random act of bravery

I painted the walls and steamcleaned the floors. I hung curtains and shouldered my weight behind a drill. There are holes in my walls and I covered them with thick coats of white primer, with furniture positioned to hide the cracks. Some nights I just walk slowly back and forth along the length of this apartment, feeling the silence around me like something with form, like a new partner.

It's an adjustment, this living alone. I wonder how many times I have to listen to this song before a neighbour calls suicide watch.

The day we moved out, I went back to my old apartment to drop off the keys, sometime around midnight. Earlier one of the guys who helped me move told me my new place reminded him of his grandmother's home in Puerto Rico, and that allowed me to find its decrepitude charming in a way I hadn't before, and I was thinking of that as I bounded up the two flights of stairs in my old building, slipped the keys into the lock for the last time. I was halfway down the hallway when I realized the new residents had already moved in. Their belongings were piled in the centre of our kitchen and living room, a couch standing on its end, a desk tucked up against the stove. I froze. By some stroke of good fortune they were out, so there was no one to catch me there. But it made my heart lodge itself in my throat - not just the fear of being found in someone else's apartment, but realizing that it was now someone else's apartment - that in less than 2 hours, the rooms I had called home for a whole year, the rooms in which I'd raised two cats, held my roommates as they wept and been held in turn, had sex, had a fever, baked loaves of zucchini bread, broken my heart, broken at least 4 glasses, changed my plans, changed them again - these rooms belonged to someone else now. I was bowled over by the temporary-ness of this, of living in New York City. By the realization that I will only ever be an interloper here.

I slipped the keys from my ring and left them on the stovetop. I turned off the light.

truths universally acknowledged

1. Moving in is better than moving out.
2. Everything is better than moving out.
3. You may have spent the year you lived with the personal trainer self-shaming and resolution-making, but you will be grateful for every ounce of guilt and loathing when it comes time to lift the things.
4. You have too much stuff.
5. With every year, it will become infinitely easier to throw away the crappy jewellery your crappy ex gave you.
6. There is no better album for motivating inane activities than Bryan Adams' 1991 masterpiece, "Waking Up the Neighbours."
7. That apartment - the one for which you signed the lease and paid the security deposit and the brokers fee in a feverish haze because it was rent-stabilized and in your neighbourhood and had a painted red door, the one you thought might need some cosmetic work but it's nothing you can't handle, what's a little grout when you will be able to live alone for the first time in your life? - will be so much worse than you remembered. Open the door to the fridge. See that? That's a fish. Half a fish frozen against the wall of the freezer. That is your life now. It's you and the fish. Mount up.

mikvahs

This is soup. This is the soup I eat at my desk. It's got soba noodles in it and tofu and you get to choose two vegetables. Choosing which vegetables is the most difficult part, sometimes.

Which isn't saying anything about my life. It's just soup, guys.

There wasn't any soup at my desk in Maine. There was, however, a lake just down the hill from our cabin that I slipped into at dawn the morning of the wedding. I went in naked, because that's what you do for a mikvah, and the water was warm from the rain the night before.

There was also this in Maine:

I mean, THAT's a wedding. 

That's me there in the blue chiffon. We were a rainbow of chiffon. And by god, we actually looked lovely. Hear that, ESB? A RAINBOW OF CHIFFON. 

There have been some brave acts lately, like speaking from the heart, but here's the real truth: I'm afraid my bravery is becoming rote. I could publish a collection of righteous emails, I think. Maybe there's not enough doing. Real doing. Real brave doing. Maybe there's a little too much eating soup at my desk while listening to The Walkmen. Where's the line, exactly? I want to see the line, and then I want to put my heart on it. 

Also I want the perfect black dress. Nothing fancy, loose and sexy, with room for my not insignificant chest. Let me know if you've seen it. 

two things

"How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner."
                                                                                                                     Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell.

Rereading Cloud Atlas as a security blanket, as a gift. This book cracks me open. I keep having to put it down because I feel unworthy of the words.

Also, this song, a whole bunch.

 

I'm heading to Maine this week to watch two of my nearest and dearest hitch their lives to each other. I'm wearing the bridesmaid hat for the first time. Turns out I'm a really shitty bridesmaid, which is perhaps not surprising. Still, I'm all glory and agog and eager, ready to stand up there and witness this, the grandest of gestures.

open wide

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.” 

— D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers

I had a revelation recently, a revelation that served as insulation, a bubble-wrapped moment of understanding that will no doubt sound pathetic on the page-ish, but which I think I might cling to for a while to see where it takes me, and that was this: Maybe there are people who are really good at being brokenhearted. By which I mean, maybe I am one of those people. There is a madness in love and I went at it full-throated and wide when I first caught the scent. It sped me up and gave me purpose. Loving - not being loved - was the thing that sustained me. Being loved back was much more difficult, and if I'm entirely honest, I'm not sure it ever really fit. I chafed under it. And when, after eight years, the one guy who had ever claimed to love me left in a pretty ugly way, there was a part of me that said, Of course. 

In the two years since, I've pinned my heart to others in a very misguided fashion, sort of blithely, gleefully saying, Oh hey, there's a cliff, go throw yourself off of it. I've made all the choices I shouldn't make. It's not a reckless affection I give to others, and it is terribly rare, but when it comes it is so intense, so consuming, and, for me, truly, so joyful. It feels so wonderful to give love. AND SO AWFUL. All at once! And I am so very, very good at it! If it were an Olympic sport, my mixtapes and love letters would win gold. So full of feeling, the Russians would say, daubing their eyes. What if, rather than resisting this, rather than becoming small and safe or opening only to something lasting, something reciprocal, I just kept. fucking. loving. Loving everything in my path. Friends and books and pie and all the wrong men. Right through the pain and the loneliness and the ache. Let the dawn-kaleidoscopic cracks open wide. What if loving, despite everything, is the bravest work of my life? 

I have these two cats. They're perfect. I've told you about them. It's round two of fostering. They're being adopted by a vet in Long Island. I have loved four cats now who weren't mine. They weren't mine, and I loved them anyway. There. That is the best thing I've ever done. 

i only care about me

So, remember that time I wrote that thing? I thought it might be an interesting experiment to say the thing I'm most ashamed to say. I thought it might be brave? I also thought - hoped - that it would invite discussion. Hey ho, it did. I feel very grateful for that, and also like I want to make a large pot of noodles and then dump then on my face and walk down the street, just to try out a different kind of humiliation.

The most pointed criticism, I think, is "Why are we supposed to care about this?" How could I imagine I have anything useful or interesting to say? It's the concern that plagues all personal essays - if there is no universal question at the heart of the work, why does it deserve to exist? I don't even begin to imagine that my tiny thoughts have any relevance to anyone - they often cease to be relevant to me as soon as I've had them - but creative nonfiction, essaying, memoir, all involves that very measure of grandiosity. It's a very vulnerable kernel: the audacity to believe that there might be one other neuron in the world that will spark the way yours did, even if only for a second. And then you have to capitalize on that small glow and try and feed it (with wine, with Honey Nut Cheerios out of a mug) in order to sustain 1500 words of whim and folly and then you have to have the gall to actually throw it askew on a proverbial wall and then, most horrifying of all, you have to stand under it, beaming, asking someone to come in and tell you what they think. (See also: OH HEY LOOK I HAVE A BLOG.)

It was a good morning to read this: The Shrinking Boundaries of Being a (Certain Kind of) Twentysomething. I have a uselessly heteronormative crush on Richard Lawson, but man, he got a little MEAN. Still, I nodded sagely - because yes! how deeply self-involved to imagine anyone else could be interested in what you have to say, especially when what you have to say is nothing more than a deeply self-involved rumination on the minute segment of the population in which you happen to live - and then I went and clicked over to my article to refresh the comments for the 75th time.

(Please note that the first comment on Lawson's article is: "Oh shut up already and go have an actual life.")

In case I didn't make myself clear: I am so lucky. I want to bake everyone who has ever read any word I have ever written a very large muffin of your choosing. I want to give back your time in baked goods. I want to take you down to Chick-fil-A so we can eat those muffins and make out, if you are a girl. Let's all do something wild and good together.

in defense of

"The tattoo is primal parent to the visual arts. Beginning as abstract maps of spiritual visions, records of the 'other' world, tattoos were originally icons of power and mystery designating realms beyond normal land-dwellers' experience.

The extra-ordinary qualities of the tattoo's magic-religious origin remain constant even today, transferring to the bearer some sense of existing outside the conventions of normal society."

Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker

lessons from Nora

While watching Heartburn, I realized I want to be the kind of woman who can have a man over to her apartment and, when we get hungry at 4am, duck into the kitchen only to come back with an impeccable plate of spaghetti puttanesca, all briny and saucy and messy, all wild in a large bowl, that we eat together in bed.

*Edited to say I care much less about having a man than I do about having the ability to cook that spaghetti.

random act of bravery

a diptych:

From Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Letter #9: "And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me, life is in the right, always."

random act of bravery

Everything happens in black and white with short hair. It's European, or something.