“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.
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:
I sat in my car today as the light outside grew more and more dim and what was left of the sun disappeared so quickly that I kept checking the time on the dashboard.
Is it supposed to be this dark this soon?
I’d set up a late afternoon appointment with my accountant and I was, as is my longstanding custom, incredibly early. Technically I suppose I was actually very late since our meeting was to have taken place two days ago, but my clenching uterus was apparently at war with whichever organ wanted to casually exist beside it and I was in the shower when the pain hit. I grabbed tightly onto the glass of the shower door and tried to steady myself. I was sopping wet and conditioner was combed through my hair when I was rendered motionless. Really: I was doubled over in agony. Thoughts like should I call an ambulance were running through my head like a bad song, but I could also hear a faded melody that tried to remind me to just breathe through it and that sound came from someplace else, a tucked away area of light that I knew I'd see again.
Anyway, through a blinding stab of physical misery that eventually subsided, I sent my accountant an email and rescheduled our appointment for today. I like my accountant very much. He's professional and he's pretty warm for a man who plays with numbers all day long. He likes me too. Not only am I his easiest client by a landslide because I show up with a grand total of four pieces of paper when I get my taxes done, but he frequently comments about how I'm always smiling. I smile again as he says it to me today.
I do not tell him that ten minutes before I flashed him my dimples I sat alone in my car and stared out the window and wondered what was next for me.
I do not mention as I hand over my W-2 that it was only about a month ago when someone who mattered described me as "so funny" and "ridiculously smart" and the person with whom he had the "deepest conversations about everything." When I unfold the paper on which I tallied my expenses, I do not say out loud that what that person said about me was entirely accurate and I felt the same way in return and that's maybe why it consumes me sometimes.
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.
My first memories of my Uncle Lenny are so vivid that they smell like sugar. That kind of sensory detail makes good sense. He owned a busy bakery in Brooklyn for most of my childhood and I remember toddling in with excitement shining in my eyes and looking around in wonder. You know that expression, "It's like a kid in a candy store"? I lived that expression, but my candy store involved layer cakes.
My favorite part of our excursion was always going into the huge kitchen. I think it was probably hot in there with all those ovens going at once, but I have no memory of the heat. What I remember instead is that he had all those icing bags filled with whipped cream and butter cream and he would let me eat as much of it as I wanted directly from the bag. He'd also walk me around the bakery and tell me I could have whatever I wanted and I often chose the largest item I could find, like some giant parfait in the refrigerated case by the door. When we'd leave, but mother's arms were laden down with bags filled with cakes and large cookies (my favorites were the chocolate chip and the huge butter cookies with a big dollop of hard chocolate in the center) and boxes of the small cookies that I grew up calling "Uncle Lenny Cookies." I always gravitated towards the complicated cookies. I liked stuff loaded with sprinkles and dipped in chocolate with jelly in the center. Even today, I like my snacks filled with things like cream or crunchies and I see absolutely no need to ever eat what I consider "unadorned" chocolate. If there's no caramel or nougat, what's the point?
I saw a pack of Fruit Stripe gum in a random candy store last weekend and I was instantly transported back to the days when my clothing was always filthy from climbing trees and because I stabbed the Capri Sun package in the wrong place.
Sometimes I’d smell like fruit punch for weeks.
When I was a little girl, an artist friend of my parents painted a rainbow on my bedroom wall that I loved. I also had a round mirror framed by heavy yellow plastic that was the color of the mid-day sun. I remember that mirror perfectly – the shape of it and the size – but I don’t remember ever gazing into it. I slept in a twin bed back then and it was crammed with stuffed animals. There was my Cookie Monster, a bear I (for some reason) named Coca Cola, and my plush Chewbacca. I slept with them every single night and I vaguely recall how they would sometimes fall out of the bed and how that would cause me to wake up instantly. I only felt safe when I could feel them close and I used to keep two on one side of me and one on the other side of me like they were my very own furry Secret Service detail that worked for nothing and never wore wires in their ears.
I still have two of those dolls. Cookie lives in a closet in my house and Coca Cola resides in my mother’s basement, but I lost Chewbacca somewhere along the way – and I never really missed him. We’d shared a bond, sure, but other things just became more important for me to sleep with, like Carlin Ozzy, my Cabbage Patch Kid who wore a Member’s Only-style windbreaker, and eventually that guy with the scruff. Still, Chewbacca must have made some dent in my psyche because, so many decades later, I named my dog Wookie. At the time I chose the name, I had no idea that Chewbacca’s species was spelled with an extra E. I did it wrong, but I stand by my mistake; that additional vowel feels slightly ridiculous to me, though not as ridiculous as when the vet calls to confirm an appointment for “Wookie Kalter” and I shake my head and think, This must be why normal people name their dogs Sophie.
I can’t remember going to see Star Wars when it first came out. I was less than two years old then, but family folklore includes a sweet little tale about how I took one look at Darth Vader’s mask and cloak and heard just a single second of his labored breathing and I dove beneath the seat in the theatre utterly traumatized. I recollect not a second of this event and I therefore cannot be sure of its accuracy, but it makes sense. Darth Vader is fucking terrifying – and that’s even before he starts talking about shit like the Dark Side. Plus, from the very start of my exposure to movies, they impacted me so profoundly that I ended up making the exploration of how and why cinema resonates with us my career. But do I genuinely remember my first Star Wars experience? I do not.
“You can’t say that,” she told me slowly, seriously.
“Why not?” I asked with more than a bit of a laugh catching in my throat.
“Because that’s mean and you’re not a mean person,” she responded.
She’s right, of course. I absolutely can’t say what it is I really want to say because, even though what I’ve got to unload in terms of comments strikes me as tremendously accurate and actually governed by a little bit of restraint, I’m also aware that those comments will undoubtedly come off as far more mean than I intend. Because here’s what I really want to say to one of my Facebook buddies:
1. Sweetheart? Your Facebook posts, while always slightly bizarre and glaringly transparent in your quest for neediness, have now veered into crazy person territory.
2. The more times you write an epic poem on social media about how you have lost yet another friend due to a disagreement the two of you had over social media, the more times I think that maybe you should be committed in a place that doesn’t have Wi-Fi.
Maybe it’s because The Real Housewives of Orange County all but devolved into a terrifying trip to a haunted church camp this past week and my mind is still trying to recover from being thrust soul-first into choruses of Amazing Grace that were harmonized by scummy women who clearly value liposuction more than they value the Lord, but I can’t seem to get prayer out of my head.
I can’t quite qualify myself as someone who prays regularly, but that’s been changing a bit. I do pray – though it’s more to the universe at large than to a particular God – and I seem to be partaking in those very personal moments more than usual these days. Obviously, some of what I bandy about late in my bed at night to the powers that cannot be seen is rather personal, but since I get to fully control what it is I share here, allow me to tell you about some of the conversations I’ve been having lately with a universe that I dearly hope is not hard of hearing. Sure, some of my prayers might strike you as superficial and perhaps others might strike you as though they were generated inside the mind of someone who is mildly psychotic, but since one of the things I pray for consistently is the continued ability not to give a shit about what other people think about me, I’m gonna forge ahead:
Dear Universe,
Please allow me to believe that there is no bottom to the reservoir of compassion, talent, forgiveness, and drive that I rely upon more often than I do air. Do not ever allow me to embrace the idea that I have been depleted of goodness or of the capacity to generate the levels of energy I need to secure for myself all it is that I desire.
Every once in a very rare while someone can really surprise you by proving that you are known by another perhaps better than you even know yourself. You have been figured out, solved like a mystery when you thought you were – at best – a hilarious comedy and – at worst, but at least interestingly – an antihero tale veering off of a steady course.
It’s not that you have been actively trying to fool yourself and you never once intentionally presented a false version of yourself to someone you might care about, but you are human after all and so you lug out the stories about your past and your present that might make you appear special, solid, sane. You reveal in your daily discussions things that are entirely accurate: that you are ambitious and analytical almost beyond what is healthy. You describe the things you are passionate about and your words come out of you like they are lyrics because you know that you will fight like hell until the entire world is singing your song. You talk about the people you trust and adore and the cadence of your vocal expression indicates that the loyalty you feel towards these people could never be compromised, that you won’t allow it to be.
The walls of the bedroom I slept in during my heady high school years were plastered with words and with images. I had photos of my friends affixed high above my scrolled headboard and I’d look up at them even in the dark and remember the heightened feelings that rushed through my body and my brain and my veins during the weekend we all went to Montauk and slept piled atop one another on the frozen beach. I had the same glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling that everyone I knew had, and even at three in the morning I could see the outline of my pictures on the wall, the formation of all of our heads curled close together, the moment of a sharing of a secret or a laugh captured forever in a manner perhaps more poignant than even a memory.
I had posters on my wall too, but most were actually advertisements that came from W, a magazine I recognized even then as aspirational living to the extreme. Those were the days of Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista, of Barney’s ads that I thought of as pure art, of an understanding settling forever inside of me that glamour took effort and I that I was someone willing to make that commitment. I wanted to be glamorous – but I also knew that I should make it look like I wasn’t even trying, that it all just happened naturally, that of course I woke up looking this way.
