4.24.2012
4.12.2012
only connect
I haven't been writing much lately. Other places, a sentence or two, but not here.
I have been spending a lot of time in the company of others.
I've watched this trailer now, like, too many times to count. I find it very comforting, somehow - it reminds me that I am part of a community. A community of women who have been fucked over. This week I ate pizza on the floor with 9 other women, and one who was Skyped in, her face disappearing every now and then from the frame, eating matzoh and smiling at us, fragmented. I don't usually spend that much time around that many women. Earlier this month, when I was asked which celebrity I would like to be in charge of during our work gala, I asked for a straight male: that's my jam. Women - all women - tend to make me nervous. They see through me much more quickly than men do.
But there we were, on the floor of an apartment on the Upper West, balancing our plates on our knees, and one of us suggested we go around the circle and update the others on our life. It was like Estrogen 101. My point is: there was a story told about a sister whose fiancee had cheated on her with a close friend. The wedding had to be called off. We were even shown the bridesmaid dress, an olive green strapless chiffon still in plastic, unrefundable. The story was being told and everyone was nodding, even if it hadn't happened to them, because it has happened to someone. Some girl. Some woman they know and love, somewhere, has been so blindsided, so gobsmacked, so wrecked by someone they thought they could trust. Someone in whom they had deposited their best work. And in some ways it feels good to know that. This particular girl got an awesome hair cut and a killer new apartment and retaliated by calling his family and rehashing every ugly detail of the cheating, so they would know who their son and brother really was. Which I suppose is an interesting way to phrase it, because isn't what I'm saying that we never really know who another person really is? Isn't that the whole point?
Still, it's comforting to think I could sleep with someone in rollerblades and drink to excess and eat chips and that somehow connects me to this grand, sweeping community of women worldwide who have been knocked farther down than they believed to be possible, and then got back up.
(I have already danced on a pole at a club. And then fallen on my face when getting out of the cab I had poured myself into. And then crawled across the street to my apartment while someone, someone, someone I couldn't even bear to acknowledge called to me: "Um...are you okay?" DEAR GOD I WILL BE.)
Today I remembered a moment in Puerto Rico, six years ago now. The 12 of us had rented a room in a hotel in San Juan so that we could lock our backpacks inside while we explored the city before our flight back to Vermont. It was a seedy and cheap place near the city centre. I remember not wanting to leave my bag - I remember some of us arguing about whether it was safe - but in the end we decided we didn't have much of a choice. It was muggy even as the sun was setting. In San Juan there are rats that climb trees just like they think they're squirrels. The city descends to the sea over sharp, lonely cliffs. On our way out of the hotel, we were stopped on the stairs by someone who didn't want us to see what was happening below, a short man who sort of waved his arms and yelled in Spanish: a woman was being carried down the steep stairs of the hotel by two old men. One held her under her young, bare arms and the other had his hands hooked beneath her legs. She lolled against them and didn't open her eyes. I don't remember if we could tell if she was alive or not. That seems important. Maybe the point is that we didn't know, couldn't ask. There was another woman in the van they brought her to and she was screaming in a closed mouth sort of way, like someone had told her to shut up. Some of us had muscled down the stairs and watched as they put the girl in the van, folding her body awkwardly. As I remember it, we thought they were arguing about whether or not they should take her to the hospital. I think we decided that she was an addict, that she was having an overdose. We must have decided she was alive. If we hadn't made that decision, then we had all seen two men carry a dead body out of a hotel in the middle of the day in San Juan. We have never talked about it. We are a community. Am I making sense? There are things that link us, and some of them are horrible, and some of them are beautiful. We were sitting on the floor eating pizza because one of us is having her breasts removed today, because cancer has come back to her lit-up, young, vibrant body. And I drank too much and danced on a pole because the man I loved for eight years deemed me worthless one day, and left. And we all watched that woman be carried out of the hotel and said nothing, knew there was nothing to be said, and maybe forgot. And I haven't been writing because I have been living, connecting, or trying to. And I'd like you to tell me that's the right thing to do, or the only thing, and maybe those are one and the same.
I have been spending a lot of time in the company of others.
I've watched this trailer now, like, too many times to count. I find it very comforting, somehow - it reminds me that I am part of a community. A community of women who have been fucked over. This week I ate pizza on the floor with 9 other women, and one who was Skyped in, her face disappearing every now and then from the frame, eating matzoh and smiling at us, fragmented. I don't usually spend that much time around that many women. Earlier this month, when I was asked which celebrity I would like to be in charge of during our work gala, I asked for a straight male: that's my jam. Women - all women - tend to make me nervous. They see through me much more quickly than men do.
But there we were, on the floor of an apartment on the Upper West, balancing our plates on our knees, and one of us suggested we go around the circle and update the others on our life. It was like Estrogen 101. My point is: there was a story told about a sister whose fiancee had cheated on her with a close friend. The wedding had to be called off. We were even shown the bridesmaid dress, an olive green strapless chiffon still in plastic, unrefundable. The story was being told and everyone was nodding, even if it hadn't happened to them, because it has happened to someone. Some girl. Some woman they know and love, somewhere, has been so blindsided, so gobsmacked, so wrecked by someone they thought they could trust. Someone in whom they had deposited their best work. And in some ways it feels good to know that. This particular girl got an awesome hair cut and a killer new apartment and retaliated by calling his family and rehashing every ugly detail of the cheating, so they would know who their son and brother really was. Which I suppose is an interesting way to phrase it, because isn't what I'm saying that we never really know who another person really is? Isn't that the whole point?
Still, it's comforting to think I could sleep with someone in rollerblades and drink to excess and eat chips and that somehow connects me to this grand, sweeping community of women worldwide who have been knocked farther down than they believed to be possible, and then got back up.
(I have already danced on a pole at a club. And then fallen on my face when getting out of the cab I had poured myself into. And then crawled across the street to my apartment while someone, someone, someone I couldn't even bear to acknowledge called to me: "Um...are you okay?" DEAR GOD I WILL BE.)
Today I remembered a moment in Puerto Rico, six years ago now. The 12 of us had rented a room in a hotel in San Juan so that we could lock our backpacks inside while we explored the city before our flight back to Vermont. It was a seedy and cheap place near the city centre. I remember not wanting to leave my bag - I remember some of us arguing about whether it was safe - but in the end we decided we didn't have much of a choice. It was muggy even as the sun was setting. In San Juan there are rats that climb trees just like they think they're squirrels. The city descends to the sea over sharp, lonely cliffs. On our way out of the hotel, we were stopped on the stairs by someone who didn't want us to see what was happening below, a short man who sort of waved his arms and yelled in Spanish: a woman was being carried down the steep stairs of the hotel by two old men. One held her under her young, bare arms and the other had his hands hooked beneath her legs. She lolled against them and didn't open her eyes. I don't remember if we could tell if she was alive or not. That seems important. Maybe the point is that we didn't know, couldn't ask. There was another woman in the van they brought her to and she was screaming in a closed mouth sort of way, like someone had told her to shut up. Some of us had muscled down the stairs and watched as they put the girl in the van, folding her body awkwardly. As I remember it, we thought they were arguing about whether or not they should take her to the hospital. I think we decided that she was an addict, that she was having an overdose. We must have decided she was alive. If we hadn't made that decision, then we had all seen two men carry a dead body out of a hotel in the middle of the day in San Juan. We have never talked about it. We are a community. Am I making sense? There are things that link us, and some of them are horrible, and some of them are beautiful. We were sitting on the floor eating pizza because one of us is having her breasts removed today, because cancer has come back to her lit-up, young, vibrant body. And I drank too much and danced on a pole because the man I loved for eight years deemed me worthless one day, and left. And we all watched that woman be carried out of the hotel and said nothing, knew there was nothing to be said, and maybe forgot. And I haven't been writing because I have been living, connecting, or trying to. And I'd like you to tell me that's the right thing to do, or the only thing, and maybe those are one and the same.
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