to find them flawed and not for me and I let it go.

So why then did this man (who recently turned 30) proceed to whisper in the ears of anyone who would listen that I was chasing him still? Because I texted him a couple times after? Because I still went to my bar, the place I'd been frequenting on a weekly to bi-weekly basis three years before his arrival? Because I didn't ignore him every time he passed me? Because I still obviously really liked him?

I did all of those things with the same logic I applied to the fire. I realized it was rare that I liked someone and if he was willing to remain on friendly terms with me (in fact, he was the one who proposed so and insisted on it) then why wouldn't I continue to enjoy his company? It would be so much easier if being romantically attracted to someone was as easy to turn off as a light switch. I am getting better at dismantling those feelings than I used to be. It requires the passing of time, which slowly erodes the beaches of my memory of things that I associate with them, each discarded shell removed.

I didn't have the luxury of time in this case. The other thing I didn't have was a clear idea of whether or not he was not interested in me. He may have informed all of his buddies that I was chasing him, but he certainly never ran away, sometimes he initiated conversations with me, and once, when he was so drunk that he doesn't remember seeing me, he tried to kiss me on the lips. So even though half the times I encountered him he could be a real dick, the other times he exhibited a sparkling kindness that I wanted to believe meant something and I believed that lie for a while, until I realized I was getting carried away and then I wouldn't go back there for a while until I felt strong enough to ignore him again, but he always managed to not be ignored. He didn't want to be ignored. He may have pretended to everyone that I was always staring at him, but to see my eyes, he had to be looking for them.

Once I knew he had a girlfriend--a fact I suspected long before I got confirmation of it, because everyone was tiptoeing around me like I was going to fly off the handle if I knew he had a girlfriend; which I never did--I let that possibility go, that there was something between us drawing us to each other, that he felt it too. Maybe he felt nothing but my clamoring, but my sense and intuition tell me that he had some interest in me, even when he was feigning that he did not.

Even asking her, this girl, the sloshed, slurring friend of his, acquaintance of mine, I knew I was going to be filling the role I surmised he'd scripted for me. I had to know. Hopefully one day I can get by without knowing, I can get along without wondering, I can just trust that what I feel is true and none of it really matters anyway. But for now, it is good to know that I wasn't completely crazy, and he was an immature idiot. And truly, this is just another example of why I am glad nothing actually happened between us.

The brick road...