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PROPER ETIQUETTE DURING A FUCKING MESS

PROPER ETIQUETTE DURING A FUCKING MESS

Life throws you curveballs, my dear.  

This is a sentence someone I’ve known for a very long time whispered into my ear late last night and the whisperer of this nugget of truth knows precisely what she’s talking about.  She’s dealing with her own screwy pitches right about now – we all are – and I felt in her hug and her whisper a bolt of blatant empathy that I found rather comforting.  Maybe others might have felt put on the spot by what she said or become offended by being included in her mass of a mess, but I took only kindness and compassion away from her words.  Sometimes, I guess, it’s hard to know exactly how you’re supposed to feel or which action you should be taking.  Sometimes it’s difficult to delineate when you should just sit still and do absolutely nothing at all.  Sometimes it’s really hard to sit still, even while the world around you is spinning and you feel like you’re losing your grip on everything, including gravity.

The thing about life and family and a lifetime spent with family is that it changes – and I’m okay with that, I suppose, as long as the changes can be tracked.  Far too logical for my own good, I’m weirded out by shocks and surprises, the ones caused when there’s been little or no preamble to a massive and seismic shift in the family unit.  I know it’s a real flaw of mine that I look to find the linear genesis of the journey that got us all here rather than just hopping on the bumpy trip right then and there and allowing myself to be careened forward.  No, I look backwards – and it makes me feel dizzy every time. 

THE DROUGHT

THE DROUGHT

Here’s something I wonder about periodically in the harsh dread of night:  Is it possible that there’s an allotted amount of personal strength doled out to each of us and eventually those wells experience a drought?  It seems only fair that the tears we shed should be able to replenish all that’s gone missing, but I’ve learned for sure over the years that it’s simply not the case. 

At sixteen, I wrote my college essay about the subject of personal strength.  Back then, it was probably the quality I felt best defined me.  I guess I was tested a lot when I was young.  I think most of us are, but here’s my own mini rundown of the curious dysfunction that was my formative years:

o   Parents divorced (really contentiously) when I was five.

o   Moved to an area of town where I was the only Jewish kid in the school and one of only four kids who came from what they called “a broken home” in the 1980s.

o   Called “a dirty Jew” when I was in the 3rd grade by some boy in my class.  To this day, I remember his name and the sneer forming on his upper lip as the words came out of his mouth while I leaned against the monkey bars.  I didn’t know why he was saying those ugly things to me, but I know that my head slowly drooped in shame.

o   Hated the man my mother married when I was in the 8th grade.

o   Moved into the city to live with my father when I was in the 9th grade.  I was at my most vulnerable then.  I didn’t know a single person in my new school in Chelsea.  I was also at the most hideous looking physical stage of my entire life, something I would be reminded of each and every time I caught sight of my reflection in a mirror or a pane of glass.

o   Saw my father keel over and die in front of me when I was fourteen.

o   Sued by my step-monster immediately after my father’s death.  She decided it might be nice to have the money he’d left to me so she dragged me into a lawsuit to try to get it.  She also stole my puppy and refused to give him back.  In those lost days following my father’s passing, I needed that dog desperately – and I never saw him again.

o   Moved back in with my mother following my father’s death.

o   Woke up to the news that one of my dearest friends died in a car accident exactly one year to the day that my father died.

It was after the loss of my friend that the people around me began commenting on my apparently impressive reservoir of strength.  I remember getting a phone call quite out of the blue from a guy I wasn’t yet close to and he told me that he couldn’t stop thinking about me and how strong I am for going through what I did and remaining perpetually optimistic and upbeat.  Honestly?  That was a better compliment to receive than hearing that he liked my dimples or that I was starting to develop a body that looked suspiciously like an hourglass.  Those physical things were nice, but they were also beyond my control while the strength factor was something I made it a point to cultivate.

SUPERSTITIONS

SUPERSTITIONS

“Are you superstitious?” a guy asked me just the other night as it started to grow dark outside and the shadows formed by the trees made strange lines dance across my ceiling.

I’m not usually the type to answer a question with a question, but I couldn’t stop myself from wondering aloud what caused him to even ask me such a thing in the first place.

“I just want to know more about you,” he replied simply, normally.

“I’m not particularly superstitious,” I told him with a lightness in my voice and a smile on my face.  

I chose in that moment not to reveal that I’d recently made a major life decision based entirely on the advice given to me by a Magic Eight Ball.  I think it was probably the right choice, but I’ll ask the ball the question later just to be sure.

 

DEAR WOOKIE

DEAR WOOKIE

You’ll write about this one day.  People said the sentence to me over and over again during that week and I knew they were correct.  But I also knew even then that it would take me a while before I allowed myself to wade into a moment so memory-ridden, so soul-demolishing.  Even now – even as I craft this particular sentence – I can feel a restraint inside that’s beginning to tug and pull.  This is going to hurt, that thudding thing that’s still caught in the back of my throat is whispering hoarsely.  

Most of my writing, even if it originates from a place of despair or confusion, eventually yields something that I can somehow view with a lens of positivity.  I can achieve a momentary catharsis. I can tread through waves of memory and come up for air with the present appearing suddenly clearer. This piece, though, brings me no joy.  This piece is an emotional debt, and it’s one I need to pay.

I’m one of those people who still writes letters.  I guess part of it is that my parents were excellent letter writers. I would literally jump up and down every single time an envelope came my way back when I was just a kid at summer camp, away from home for eight weeks starting from the June when I turned six years old.  Part of my affinity for communicating the old-fashioned way probably also stems directly from what I consider to be my most prized possession.  Each year, my father wrote a letter to me on the eve of my birthday.  He’d recount who I was over the last year and what I liked and what I’d learned and it’s the closest thing I have to an oral history about the formative years of my life, much of which I’ve protectively repressed.  He sealed those letters firmly, signed and dated them, and placed them into a locked file cabinet. I got to open my letters on the night of my thirteenth birthday, when I was old enough to understand the significance of what they contained.

My father died when I was fourteen.  The night he gave me those letters – only a year before his passing – remains in my mind as a time when I felt a singularly pure love radiating out of another person, beaming into me like the sun.  Those letters still serve as the closest thing I have to his insights about who I was and who he was to me and I treasure them more than I think he even expected that I would.

Over the years, I’ve written letters to friends and letters to men and there are a few I really wish I hadn’t sent.  But I think there are more I just wish I’d never had to write in the first place, and this is one of them.  

This letter makes it real.  

This letter makes a goodbye forever.

And this letter will never be enough to convey what it is I want to say, but I’m going to try: 

MATH I UNDERSTAND

MATH I UNDERSTAND

I've been in love 5 times. I'd say that 3 of them were truly good relationships in that they were all about equality. With those 3, I spent a lot of time with their families and they in turn spent a good deal of time with mine. There were 2 where we combined families and spent the holidays together. I thought 3 of them could potentially propose to me. The idea of such a thing terrified me with 2 of them and so excited me with the other that I kept my nails manicured for a year straight, which is not something I usually do.

The thought of being with any of them now sends me momentarily spinning to an alternate universe where I'm not entirely miserable, but I'm not entirely myself either. 

No matter if I broke up with them or they broke up with me, one of the things that always happened was I'd have to cut some music out of my life, a practice that is inconvenient to say the least and searing in its inherent agony at its very worst. It's been good music that was compromised, too. I mean, I never burst into tears when I'd hear an Ace of Base song. But it's only been about 3 years since I've reclaimed Crush by Dave Matthews after talking myself into believing that it was my song before I thought of it as our song and I needed to take it the fuck back and I'd go on a march to do it if I had to. The hardest loss was Pearl Jam. I couldn't listen to them for a good 2 years. I finally let them back in, but I haven't listened to Just Breathe for 5 years now besides that time I was at a cafe with friends and some guy was playing acoustic guitar in the corner and all of a sudden I heard the melody of the song being plucked out and my head started to shake back and forth involuntarily. On the plus side, I found out I have a superpower I never knew about before: I can go spontaneously deaf if it means not crumbling to the floor in public. The music association hasn't impacted me for a while, but that's changed a little this week with Kanye releasing new music and proclaiming his brilliance to the masses. That shit has briefly complicated things. It'll pass, though.

With 3 of the guys, I spoke about politics extensively. Of the 3, 2 of them knew what they were talking about. I miss talking politics with only 1 of them, especially this month.

I experienced a lot of firsts with all of them. First real date. First sex. First good sex. First trips. First heartbreak. First realization that I'd hurt somebody tremendously. First thoughts of forever. First Springsteen concert. First inclusion in another family's family portraits. First blistering fight. First time jet skiing. First time snow skiing. First time I drank a cappuccino. First time I drank sake. First time I wore lingerie. First time I felt comfortable wearing lingerie. First time I felt like a writer. First time I felt like I was someone's person.

PRINCE CHARMING IS STRAIGHT...AND HE'S STANDING IN A CLOSET

PRINCE CHARMING IS STRAIGHT...AND HE'S STANDING IN A CLOSET

I own every single DVD from every single season, but despite its very positive attributes, I'm still pretty sure that Sex and the City might be more responsible for fucking up a woman's perception of what's real than any other show in the history of television – and I’m not just saying that because for a few months there, I thought it made perfect sense to pick up my dry cleaning while wearing a puffy pink tutu.

There was the time my mother watched me unwrap a birthday present and gazed at my puzzled face as I held up a long grey taffeta dress that was backless and had a plunging neckline that was designed to make nipples the outfit’s key accessory.

"I thought you could wear it to dinner when you go out with your friends," she said. 

Those were the days when I spent most of my time in the city, arriving at my friend’s apartment lugging a bag crammed with a toothbrush, some makeup, about four pairs of shoes for one night, and my dog. She would stick her furry face out of the top of the carrier bag she'd been stuffed into for an hour and she would look entirely pissed off.  There wasn’t even a smidgen of an expression of gratitude on her puppy face for the fact that I took her with me everywhere, but then again, Wookie has always been an animal who never warmed to a plush carrier, a carpeted crate stuffed with every squeak toy in the universe, or having bows stuck into her hair.  

You’ve kind of got to respect her for all of that.

My friends and I went to great places, but I tried to imagine myself walking though Union Square in my birthday gown. I just couldn't see it happening. 

 

AN ENDING

AN ENDING

It feels almost cool outside.  I’m in cropped sweatpants and a grey Grateful Dead tee that I somehow inherited.  I have no memory of who it was that the shirt belonged to initially anymore, but it’s soft and faded and the perfect shade of charcoal; it’s mine now.  I can no longer sense the scent of the hint of smoking fireworks in the air and the trees are still green and lush and I guess all any of this means is that it doesn’t feel like July anymore but it also doesn’t feel like the September that it’s about to be.

My summer officially ends tomorrow morning and, as a result, I am in mourning.  I am also in denial.  I can see it all happening in my head like a colorful fantasy that’s scored by Disney songs played backwards, but I can’t seem to comprehend for real that tomorrow morning I will be walking my dog in the darkness and making coffee out of need instead of out of want.  The dress I’m wearing tomorrow is hanging up on the back of my door and I’ve even picked out my bra, but the thought of slipping it over my head before six o’clock in the morning is making the dress appear terrifying to me.  I guess everything is really a matter of perception and I’d take a moment to be very excited that I have finally mastered this line of thinking, but I’m just way too stressed to be excited by perception-inspiring knowledge right now.