The night of the supermoon, I burned myself on a pan full of spinach and mushrooms and a bit of garlic, which I was cooking for my mom. I was rushing and when I went to set the spatula down, I didn’t realize how far down I was placing it and set my arm straight onto the rim of the pan. Immediately the burn went white as the moon. I ran some cold water over it, should have iced it immediately, but I wanted to get outside, wanted to see the big moon on the horizon, wanted to feel it at its Biggest and Pumpkiniest. It began blistering as I cooked. As soon as I was done, I grabbed a bag of frozen peas and carrots from the freezer, the go-to bag for injuries. They’ve defrosted and been refrozen a hundred times over. I cradled them in my arms, the burn in an awkward spot on the underside of my wrist, and called the dog to head out with me.  We walked up the street, me looking up and around. A woman was heading down the block toward us, and as I glanced her way I could see her eying me warily. There I was, my jeans rolled up, one leg higher than the other, a dog wandering nearby, a bag of frozen vegetables in the crook of one arm, my head thrown back as I stumbled uncertainly along my way.  “Oh hi,” I called out, hoping to reassure her. “I’m just looking for the moon.” She smiled, reassured of exactly one thing, and continued on her way. After almost 20 years since the day I first set foot in Berkeley, I’d finally become what I’d always resisted. Another Berkeley weirdo. I kept walking and waiting. I did see the moon eventually that night, although it took me longer to find than I’d like to admit. I was behind the hills, behind a lot of buildings and trees and a playground and my own ridiculous normal head-in-the-clouds natural state of being. The burn is still a dark red. It hasn’t faded away. So I think about it plenty. Sometimes I tell a story that makes people laugh, about being in a yoga class once, when a male teacher asked, “Are any of your on your moons?” It was horrible and gross and funny as shit. But you know, the moon goes in cycles and so do we, not just women but people. For me, the supermoon came at the end of the second of two major ten-year cycles. The first was terrible. The second was fixing the terrible, but it was still very difficult. I don’t know what the third will bring, but so far some amazing pieces are falling into place. What I do know is that the burn seems in part to have both cauterized the end of the previous cycle - there! done! you goddamn did it - but also to serve as a reminder of what I learned. Over the past two weeks I’ve experienced some emotional turmoil in something I thought, hoped was one of the remarkable pieces as I started this next ten-year cycle. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but right now, it’s difficult and painful. In the past, I might have let it throw me or derail me entirely, messing up everything else in my life, might have let it hurt me so deeply I have to focus all my energy on it. And sure, it has hurt me. But over the past two weeks, I’ve focused and relied on the other wonderful things I’m fortunate enough to be building, and made sure I kept those in full swing. More than that, I was delighted by them, even on tough days, and grateful to have them in my life. Those are just as important. Funny how building a solid base will keep you stable, isn’t it. At first, when I realized I wasn’t being as tough or as strong or as graceful as I wanted, I was afraid I hadn’t learned anything from my past experiences. Hadn’t changed, hadn’t grown, hadn’t bothered to improve. Then I realized I had, because I’d kept everything else rolling along. We’ve always got stuff to work on and improve - at least I do - and now I know where to fine tune.  I also know it might be time to start a podcast called “Our Bodies, Our Moons”. 
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The night of the supermoon, I burned myself on a pan full of spinach and mushrooms and a bit of garlic, which I was cooking for my mom. I was rushing and when I went to set the spatula down, I didn’t realize how far down I was placing it and set my arm straight onto the rim of the pan. Immediately the burn went white as the moon. I ran some cold water over it, should have iced it immediately, but I wanted to get outside, wanted to see the big moon on the horizon, wanted to feel it at its Biggest and Pumpkiniest. It began blistering as I cooked.

As soon as I was done, I grabbed a bag of frozen peas and carrots from the freezer, the go-to bag for injuries. They’ve defrosted and been refrozen a hundred times over. I cradled them in my arms, the burn in an awkward spot on the underside of my wrist, and called the dog to head out with me. 

We walked up the street, me looking up and around. A woman was heading down the block toward us, and as I glanced her way I could see her eying me warily. There I was, my jeans rolled up, one leg higher than the other, a dog wandering nearby, a bag of frozen vegetables in the crook of one arm, my head thrown back as I stumbled uncertainly along my way. 

“Oh hi,” I called out, hoping to reassure her. “I’m just looking for the moon.”

She smiled, reassured of exactly one thing, and continued on her way. After almost 20 years since the day I first set foot in Berkeley, I’d finally become what I’d always resisted. Another Berkeley weirdo.

I kept walking and waiting. I did see the moon eventually that night, although it took me longer to find than I’d like to admit. I was behind the hills, behind a lot of buildings and trees and a playground and my own ridiculous normal head-in-the-clouds natural state of being. The burn is still a dark red. It hasn’t faded away. So I think about it plenty.

Sometimes I tell a story that makes people laugh, about being in a yoga class once, when a male teacher asked, “Are any of your on your moons?” It was horrible and gross and funny as shit.

But you know, the moon goes in cycles and so do we, not just women but people. For me, the supermoon came at the end of the second of two major ten-year cycles. The first was terrible. The second was fixing the terrible, but it was still very difficult. I don’t know what the third will bring, but so far some amazing pieces are falling into place. What I do know is that the burn seems in part to have both cauterized the end of the previous cycle - there! done! you goddamn did it - but also to serve as a reminder of what I learned.

Over the past two weeks I’ve experienced some emotional turmoil in something I thought, hoped was one of the remarkable pieces as I started this next ten-year cycle. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but right now, it’s difficult and painful. In the past, I might have let it throw me or derail me entirely, messing up everything else in my life, might have let it hurt me so deeply I have to focus all my energy on it. And sure, it has hurt me. But over the past two weeks, I’ve focused and relied on the other wonderful things I’m fortunate enough to be building, and made sure I kept those in full swing. More than that, I was delighted by them, even on tough days, and grateful to have them in my life. Those are just as important. Funny how building a solid base will keep you stable, isn’t it.

At first, when I realized I wasn’t being as tough or as strong or as graceful as I wanted, I was afraid I hadn’t learned anything from my past experiences. Hadn’t changed, hadn’t grown, hadn’t bothered to improve. Then I realized I had, because I’d kept everything else rolling along. We’ve always got stuff to work on and improve - at least I do - and now I know where to fine tune. 

I also know it might be time to start a podcast called “Our Bodies, Our Moons”. 

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

Last Tuesday morning I was packing my bag for work, as usual in a rush to get my laptop into the case and get to the train, when a piece of paper folded in half fell out onto my bed. It was a list of local notaries. I looked at the paper for a few seconds, opening it up and smoothing it flat, before re-creasing it with my fingertips. I stood awkwardly in my bedroom, wasting time I didn’t have, staring at everything and nothing. How had I not seen this paper in all the time I’d used the bag since then? It had been sitting in there, waiting, quietly. I didn’t have time to put it in one of the boxes, this list of notaries I would probably never use again, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. Later I could put it with everything else, all the other pieces, everything else I was holding on to, until I figured out where it was all supposed to go. Calling a notary from the hospital and asking—borderline begging, I suppose—if he, she, anyone can please come to notarize your mother’s will because your mother is suddenly dying: This isn’t something I ever imagined doing. I don’t mean illness, death, loss. I’d thought about those. I mean the details, the unknowable sudden onslaught of details that must be attended to when you discover someone you know and love is so sick with cancer she is dying. Not just dying, but sprinting toward death. Still, you try and control the details, keep them from blowing away in the wind, as if somehow this way you can keep her safe.  I never imagined standing there in the hallway with the notary I finally found, after a series of calls to unavailable notaries, notaries too far away, notaries not in the office. He held a big, leather-bound book. He was very professional, very courteous, very out of place in the white hallway where I had of late found myself trying to maintain control of a train that was careening over a very terrifying abyss. There are a lot of things to learn when you’re faced with illness and death. You have to learn them if it’s an emergency or a slow-building process. You have to learn them if it’s you who is ill or someone you love. You have a lot to learn, often in a very little period of time. So little you feel like yelling about how unfair it is, all of it, everything, shaking tiny fists at the universe in futile anger and yelling about the great unfairness. Instead you switch on the light of the day room at the end of the hall and sit, at 5:00 am, the world waking up and going about its business as if nothing is wrong, to sit and talk to a lanky, bespectacled hospitalist about how exactly the doctors should interpret your mother’s do not resuscitate orders now that treatment has started. The paperwork is astounding. Forms, coming and going. Lab reports. Booklets about what lymphoma is, what types there are, what the treatment options are, what a person going through chemo should expect, what a person-going-through-chemo’s caretakers should expect, what the types of stem cell transplants are, what will happen, what the person can and absolutely cannot eat, what the immunization schedule is, release forms. On and on and on. Even menus, from hospital stays, although to call them menus is sort of cruel. I have folder after folder of it all. A huge binder. A box full of booklets. You should see them. I should find a way to show them all to you. In just under a month it will be two years since that first week in the hospital. Two years since I discovered what dark humor really is, how jokes an unfortunate cohort people can understand will somehow get you through grim hours. Two years I have thought about what it meant to go grey, all emotions and sensations inaccessible, to shut myself down in order to contend with something that was so much larger than me. Two years I have quietly hoarded away paperwork. Two years of learning there is more than the simple black and white of cancer, more than lived or died. Two years of nearly every emotion save paralyzing grief. Two years since my mother very nearly died, and then didn’t. Two Mother’s Days. I count them now.
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Last Tuesday morning I was packing my bag for work, as usual in a rush to get my laptop into the case and get to the train, when a piece of paper folded in half fell out onto my bed. It was a list of local notaries. I looked at the paper for a few seconds, opening it up and smoothing it flat, before re-creasing it with my fingertips. I stood awkwardly in my bedroom, wasting time I didn’t have, staring at everything and nothing. How had I not seen this paper in all the time I’d used the bag since then? It had been sitting in there, waiting, quietly. I didn’t have time to put it in one of the boxes, this list of notaries I would probably never use again, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. Later I could put it with everything else, all the other pieces, everything else I was holding on to, until I figured out where it was all supposed to go.

Calling a notary from the hospital and asking—borderline begging, I suppose—if he, she, anyone can please come to notarize your mother’s will because your mother is suddenly dying: This isn’t something I ever imagined doing. I don’t mean illness, death, loss. I’d thought about those. I mean the details, the unknowable sudden onslaught of details that must be attended to when you discover someone you know and love is so sick with cancer she is dying.

Not just dying, but sprinting toward death. Still, you try and control the details, keep them from blowing away in the wind, as if somehow this way you can keep her safe. 

I never imagined standing there in the hallway with the notary I finally found, after a series of calls to unavailable notaries, notaries too far away, notaries not in the office. He held a big, leather-bound book. He was very professional, very courteous, very out of place in the white hallway where I had of late found myself trying to maintain control of a train that was careening over a very terrifying abyss.

There are a lot of things to learn when you’re faced with illness and death. You have to learn them if it’s an emergency or a slow-building process. You have to learn them if it’s you who is ill or someone you love. You have a lot to learn, often in a very little period of time. So little you feel like yelling about how unfair it is, all of it, everything, shaking tiny fists at the universe in futile anger and yelling about the great unfairness. Instead you switch on the light of the day room at the end of the hall and sit, at 5:00 am, the world waking up and going about its business as if nothing is wrong, to sit and talk to a lanky, bespectacled hospitalist about how exactly the doctors should interpret your mother’s do not resuscitate orders now that treatment has started.

The paperwork is astounding. Forms, coming and going. Lab reports. Booklets about what lymphoma is, what types there are, what the treatment options are, what a person going through chemo should expect, what a person-going-through-chemo’s caretakers should expect, what the types of stem cell transplants are, what will happen, what the person can and absolutely cannot eat, what the immunization schedule is, release forms. On and on and on. Even menus, from hospital stays, although to call them menus is sort of cruel. I have folder after folder of it all. A huge binder. A box full of booklets. You should see them. I should find a way to show them all to you.

In just under a month it will be two years since that first week in the hospital. Two years since I discovered what dark humor really is, how jokes an unfortunate cohort people can understand will somehow get you through grim hours. Two years I have thought about what it meant to go grey, all emotions and sensations inaccessible, to shut myself down in order to contend with something that was so much larger than me. Two years I have quietly hoarded away paperwork. Two years of learning there is more than the simple black and white of cancer, more than lived or died. Two years of nearly every emotion save paralyzing grief. Two years since my mother very nearly died, and then didn’t.

Two Mother’s Days. I count them now.

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

In the past nine days I have cried or almost-cried at least as many times, if not more. Probably I shouldn’t tell you this so publicly, probably I should keep this for a personal diary, but I have always been terrible at keeping a journal. It’s on my list of things to do – start a journal, this time for real, and actually stick to it – so for now I will say it here. There have been an awful lot of tears and almost-tears this week-and-two-days. Only one of those cries was an ugly cry, a big sobbing mess of a cry, exploding my sinuses and making it painful to breathe or to do much of anything really but leak in every direction and rage impotently. One other was a delicate cry, while another was even smaller and more poetic than that. The others were merely stinging eyes, filling eyes, pricking eyes, welling-up eyes. Tears that stood but did not fall. A thing about me: Sometimes my eyes change colors. When I cry, my eyes, eyes that lightened from a true brown to hazel as I aged, turn very green. Eyes don’t usually do this. Well, maybe not the changing color part, because I know of other people with eyes that shift mercurially, but I mean the lightening. Eyes don’t usually become lighter as we age. In most people, they darken. Whenever I tell people about my eyes, this is what they tell me anyway. That it’s uncommon to become lighter with age. But not impossible. Last night I took a shower before I went to bed. I lingered beneath the running water, just warm enough to be relaxing at the end of a sunny Northern California May Saturday. I thought about the idea my friend had proposed to me, on the day I had been most emotionally upended: that while it might sound ludicrous, it was most certainly the moon because everyone she knew was distraught. I thought about moons, and what moons meant to women. I thought about what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to me to be a woman. I thought about the fact I had never really given thanks to the girl I had been. I thought about how little we own our bodies, in so many senses of the word own. I thought about the ways we perform every day, to others and even to ourselves, how often we are honest, and perhaps how rarely. I thought about how I would be performing when I wrote this. I thought about the women I was reading, the words and memoirs that were changing me and teaching me to truly be fearless. I thought about letting go of a lot of things, about the worry that maybe this was all something I should have gone through in my 20s, because that’s when you go through things like this, when you carefully craft who you are, layer by layer, influence by influence, and should be finished by that most certainly by your late 30s. As the water ran down my face and neck, I rubbed my fingers on my brow and down across my eyelids, down past my nose and mouth. I could smell garlic, thyme picked from the herb box, and the bright, sweet perfume of Meyer lemon, brazenly purloined from an unknown neighbor’s yard in broad daylight. I ran my hands down with the water, past my breasts, to my belly, no longer quite so flat but still smooth, and held them there, quietly. I thought, good-bye to all that. I thought we are who we are, and we change how we change, and some of us are lucky enough to become lighter as we age.
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In the past nine days I have cried or almost-cried at least as many times, if not more. Probably I shouldn’t tell you this so publicly, probably I should keep this for a personal diary, but I have always been terrible at keeping a journal. It’s on my list of things to do – start a journal, this time for real, and actually stick to it – so for now I will say it here. There have been an awful lot of tears and almost-tears this week-and-two-days.

Only one of those cries was an ugly cry, a big sobbing mess of a cry, exploding my sinuses and making it painful to breathe or to do much of anything really but leak in every direction and rage impotently. One other was a delicate cry, while another was even smaller and more poetic than that. The others were merely stinging eyes, filling eyes, pricking eyes, welling-up eyes. Tears that stood but did not fall.

A thing about me: Sometimes my eyes change colors. When I cry, my eyes, eyes that lightened from a true brown to hazel as I aged, turn very green.

Eyes don’t usually do this. Well, maybe not the changing color part, because I know of other people with eyes that shift mercurially, but I mean the lightening. Eyes don’t usually become lighter as we age. In most people, they darken. Whenever I tell people about my eyes, this is what they tell me anyway. That it’s uncommon to become lighter with age.

But not impossible.

Last night I took a shower before I went to bed. I lingered beneath the running water, just warm enough to be relaxing at the end of a sunny Northern California May Saturday. I thought about the idea my friend had proposed to me, on the day I had been most emotionally upended: that while it might sound ludicrous, it was most certainly the moon because everyone she knew was distraught. I thought about moons, and what moons meant to women. I thought about what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to me to be a woman. I thought about the fact I had never really given thanks to the girl I had been. I thought about how little we own our bodies, in so many senses of the word own. I thought about the ways we perform every day, to others and even to ourselves, how often we are honest, and perhaps how rarely. I thought about how I would be performing when I wrote this. I thought about the women I was reading, the words and memoirs that were changing me and teaching me to truly be fearless. I thought about letting go of a lot of things, about the worry that maybe this was all something I should have gone through in my 20s, because that’s when you go through things like this, when you carefully craft who you are, layer by layer, influence by influence, and should be finished by that most certainly by your late 30s.

As the water ran down my face and neck, I rubbed my fingers on my brow and down across my eyelids, down past my nose and mouth. I could smell garlic, thyme picked from the herb box, and the bright, sweet perfume of Meyer lemon, brazenly purloined from an unknown neighbor’s yard in broad daylight. I ran my hands down with the water, past my breasts, to my belly, no longer quite so flat but still smooth, and held them there, quietly.

I thought, good-bye to all that. I thought we are who we are, and we change how we change, and some of us are lucky enough to become lighter as we age.

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

The other day I had a chat with someone who told me she believes everyone is fundamentally a good person at heart and there are no bad people in the world, not really, when you get down to it. I told her that was a lovely sentiment but I disagreed, because I had once dated someone who had a black soul and did not have a single redeeming quality, other than the ability to make a truly excellent oven-roasted tomatillo salsa. I was firmly, unshakably convinced he was Not A Good Person. He lacked some fundamental element of human-ness, some kind quality underneath his incredible ability to charm and attract women. Fundamentally, his ultimate choice was not to be or to do good when it came to others. He was a dam of no-goodness waiting to burst. She asked how that could happen, and I said I didn’t know, he must have been born that way. “No,” she said. “How could you have dated him?” “Oh. Right. That. We were together for nearly a year, too.” She looked at me. “Well, the salsa was really good.” I think every relationship is a learning experience. You learn from the person you date, you learn from the relationship, you learn from yourself. You learn what your limitations are, what you are and are not capable of. You should be able to take at least one thing away, and not just an actual tangible item, although those are nice sometimes. (I did get an iPod for my birthday from the salsa maker, which was great, so to be fair I guess he had at least one other redeeming quality.) You learn that everyone – all of us, including you and most certainly including me – will be able to list at least one absolute disaster on the personal dating roster, and if we aren’t able to we should make one up or our stories will be really, horribly boring. And by disaster I don’t mean very brief dating horror stories like the Thai Massage Debacle of ’05 (true story, and came after The First Date When the Bread Basket Napkin Caught Fire). I mean things like “yes, he was 41 and still wore eyeliner and was immature and rude to me, and yes my friends still mock me for this, to this day” or “a black-souled human being I called my boyfriend for reasons none of us still can understand, including him, who later wondered how anyone ever dated him, because even he thinks he’s got serious not-funny problems, and not in a self-deprecating or cry-for-help way.” This what I learned from him, I suppose. Whenever anyone says to me, “That guy’s bad news” I can more effectively tell whether not he is, in fact, bad news of the truly Bad News variety or just, you know, sad. Troubled. In need of a hug. Borderline, maybe. Kind of a jerk, yeah, but not someone who will eventually do things that will cause everyone to whisper and walk away and refuse to discuss exactly what happened because they are that sort of bad indeed. It’s funny, the things that teach us to try and be more generous toward others. In a way, that relationship, as stupid and gross as it was, gave me a pretty tremendous gift. Where once I might have dismissed people for capital offenses, I try to see them in a more gentle light. Maybe I can’t live with whatever problem you’ve got, but I don’t think you’re actually a bad person. I know what a bad person is! You’re not it. A good lesson. But really, I wish I had learned to make that salsa.
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The other day I had a chat with someone who told me she believes everyone is fundamentally a good person at heart and there are no bad people in the world, not really, when you get down to it. I told her that was a lovely sentiment but I disagreed, because I had once dated someone who had a black soul and did not have a single redeeming quality, other than the ability to make a truly excellent oven-roasted tomatillo salsa. I was firmly, unshakably convinced he was Not A Good Person. He lacked some fundamental element of human-ness, some kind quality underneath his incredible ability to charm and attract women. Fundamentally, his ultimate choice was not to be or to do good when it came to others. He was a dam of no-goodness waiting to burst.

She asked how that could happen, and I said I didn’t know, he must have been born that way.

“No,” she said. “How could you have dated him?”

“Oh. Right. That. We were together for nearly a year, too.”

She looked at me.

“Well, the salsa was really good.”

I think every relationship is a learning experience. You learn from the person you date, you learn from the relationship, you learn from yourself. You learn what your limitations are, what you are and are not capable of. You should be able to take at least one thing away, and not just an actual tangible item, although those are nice sometimes. (I did get an iPod for my birthday from the salsa maker, which was great, so to be fair I guess he had at least one other redeeming quality.)

You learn that everyone – all of us, including you and most certainly including me – will be able to list at least one absolute disaster on the personal dating roster, and if we aren’t able to we should make one up or our stories will be really, horribly boring. And by disaster I don’t mean very brief dating horror stories like the Thai Massage Debacle of ’05 (true story, and came after The First Date When the Bread Basket Napkin Caught Fire). I mean things like “yes, he was 41 and still wore eyeliner and was immature and rude to me, and yes my friends still mock me for this, to this day” or “a black-souled human being I called my boyfriend for reasons none of us still can understand, including him, who later wondered how anyone ever dated him, because even he thinks he’s got serious not-funny problems, and not in a self-deprecating or cry-for-help way.”

This what I learned from him, I suppose. Whenever anyone says to me, “That guy’s bad news” I can more effectively tell whether not he is, in fact, bad news of the truly Bad News variety or just, you know, sad. Troubled. In need of a hug. Borderline, maybe. Kind of a jerk, yeah, but not someone who will eventually do things that will cause everyone to whisper and walk away and refuse to discuss exactly what happened because they are that sort of bad indeed.

It’s funny, the things that teach us to try and be more generous toward others. In a way, that relationship, as stupid and gross as it was, gave me a pretty tremendous gift. Where once I might have dismissed people for capital offenses, I try to see them in a more gentle light. Maybe I can’t live with whatever problem you’ve got, but I don’t think you’re actually a bad person. I know what a bad person is! You’re not it.

A good lesson. But really, I wish I had learned to make that salsa.

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

A few weeks ago, I went out for coffee with a man. This was not in itself a noteworthy activity. Not because I have coffee with a lot of men, but rather because “coffee with a man” does not itself, as an activity, lend to essay writing under normal circumstances. Yet here I am, so something about this was worth remembering. I was away from California, on a trip exploring the possibility of moving to a new city. I was going to a lot of meetings, interviews, and mixer-type events, plus fitting in as many coffees and dinners and drinks and outings with friends as humanly possible. Coffee with this man was in there, too. “Away from California” is fraught for me, never more so than after the past year or so. Somehow, in the past two years, California planted itself in my heart as home, like a little seedling wending its way up through cracked plaster. Funny, because I’ve lived in California a long time, have loved and hated it in equal measures, but never had I felt like maybe it could be home. But I went on this trip, delightedly looking into leaving what currently passes as home, at least for a time. Away from my parents, away from a vastly expanded and strengthened root system, away from a sense of place. From California itself. What sane person would leave beautiful California? There I was, not in California, seeing friends and meeting new people, feeling a type of freedom and happiness I haven’t experienced in a long time. Not the typical relaxed “I’m on vacation” happiness, and not simply the energy of a new city. It was different, and the words I can think of to describe this feeling are two terribly California words, which tell me just how much I need to take a break from this place: centered and grounded. I’d also tell you I felt a glow-y vibrancy and an inner strength, but I’d like you to keep reading, so I won’t. In the middle of all this, I made plans to have coffee with this man. He was a friend I’d met on Twitter through friendly conversation; I’d read one of his articles and loved it, so I followed him without knowing much else and that’s sometimes how those friendships start, isn’t it? But of course, I wouldn’t be writing about this if it were just a bit of nothing, and the truth is I’d developed a little crush on this man. Once upon a time, I developed crushes as easily as stepping off a curb. Sidewalk’s ending—there’s a new one! The world was full of possible love interests, and I possibly loved so many of them. Then as I got older and grew to understand a thing or two, I folded in around myself. I might like someone, I might respond to them, might even say yes to a date, but to become becrushed of my own accord? It requires a certain type of bewitching, to be sure. The secret of the central crush is very basic, but it’s not so simple. It’s not necessarily a romantic crush; it applies to both men and women in very non-romantic ways. A romantic crush is a separate piece that may or may not complicate matters. The crush is this: Are you particularly brilliant in a way I most certainly am not? Do you possess in spades a talent I lack? Is your well of knowledge so crazy deep that I have to secretly Google every other reference when we email, and I’m a little nervous to have spend time with you because what if you realize I can’t keep up? The man with whom I had coffee is a writer, and he’s a writer whose writing I enjoy very much. He has a wonderful turn of phrase. More than that, a conversation with him is a heady bricolage, a steady beat of historical, literary, political references. I delight in people whose brains work differently than mine. I love to listen to them, to watch them at work, to see them in action. When I find someone like this, that rare sense of wonder overtakes me and I want to sit and be delighted with them as much and as long as possible. My god. Who doesn’t want to sit and be delighted? So, coffee: An hour of excellent conversation passed. Then a second. Then we cheerfully parted ways. As I left, it occurred to me: I’m in town a few more days and while there are so many things I want to do, this – this! – is conversation I’d like to have more of. I couldn’t honestly tell you if I had a strong romantic interest in him because I was a little enchanted with how smart he was. I liked it, being around his smartness, and I wanted to keep being delighted. Okay, I admit, he was also nice looking and had a wonderful smile. So I emailed him straight away and told him that with my limited time left in his city, before returning to my city, I would like to go out again and continue to be charmed. And? Nothing. Silence. I was mortified. Absolutely horrified. I felt stupid in a way I can’t describe. I mean, I know, sometimes people are busy and totally distracted by their lives and their work, and some people get freaked out by your friendliness and your forwardness, and some people are not polite enough to respond like adults—oh god, who knew what some people did, because I was too busy turning scarlet and wanting to die inside whenever I checked my email and turned scarlet all over again. So I did what I always do in these situations: I conducted research. Using the details of the story, such as the wording of my email, but revealing no confidential information about the gentleman in question, I went to work to discover, in the least scientific and most anecdotal way possible: In 2012, can a woman ask out a man? Should she? Is it the last of our gendered hurdles we have yet to address? If we are addressing it, then how? What the hell does all this mean? Anecdotally, I can tell you at least one thing: Every single married man who was involved in any of these conversations (and thanks to the various dinners and mixers I went to, more than you’d think) was completely gung-ho about women asking men out. More so than any other group. Which makes me wonder: Marriage changes your perspective? Your insecurities? Your wishful thinking? Single guys were a little more divided: At least one told me I needed to (and I quote) “NEVER EVER AGAIN” say anything like that to a guy. One female friend told me I’d “crossed the guy boundary” by asking him to do something with me. Other female friends were much more in the “you must be fucking joking, what YEAR is it” camp. And some male friends were mostly curious: “Why haven’t you asked ME out?”  A lot of people, bless their hearts, thought the man was a fool. They also wanted to know what kind of person can’t even respond to a nice email from a nice lady. It’s a funny, isn’t it? Maybe it’s not about gender so much, at least not with everyone. We all want to chase and be chased a little. We want things to be easy but not too easy, to be interesting but not crazy, to be just right but not a fairytale. We want what we want and we’ll know it when we see it and maybe we’re screwed up but we’re not nuts like that one person who sure was horrible, and how could you have dated them anyway? I imagine if I’d sent a series of increasingly hysterical emails that said things like “Our children will have brown hair! Why aren’t you emailing me?????” and “I’ve come up with the names for four of our imaginary kids but name number five is super hard and I can’t do it without you ps coffee makes you pregnant” and “Been emailing with your mom, we’re having dinner on Thursday! Are you coming?” then that would be, you know, fucking weird. But saying, “let’s go out again” isn’t weird. It’s not stepping over any boundaries. It’s not even necessarily romantic. If there’s anything I’ve learned, not just from my “research” but from the growing older and a little wiser and folding in on myself, it’s this:  Be you. Seriously, all these gender rules in dating are the worst. Be less afraid of asking men out. Be less afraid of being asked out, men. Be less insecure, all of us. “Men like to do the chasing” and “You’ll upset the power balance” and “You should wait x number of days”? Just go be you. Ask someone out for coffee if it feels right, if talking to them is the most delightful thing you’ve experienced in so long you can’t imagine not wanting to have that experience all over again. They might ignore you. Trust me, you won’t die. The one who responds to you? That person gets you, and when they do, the rules won’t matter one tiny bit. 
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A few weeks ago, I went out for coffee with a man. This was not in itself a noteworthy activity. Not because I have coffee with a lot of men, but rather because “coffee with a man” does not itself, as an activity, lend to essay writing under normal circumstances. Yet here I am, so something about this was worth remembering.

I was away from California, on a trip exploring the possibility of moving to a new city. I was going to a lot of meetings, interviews, and mixer-type events, plus fitting in as many coffees and dinners and drinks and outings with friends as humanly possible. Coffee with this man was in there, too.

“Away from California” is fraught for me, never more so than after the past year or so. Somehow, in the past two years, California planted itself in my heart as home, like a little seedling wending its way up through cracked plaster. Funny, because I’ve lived in California a long time, have loved and hated it in equal measures, but never had I felt like maybe it could be home. But I went on this trip, delightedly looking into leaving what currently passes as home, at least for a time. Away from my parents, away from a vastly expanded and strengthened root system, away from a sense of place. From California itself. What sane person would leave beautiful California?

There I was, not in California, seeing friends and meeting new people, feeling a type of freedom and happiness I haven’t experienced in a long time. Not the typical relaxed “I’m on vacation” happiness, and not simply the energy of a new city. It was different, and the words I can think of to describe this feeling are two terribly California words, which tell me just how much I need to take a break from this place: centered and grounded. I’d also tell you I felt a glow-y vibrancy and an inner strength, but I’d like you to keep reading, so I won’t.

In the middle of all this, I made plans to have coffee with this man. He was a friend I’d met on Twitter through friendly conversation; I’d read one of his articles and loved it, so I followed him without knowing much else and that’s sometimes how those friendships start, isn’t it? But of course, I wouldn’t be writing about this if it were just a bit of nothing, and the truth is I’d developed a little crush on this man.

Once upon a time, I developed crushes as easily as stepping off a curb. Sidewalk’s ending—there’s a new one! The world was full of possible love interests, and I possibly loved so many of them. Then as I got older and grew to understand a thing or two, I folded in around myself. I might like someone, I might respond to them, might even say yes to a date, but to become becrushed of my own accord? It requires a certain type of bewitching, to be sure.

The secret of the central crush is very basic, but it’s not so simple. It’s not necessarily a romantic crush; it applies to both men and women in very non-romantic ways. A romantic crush is a separate piece that may or may not complicate matters. The crush is this: Are you particularly brilliant in a way I most certainly am not? Do you possess in spades a talent I lack? Is your well of knowledge so crazy deep that I have to secretly Google every other reference when we email, and I’m a little nervous to have spend time with you because what if you realize I can’t keep up?

The man with whom I had coffee is a writer, and he’s a writer whose writing I enjoy very much. He has a wonderful turn of phrase. More than that, a conversation with him is a heady bricolage, a steady beat of historical, literary, political references.

I delight in people whose brains work differently than mine. I love to listen to them, to watch them at work, to see them in action. When I find someone like this, that rare sense of wonder overtakes me and I want to sit and be delighted with them as much and as long as possible. My god. Who doesn’t want to sit and be delighted?

So, coffee: An hour of excellent conversation passed. Then a second. Then we cheerfully parted ways.

As I left, it occurred to me: I’m in town a few more days and while there are so many things I want to do, this – this! – is conversation I’d like to have more of. I couldn’t honestly tell you if I had a strong romantic interest in him because I was a little enchanted with how smart he was. I liked it, being around his smartness, and I wanted to keep being delighted. Okay, I admit, he was also nice looking and had a wonderful smile. So I emailed him straight away and told him that with my limited time left in his city, before returning to my city, I would like to go out again and continue to be charmed.

And? Nothing. Silence.

I was mortified. Absolutely horrified. I felt stupid in a way I can’t describe. I mean, I know, sometimes people are busy and totally distracted by their lives and their work, and some people get freaked out by your friendliness and your forwardness, and some people are not polite enough to respond like adults—oh god, who knew what some people did, because I was too busy turning scarlet and wanting to die inside whenever I checked my email and turned scarlet all over again.

So I did what I always do in these situations: I conducted research. Using the details of the story, such as the wording of my email, but revealing no confidential information about the gentleman in question, I went to work to discover, in the least scientific and most anecdotal way possible: In 2012, can a woman ask out a man? Should she? Is it the last of our gendered hurdles we have yet to address? If we are addressing it, then how? What the hell does all this mean?

Anecdotally, I can tell you at least one thing: Every single married man who was involved in any of these conversations (and thanks to the various dinners and mixers I went to, more than you’d think) was completely gung-ho about women asking men out. More so than any other group. Which makes me wonder: Marriage changes your perspective? Your insecurities? Your wishful thinking?

Single guys were a little more divided: At least one told me I needed to (and I quote) “NEVER EVER AGAIN” say anything like that to a guy. One female friend told me I’d “crossed the guy boundary” by asking him to do something with me. Other female friends were much more in the “you must be fucking joking, what YEAR is it” camp. And some male friends were mostly curious: “Why haven’t you asked ME out?” 

A lot of people, bless their hearts, thought the man was a fool. They also wanted to know what kind of person can’t even respond to a nice email from a nice lady.

It’s a funny, isn’t it? Maybe it’s not about gender so much, at least not with everyone. We all want to chase and be chased a little. We want things to be easy but not too easy, to be interesting but not crazy, to be just right but not a fairytale. We want what we want and we’ll know it when we see it and maybe we’re screwed up but we’re not nuts like that one person who sure was horrible, and how could you have dated them anyway?

I imagine if I’d sent a series of increasingly hysterical emails that said things like “Our children will have brown hair! Why aren’t you emailing me?????” and “I’ve come up with the names for four of our imaginary kids but name number five is super hard and I can’t do it without you ps coffee makes you pregnant” and “Been emailing with your mom, we’re having dinner on Thursday! Are you coming?” then that would be, you know, fucking weird. But saying, “let’s go out again” isn’t weird. It’s not stepping over any boundaries. It’s not even necessarily romantic. If there’s anything I’ve learned, not just from my “research” but from the growing older and a little wiser and folding in on myself, it’s this: 

Be you.

Seriously, all these gender rules in dating are the worst. Be less afraid of asking men out. Be less afraid of being asked out, men. Be less insecure, all of us. “Men like to do the chasing” and “You’ll upset the power balance” and “You should wait x number of days”? Just go be you. Ask someone out for coffee if it feels right, if talking to them is the most delightful thing you’ve experienced in so long you can’t imagine not wanting to have that experience all over again. They might ignore you. Trust me, you won’t die. The one who responds to you? That person gets you, and when they do, the rules won’t matter one tiny bit. 

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

The second time we met you aimed yourself at me with a single-mindedness of intent and precision that only my own combined stupidity and insecurity could doubt. Technically it was the third time we’d met. But somehow I decided the first time didn’t count, because the first time was the year before, just after I’d started dating the worst person to ever call himself my boyfriend, and I’d been just drunk enough to be able to tell you I couldn’t remember specifically if we’d been introduced. It took me a long time to confess to you I’d known who you were, even that very first time. I’d been weirdly fascinated by what a self-centered creep you came off as online, like some yet-unearthed Brett Easton Ellis character come to life. I stood inside in the dark just beyond the door, away from the stage and the bar. You were talking to your friend, deep in conversation, when you looked up and saw me. A few months earlier, we’d met at the same place, outside. It was during some crowded and horrible event, made all the worse because of my breakup with that same sorry excuse for a human being from the year before. We had bumped into each other, floating through the crowd this way and that, in and out of the social pools and eddies that form in every gathering. You were there with a woman I somehow knew, a friend of a friend. It was a date that was not really a date, something that didn’t seem to be romantic although I’m sure she wanted it to be. You were beautiful. Kind of an asshole word was, but oh, you were beautiful. Whatever impression a woman can make in under five minutes of conversation, followed by bursting into tears and immediately leaving, I suppose I made that impression on you. Because that very next time you saw me, as you were talking to your friend, you stepped away from him without hesitation and came straight to me, like guided by some other hand, like a hawk tracking its god-given prey. You had been waiting for me, looking, scanning crowds. And there I was, and there it began. We talked as we stood there. You, me, and a friend of mine. The three of us stood and chatted about things I can’t remember now, except for this part, that I remember as clearly as I can remember the skin on your shoulders, so impossibly smooth. “We should get dinner sometime,” you said to me, interjecting it into the flow of conversation as naturally as you could. “Sure,” I replied, “that’d be great. I’d love to.” “You and I should get together too,” you said to my friend, as if we were all just to be friends, as if you had some intention of spending time with him too. Or maybe your social largesse, your need to connect and to collect, could not be controlled even in that moment. So we all exchanged information, our phones open and glowing in the bar, and then we drifted away like anything else in the dark currents. For a long time, I was under the mistaken impression that a soulmate was some sort of dream, like a love match from a fairy tale. A—maybe even the—person who would make you fundamentally happy. Who would make your life better simply by existing in your orbit. And maybe it is, for someone. I don’t know very many of those people. Because I think the truth is darker for so many of us. A soulmate may well be a connection to a part you never imagined could connect to anyone or anything, and for good reason. But there it is, and there you are, staring at someone who is so much like you, even if you can’t bring yourself to admit it. You can love a soulmate, but you cannot always stay with a soulmate: You are there to teach each other, to learn, to become hopelessly entangled, and eventually, to release.
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The second time we met you aimed yourself at me with a single-mindedness of intent and precision that only my own combined stupidity and insecurity could doubt. Technically it was the third time we’d met. But somehow I decided the first time didn’t count, because the first time was the year before, just after I’d started dating the worst person to ever call himself my boyfriend, and I’d been just drunk enough to be able to tell you I couldn’t remember specifically if we’d been introduced. It took me a long time to confess to you I’d known who you were, even that very first time. I’d been weirdly fascinated by what a self-centered creep you came off as online, like some yet-unearthed Brett Easton Ellis character come to life.

I stood inside in the dark just beyond the door, away from the stage and the bar. You were talking to your friend, deep in conversation, when you looked up and saw me.

A few months earlier, we’d met at the same place, outside. It was during some crowded and horrible event, made all the worse because of my breakup with that same sorry excuse for a human being from the year before. We had bumped into each other, floating through the crowd this way and that, in and out of the social pools and eddies that form in every gathering. You were there with a woman I somehow knew, a friend of a friend. It was a date that was not really a date, something that didn’t seem to be romantic although I’m sure she wanted it to be. You were beautiful. Kind of an asshole word was, but oh, you were beautiful.

Whatever impression a woman can make in under five minutes of conversation, followed by bursting into tears and immediately leaving, I suppose I made that impression on you. Because that very next time you saw me, as you were talking to your friend, you stepped away from him without hesitation and came straight to me, like guided by some other hand, like a hawk tracking its god-given prey. You had been waiting for me, looking, scanning crowds. And there I was, and there it began.

We talked as we stood there. You, me, and a friend of mine. The three of us stood and chatted about things I can’t remember now, except for this part, that I remember as clearly as I can remember the skin on your shoulders, so impossibly smooth.

“We should get dinner sometime,” you said to me, interjecting it into the flow of conversation as naturally as you could.

“Sure,” I replied, “that’d be great. I’d love to.”

“You and I should get together too,” you said to my friend, as if we were all just to be friends, as if you had some intention of spending time with him too. Or maybe your social largesse, your need to connect and to collect, could not be controlled even in that moment. So we all exchanged information, our phones open and glowing in the bar, and then we drifted away like anything else in the dark currents.

For a long time, I was under the mistaken impression that a soulmate was some sort of dream, like a love match from a fairy tale. A—maybe even the—person who would make you fundamentally happy. Who would make your life better simply by existing in your orbit. And maybe it is, for someone. I don’t know very many of those people. Because I think the truth is darker for so many of us. A soulmate may well be a connection to a part you never imagined could connect to anyone or anything, and for good reason. But there it is, and there you are, staring at someone who is so much like you, even if you can’t bring yourself to admit it. You can love a soulmate, but you cannot always stay with a soulmate: You are there to teach each other, to learn, to become hopelessly entangled, and eventually, to release.

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

You kept hissing at us in the Mercado Central, telling us to stop talking so loudly, glaring at me when my voice would rise from excitement or interest, informing us we needed to be more careful with our cameras and to stop drawing attention to our quartet of obviously American tourists. You were particularly annoyed with me and not your friends.  The Central Market in Lima is as big as anyone could imagine a central city market to be. Story after story, stall after stall, each floor dedicated to different household goods, tools, clothing, food. I remember in particular the food stalls. There was the bottom floor where all the butchers were, with their meats and ducks and chickens, stalls of unrefrigerated pig flesh parts swinging in the open Peruvian air above their own piggy heads. Just above, on sort of a mezzanine, was an astonishing array of vegetables, fruits, spices. Potatoes. So many potatoes. It makes sense I would remember the food. We spent a lot of time with food. We were fond of f-words. As we walked through the market, we made our way through an aisle filled with herbs and spices, loose in baskets and tucked tidily into plastic bags. You and your friends wandered off ahead, looping around out of sight. I lingered, caught by the bright red of a pepper and two ladies in stalls opposite one another watching me.  To my left, a tiny lady sat in what appeared to be a stall full of bagged chamomile flowers. To my right was an equally tiny woman, standing next to a large wooden bowl, over which she massaged peppers, creating a vermilion paste that stained her fingers a sort of reddish ochre. Neither stood over five feet. Neither were fat but rather sweetly round in a comforting, grandmotherly way. I was pretty sure both were part Indian, and while I didn’t speak Quechua, they chatted to each other in something other than Spanish at times. Both were missing a few teeth. I could not tell how old either was. Having lived in California, my ability to tell a person’s age had been disabled.  The woman to my right, with the peppers, smiled at me a little less shyly than her friend. She asked me where I was from. I told her, and we talked for a minute or two about California, Southern California in particular, where I was living. The bubble of Orange County seemed so far away from where we stood at that moment, a million lifetime years away.  Suddenly, after only a few minutes of chatter, the woman spoke with absolute seriousness. She put her small, rough hand on my arm and looked me in the eye.  “Nunca se casa, entonces puede viajar por todo el mundo.”  I looked back at her and blinked, not quite sure I’d heard what she said. Just then you rounded the corner and came looking for me. You came up to the two of us as we stood there and touched my shoulder, said you’d been looking for me. My little lady, my friend, her hand still on my other forearm, looked at you and then back at me. Eyes locked on me, she repeated herself. “Nunca se casa, entonces puede viajar por todo el mundo.” You looked at her and then at me, as if to ask: What on earth were you talking about? You were confused. Possibly upset? I couldn’t tell. I shook my head and broke the mood quickly, asking if you’d take a photo of us, me and my new friend. She was delighted, and so was I. Everything was forgotten in the snapping of digital shots and showing her what it looked like and saying goodbye. We walked away and I waved. Her words drummed themselves into me, a separate drumbeat. “Never get married, so you can travel the whole world.” Who was this lady, this little oracle, this voice? How did she know? How could she see so clearly? What had she wanted from her life that she had been unable to achieve? Had she ever left Peru? How far had she been from Lima? Had she wanted to travel the world? I had no way of knowing now, no way of knowing whether it was life or love that had kept her from some dream she had kept hidden. Maybe. But at heart it was this - what we all should know with such utter certainty: Never let anyone else keep you from your dreams. Never let anyone else define you. 
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You kept hissing at us in the Mercado Central, telling us to stop talking so loudly, glaring at me when my voice would rise from excitement or interest, informing us we needed to be more careful with our cameras and to stop drawing attention to our quartet of obviously American tourists. You were particularly annoyed with me and not your friends. 

The Central Market in Lima is as big as anyone could imagine a central city market to be. Story after story, stall after stall, each floor dedicated to different household goods, tools, clothing, food. I remember in particular the food stalls. There was the bottom floor where all the butchers were, with their meats and ducks and chickens, stalls of unrefrigerated pig flesh parts swinging in the open Peruvian air above their own piggy heads. Just above, on sort of a mezzanine, was an astonishing array of vegetables, fruits, spices. Potatoes. So many potatoes. It makes sense I would remember the food. We spent a lot of time with food. We were fond of f-words.

As we walked through the market, we made our way through an aisle filled with herbs and spices, loose in baskets and tucked tidily into plastic bags. You and your friends wandered off ahead, looping around out of sight. I lingered, caught by the bright red of a pepper and two ladies in stalls opposite one another watching me. 

To my left, a tiny lady sat in what appeared to be a stall full of bagged chamomile flowers. To my right was an equally tiny woman, standing next to a large wooden bowl, over which she massaged peppers, creating a vermilion paste that stained her fingers a sort of reddish ochre. Neither stood over five feet. Neither were fat but rather sweetly round in a comforting, grandmotherly way. I was pretty sure both were part Indian, and while I didn’t speak Quechua, they chatted to each other in something other than Spanish at times. Both were missing a few teeth. I could not tell how old either was. Having lived in California, my ability to tell a person’s age had been disabled. 

The woman to my right, with the peppers, smiled at me a little less shyly than her friend. She asked me where I was from. I told her, and we talked for a minute or two about California, Southern California in particular, where I was living. The bubble of Orange County seemed so far away from where we stood at that moment, a million lifetime years away. 

Suddenly, after only a few minutes of chatter, the woman spoke with absolute seriousness. She put her small, rough hand on my arm and looked me in the eye. 

“Nunca se casa, entonces puede viajar por todo el mundo.” 

I looked back at her and blinked, not quite sure I’d heard what she said.

Just then you rounded the corner and came looking for me. You came up to the two of us as we stood there and touched my shoulder, said you’d been looking for me. My little lady, my friend, her hand still on my other forearm, looked at you and then back at me. Eyes locked on me, she repeated herself.

“Nunca se casa, entonces puede viajar por todo el mundo.”

You looked at her and then at me, as if to ask: What on earth were you talking about? You were confused. Possibly upset? I couldn’t tell. I shook my head and broke the mood quickly, asking if you’d take a photo of us, me and my new friend. She was delighted, and so was I. Everything was forgotten in the snapping of digital shots and showing her what it looked like and saying goodbye. We walked away and I waved. Her words drummed themselves into me, a separate drumbeat.

“Never get married, so you can travel the whole world.”

Who was this lady, this little oracle, this voice? How did she know? How could she see so clearly? What had she wanted from her life that she had been unable to achieve? Had she ever left Peru? How far had she been from Lima? Had she wanted to travel the world? I had no way of knowing now, no way of knowing whether it was life or love that had kept her from some dream she had kept hidden. Maybe. But at heart it was this - what we all should know with such utter certainty: Never let anyone else keep you from your dreams. Never let anyone else define you. 

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

My first good and proper heartbreak came at 24, in a bedroom in Noe Valley, while I was wearing nothing but a pair of underwear. They were a dark grey and slung low across my hipbones, a very thin and soft cotton. I loved them.  The big bang happened after about four hours of fighting, the sort of unnecessary back-and-forth fighting that entails confused sobbing, then some yelling, then some quiet trying-to-understand, some crying and sad pleading for answers, and then yelling again. It was about 3:00 in the morning. Right then and there, as I watched and cried and yelled and once stupidly threw the keys across the room in a ridiculously dramatic gesture, he packed up everything he’d had at my apartment. He threw his large camping backpack over his shoulders and hoisted up his suitcase, both crammed with belongings that had migrated to my house over the months we’d fallen in love, through evenings at the bar where we’d met, weekend jaunts to nowhere in particular, and the long road trip we’d taken to Colorado and back. Without anything left to say, he turned away from me and walked slowly, a little unsteadily down the staircase to my front door. He left. I began wailing in earnest. Days later, during a horrible and painful phone conversation when he ill-advisedly called me to check and see how I was doing, he told me he could hear one last painfully long and drawn out “No!” as the door closed behind him. I said I imagined he could. In fact, I said imagined the entire neighborhood could. He related what had happened when he walked outside, bent forward slightly with his camping backpack on his back and his heavy suitcase in his hand. There were two people on the hood of his car. Of all the cars on the entire block, these two people, this couple, had picked his car. They were making out, intent and blissfully unaware beneath the street lights, against the white car in the black night. He stood there, burdened but dry-eyed, staring at them for a few moments, until they realized he was there. They looked at him, at his bags, and up toward the blazing lights of my apartment, where I was still crying. Glancing back at him, they quickly slipped off the hood and disappeared toward Mission Street. I was in bed when he called to check on me. I was in bed a lot that first week. I didn’t move much except to go to work or, when home, to the bathroom or to go to the kitchen, where I’d put the smoothies people brought me into the fridge. My collection of smoothies, anywhere from one-half to two-thirds full, slowly amassed on the cool shelves. The small and brightly colored army of slowly-melting fruity drinks were ready for me, their straws standing at full attention. It was no use. The breakup diet was in full effect, and those hipbones began to poke through ever more prominently. Then one day, after about a week had passed, I swung out of bed. It wasn’t that I had somewhere I wanted to go. After all, everywhere was terrible, because everywhere was without him. But terrible as it all was, my skin prickled and I knew lying there was more terrible. I couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t, with that feeling of slowly dying inside - although to be honest, after a week, the dying feeling was marginally better than it had been the week before. Maybe I’d perish, but not as horribly. So I started to walk. I walked from that same bedroom to downtown San Francisco, through The Mission, along Market Street, up into the edge of the Tenderloin, down past the busy shoppers near Powell and Union Square. I walked up the hills of Noe Valley and the Castro, up over to Buena Vista Park, to the top of Haight Street. I walked down Dolores to take Mandarin classes from a little tiny woman who had taught Mike Tyson to speak Chinese in prison. I walked to coffee shops, where I sat with a book and tried not to cry in public. I walked to overpriced food stores where things slowly started tasting like food again, albeit unnecessarily expensive food. I walked to nowhere in particular. Sometimes I talked to people. Usually I didn’t. The thing about walking in a city is you get to know it very well. You see houses you’d never discover in a car, make your way to streets you’d never find your way to if you had a specific destination, hear new languages and arguments and laughter and music. I’ve walked from 5th and 2nd to 72nd and 8th, from Logan Circle to the Library of Congress through the Mall to Georgetown and back again, from one arrondissment to another and then another. Each one of those walks has made the city unfold for me, given me my own secrets and memories, helped make the city mine. But this walking was different. This was never about the city. It was staying in motion until it all fell away, walking as long and as far as I needed to until I quite literally walked it off. Until I felt better. And of course, as we all eventually do, I did.  Years later, I laugh when I think about the whole thing, ridiculous wailing over-the-top heartbreak included. That’s how far I walked. I kind of think I never stopped. Here I am, still walking. And as for the underwear, I still have them too.
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My first good and proper heartbreak came at 24, in a bedroom in Noe Valley, while I was wearing nothing but a pair of underwear. They were a dark grey and slung low across my hipbones, a very thin and soft cotton. I loved them. 

The big bang happened after about four hours of fighting, the sort of unnecessary back-and-forth fighting that entails confused sobbing, then some yelling, then some quiet trying-to-understand, some crying and sad pleading for answers, and then yelling again. It was about 3:00 in the morning. Right then and there, as I watched and cried and yelled and once stupidly threw the keys across the room in a ridiculously dramatic gesture, he packed up everything he’d had at my apartment. He threw his large camping backpack over his shoulders and hoisted up his suitcase, both crammed with belongings that had migrated to my house over the months we’d fallen in love, through evenings at the bar where we’d met, weekend jaunts to nowhere in particular, and the long road trip we’d taken to Colorado and back. Without anything left to say, he turned away from me and walked slowly, a little unsteadily down the staircase to my front door. He left. I began wailing in earnest.

Days later, during a horrible and painful phone conversation when he ill-advisedly called me to check and see how I was doing, he told me he could hear one last painfully long and drawn out “No!” as the door closed behind him. I said I imagined he could. In fact, I said imagined the entire neighborhood could. He related what had happened when he walked outside, bent forward slightly with his camping backpack on his back and his heavy suitcase in his hand. There were two people on the hood of his car. Of all the cars on the entire block, these two people, this couple, had picked his car. They were making out, intent and blissfully unaware beneath the street lights, against the white car in the black night. He stood there, burdened but dry-eyed, staring at them for a few moments, until they realized he was there. They looked at him, at his bags, and up toward the blazing lights of my apartment, where I was still crying. Glancing back at him, they quickly slipped off the hood and disappeared toward Mission Street.

I was in bed when he called to check on me. I was in bed a lot that first week. I didn’t move much except to go to work or, when home, to the bathroom or to go to the kitchen, where I’d put the smoothies people brought me into the fridge. My collection of smoothies, anywhere from one-half to two-thirds full, slowly amassed on the cool shelves. The small and brightly colored army of slowly-melting fruity drinks were ready for me, their straws standing at full attention. It was no use. The breakup diet was in full effect, and those hipbones began to poke through ever more prominently.

Then one day, after about a week had passed, I swung out of bed. It wasn’t that I had somewhere I wanted to go. After all, everywhere was terrible, because everywhere was without him. But terrible as it all was, my skin prickled and I knew lying there was more terrible. I couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t, with that feeling of slowly dying inside - although to be honest, after a week, the dying feeling was marginally better than it had been the week before. Maybe I’d perish, but not as horribly. So I started to walk.

I walked from that same bedroom to downtown San Francisco, through The Mission, along Market Street, up into the edge of the Tenderloin, down past the busy shoppers near Powell and Union Square. I walked up the hills of Noe Valley and the Castro, up over to Buena Vista Park, to the top of Haight Street. I walked down Dolores to take Mandarin classes from a little tiny woman who had taught Mike Tyson to speak Chinese in prison. I walked to coffee shops, where I sat with a book and tried not to cry in public. I walked to overpriced food stores where things slowly started tasting like food again, albeit unnecessarily expensive food. I walked to nowhere in particular. Sometimes I talked to people. Usually I didn’t.

The thing about walking in a city is you get to know it very well. You see houses you’d never discover in a car, make your way to streets you’d never find your way to if you had a specific destination, hear new languages and arguments and laughter and music. I’ve walked from 5th and 2nd to 72nd and 8th, from Logan Circle to the Library of Congress through the Mall to Georgetown and back again, from one arrondissment to another and then another. Each one of those walks has made the city unfold for me, given me my own secrets and memories, helped make the city mine.

But this walking was different. This was never about the city. It was staying in motion until it all fell away, walking as long and as far as I needed to until I quite literally walked it off. Until I felt better. And of course, as we all eventually do, I did. 

Years later, I laugh when I think about the whole thing, ridiculous wailing over-the-top heartbreak included. That’s how far I walked. I kind of think I never stopped. Here I am, still walking.

And as for the underwear, I still have them too.

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

The first time I flew to Orange County, I cried.  I was living in Washington, DC at the time, and I had been on the east coast for a few years, having left California in a bit of a huff: I had to leave, just had to, because I felt like I was climbing out of my skin and wanted to shed it, leave it behind, get as far away from it and become whoever I was destined to become. It sounded good at the time, anyway, and so I’d done it and discovered exactly how well that sort of thing works. Washington, DC isn’t everyone’s favorite city, but I had loved my time there, had loved the Georgetown campus and my neighborhood to the east, had loved walking as many miles throughout the city as I possibly could. I was at a delicate point, too easily devourable then, and my short stint in New York had been long enough. DC had felt good and, I suppose, manageable. There was something about the underlying tension of the city that had fascinated me, too. My trip to Southern California signaled the end of my time in DC, but that wasn’t what saddened me. I was exploring the possibility of a new adventure, at a new university, in a place I’d never been. I’d been to Los Angeles, and once to San Diego. But Orange County was a mystery to me. Somewhere deep inside I felt the rumbling of uncertainty, but I pushed it aside. Then we began to descend and I saw it: The sprawling endless suburbs. The megalopolis extending from one mountain range to the next, from the hills to the shore, not so much metropolitan as an iterative series of interlocking strip malls and community developments, of 1950s cul de sacs and low slung anti-malls, of big box stores and bigger box McMansions, of the graveyards of orange groves and the last few nature preserves guarded against fire and encroaching development.  I had never lived in a suburb or a planned community. I had never really considered them. I had no interest in the suburbs and they had, as yet, had never taken an interest in me. But here I was, literally descending into them: panicking and crying. An absolute visceral reaction. It sounds ridiculous, I know. Flying to lovely Southern California, to a place people would kill to live in, and you would think I was being dropped off in a war zone. I even knew how ridiculous it was at the time, so I ignored it. Because who doesn’t pursue the next step in their lives - the future they’ve decided they want, for whatever reason - based simply on a powerful, immediate gut reaction? Who?  Next time, maybe you. Next time, maybe me. I know, sometimes we are very wrong. We meet someone and are swept off our feet. We judge by the cover and later learn exactly what lurks underneath. Even I discovered Orange County wasn’t all bad. But not all bad doesn’t mean all right. Sometimes you’re right. Sometimes you know. Recently I talked to someone who said he’s listened to his gut too much. He wanted to listen to something, maybe anything else. I felt a whisper. Was it about ignoring your gut as it was knowing how to listen? Do you know how to listen to yourself? Because I didn’t. What exactly is your gut telling you? Is it a case of nerves? Are you in the Poltergeist house? Is it in fact not your gut at all speaking but your hormones, or even your heart? On that plane, I heard myself telling me two very different things: one voice telling me this was the right track and one much deeper, more powerful voice telling me to get out, to go anywhere else. We’re always told to listen to ourselves above all, but until I was finding out what was beneath that cover, it never occurred to me to think about how.
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The first time I flew to Orange County, I cried. 

I was living in Washington, DC at the time, and I had been on the east coast for a few years, having left California in a bit of a huff: I had to leave, just had to, because I felt like I was climbing out of my skin and wanted to shed it, leave it behind, get as far away from it and become whoever I was destined to become. It sounded good at the time, anyway, and so I’d done it and discovered exactly how well that sort of thing works.

Washington, DC isn’t everyone’s favorite city, but I had loved my time there, had loved the Georgetown campus and my neighborhood to the east, had loved walking as many miles throughout the city as I possibly could. I was at a delicate point, too easily devourable then, and my short stint in New York had been long enough. DC had felt good and, I suppose, manageable. There was something about the underlying tension of the city that had fascinated me, too.

My trip to Southern California signaled the end of my time in DC, but that wasn’t what saddened me. I was exploring the possibility of a new adventure, at a new university, in a place I’d never been. I’d been to Los Angeles, and once to San Diego. But Orange County was a mystery to me. Somewhere deep inside I felt the rumbling of uncertainty, but I pushed it aside.

Then we began to descend and I saw it: The sprawling endless suburbs. The megalopolis extending from one mountain range to the next, from the hills to the shore, not so much metropolitan as an iterative series of interlocking strip malls and community developments, of 1950s cul de sacs and low slung anti-malls, of big box stores and bigger box McMansions, of the graveyards of orange groves and the last few nature preserves guarded against fire and encroaching development. 

I had never lived in a suburb or a planned community. I had never really considered them. I had no interest in the suburbs and they had, as yet, had never taken an interest in me. But here I was, literally descending into them: panicking and crying. An absolute visceral reaction.

It sounds ridiculous, I know. Flying to lovely Southern California, to a place people would kill to live in, and you would think I was being dropped off in a war zone. I even knew how ridiculous it was at the time, so I ignored it. Because who doesn’t pursue the next step in their lives - the future they’ve decided they want, for whatever reason - based simply on a powerful, immediate gut reaction? Who? 

Next time, maybe you. Next time, maybe me.

I know, sometimes we are very wrong. We meet someone and are swept off our feet. We judge by the cover and later learn exactly what lurks underneath. Even I discovered Orange County wasn’t all bad. But not all bad doesn’t mean all right. Sometimes you’re right. Sometimes you know.

Recently I talked to someone who said he’s listened to his gut too much. He wanted to listen to something, maybe anything else. I felt a whisper. Was it about ignoring your gut as it was knowing how to listen? Do you know how to listen to yourself? Because I didn’t. What exactly is your gut telling you? Is it a case of nerves? Are you in the Poltergeist house? Is it in fact not your gut at all speaking but your hormones, or even your heart?

On that plane, I heard myself telling me two very different things: one voice telling me this was the right track and one much deeper, more powerful voice telling me to get out, to go anywhere else. We’re always told to listen to ourselves above all, but until I was finding out what was beneath that cover, it never occurred to me to think about how.

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

The Fine Art Of Doing It Wrong

In high school, one of my chores was shoveling the driveway. Given that we lived in the Colorado high country, way up in the Rockies over 5000 feet above sea level, we received a not-insubstantial amount of snow: On average, about 30 feet a winter. 

The driveway to our house was not terribly long but it was long enough. It could fit a Volvo wagon and at least another car or two, including one of Toyota 4-Runner length and another similar, plus a little extra. It was straight and wide. Unlike most of the rest of the block, we didn’t have a snowblower, possibly because they were loud and obnoxious, but honestly I don’t remember why because I was 13 and too busy rolling my eyes and complaining in my head about the stupid reasons a person could come up with for thinking snowblowers were a bad idea.

Like many high schoolers, my first class of the day was at 7:30. If it snowed, and during the winter it often did, the driveway needed to be shoveled before I left for school. This sometimes meant shoveling at 5:30 in the morning. It’s worth noting that I was a teenage girl, that I do not do well in the cold thanks to bad circulation in my hands and feet, and that I was never in my life a morning person until recently - even this we could still debate, both in terms of “morning” and “person”. 

Shoveling the driveway meant first standing behind a large metal scoop with a large handle attached to both sides of the scoop, near the back. You grasped the handle, jammed the scoop into the fresh snow, down into the packed snow, down as far as you could to get as close to the pavement. Then you scooped forward, gathering as much old and new snow as possible, carrying it to the end of the driveway and across the street, and dumping it in the field on the other side. 

As a teenager, I was in good enough shape, but I didn’t have an enormous amount of upper body strength. I confess to you here what you can already guess: I hated this chore. Even so, I did it without fail every time it snowed, before school started, and I never hated it enough to intentionally do it wrong. I struggled with the scoop and often couldn’t get it to go down into the harder packed, old snow. Sometimes I’d just get the fresh new powder, running it along top the original surface, packing even more on top.

One weekend morning, as I was shoveling away, my dad - a tall, strong man - came outside and watched me for a moment as I maneuvered the scoop up and down the driveway. Suddenly I heard him behind me.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

I stopped as he came over. 

“See,” he told me, “you’re not getting down into the old stuff. You need to really get down in there, harder.”

He took the scoop and said, “Let me show you.”

I stood there, my face and fingers tingling with a combination of cold and the blood-rush of unfettered annoyance. My father tilted the scoop upward, angling the sharp front edge down into the packed snow and drove it in, gouging far deeper than I’d been able to. The scoop piled high with snow and he deftly ran it down the length of the driveway, dumping it across the street. He dragged the scoop back up to the top and repeated the process, and then again, and then again. I watched him two, three, maybe four times.

And then I slowly and quietly turned and went inside. where it was warm. He didn’t seem to notice. Eventually, the driveway was clear.

So next time, if someone tells you you’re doing it wrong, why not let them go ahead and expertly show you how to do it right?

Sometimes I joke that I’ll listen to any music, no matter how hokey or cheesy, as long as the lyrics aren’t sung in English. This is in fact mostly true. Right now I’m listening to Juanes. Juanes is a huge rock (okay, pop too) star from Colombia. The kind of huge rock star from Colombia who has won many Latin Grammies and who does a duet with Nelly Furtado. But it’s in Spanish! In Spanish, okay? That song is playing right this second, as I type. It’s called Fotografía. If the only song you know by Nelly Furtado is her major English hit, this is so much better. Although I can’t imagine it will be to your liking either if you don’t like pop music, even of the Latin-influenced variety. It’s about longing for someone, being heartsick and in love with someone who’s gone away and exists only in memories and photos. It’s a funny thing about photos. This one here: I took it two days before that other one, the one of all eyes and heart and torn edges. Two days. “In case you forget,” I wrote on it, “what I look like, especially when I look like this, here’s a reminder.”  We listened to Juanes together, he and I. After I left, I put Juanes away for a long time, along with a few other bands, most of them from Latin and South America. Maybe two years went by before I listened to any of it again, around the time we could finally have an email exchange without my feeling a rising panic, a sense of losing myself and being pulled into an unnecessary and multiple-day back-and-forth, instead walking away, breathing, and taking as long as I needed to reply - if I even replied at all - when things felt beyond my control. I think everyone does this with anything that plays into the rhythm and tactile experience of a relationship. A song, that song, forever ruined. Restaurants in whose booths your ghosts still linger. A latte preparation that can never be repeated. A photograph that you have to bury at the bottom of a shoebox, lock in a folder deep in the recesses of an external drive to keep you from re-imprinting the image in your mind, over and over. This photo, then. When I took it, I thought it showed how happy I was, how relaxed and at peace I was with a love I thought had been battled over then reconciled for the Nth time. God knows how many; at some point we lost count. Yet now when I look at it, this photo that I took three years ago yesterday, it is so clear to me, so obvious and plain and painful how exhausted and sad I am. The smile is in the eyes we always say, and in these eyes there is nothing but a realization without acceptance. The acceptance that crashes in a few days later and makes a long drive up the interstate even longer and angrier and lonelier. It has taken me three years to see this. It has taken me three years to begin writing about any of this. What I see now is how, when you are pushed up close against anything, clutching it to you like a photograph to your heart, you can’t see the truth in it. You can’t see the truth in yourself. Sometimes you have to walk and walk and walk, go as far as you can for as long as you can. There’s no set time limit, no “half as long as the experience itself” sort of equation. There’s no negating everything that happens after, either: The relationships and the people and the things you say and the things you do, those will matter too. In some ways they will be separate, and you will need to learn to separate them out and do them justice. In some ways they will be all tangled up in this thing and in the even bigger, unrelated things you will need to sort through, the things that will take much longer than three years to wrap your whole self around. But wrap you should. Unlock and learn, and then put it away more gently this time. Because you have looked like this too, haven’t you. We all have. Because it turns out what a person looks like, when she looks like this, is someone who is too close to understand the mountain she’s about to scramble down, whether it’s full of sheer walls or rocky slopes, whether it’s a towering K2 two people created together, whether it’s very much a molehill, or whether it’s a single summit in a range full of peaks to climb.
View Separately

Sometimes I joke that I’ll listen to any music, no matter how hokey or cheesy, as long as the lyrics aren’t sung in English. This is in fact mostly true. Right now I’m listening to Juanes. Juanes is a huge rock (okay, pop too) star from Colombia. The kind of huge rock star from Colombia who has won many Latin Grammies and who does a duet with Nelly Furtado. But it’s in Spanish! In Spanish, okay?

That song is playing right this second, as I type. It’s called Fotografía. If the only song you know by Nelly Furtado is her major English hit, this is so much better. Although I can’t imagine it will be to your liking either if you don’t like pop music, even of the Latin-influenced variety. It’s about longing for someone, being heartsick and in love with someone who’s gone away and exists only in memories and photos.

It’s a funny thing about photos. This one here: I took it two days before that other one, the one of all eyes and heart and torn edges. Two days. “In case you forget,” I wrote on it, “what I look like, especially when I look like this, here’s a reminder.” 

We listened to Juanes together, he and I. After I left, I put Juanes away for a long time, along with a few other bands, most of them from Latin and South America. Maybe two years went by before I listened to any of it again, around the time we could finally have an email exchange without my feeling a rising panic, a sense of losing myself and being pulled into an unnecessary and multiple-day back-and-forth, instead walking away, breathing, and taking as long as I needed to reply - if I even replied at all - when things felt beyond my control.

I think everyone does this with anything that plays into the rhythm and tactile experience of a relationship. A song, that song, forever ruined. Restaurants in whose booths your ghosts still linger. A latte preparation that can never be repeated. A photograph that you have to bury at the bottom of a shoebox, lock in a folder deep in the recesses of an external drive to keep you from re-imprinting the image in your mind, over and over.

This photo, then. When I took it, I thought it showed how happy I was, how relaxed and at peace I was with a love I thought had been battled over then reconciled for the Nth time. God knows how many; at some point we lost count. Yet now when I look at it, this photo that I took three years ago yesterday, it is so clear to me, so obvious and plain and painful how exhausted and sad I am. The smile is in the eyes we always say, and in these eyes there is nothing but a realization without acceptance. The acceptance that crashes in a few days later and makes a long drive up the interstate even longer and angrier and lonelier.

It has taken me three years to see this. It has taken me three years to begin writing about any of this. What I see now is how, when you are pushed up close against anything, clutching it to you like a photograph to your heart, you can’t see the truth in it. You can’t see the truth in yourself. Sometimes you have to walk and walk and walk, go as far as you can for as long as you can. There’s no set time limit, no “half as long as the experience itself” sort of equation. There’s no negating everything that happens after, either: The relationships and the people and the things you say and the things you do, those will matter too. In some ways they will be separate, and you will need to learn to separate them out and do them justice. In some ways they will be all tangled up in this thing and in the even bigger, unrelated things you will need to sort through, the things that will take much longer than three years to wrap your whole self around.

But wrap you should. Unlock and learn, and then put it away more gently this time. Because you have looked like this too, haven’t you. We all have. Because it turns out what a person looks like, when she looks like this, is someone who is too close to understand the mountain she’s about to scramble down, whether it’s full of sheer walls or rocky slopes, whether it’s a towering K2 two people created together, whether it’s very much a molehill, or whether it’s a single summit in a range full of peaks to climb.

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

Last night I listened to a Gladys Knight song about ten times in a row. That looping thing is something I do all the time, but I don’t know exactly why I did it last night. I’ve heard the song countless times before, so it wasn’t a new fascination. The lyrics, about a newly heartbroken man trying to find solace in the arms of a woman whose heart he broke before: That’s not a story I know. At least, not a story I know very well.  But there I was anyway, listening over and over. I’d felt an outsized sense of melancholy all day, a sort of blue-grey Sunday-ness. There was something necessary about the opening strains of the song, the lonely piano followed by the ticka-ticka-ticka-tick of the drumsticks and Gladys’ voice, tender yet full of sorrowful, powerful wisdom. I lay on my bed and half-heartedly wanted to cry. About three years ago I left a relationship. In fact, it was almost exactly three years ago. In two days, it will be precisely three years since I took that photo of myself. When I look at it, this self-portrait that is so very much a portrait of me, in a way few portraits ever have been, I see too-skinny arms and sharp jaw points and giant eyes that aren’t windows to the soul so much as they’re wide-open doorways directly to a slowly-broken-but-not-beaten heart. I’ve joked in the subsequent three years that the other person and I, we were like two hurricanes, not so much in a relationship as butting up against each other, smashing and storming and destroying, resting for occasional moments of peaceful beauty. We were not so much a couple that had trouble as we were a couple that sifted through the rubble to hold up the gleaming shells and the shining pieces of beach glass. Eventually I downgraded to a much smaller tropical storm and wanted to move on up the coast to slowly dissipate. I wanted out. Only the joke wasn’t as much a joke as it was a lot of truth wrapped up in a way I could deliver it, so I could try and distance myself from this thing that had defined those years of my life. More than defined: claimed, marked, owned, done things to I’m not even clear about. Realizing you’ve lost yourself in someone else is a difficult thing to admit. It’s an even more difficult thing to take responsibility for. When I got myself out of that relationship, it was a strangely brave thing. About two years later, when we were able to have a fairly reasonable conversation, he admitted it wasn’t something he would have been able to do but it was necessary. We were so wound up in each other, in pushing the worst of each other’s buttons, in being unable to let our own insecurities go and to hold gently the secret selves we shared with one another, in allowing him to be him and me to be me, whoever we were, with all our faults and annoying quirks. Being bewildered at the other’s inability to fill the deepest, darkest holes we all have. Because no one else can do that for another person. I think about him now and again, less than you’d think but more than I admit. I see where I, he, we - we - went wrong. How much I had to learn, and will always have to learn, about myself and other people. How it’s possible to do better in some ways, maybe in a lot of ways. How good the good parts were, and how I wish we’d held onto them more tightly. How, as scary and sometimes horrible it is to have your heart cracked wide open, whether by love or by something else altogether, to have it laid bare for everyone to see, scrawled all over your face no matter how hard you to try to be stoic or happy or to hide away: How else do you shine a light inside to do the real work?
View Separately

Last night I listened to a Gladys Knight song about ten times in a row. That looping thing is something I do all the time, but I don’t know exactly why I did it last night. I’ve heard the song countless times before, so it wasn’t a new fascination. The lyrics, about a newly heartbroken man trying to find solace in the arms of a woman whose heart he broke before: That’s not a story I know. At least, not a story I know very well. 

But there I was anyway, listening over and over. I’d felt an outsized sense of melancholy all day, a sort of blue-grey Sunday-ness. There was something necessary about the opening strains of the song, the lonely piano followed by the ticka-ticka-ticka-tick of the drumsticks and Gladys’ voice, tender yet full of sorrowful, powerful wisdom. I lay on my bed and half-heartedly wanted to cry.

About three years ago I left a relationship. In fact, it was almost exactly three years ago. In two days, it will be precisely three years since I took that photo of myself. When I look at it, this self-portrait that is so very much a portrait of me, in a way few portraits ever have been, I see too-skinny arms and sharp jaw points and giant eyes that aren’t windows to the soul so much as they’re wide-open doorways directly to a slowly-broken-but-not-beaten heart.

I’ve joked in the subsequent three years that the other person and I, we were like two hurricanes, not so much in a relationship as butting up against each other, smashing and storming and destroying, resting for occasional moments of peaceful beauty. We were not so much a couple that had trouble as we were a couple that sifted through the rubble to hold up the gleaming shells and the shining pieces of beach glass. Eventually I downgraded to a much smaller tropical storm and wanted to move on up the coast to slowly dissipate. I wanted out.

Only the joke wasn’t as much a joke as it was a lot of truth wrapped up in a way I could deliver it, so I could try and distance myself from this thing that had defined those years of my life. More than defined: claimed, marked, owned, done things to I’m not even clear about. Realizing you’ve lost yourself in someone else is a difficult thing to admit. It’s an even more difficult thing to take responsibility for.

When I got myself out of that relationship, it was a strangely brave thing. About two years later, when we were able to have a fairly reasonable conversation, he admitted it wasn’t something he would have been able to do but it was necessary. We were so wound up in each other, in pushing the worst of each other’s buttons, in being unable to let our own insecurities go and to hold gently the secret selves we shared with one another, in allowing him to be him and me to be me, whoever we were, with all our faults and annoying quirks. Being bewildered at the other’s inability to fill the deepest, darkest holes we all have. Because no one else can do that for another person.

I think about him now and again, less than you’d think but more than I admit. I see where I, he, we - we - went wrong. How much I had to learn, and will always have to learn, about myself and other people. How it’s possible to do better in some ways, maybe in a lot of ways. How good the good parts were, and how I wish we’d held onto them more tightly. How, as scary and sometimes horrible it is to have your heart cracked wide open, whether by love or by something else altogether, to have it laid bare for everyone to see, scrawled all over your face no matter how hard you to try to be stoic or happy or to hide away: How else do you shine a light inside to do the real work?

Source: Flickr / ohheygreat

Unearthings

I was named after my great-grandmother.

That much I knew already. I didn’t know that I met her husband, my great-grandfather Lepa. I also didn’t know he was offering $1000 for one of his grandchildren to name a daughter after his wife.

“You don’t remember meeting Zaydeh, do you? I don’t imagine you would. You were a very little girl.”

“No. What happened? Did he hold me? What did he say?”

“He called you ‘little goil’. And no, he didn’t hold you. He was very old.”

“Little goil!”

“He was delighted we had actually named you after my grandmother. My cousin Diane had named her daughter Leora, but that didn’t count. Anyway, Leora sounds… I don’t know, like a washerwoman or something.”

“You’re terrible.”

“What? Come on, can’t you see the stockings rolled at the knees and the crepe-soled shoes?”

“Stop.”

“Anyway, Diane named her daughter Leora, but that wasn’t my grandmother’s name. I wanted to name you Lena, because that was how I knew my grandmother. I didn’t love the name Lena but I was going to name you Lena because I loved my grandmother and that’s how I knew her. But Zaydeh wanted a granddaughter to be named after her real name, Leah. Her Hebrew name.”

“I like the name Lena.”

“You can call yourself Lena if you want.”

“So wait, did you get the $1000? I always thought…”

“I don’t remember if I did. I mean, it was a lot of money back then but it was also a long time ago. And no, that’s not why I named you Leah. Not for the money. I named you Leah because I loved my grandmother, and I wanted to name you after her. Also, I liked the name Leah. Lena wasn’t too bad, so I would have gone with that. But believe me, if her name had been Leora, I wouldn’t have named you Leora, not even for $1000.”

*********

“I can’t believe my mother was friends with all these famous artists, and the only one she bothered to get a piece of art from was a total no-name.”

“She was friends with famous artists?”

“Sure. She went to the Tyler School in the late ’30s, the ’40s. She was there maybe even in the ’50s. She was friends with Boris Blai, the dean of the school. Apparently Blai had an incredible house on the coast, filled with an amazing art collection. Then one day there was a hurricane. No more house… and no more amazing art collection.”

2011: A Love/Hate Letter

Remember how I wrote one to 2010? I thought I should write a quick one to 2011 too. 

Except then I realized I don’t have as much to say this year. 

Here’s the thing: 2011 was the year I put a lot of feelings aside to get a lot done. And I did. My mom is doing pretty well. I finished my PhD, despite some tough obstacles. I’m writing. I’m job hunting. 

2011 was also the year I really learned that a lot of times in life, you’re the one standing in your own way. Quit it. The sooner you stop living your life defined by someone else, living your life defined by your fears, living your life defined by some long-ago definition that you came up with and never learned from enough to make it a useful lesson - the sooner you go out and find some happiness. Seriously, you can’t know how short life is until it punches you right in the face with that brutal fact. No, you might not get the exact happiness you want or the happiness you feel you deserve, but you might get some pretty great happiness just the same. It might even turn out to be better than you imagined it could be. Let go of the horseshit and grab hold of the horse for once, ok?

2011 was the year I realized that you really do have to figure out how to love yourself. 

So 2011. You weren’t so bad. Not for me anyway (America’s 2011? That’s another story). Even so, I’m ready for your arbitrarily defined end, and as always I’m grateful. 

Now everyone, let’s make this world - and our lives - a little better in 2012. To hell with it: Fear less. Grow a pair. Go get what you want. Me too.

What do you say?