Oooh! Wait! Two more! Because I can’t get enough LM quotes!

Again. Anagrams. It’s a wonderful, bewildering, poignant novel.

By this point we’re all aware that I’m obsessed and sing praises of this woman and her work quite frequently to the moon. As if you needed more fodder, more reason to get out and buy a book, here are three more Moore snippets. I don’t think I have to explain why I love them so much–though I am no longer nearly as bereft as Benna.

“I was not large enough for Gerard. I was small, lumpy, anchored with worry, imploded. He didn’t want me, he wanted Macy’s; like Aeneas or Ulysses, he wanted the anonymity and freedom to wander purchaseless from island to island. I could not be enough of the world for him. A woman could never be enough of the world, I thought, though that was what a man desired of her, though she flap her arms frantically trying.” (35)

And:

“It was like some principle of physics: Things flowed naturally back and forth between the two apartments until the maximum level of chaos was reached. I had his can opener, but he had my ice-cube trays. It was as if our possessions were embarked upon some osmotic, conjugal exchange, a giant french kiss of personal effects, which had somehow left us behind.” (35)

And one more. I swear it’s the last for a goodly while!

“He also had a habit of charging after small animals and frightening them. Actually, the first time he did this it was with a bird in the park, and I laughed, thinking it hilarious. Later, I realized, it was weird: Gerard was thirty-one and charging after small mammals, sending them leaping into bushes, up trees, over furniture. He would then turn and grin, like a charmed maniac, a Puck with a Master’s degree. He liked also to water down the face and neck fur of cats and dogs, smoothing it back with his palms, like a hairdresser, saying it made them look like Judy Garland. I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.” (19)

Lorrie Moore–if ever you read this whilst Google searching your name–I thoroughly, completely, totally admire you. If you need boots licked, children wet-nursed, dogs walked or help moving heavy kitchen applicances, I’m here and I’m willing. Lugging your fridge? It would be an honor.

Lorrie Mooreisms

This is the quote I ought to have posted for Thanksgiving. It (and the beautiful snippets that follow) are, in general, more gems from Lorrie Moore, in particular, from a novel called Anagrams. Here, the protagonist, Benna, watches her daughter repeat Thanksgiving grace and ponders children, the past and gratitude.

“You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That is why children are incapable of gratitude and why night prayers and dinner graces are lost on them. “Gobbles Mommy, Gobbles Grandpa…” George races through it. She has no reference points. As I get older the past widens and accumulates, all sloppy landlessness like a river, and as a result I have more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like ice cream or scenery or one good kiss become objects of huge soulful thanks. Nothing is gobbled. This is a sign of getting old.” (116)

This is a particular favorite of mine. It hurt the first time I read it; I identified. I didn’t necessarily want to. I loved it all the same. This one is thought/spoken by Benna, too.

“Words, I think, words are all you need for love–you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting that way.” (148)

And the last–which I appreciate, but certainly would have appreciated more ’round March of 2007 whilst penning ye olde undergrad thesis.

“How can she say that she has begun to think that all writing about art is simply language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind?” (56)

Relics

It is a month now. Since I took the GRE. Since I came home to crow my delight to a receiver 2,839 miles away. Since I was coolly received. Since I was asked whether I remembered a conversation in which I’d stated “If ever you cheat on me, it will be over.” It has been a month since I replied a sinking, tentative “I remember,” and a month since he hung up, signing off with only a choked, “say hi to your mom.”

At first hurt the large, systemic questions hulk in the foreground, bustling and crowding one another like a pair of chubby thighs. They scramblestep fast, struggling against, jarring past one another, working up an untidy, embarrassing friction that creates a “shush, shush, shush”  as background music for each step. Did he ever love me? was he lying all along? for how many days, weeks, months was nothing as true as I thought?

Did I coo  “I love you” to an unfeeling, remorseless person who had lost his mind, or to a boy who had simply lost interest?

But, then, thirty days of chipping away at the big questions yields no satisfaction. Now in their place are unanswerable, fragmentary queries that used to comprise the big, unanswerable wholes. Now I wonder the silliest, smallest things. I cry over the tiny injustices, over the things I have yet to send back in an unceremonious cardboard box.

How does he think of me? Have I gone from Peachtown, from tiny dove, to simply “my ex girlfriend,” or does he dare name me when he speaks to her, to others, to himself?

Does he speak of me to her, to others, to himself?  Am I still there, dirtying up his head? Or has he zenned me away with willful, mindful mindlessness?  Am I as invisible, impossible, as the future he could not see for us? Am I as unwelcome and feared and unloved as that thing I represented?

Does he sing to her, ridiculous, made up, ebullient songs?

I am, even with a month intervening, unable to call him “my ex,” partly because I feel no right to the possessive, partly because he is, and always was, simply Greg. I have not been able to stop wondering why, or wishing I could wake up tomorrow and it wouldn’t be true. And I think about how it started, and the sweetness in between, and I think about seeing the green and gray stripes of his shirt from a high-up airplane window and wish–God, how I wish–I’d known that was the last time we’d suffer a  goodbye. I would have looked him–really looked him–in the eye. I would have kissed him goodbye once more, hoping it would somehow matter. And I wouldn’t have taken his sweatshirt. It would have been one less thing to pack in the cardboard box.

Walking home in the cold, shoulders hunched against the wind, I wondered: does he look at the wool hat I brought him from Morocco and does he feel sad? Did he cut off the long, funny tassle, or did he throw it–the entire hat–in the trash? I hope he at least found a nice bum somewhere, a nice bum that needs a nice wool hat.

Does he ever think of me at all, and did he cry? Does he still miss me?

Why do I still miss him?

Nacho the otter has been exiled from my bed. He lies on his back on a notebook on the floor, stuffing leaking out of a seam I never got around to sewing shut. The last time Greg called me before The News was in the middle of the week. It was to tell me that he’d just seen a dog get hit by a car, by the car that drove behind him, then drove away. He’d pulled over and gotten out to hold the animal as it bled, squealed, cried. The owners rushed from their house and took the dog away to the vet. I don’t know if it died.

“Why did you call me to tell me?” I’d asked.
“I just though I should tell somebody,” he said. He had to go. He just wanted to say it. He hung up. Compassion or curiosity?

And now I  have dreams of him mowing down animals with his car–flocks of chickens and one snow white rabbit–and I am holding open a gate that he’s meant to drive through. We have been escaping, through tall grass, to somewhere, from something. We are both tense. I yell to him to stop–he’s going to kill these animals. He doesn’t see them. He doesn’t stop in time. He is focused on driving.

I wonder why he called. I wonder if it was in that moment I asked that I became just somebody to tell something to. Or maybe it had happened long before. Maybe I’d just been a voice, a vessel, for longer than I care to consider.

I wonder who he calls now when he sees animals dying in the street.

The end.

A missed morning phone call. An afternoon of wondering. Late night, poorly planned, alphanumeric tapping.
She writes: “Why did you call me?”
He writes: “To see how you are doing.”
She writes: “And why in the world do you care? You wanted your freedom from me and you got it. Run. I’m not holding on.”
He writes: “How are you doing?”
She fumes.

She writes: “You have absolutely no right to know: you forfeited that two weeks ago. Stop acting, unless it’s to do me the same courtesy I did you and exit yourself from my life. I don’t know you anymore, and you don’t know me.”
He writes: “Then how are the cats?”

She waits. She writes “You must be retarded.” She erases it lest he think she’s being cute. She stews. She decides that maybe he should know. Maybe he should care.

An hour later she writes: “What precisely do you want to know? That the cats loathe you? That I range from being excellent to forlorn and fucking weeping from hour to hour? Is it that you want to survey the damage you’ve wrought? Does it delight you? Does it remind you how to feel? What? You’ve got it now–all the news there is. Now, let me get on with a life that does not include you.”

He waits. He writes the only two words that would have alleviated anything had they arrived two weeks earlier.

“I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t reply. She knows there’s nothing left to say.

Brace yourself: I’m about to go all Shakespeare on your ass

This marks night eight of my studies for the (largely impossible, excruciatingly daunting) GRE Literature in English exam. I find my labours have borne me well past ancient Greek isles and a snarling Scandinavian Beowulf and onward past duels ‘tween the Redcrosse Knight and Mephistopheles. With The Faerie Queene at my back and Piers Plowman pushing me onward, I now draw upon the Jolly Old English shore. It is there that I now scrape my stern and am greeted by a playwright, a poet, a scoundrel, and a wit: the highly-lauded (but certainly not overrated) Mr. William Shakespeare.

Hang on: let me explain. I am not one of those creepy Shakespeare fans who believes that Billy Boy was the only man ever for her. I do not attend Shakespeare festivals. I don’t even belong to any Shakespeare-centric online covenants (and that’s totally my bag, in case you couldn’t tell). In fact, for years I loathed–loathed–Shakespeare and what I appraised to be his entirely overrated, overplayed art. I don’t think, however, that my lack of deference to the Master had a damn thing to do with Shakespeare, but with me. I think it was the badass bitch persona I erected around myself rejecting the fettered romantic creampuff to whom in large part I attribute my true weepy softness. You see, I’ve spent the better part of my life being terrorized by my own snuggleability–so, because of all the silly twits I knew who loved Shakespeare so and my desperation NOT to be like one of them, I claimed I hated Shakespeare. But of course, like all groundless claims, this sham was destroyed by a lovely, gentle woman named Chloe Wheatley.

In my junior year at Trinity my former advisor and then-professor Chloe forced me, despite my haterness, to read Shakespeare’s sonnets–all of them. I grumblingly set about my task, convinced this would be the most painful homework assignment of my college career (next to Math One-oh-Dumb, of course). However, little by little, something rather surprising occurred: I fell into respect, then appreciation, then awe. The man had a voluble, virtuistic way with words, and, I’d like to think, a very rare heart from which to decant them. In partial penance for my late conversion to respectful admirer I’m posting here one of my favorite sonnets. Take number 116 and hold it close to your bosom–I’m pretty sure that that’s exactly where it would want to be.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

This visitation brought to you by prehistoric cellular devices.

Sometimes I am just. so. stupid.

I fired up the ancient Samsung phone with the intent of harvesting the contact info for Trinity people I’m hoping to see over the course of the next few days. My intentions were to dive straight for the phonebook, to entirely eschew the backlog of received messages…and yet… I couldn’t help myself. Okay. If I’m to be honest, I suppose I should admit that I didn’t even try that hard to block out the siren song of a dead romance.

Interspersed with messages from Katie, from Marisa, from Thea, there were a string of them–the things I “did not” want to see; but, just like me, I opened them and I read them–each and every one. They ranged from the more overt “I love you, Smalls” and “Happy Birthday, Small one!” and “Can’t wait to see you tonight, either. Muah,” to those which were then and shall always remain mysterious. “Mission accomplished. Expect results in o-100 hours.” “You wouldn’t believe it even if I took a picture” and “Thanks for putting up with me, Bean. You’re the best. xoxo” I don’t remember what that mission was now, and I have no idea what the results might have been or if I ever received them. What it was that I wouldn’t believe even if presented with photographic evidence I couldn’t tell you. I cannot remember what he did wrong that warranted that last  message, but I’m sure I forgave him, and I’m sure that it didn’t matter in the long run, and I’m sure I still wanted him to kiss me good night. All I know now is that I miss the boy who renamed me Smalls (regardless of how much I hated it at first) and Baby Bee and called me every night and knew how to hold me like nobody else ever has.

He had all of my heart and he’s seen everything I am. He’s the only one, in fact, who ever has. He’s the only one who ever wanted to shoulder some of my sadness. He’s the only one who I ever trusted with so much of me. Not because of ego, but because of how stridently he proclaimed his affections, I still can’t believe he threw it–threw me–away. I still can’t believe that he probably doesn’t think it was a mistake.

I don’t know how I feel about going to campus now. I’m not sure I can without seeing specters of a wraith-thin boy in a horrible winter coat grinning as he lopes toward me. Of course, All-Hallows Eve is the ideal date for a haunting. I suppose there’s nothing for it but to go, to be brave, and to confront my ghosts.

It isn’t easy, but I’ve made it look pretty good.

For days now–three, to be precise–I haven’t cried. I’ve felt as though I’m steadily growing taller, standing straighter,  stooping over in a motion of sick and woebegone fetal aching less and less.

When the phone rang on Monday night I did not answer. I watched it there on the bed as it sounded and stared at the familiar numbers flashing across the screen. My palms were pricked with sweat, heart raced as I gazed. But I did not answer. Only after it had lain dead for a while, chimed to signify a missed call and new mail, did I listen to his message. My real name–not Peach, not Little Dove, not Bean–in his voice, then his own name, as if I couldn’t tell who it was, as if I hadn’t been holding on to that voice telling me he loved me across months and miles. He said he wanted to see how I was doing. He said he was glad I was reconnecting with my friends. He said he’d been conferring with the older brother I like so well, that I should use my November tickets out West to see graduate schools in California in place of seeing him. He said he’d call back.

And that’s when the shaking commenced.

Somehow I texted back a curt reply about having already canceled the plane tickets. I said his obligation to me was at a close. I said to tell his wonderful mother that he’d done his job by getting in touch. I said he was a “very good boy” to have done so. He called seconds later but I just stared there at the phone, knowing that if we spoke now, it would be only to hear him protest that he’d called because he wanted to, not because his mother or his brother told him he should. And I’d know it was a lie.

If for a second I believed he’d called because he cared, I would have flipped it open. I would have said hello.

How do you love someone who does good only out of fear of the punishment he’ll receive should he not? How do you believe in someone to whom giving something to you will always translate into giving something up? How do you trust someone to whom loving you, by definition, can be nothing but a job, even if it is a job with occasional acknowledged benefits? These are questions to which I do not have the answer, so regardless of what my heart wants, of the intimacy I crave, of the continued confusion and the indignation of being given up on, I cannot–I will not–answer the phone. I can’t put myself at risk to continue loving or wanting something that I shouldn’t want back, that doesn’t want me back, either. His bed is warmed now. His ego is stroked. I was the suspect, prehensile tail that kept him from pulling on his new life, one leg at a time. He’s evolved into something that does not require or include me.

I am obsolete.

The last time I saw him was from a plane  rising into the air, away from the Oregon coastline I was certain I’d see in only a few months. To my surprise he’d stayed there at the airport for nearly an hour after we’d parted, waiting for the last glimpse of my plane as I left him to his new life. At the time I’d thought it was a way to hold on just for a few moments more, but now I wonder if he stayed and watched just to confirm that I’d finally actually gone, giving him entirely back to himself. I wonder if he rejoiced after.

I sobbed so hard on the plane that the stewardess brought me more napkins, offered an extra glass of wine. I don’t know why he stayed now, and I don’t know why he cried, too, when we said goodbye. I’m trying to untangle why, the night before, he’d pulled the blankets over both of our heads and pulled me against him, eyes welling with tears. He told me he wished he could keep me there forever, and I believed. I remember the dark sparkling of his eyes in the dim light, of holding onto him and weeping, of telling him that I didn’t want to go. I know that at least I meant everything I said.

If he called again I’d answer, but I don’t know why. He could have kept me by his side forever, but he’ll never get me back.

About my aversion to amusement parks, + deep appreciation for Fielding and Dostoyevsky

I have never, ever been particularly amused by amusement parks. When I do go to amusement parks, even when I pay for them myself as opposed to being dragged along for free as part of a group bonding activity in which I have no desire to participate, my default activity is people watching. I survey hulking families and their poorly behaved spawn gallumphing about the park’s bounds, stuffing faces with fried dough and Dippin’ Dots, deploying ferociously awful grammar as though it were entirely acceptable, and yelling over other roaming herds of monolothic Americans. It’s fun at first, but gets pretty grim pretty fast. Also, I find it usually results in sunburn.

But it isn’t for the crowds that I dislike amusement parks. See, I’m not a gigantic fan of thrill rides–least of all roller coasters. Why do people love the terrifying ascent of each hill and attendant anticipation of a great fall, then that horrible, sick, rising feeling in the gut as you plummet towards earth? And they love it enough to sustain it multiple times in one ride, no less! See, call me crazy, but none of that appeals to me. I don’t choose to take myself  on physical adventures that can make me feel so horrible. Happily enough, today I concluded that I have no need to do so, because I can induce these very same sensations all by myself, free of charge, without standing in line and sweating, running the risk of contracting some sort of awful staph infection from the seat belt or being puked upon by someone three seats above me on the ferris wheel. This week has been one big fucking roller coaster ride. I’m up! I’ve down! Then, oh god! I’m flatlining! Oh shit, down again! Then without warning I’m retching out psychic and emotional illness over heart-wrenching, gut-hollowing images of what it must have been like every time he took her home. I’m sickest, however, over the knowledge that maybe I loved someone I didn’t know at all. Maybe I loved someone who, as he once intimated, didn’t really know how to love or be compassionate. Maybe for two years I’ve simply been an experiment, used as a template for how one acts when one deeply cares. Maybe I don’t know anything at all.

Maybe I’m going to go be sick again. Fuck.

(Service announcemet: Okay. That concludes the angsty portion of this entry. Now. Read on to get a dose of lit’rature)

To combat the sickness and my own unattractive descent into misery, I’d like to share a few literary snippets. The first comes from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, an 18th Century novel initially received with some fierce contumely for its amorality, but which is now canonized for its exquisite attention to human manners. In this scene Squire Allworthy, the novel’s figure of goodness and virtue, has a stern talking to Jenny Jones, the strumpet who’s left her bastard infant in his home in hopes that he’ll care for it out of beneficence. Allworthy initially lays into Jones for the opprobrious situation into which she’s delivered them all, but in short order turns his invective upon her unknown violator. Specifically, Allworthy fulminates men who achieve empty use of women as fucktoys by professing to love them. I adored this selection because I think it’s exceptionally well written and exceptionally incisive. Here’s some of Allworthy’s speech:

“Love, however barbarously we may corrupt and pervert its meaning, as it is a laudable, is a rational passion, and can never be violent but when reciprocal; for though the Scripture bid us love our enemies, it means not with that fervent love which we naturally bear towards our friends; much less that we should sacrifice to them our lives, and what ought be dearer to us our innocence. Now in what light, but that of an enemy, can a reasonable woman regard the man who solicits her to entail on herself all the misery I have described to you, and who would purchase to himself a short, trivial, contemptible pleasure, so greatly at her expense! For, by the laws of custom, the whole shame, with all its dreadful consequences, falls entirely upon her. Can love, which always seeks the good of its object, attempt to betray a woman into a bargain where she is so greatly to be the loser? If such corrupter, therefore, should have the impudence to pretend a real affection for her, ought not the woman to regeard him not only as an enemy, but as the worst of all enemies, a false, designing, treacherous, pretended friend, who intends not only to debauch her body, but her understanding at the same time?” (Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 53, super class Barnes & Noble Classic edition)

Researching for the Literature in English GRE, I’ve been doing some overview-ish reading about the works and lives of the many non-British authors with whom I’m embarrassingly unfamiliar. During today’s exploration of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I learned about Anna Karenina (which is DEFINITELY next on my reading list) Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and just a few moments ago, Notes From Underground by the big D. man himself. Notes From Underground is widely regarded as the first ever existentialist text, so naturally it has its depressing undercurrents of determinism and ennui. Yay! Anyhow–here’s something that struck a chord with me (yes, this is harvested from Wikipedia. Yes, I DO feel dirty, thank you).

“He (the Man Underground) states that despite humanity’s attempt to create the “Crystal Palace,” a reference to a famous symbol of utopianism in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, one cannot avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time can decide to act against what is considered good, and some will do so simply to validate their existence and to protest that they exist as individuals.”

This made me feel remarkably free and, for a moment, quieted my brain chatter. Really? I wondered. You mean that sometimes, things are just horrible and there is no deep reason to undergird or explain it? Maybe that’s just the case, and maybe that conclusion saves me a lot of wondering for tonight. From my heart to yours, Fyodor, thanks.

Reckoning, Part I

It’s funny how much we allow our parameters of reality to be defined by love.

One moment you’re standing on your own two feet, looking at a broad horizon peppered with people, things yet to conquer, ideas to be challenged. Shit’s uncertain, but you’re cool, you’re collected, you’re self reliant and resourceful–you’ve been that way for as long as you can remember, for effectively forever. But maybe you take a look downwards to tie a shoe or root for something in a pocket and when next you look up there is only one thing in the foreground, and he’s incredibly close, incredibly earnest, incredibly warm.  And just like that, there’s just one thing to win and work for, one idea to wrap your mind around, one warmth to grow into. Reality constricts: you don’t miss the horizon, your goals become willfully tangential to those of someone else. And hey–those feet once so firmly rooted in the ground? Baby, you’re floating, and your feet don’t touch the bottom. But you take it–and you like it– ’cause he loves you, or he says he does, and you in your infinite wisdom think he does, and ’til he got there you didn’t realize how goddamn tired you were of fighting every battle on your own. Life is good. You don’t have to cry alone for two years, except when he makes you, and he’s learning how to make you less and less, so that’s something. But then something joggles loose, reality dilates, and suddenly you’re squinting up into the sun like a portly little mole who’s been underground for decades, blinking as you look around at a landscape that’s changed so much you no longer recognize it. Huffing the air, rubbing your eyes, you wonder where everybody went, why the world is so large, and what the fuck it could have been you had your sights on when last you saw the sky through nobody’s lens but your own.

I’m there now.

I know what it feels like to be tossed incautiously aside and to be betrayed–betrayed for real–with sexual organs and everything. Having an invested partner is a beautiful thing, but the repercussions of its going sour, I tell you, are the pits. From one moment to the next I’m not sure if I’ll smash something or sob, and I can’t tell you how many spontaneous, wild fits of crying the bathroom at work has seen over the course of the past five days. For nearly two years I’ve grown myself around Greg, learning him, loving him, patiently waiting for him while he does his growing and trusting that, at the end of the day, I matter enough that he’ll grow toward me, too. Perhaps foolishly, I pinned my deepest joy upon the next time I’d see him, considering he and I were a perpetual long distance love story. Now, with him forcibly removed from my world of his own cavalier accord I find myself, for the first time perhaps ever, extremely lonely (lonely!? I get lonely? What?) and extremely confused about who the fuck I am and what I want.

I’ve spent so long winding myself around Greg that the reflection that meets me upon regarding myself in the mirror is not the woman I think I remember from two falls ago. That girl was writing an ambitious thesis, dominating in seminars, slinging razor-edged wisecracks so fast they made whooshing sounds around others’ ears, tutoring, drinking copious amounts of cheap rose wine before dining hall dinners and giggling maniacally with graphic design buddies over thai noodles. She was plotting a future that involved a foreign country, a grand escape, a plan to be an academic and change people’s lives for the better. What a sovereign nation I was! What an island! And then Greg stepped on the scene. There was a tectonic shift, a comfortable collision, suddenly, an aggregate “we.”  For two years I got lost in the hinterland created by our borders’ collision and now that there’s a rift between us that spans from Hartford, Connecticut, to Coos Bay, Oregon, the distance between fidelity and philandering, maturity and uncertainty, I have nothing left to do but go back to what used to be my base camp and see whether it’s tenable, or if I can even recognize it upon arrival.

We were together through one of the greatest adventures of my life–my year in Spain. Every night I shared my world with him, despite the ocean that separated us. Perhaps it sounds silly, but so many of my memories from that year don’t even feel like my own now. I signed the paperwork. I gave him joint custody. So much of who I’ve become I can only trace through phone calls with him, nights in a shared twin bed in Madrid, lazy afternoons holding hands and walking around cities that didn’t belong to either one of us, reunions that felt good enough to negate having been apart for so long and missed him so much.

It’s been so long since I imagined a future without him in it that I don’t even know how to begin. He used to like to talk about marrying me, about a future. It scared the shit out of me and I balked, even considered dumping him for suggesting such a ridiculous, premature prescription. But slowly, sweetly, he wore me down, talked about kids, about second childhoods in Europe, about traveling together, about being part of one another’s lives in a way I finally trusted. Perhaps he was just kidding–about everything, including loving me–but it seemed sincere. I decided not to fix it if it wasn’t broken. For the first time in my life, I just let go and I believed. But things have changed, there’s too many broken things to pick up, let alone fix and now I wonder, who am I? What do I want? Where am I going, and why am I going there?

I don’t know. I can’t know yet, but… I guess… I’m going  to find out.

Public Transportation Blues

No matter how much you’d like it to, it doesn’t happen all at once. It isn’t over after the One Good Cry you allow to yourself. But that’s something you only realize after the One Good Cry happens One, Two, or Three times more.

It comes on unexpectedly. It springs from the timbre of a voice from the other side of the street. Maybe you don’t see it right away but it’s there, curled waiting in the faded corduroy stretched over a stranger’s knee. It will wait til the moment is right, then settle itself around your heart when you’re least prepared to fight. It’s in the words curiously scribbled in upside down handwriting in the books you forgot were not always yours.

It’s recognizing you’ll be going to sleep and waking up alone for a long, long time. It’s knowing that your belly’s never going to be pressed to his again. It’s coming home at night to realize there’s no one to call and nothing to wait for.

The phone won’t ring.
The picture has to go.

You can say it doesn’t hurt, and sometimes, it won’t–but the hurting isn’t over.

And suddenly, strangely, you’re the girl crying on the bus.