I love to whisper beside you, asking which states you’ve never been to and therefore don’t believe in. I love to learn your quiet morning routine, the way you talk with your hands, the way that you hold me for tens of minutes in your kitchen. I love the way you count the days you’ve known me, as if I hadn’t already told you that I didn’t believe in time and things like that anymore. 

This is the line in the sand.

For months, I was desperate to leave this city. For weeks, all I could think about was the sucking black hole of this place and how I would possibly survive if my escape plan didn’t work. I couldn’t imagine how I would go on if this company rejected me, if they didn’t like my work enough to be my rope ladder. The friends that left, the relationship that failed, the family member I lost, the work I hated and the pressure I was being crushed by slowly. At some point, I gave up my slow crawl in exchange for treading water. I let every small failure hit me unguarded. Took every punch to the gut and convinced myself I deserved it. I slept late or didn’t sleep at all. I hid from people that cared for me and ran to the arms of people that I knew would treat me exactly how I felt about myself already. I got sick and stayed sick.  In every sense I was desperate. In every sense, I couldn’t imagine how I would feel in March. I couldn’t even imagine March.

It’s March. It’s here and I’m here and this is the place where I will rebuild. In part, it starts with realizing that I have been an absolute idiot about men, or even people in general. Save one important exception, I have grown accustomed to being expendable, to being taken and left in love. I’ve betrayed my little heart by by inflating small moments to be signifiers of great emotional connection. By accepting less than what I’ve deserved. Perhaps this is the problem with having had amazing love early in life- anything since has been paltry and frustratingly dim. So, instead of holding to that bright example, I’ve accepted anything that was offered and received exactly what I should have expected. My awesome friends, please hear this and smack me upside the head with it when I ignore my own words: this is bullshit. I deserve what I love to give. You do. K, You deserve what you give and what you have been accepting is not even close to what you would like to give. So stop. Oh god, it is so simple isn’t it. Stop accepting it. 

In January, I couldn’t imagine making it here. I had no idea that I could hit back, no idea that the simple word ‘No’ would become the most empowering weapon in my arsenal. When I said I couldn’t imagine being here in this city much longer, what I meant to say was, “I cannot imagine being myself for much longer”. This month is a detox of all that. No dating, no wasting my time with things that don’t fill my heart to bursting. A giant life reset- a cleaning out of the things and people and habits that don’t serve my brighter spirit. These are the first days of the month, but I had coffee with a friend early today and yoga with another this morning. Yes, to all of that. Yes. I could live like this. I could survive like this. With no and yes, I’m beginning to imagine March and May and April and June in any city. I can imagine March and May and April with myself. 

Dear Love, 

This is your year to be brave. To choose the harder, better path. To be more, to be amazing. To push forward in the way you know to grow. Follow the tiny voice, the challenging voice that will never be quiet, no matter how many easy roads you may try to take. Take control of your finances. Face things head on. Look your inhibitions square in the eye and say no. Remember your meeting with Dad. Remember your time with Grandpa- “I fear nothing.”

This year, choose to be brief but powerful. Seek what you need and take it. Keep art in your life. Keep our promises to yourself, to others. If you fuck up, fix it. If you get sad, face it. If you over do it, forgive yourself. Read more poetry. Use your cell phone less. Love, love, love, love, love, love, love. Above all things; love. 

-12/31/11

I had a dream that I built a tiny postbox under the bus stop bench where he sits at every day. In real life, this bench is coincidentally located below my apartment window. He goes home to his apartment where he coincidentally has the same print that hangs in the window of my apartment above the bench where he sits. He makes himself a drink at the countertop next to the bookshelf that also coincidentally holds plenty of books that I also have or love. He sits at his computer where I once left him a small note in calligraphy: “Today is the day after yesterday. -K.”

In real life, I went to the hardware store down the street from his bus stop/my house. I asked for a mason jar and the well worn owner of the hardware store made me explain why I wanted it. It sounded silly saying out loud- the reasons why I would build a little post box in real life when I had already dreamed it. I blushed, losing all sense of appropriateness, telling him that “Everything in this world is too easy. Too meaningless. It’s texting or emailing or liking. How lovely would it be to wait for the bus and find a note left for you by a girl that lives above where you’re sitting right now?” 

Right now, I’m awash in small disappointments every day. It’s one of those times when things just won’t go right. But if I can hold on to the part of me that will build a tiny postbox because it worked in a dream, I think I can weather the rest. 

"…I mistake you for the city where we lived. In the city where I live now, I smoke in bed and think of you, but like in dreams where I can’t see anyone’s face, when I look too hard, you’re not you. You’re the sound of traffic and the back of a shirtless rickshaw driver and the rows of yellow lights by the lake that turn everything colorless and the sun on the tops of buildings and the shade in the streets. You’re the sidewalk that gets swept by water when it storms and the vines taking over the abandoned warehouse across the street where we saw kids smoking in the afternoon when they skipped class and it turns out you’re even me; me sweating in the cold biking home from work, me sitting on a fire hydrant on a street corner, me staring at nothing, my chest heaving. It turns out you’re my heaving chest. It turns out you’re everything but you.” - BPT"

I had forgotten that a man once wrote a poem to me. It was a about the woman he thought I was and I remember how angry this made me then. I thought he should have been able to see me so well, after recitation of poetry in bed that he wrote to me in France and letters we ended up writing to each other while he was in Avignon and I was in Anthropologie. Please, don’t mistake me; there was no great love here- just two writers and one summer and nothing more than too much wine on a porch. I accused him of putting me down like a coffee mug on his way to wherever he went after. Maybe I was right? Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe I had been put down or misplaced one or two too many times before and he was just the one that would understand the metaphor. No matter. We were silent for years until I came across his recorded voice today, clear as a bell, reading to everyone.

In the giant mess after the storm of the last six months, I am the misty girl he mistook me for then.  Ugly, messy, raw as a scar but healing. Each of these days has started with the quiet reassurance that ‘I am doing just fine’. I am trying to be small and quiet and tiny with grief. I am doing yoga every day. I am making lentil soup. I am going on dates. I am going to work. I am waiting anxiously for an answer. I am avoiding phone calls. I am trying not to be annoyed by the clicking of shoes on wood floors. I am trying to wake up early. I am making french toast. I am getting manicures. I am drinking coffee on my roof.  I am trying to sleep late. I am watching movies. I am reading books. I am waiting.

I am trying to be fine but I am also trying to cope. The only people I seem to be okay telling are the people I owe excuses. I don’t know how to call up my close but far away friends and say “I lost my grandfather and I’ve been a surrogate mother for months so my own mother could be his mother while my father lives elsewhere and my sister lives elsewhere and my whole life is elsewhere now too.” No easy way to explain that the funeral was hard and it is all getting to me in a cumulative way. Like I said, I’m trying to be fine. 

The big fear here is, of course, the next step. For months, I couldn’t go. I couldn’t commit to forty hours a week, limited vacation days and a set schedule. I had to be there- not because they made me, but because someone needed to be. The kickstand is gone, the tether unwound and I am drifting in every sense. I am my own chest heaving. I am my own sidewalk swept. I am myself staring at nothing and feeling everything but me.

May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
The sun shine warm upon your face
The rains fall soft upon your fields
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.

I don’t quite know what to do with today, with what happened tonight. I suppose when you hear someone receive their last rites on an iphone speaker, it’s bound to be a confusing comedown. Here in the interim I probably prayed. Prayed because that’s the language that he spoke and they speak. Praying for him, with them, but not for myself.

They say, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee”. I think “Oh, whoever is there, let me always remember the days he showed me maps of where he had been and where he planned to go next. Let me inherit his wandering spirit, his bravery and his love of living things. Let those memories become like little egrets, waking me with song and wingspan and soft downy whiteness.” 

Soften your heart and brighten.

Today was the first day of my yoga month. My month to repair and strengthen. This year, I lost twenty-eight pounds. I finished school, I launched ships and buried old sadnesses. I let go of expectations and long grudges. I stripped bare- down to the heart of me. Listening to what I was afraid of, discovering what I wanted. I softened my heart to take away armor and now is the time to rebuild. Fittingly, the first class of my thirty day yoga experience was about newness. Preparing for rebirth, readying for change. I went with a friend for the first time, a bit late but filling my saved spot with haste.

This week has been exhaustingly new- taken up entirely with first dates and job interviews, both of which flowed oddly together into a blur of “tell me about yourself”. When I woke up today, I wanted to leave my guard down. I wanted to say I love you (as I habitually do), and hug and not think about my hair. When I got to class, I dropped my shoulders, my arms. My fingers stretching to my toes and catching on taut hamstrings. I felt my body curve and remember those steps I’ve repeated for twelve years now. My mind raced to a peacefully contemplative space- wandering through the words the instructor spoke, ambling about a hip to be opened more, a tailbone to tuck, an abdomen to hollow and scoop. This body of mine, oh how it can defeat me at moments. My mind is so much more predictable- it loves color and small works of art. My brain loves emotion and sharing and the brilliance of good conversation. My mind, I can trust.

When the instructor noticed me gasp in pain at a pinched nerve in my shoulder (no doubt the fault of poor sleep and wild dreams), she came to me and didn’t ask. She reached beneath my shoulder blade, stretching hands beneath me to soothe the knot while my breathing slowed. In memory, the lines blurred between this breathy admission of pain and the sound I didn’t mean to make when he gently brushed clavicle with thumb, before tucking hair behind my ear just nights before. Is there any doubt that this is what we all want? Of course, white hot tears sprang to my eyes in both moments. For now I am all beginnings.

"You couldn’t pretend you had lost nothing… you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.”
― Lorrie Moore"

Coping mechanisms were not the ship that would come to save her. No, they were the hole-riddled bucket that she used to bail and bail until the ship came around. The list of existing (but not condoned) coping mechanisms include activities such as: eating only oranges and drinking only water until the individual in question was nearly drunk on water alone- light headed and hitting the bathroom in ten minute increments. They included such things as going outside and sobbing beside a rental car, bare feet squishing on moist tar roads. On moist tar roads where bugs and small lizards and not-so-small frogs walked like it was nothing. They involved stupid, stupid ideas like online dating, where she could gather something to fortify herself against the small voice (which she suspected was wrong, by the way) that promised she wasn’t worth finding serendipitously. She let the inbox fill and fill her with hate so she didn’t think about the men she loved, who loved her well and with whom she parted when it was time. She loved those men and loved who they helped her be and she was overrun with the complicated emotion of completely understanding why, but still not liking it.

She filled up her bucket with all of these things so that she didn’t have to think about the real thing. She distracted herself with clicking and typing out her core interests so that when she felt another crushing blow, it would be like music muffled through water. The drowning was too hard to explain- no easy way to just say that a death was coming and it wasn’t stopping and that was how it would be. No way to gently lob that piece of information without silencing everything so awkwardly. No easy way to say “I held his hand while they fed him through a tube. I rubbed his back and felt every bone.”

No, none of these things were the ship. The ship was time and quiet. All she could do was hold on.