Where the past went

“[...]How that time has passed away,
grown dark under cover of night, as if it had never been!”

- Beowulf

There is a family story that, upon his engagement to my grandmother, my grandfather built a fire in the yard (of wherever he was living—probably in an apartment in northern New Jersey with his mother, already a widow) and burned all his old love letters. Since he was 36 at the time, there may have been quite a few of these, but I grew up knowing little of his history—and nothing about his loves—before my grandmother. It was as if that point in time was when his life really began.

When I’ve thought of this story before, I saw his action as a disciplined, rather Sicilian gesture that I admired, but would never imitate. And I haven’t. I’ve clung hard to my past, dragged it all over the country with me from state to state and relationship to relationship, through the ambiguities of marriage, divorce, and parenthood. Over the past few years such “baggage” was taking up a lot of room, so the love letters et al. migrated to a large plastic bin in the laundry shed behind my apartment, where they waited to be perused and ignite old feelings. But I discovered yesterday that someone in the city of New Orleans has decided to relieve me of them.

It’s a bizarre, creepy crime because the person(s) did not take other items in the shed that, unlike the unwieldy storage bin, have material value: a TV, boxes full of crystal glassware. Instead he or she removed only the happiest or most meaningful parts of my past. This includes not only the love letters (since I came of age in the 1990s, these were on actual paper) but my first stuffed animal, a beat up, mournful-looking dog I named Georgie Porgie and used to talk to and take everywhere; a framed photo of my ex-husband Chris and I, in the first flush of dating, taken in a restaurant in Albuquerque; and years of notes my high school best friends and I randomly, often hilariously wrote each other. God knows what else was in there, but I never will, because it’s gone (to where or for what purpose, I cringe to imagine).

Since discovering the theft yesterday, my feelings have ranged from rage at whatever creeper would steal someone’s memorabilia, to tears as I imagine delicate Georgie Porgie, who I’d wrapped in tissue paper, in a trash compacter somewhere. When I was in preschool my grandmother sewed a collar, bright red with a pattern of stars and hearts, around his neck (he was always mysteriously getting holes worn into him); and I wish I still had this reminder of her. But regardless of how the tangible past may be purged from us—by act of will or natural disaster, by our choice or someone else’s—a lot of mine just was.

Maybe I finally have to process that many of the positive and negative remnants of who I used to be, who and what I used to love, need to be decisively left behind. That they were stolen or they faded, were misplaced, abandoned, or yielded to something else; or the feelings I used to attach to them fled, shifted, transferred onto other objects. This is a natural process. In igniting those letters, my grandfather was embracing it and welcoming the new, making space. Or maybe he couldn’t bear to be reminded of some things.


 

My grandmother Olinda (circa 1940s)... a woman worth burning stuff for

Hurricane

There has to be something still
At the center of the swirl—
Ask any hurricane—
An everlasting, an all-powerful,
A Let’s grow old together and die
In each other’s arms—
Or the one left back dies soon of grief everlasting,
A no-matter-what.

-James Galvin, from "Dying into What I've Done," X

 

The first time I fell in love, at 18, I felt sure it would last forever: a joy to light the dingy, daily corners of life. So many forevers later, I am still looking for that, rightly or wrongly.

...I recently experienced my first-ever hurricane in the form of Isaac, the storm that tediously spun over Southern Louisiana for days, dumping wind-lashed rains, cutting power, strewing debris, straining people’s patience and attempts at cheer. I’d just left a 4-month relationship with a man who was super-smart, creative, kind, ambitious, a good lover. He was willing to introduce me to his parents and spend weekend nights with Sara and I, making her laugh by saying we were going to turn into giant raspberries, or that he liked spiders in his ice cream. And yet I wasn’t happy; remained in some way apart and alone. So after months spinning in my own mental turmoil, I ended it, a week before the storm.

By Saturday, I was starting to feel better and even a little empowered. I spent the night with 2 women friends—dining on avocado slices with olive oil and blue cheese, the three of us watching Eat, Pray, Love for the umpteenth time. Like Liz Gilbert, I had felt irrationally unfulfilled in circumstances that would make other women swoon. Yet in initiating the breakup, I’d listened to my feelings and instincts, though they struck me as crazy—as they really have my whole life. The decision, though difficult and painful, felt right and was starting to make me reframe my similar-feeling split with C., my ex-husband. Then, too, I listened to my gut and left the security and camaraderie he offered, in search of something Else, some further, deeper aliveness. I regretted and essentially whipped myself over that choice for years. Maybe, I began to glimpse, all the self-punishment was not cool? And then a hurricane—what I’d been dreading for the 3 years I’ve lived here—hit, and the thoughts I had wrenched toward the positive turned dark. You thought you could stand alone? Take this.

As Isaac neared, I holed up with a friend and his wife, having sent Sara to her dad’s on the Northshore. She and her two stepsiblings had their picture snapped against the ominous grey waves of Lake Pontchartrain, a day before landfall, with the Facebook caption: “Our first hurricane as a family!” Despite going through a couple bottles of wine the first night, my friends and I weren’t feeling festive. We passed that Wednesday—Hurricane Katrina’s 7-year anniversary— sitting dejectedly in their dim living room, framed by heavy drapes over long windows, with one of their dogs, old and sick, panting in the unaccustomed, stale heat. I’d woken at 3 AM to find the power newly out, and thrashing trees outside the guestroom windows about to become projectiles, it seemed, with each roaring gust. 

A surprising thing brought me comfort then: a cologne sample torn from a magazine. In a fit of New Agey activity, I’d glued it into a journal along with words and images that moved me, that I somehow wanted in my life—the phrase “Give Wildly” and pictures of a whole cooked chicken in a wreath of herbs, and of a well-stocked pantry replete with sardines, molasses, Worcestershire, and apricot halves; and this shred of scent, Polo Blue. I don’t even know any man who wears this. But my first love wore the Polo that came in an identical square glass bottle, green instead of blue, featuring a tiny gold man on horseback. As we were leaving Colgate’s campus at the end of our freshman year, he dabbed some on the sleeves and collar of a flannel shirt, which he gave me so I would have part of him: the part he would not (presumably) be giving to his hometown girlfriend. I clung to his smell on the shirt for months, and that scent-fingerprint brought tears, comfort, a hit of beauty beyond any words I would have to describe it.

The week of the hurricane, I had $70 in my bank account. My daughter wasn’t with me; I’d tearfully hugged her goodbye at her dad’s workplace, feeling that she’d be safer with him and his fiancé, who’s been through all this before, than with broke, hysterical me. I had to ask a couple different friends to take me in—fearing the unknown, and not wanting to be stuck by myself—and each of them said that they would have me, but either my child or cat would pose problems. I felt like a problem. And luckily I was received, plus cat, minus one supportive boyfriend whose presence, during that time, I sharply missed. I had nothing, in a sense: no job, funds, partner, nearby family. But I had the whiff of Polo Blue... and it made me feel, absurdly, as if there was someone with me. Into that dark, eerie room, it brought rich sense-memories of the past and intimations of a future yet to materialize except as molecules, released from a paper strip, that registered on me physically, bypassing my anxious mind. 

Over that week, intending to maybe write, I produced a few bleak fragments:
 

I don’t have money, but I’m sexy

Sept. 1: I heard a truck on my street and felt a surge of hope—Entergy?[New Orleans' energy co.] When I looked out the window it was a Miller Lite truck.

The second observation encapsulates what it’s like to live in New Orleans, where partying trumps efficiency: something I’m strangely proud to have learned more about, the way so many others have over the years—by being sweaty. And bored. And not knowing what will happen next.



 

 

August 31: Sara and I at Rock 'N Bowl Mid-City Lanes, escaping the crushing heat of my apartment

Alone

For years now, I’ve been going to restaurants, bars, movies, and parties alone—a practice which is not as supported in our culture as you would hope. Sometimes I am ignored by waitstaff to whom a woman sitting by herself is invisible; other times I get free drinks and food at places where I’ve come to know the people who work there and they, in turn, know me as that Girl Who Always Comes in Alone—who brings a poetry book or philosophy essay out to the bar. Sometimes this practice scores me a boyfriend for 3-6 months. Most of the time, anymore, I don’t even bring a book because it feels too weird/sad to sit and read while conversation and laughter swirl around me, as if I’m a rock in the stream of human sociability.

I spent much of my marriage alone in a room at the opposite corner of the house from where my then-husband lay on the couch in his office, both of us writing (he seemed to find a lot more pleasure in this process than me, for whom sitting all day trying to make a poem produced angst). In the first years after C. and I separated/divorced, I spent many weekend mornings at Café DeWitt (in Ithaca, NY) on a bench in front of a wall of fish tanks, feeling like a fish myself suspended in a glass wall of isolation visible to all the couples and families brunching around me. I would sometimes glimpse a guy there with whom I’d formerly had a one-time, athletic sexual encounter. He and his girlfriend, a stunning blond, would be sitting at a table across the restaurant dressed as if they were about to work out or had just rolled out of bed. How I envied them as he read the newspaper and they both sipped coffee and looked totally relaxed. It seemed incredible, to me, that there were people who could take such casual intimacy for granted; there were women who inspired in their men a desire not just to have sex but, afterwards, breakfast at a cute café. Oh, I did have a boyfriend at the time but as is so often the case in my life, he was not there. I don’t even know why anymore. When we did go out in public together, I would try to grab his hand and he would drop mine. (He did other, nice things, like attempting to make a banana cream pie for my birthday. But in my mind our relationship was often characterized by my feeling alone and unsupported.) It was only 6 months after our breakup that he decided he really wanted to be with me and by then, I’d had enough.

On the night, this past fall, when my last relationship ended, I took myself on a date to see Midnight in Paris at the fancy-pantsy cinema downtown (they serve dinner/wine in the theater). Before the movie started, I walked in my high heels through the surrounding empty mall and ended up staring out a wall-length window at the lights of Canal Street; palm trees whipped by breeze and the city extending in a soft, twinkly darkness beyond my line of sight. I remember being concerned that the tears on my face were ruining my eyeliner and would be visible when I headed back into the bright lights of the lobby, where I would be deemed not only sad but unattractive.

What to make of this ongoing pattern of loneliness? In part it can definitely be attributed to me. Like many writers, I tend to get my sense of meaning and reality more from what is going on inside me than what’s happening out there. I avoid opportunities to volunteer, or host, and any social events I’m not sure will be fulfilling; and I feel a smidge suicidal when called upon to stand around at a child’s birthday while my daughter jumps in the bounce house. These behaviors/attitudes help to keep me outside of things. But this whole issue of painful or missing relationships goes a lot deeper than that, to places in my past I can’t even disclose here because they are scary and painful; things that only leave me numb, now, when I think of them.

As I am now in another relationship (?) in which the other person has dropped out of sight, I was dreading the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, when couples, families, and groups of friends wear (sometimes outrageous) green outfits, drink, and joyously converge on my neighborhood in a way that just highlights my sense of separateness. Typically of the way I usually experience this event, as I walked to the store yesterday morning I was the only person on bustling Magazine Street not wearing a shred of green. However, my tacit “fuck your parade” message did not give me a sense of empowerment. So after I put my groceries away, I suited up in a sequined top, shorts, heels, and a strand of green beads (there are plenty to choose from in a glittery sprawl on the mantle in my daughter’s bedroom, like a Mardi Gras altar), and walked out, thinking of getting a beer and just being part of the festivities. And so with a go-cup of Blue Moon, I walked down Magazine toward Jackson,figuring walking would give me something to do (rather than stand around alone). I passed several parties going on at bars and houses; musicians playing on porches. The street was closed but the parade hadn’t reached us, so green-clad groups were walking down both sides of the street. I noticed that whereas I'd pictured most of the parade-goers as families or couples, there were a lot of younger people strolling in loose assortments. My hair grew heavy and sweaty and I draped it over my shoulder, scanned the crowds on the sidewalk through sunglasses, and actually felt kind of powerful, like there was a caption in my mind reading: “A beautiful woman walks down the street…” That is what I would want it to say. And I was also giving myself a pep talk so I wouldn’t feel pathetic for being there without a friend or lover, which went something like this. That this was like a birthday or other personal celebration for me because no one could know how much it takes, sometimes, for me just to leave the apartment, be brave, and try to have some joy...that I could think of this parade as representing what my future is going to be like, as opposed to a lonely and sad past...that at this time next year I absolutely WILL NOT be alone, and I am sure of that. (Though no, I’m really, really not sure. But I so want it to be true.) And when the edges of my happiness began to feel stretched and I could feel the other awarenesses, a current of anxiety and despair, starting to push in, I kept telling myself that the bad feelings are temporary and soon I will kick ass.

...I was telling myself this when my daughter’s father called, pissed because the closed/blocked streets made it difficult for him to deliver Sara to me and get on with his weekend plans with his fiancé. After that, I spent the rest of the afternoon depressed, though Sara and I did stand at the corner of my street, amidst a profusion of garbage including shreds of cabbages thrown from floats, and I caught her some beads but, to her vocal disappointment, no toys. And that was that—for now.

Summary

Today my ex got engaged; I got drug-tested.
That is all.

Seeking home

The ideogram portrays a heart and a boat between two shores, enduring in the voyage of life.- from the I Ching Ideogram 32, “Persevering”

Almost 7 years ago when I left my husband, moving 1,000 miles north with no job or friends waiting, I had come to a few conclusions about myself. That I am a person who probably shouldn’t be married, but should have a series of passionate flings like Anaïs Nin (though she was, uh, also married); that I am too restless and curious to be satisfied by one person forever; that I would prefer to provide security for myself, and find excitement through my relationships.

The conclusions I drew then turned into a reality that, at this point, I long to escape. But I don’t know how.

This is from a journal entry written when I was soon to move away from the house we shared in Auburn, Alabama:

I feel very sad at the prospect of leaving this street, which I love. It is lush & chirping. The crape myrtle is blooming all over town and outside my office window. After 2 yrs of hating this place I have to admit I’ve become attached to it. This street is so quiet & peaceful—it’s been a haven and a retreat. I feel grounded here—God, I have spent so much time in this house, on this street, it’s like I’ve put down roots. Even though I spent so much time looking out the window at the neighbor’s blue mailbox with the weeds or swamp grass or whatever growing around it. I like Victor’s yard & the mysterious gate—like something in the English countryside—that leads into his backyard and which I’ve never seen beyond. The stump in the across-the-street neighbor’s yard from where a hurricane knocked their tree down. The stump always makes me sad because the tree protected their house from view, it’s so naked over there now. I’ll miss the porch & sitting with Gretel [my cat] in the sunlight, & the Pin Oak in our front yard, which I thought for a while was dead but then one day was full of little leaves. I’ll miss the nighttime insect sounds which I hear right now. And all the birds—birds love our crape myrtle & I would always see cardinals hopping in its branches and hear birdsong all day. & watching the bushes in our front yard grow and how they get tall & unruly & give us more privacy behind them. & the curve of our street and the neighbor’s chalked-in basketball court, how he put a basketball court right in the middle of the street & he’s always out there with his dog and little boy & he acknowledges me with a wave and a look when I drive by & sometimes his boy does, too.

I concluded, These things didn’t make me happy, but they were there for me, they accepted me into them, they did no harm.

So what would make me happy? This is what I thought, then:

I want to be on a date with someone I’m wildly attracted to. To stay up all night with someone—to have that intimacy & specialness. To have extreme and intense experiences of aliveness (not extreme like bungee jumping). I want to be buzzed & laughing at a dinner with friends. I want to go dancing to 80s music. I want to go camping and talk around a fire, and drink. I want to make love so intensely I feel the whole universe coming into it and lose all self-consciousness. I want to scream. I want to have FUN.

Well, I can honestly say that I’ve experienced those things since. Except the camping. And even my most ecstatic moments are tinged with self-consciousness...but a lot less than before.

After I announced who I thought I was, and left—a conversation which happened the day after I’d graduated with my MFA, with trees outside our dining room window thrashing in a tropical storm-grade wind—I missed my ex-husband for years. And sometimes still do. Not just the things we did together habitually, like making Indian food or traveling the country by car—but his presence as a person. His light-blue eyes, and the care he took parting his hair after showering; the piercing way he looked at me when I was upset and sulking, like he was frustrated but wasn’t going anywhere.

…I do think C was right in saying that I’m too young, didn’t know what I want, need to have more experiences. He said he wants someone who’ll be there at his deathbed. I said, “I just want to feel alive.”

Oh, maybe I should see the past 7 years as a success. Instead of thinking words like lonely, grief, failure, unstable, scary, I should think, ALIVE!

...Four years ago, my ex remarried and now has two sons with his wife, another poet like him. I’m not even a poet anymore or at least, not a practicing one. Despite my having put years into the MFA, I am not writing poems, not sending any out. I’m a stressed single parent; I've been dating someone for two months, so things are uncertain in a way I've become accustomed to.

I’m training as a mental health counselor to spend my days listening to others’ stories of brokenness, which reflect my own. That role and being mother to my 4-year-old offer me glimpses of the stability I’ve lost in the vicissitudes of romantic relationship.

And yet I feel pretty damn sure I want what my ex-husband offered me, too early in my adulthood for me to accept it—that secure love which, now that I feel I’m being denied it, looks like the only path toward wholeness.

 

C. and I at my MFA graduation ceremony

The waiting

I made fun of online dating on this blog (http://fallingovergirl.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html) a while back. But now I’ve decided to try it, using a free site. Some thoughts a few days in:

1. As in life, the men I like and those who like me are two different categories.

2. Being a 36-year-old baby mama does not make me part of the most popular demographic in men’s eyes.

3. I seem to fare better in bars, where my age and parental status are not immediately apparent. Online, it's like they are written on big signs that people see before they register anything else.

4. But I have to try it because all the couples I know met online.

5. Because relationships that start in bars are unlikely to lead to feeling loved.

6. And Christmas break is coming up—the time when my grad-school friends leave town. Might as well go out with strangers so as not to asphyxiate of boredom.

7. Dating sites subject you to a lot of junk-email from folks who CANNOT SPELL OR USE GRAMMAR.

8. Yet they also increase your odds of having an important encounter with someone you wouldn’t have met otherwise.

9. If love is a hotel, online dating is like the hallway. As you walk through, checking out the people passing by or beckoning you toward slightly-open doors, you think: “In the past, I have always just rushed into a room in this hotel. And then I woke up 12 hours later, bruised, robbed, and with no real idea what happened...”

10. It would take only one really good date to make this worthwhile.

And this, from T.S. Eliot (in “East Coker” from Four Quartets):

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

Passport

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver

Recently I got several boxes in the mail from my mother, mostly full of stuff from my daughter’s 4th birthday party over the summer. It was like Christmas for Sara as I opened each box, and toys emerged that she thought she had lost or maybe dreamed of—a mermaid doll that changes colors in the tub, Buzz Lightyear, a few plastic Smurfs (which she calls “Smurths”).

My mom also sent along a surprising item: my passport, not used since I lived in London for three months on study abroad. The photo was taken when I was 16, and I always thought it was awful. In it I sport a puffy, shoulder-length perm,un-groomed eyebrows, braces, and no makeup. But now, I see something different—for instance, someone who could go without makeup and still look OK. But the picture doesn’t matter.

See, I have a flying phobia—circa post-9/11. And I have “had” depression circa way before that. More than the fear of airplanes or terrorists, depression has kept me far from the world I began to explore in high school and college; from connecting to other places and people outside my own sadness. And yet the stamps on my passport remind me that I was once in Vaduz, Lichtenstein (where I remember climbing many stairs to the top of an old Olympic ski slope); Heathrow and Gatwick airports; Greece; and back in New York City on November 30, 1995, when I returned from my months in England. I had also visited Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and a tiny, ancient part of Turkey, where I bought a little souvenir keychain: a brass figurine of a man with a disproportionately large, erect penis, some kind of fertility symbol. But I wouldn’t say my life after that was very fertile.

Depression creates an inner, and eventually outer, landscape inhospitable to life. Basically, in this state of mind it’s like there is an immovable obstacle between me and anything I might want or need to do, whether it’s to take a walk at the park, play with my child, do homework (I’m a grad student), make plans for the weekend, work a job, write a poem, cope with normal feelings of sadness, anger, and anxiety, or even open my mail. And the most frustrating or debilitating thing is that no one else sees that I have an illness that is walking and talking for me; not even me. Instead, I beat myself up for my lack of motivation, my inability to do this or that.

A couple months ago, I had a vast realization—this is really how it felt—that this identity, of being a depressed person, actually doesn’t have to be permanent. I am 36. And I have struggled through depressive episodes for 18 years now, since my grandfather died of lung cancer during my second week of college. But what if in the next parts of my life, I am going to be an essentially different person: one who isn’t depressed? I was walking in my neighborhood when I first had this astounding thought...It had been a bad weekend. The previous day, I’d spent all afternoon lying in bed. That was Sunday, and my daughter kept wandering in from where she was playing in her adjacent bedroom, probably wondering what was going on with me. As I walked over the broken, tilted old sidewalks I thought about the kind of parent I want to be: one who is not one day remembered by her child as having spent days in bed. I suddenly conceived of the depression as a separate thing—as not really “me,” but as something else that had been added and could be un-added.

At this point on my walk, I noticed a house that I have passed many times since I moved to this neighborhood two years ago. Whenever I’d previously seen it, the house—white, two-story, over a century old, with a dark-blue mansard roof—was under renovation. There was a dumpster out front full of materials being discarded in the process. (This is a common sight on the streets of New Orleans.) The house, I now saw, was done; the dumpster was gone. I could see into the row of tall front windows, made of wavy old glass, into a spacious room whose walls had been painted a delicate, vibrant shade of yellow similar to egg yolk. It looked like no one was living there yet. For some reason that glimpse of color through the glass moved me, and tears came to my eyes. The empty yellow room was somehow my hope of not being depressed—what it would look like. Bright, and lively…I could move into that, and there could be a whole new life. And then, because I didn’t want anyone to notice me staring at this house like someone with mental problems, I walked past, but glanced back a couple times to re-experience that flash of feeling.

When I opened my passport for the first time in so many years and looked at my 16-year-old face in all its awkwardness, and the dark stamps on the blue pages, I was again moved. It struck me as an invitation that had arrived at just the right time: to explore this earth, live in this world and be at ease in my skin. Though I may have to update the photo.

Falling up

I am not sure how to write about my feelings for New Orleans. So many people have; it’s almost a cliché. But though my emerging attachment to this place is hardly unique, it is real and mysterious enough for me to want to share.

Before becoming a NOLA transplant, I spent 7 years in Ithaca, New York--not a place I was lukewarm about. During several years away, living in New Mexico, Virginia, and Alabama, it haunted me. There is a joke that because Ithaca is in a valley, it boasts a gravity that sucks people back in. In my house in Alabama where, as a poetry grad student, I spent most of each day writing, I had daydreamed of Ithaca: the lake with different colors of ice; waterfalls gushing each spring; the tidy grid of streets, yards messy with flowers; the high likelihood of glimpsing Tibetan Buddhist monks around in red and orange robes. During my last stint in I-town (as it is called), I often walked with Sara in her stroller along Cascadilla Creek. Watching the ducks or geese drifting by, and dreadlocked youths streaming in and out of Gimme Coffee across from a pretty park, I felt I was in a paradise of beauty and simplicity.

When it was time to leave, I did not want to go. Like, at all. I envisioned myself buying one of the Victorians in the coveted Fall Creek neighborhood and settling in. At the time I could have done so (probably a ranch, not a Victorian) thanks to an inheritance from my grandmother. I had a support network of friends and my mom 3 hours away to help with Sara; she and I lived in a spacious apartment in one of the downtown’s “high-rise” buildings (i.e., it had 5 floors) where there was a balcony from which we could see the whole city and surrounding farmland. Packing up in July 2009, I felt a huge ache.

At the time, my then-boyfriend and child’s father was heading to Tulane Law. Things between us were tenuous. If he left and I stayed, I felt, I would always wonder if I could have made it work, and would bear the responsibility of depriving my child of a day-to-day relationship with her dad. It was a natural time for me to think of leaving, too, since I craved a change in my career situation and—laughably—thought New Orleans would have more, not fewer, opportunities. Delusion is probably a big reason why anyone does anything in life.

But in the end, I moved because of a dream. I am not a religious person except when it comes to Mary of Guadalupe, whose images/statuettes have taken over my décor in the past ten years. So I prayed for an answer—stay or face an uncertain move—requesting that Mary’s response be as immediate and unambiguous as possible. That night, I dreamed that my boyfriend and I were in a boat together suspended in the sky over New Orleans. He skillfully guided the boat down to land on Lake Pontchartrain. It was like a precognitive dream for dummies.

The first months in New Orleans, though, were reminiscent of Biblical plagues rather than an affirmation of my divinely-guided choice. Car break-in and GPS theft were followed by months of scabies (if you don’t know what that is…good). The almost-immediate breakup with my boyfriend segued to 10 days of homelessness when the energy company killed the power at my new apartment. That October I somehow found myself on 3 leases at once, with no job; subsequently, over 6 months and with a Master’s, I could not land even one interview (eventually securing a temp position with the Census).

Yet New Orleans gave me things I didn’t even know I was missing. Ripe citrus on trees in November; king cake; the St. Charles streetcar lit up at night, full of tourists eager to abandon themselves to this place of muscular oaks and joyous funerals and decadent cuisine. Several friends I know of were arrested here in their youth, because it’s that kind of place where you do things to excess. When you lose, you lose big, and when you receive, you have more than your arms can hold.

Like any experience of love, my love for this city has been complicated. I resent the insufficient drainage system that causes water to gush up onto my lawn almost every time it rains; and I was exalted after the Superbowl win when people in the Carrollton neighborhood (where I watched the game) stopped their cars in the middle of the road, jumped out, and hugged strangers. Due to the endless summers, everyone always seems to be partying like it’s prom night or New Years, so there is pressure to make every day and night a tremendous event: to be, as one of my Counseling classmates labels it, a “fun-seeker.” If you feel isolated in such an atmosphere there is not much support, and it can be challenging to break into groups that have been established for years among locals.

Last Friday, I witnessed a brass band playing outside near Frenchmen Street, the bohemian hub of New Orleans nightlife. Watching the musicians, I didn’t want to stand still, and I could feel that happy energy in the crowd of strangers around me. Wanting to dance in a crowd outside is what this city is about. It is also about yellow-tape crime scenes and poor neighborhoods lacking any trees to shelter residents from the brutal months of heat, the monsoon-like rains. There is no illusion of anything being egalitarian or offered easily. When you can’t get a job in your field, your water is shut off due to a bureaucratic misunderstanding, and you are part of the massive population on Medicaid, there is a sense of living close to the fundamentals of life, having to discern and love what is of greatest value.

And I try to. I love that my daughter is growing up here, that—in contrast to my early, homogenous environment in the North—she is among kids of diverse backgrounds at daycare. I am excited that she will be able to claim this place, with its unique resemblance of European and Caribbean cities, as part of her identity. She won’t have to mumble, “I’m from…Jersey,” as I do every time someone asks my origins. Growing up in New Orleans will give Sara years of conversation at parties, at the very least.

As for me, what this place will provide in the final analysis (as my grandmother used to say) is a mystery. I have experienced its chaos and my own insecurity, felt keenly the Otherness that excludes and attracts me. Here, I am invited to be stronger than I have ever been rather than remaining a person who is self-characterized as “Falling Over” (the previous name of this blog). It is easy to fall: fall in love, fall apart. It’s a matter of gravity and of old patterns. It is harder, and richer, to rise.

The End of the Innocence

One of my classmates did a cool thing the other day: brought a small, flowering branch to our Research and Statistics class. It was from a local bush called Sweet Olive which, he told a couple of us during lunch, blooms during sudden changes in temperature. He said the smell, more intensely than any other sensory data, brings back a childhood of happy time spent outside. That reminded me of Proust’s madeleine—the capacity of scent (and for me, music) not just to evoke, but almost to conjure or reinstate the past. This is why I could never really get into Buddhism; because I find the past to be one of the best things in life. Why try to detach from it? Why not just wallow in it?

I remember returning from class one gloomy October day during my sophomore year of college to find my suitemate, Dawn, sitting alone in the dark, listening to music and weeping. I hope it doesn’t ruin this if I say, the music might have been Journey. I must have attempted to console her; she tried to explain to me that one day, I would understand and even welcome the pleasures of melancholy. I think I may have since taken her message a little too far. She also suggested that I would not always feel the need to hide my long brown hair under a hat—which I did for roughly 3 years of college, either a baseball cap or the soft, velvety winter hat given to me by my grandmother, the queen of hats. She was right about that, too. I probably could have learned more from her; but in her wisdom she soon transferred from Colgate to a much more liberal school in Massachusetts, where people probably understood such things automatically.

Anyway, in the car this morning on the way home from Sara’s daycare—where, when I lingered too long, my child ordered me to “leave, mom!” in a tone that made me flash ahead to her teen years—I heard a Don Henley song on the radio that catapulted me back. I somehow drove home but I was not really aware of my current surroundings. Instead, I was in the summer of 1994 when the man I was in love with (my first requited love, which is a powerful thing) had made me a mix-tape—to take the sting out of the fact that he was spending the summer after our Freshman year strolling around Princeton with his long-term girlfriend, and I was spending it working at Drug Fair and DJ’s Fast Pizza, as well as cleaning the 4 litter boxes in my parents’ basement. (I remember counting down—only 64 more litter boxes before I go back to school...) On lunch breaks from Drug Fair, I sat on the bleachers behind the middle school with my Walkman and listened to the tape, which had on it Henley’s “The End of the Innocence”; “Nights in White Satin” ('Cos I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you); Simon and Garfunkel’s suicide-inducing “Scarborough Fair”; and the REM song with the refrain I’m SOORREEE… Oh, the drama. I sat out there crying, my headphones sealing me into a private world in which I was the star—not a minor player relegated to ringing up people’s cigarette purchases or sneezing over cat litter boxes. The songs he gave me, while they did not help me to stop imagining him in bed with her, did help restore me to myself, and that was quite a gift.

Hearing that song today, I felt some tears for him (who I am still in touch with, of course, on Facebook); tears I had thought, 16 or so years ago, would never stop. But they did. And that is the real “end of the innocence”: to become aware that it all passes; a well that seemed inexhaustible goes dry. I used to think love meant marriage and a future. Now I know that if love comes into my life, I can’t assume I know what it means. I should just be thankful for its fleeting presence and the enduring sensory traces it leaves behind, the being happy inside the being sad.

Life as a pair of pants

My friend Elizabeth told me about a study showing that things which annoy you on a daily basis can cause more mental harm, over time, than larger events such as divorce or job loss. The researchers’ finding was that if a minor annoyance—the broken fridge door, the tree in the yard that blocks light and generates a litter of needles, the paint flaking off the ceiling—is not dealt with, it spreads like a stain, causing mental anguish and slow physical decline. Well, for the past five years, my pants won’t stay up. Maybe this explains…a lot about my recent life.

Let me start at the beginning, during the time when my pants sat cozily at my expanding waist: marriage. Living in small-town Alabama with no access to decent restaurants, my spouse and I cooked pasta, filled our recycling bin with wine bottles, and ate cheese. A lot. I gained 15 pounds, he gained 20, and I hadn’t got the memo telling women that to be fashionable, jeans were now supposed to reveal the butterfly tattoo flowing out of their ass crack. Not only did my jeans button way high up, they were baggy, tenting out around the crotch like those worn on the Northeastern college campuses of my early-1990s youth. I think the intent of this style was to redirect attention from the butt toward the brain, as this was the hopeful early-Clinton era, when egalitarian relationships seemed possible. (Remember?) At any rate, I had no idea that the winds had shifted…until my separation from my husband when, sooner than I’d imagined, I began dating. As well as dropping the 15 pounds from stress and a cross-country move. When I went to the local mall to find some new clothes for my new, uncharted life, I found a curious dichotomy. There were hideous, “sensible” garments meant for folks in my age-range (I was 30), who were clearly perceived as spending all their time in a corporate office or on a golf course—or boat. Alternately, there was Juniors: clothes designed to make teens look like hookers. I didn’t want to appear 53 at 30, so I chose hooker-wear (I chose…the microwave!), and my lower back has been chilly ever since.

As the weather in my Northern town cooled and my pants sexily offered sparse cover, I began dating a 25-year-old—who later became the father of my child, but that’s another story. He told me that in his college classes he often noticed girls, as they rose from their chairs or walked around campus, spastically yanking their pants up in attempt to recapture parts of their lower back/ass that were poofing out. I don’t think he perceived this as flattering. So if this style disaster has been an attempt to please heterosexual men, one might question its success.

When I “became pregnant” a year later, I settled in for 9 months of pants misery. Anyone who has ever enjoyed maternity wear, and the changes of pregnancy, knows what I mean: at a certain point the pants either retreated in horror as they were forced toward my thighs, or, after seeming to fit, loosened and slid toward my enlarged feet. In the last trimester I often felt that I would give my kingdom for a pair of jeans with a zipper . But my post-pregnant era has provided scant relief for the overriding (low-riding) problem of pants designed to punish the fact that most of us, unlike prepubescent girls, have got “back,” and fill our stomachs with good food occasionally. OK, there’s also vanity. I could buy the golfing/ yachting/ office pants and have done with this. But I want to appear as if I have a sexual pulse, which has meant, among other things, never working in an office. I also have a generously-proportioned ass that requires restraint or containment, so baggier or high-waisted pants make it look HUGE. And I don’t have the budget to acquire whatever new styles are available to rich people, which may have moved on from the plumber-crack trend: I’m stuck in thrift stores where the jeans are from at least 5 years ago.

I wrote this because all morning—dropping my kid off at daycare; purchasing an iced coffee; crawling back into bed to stay warm, since New Orleans’ temperature has, in two days, just dropped from 89 to 59 (hi, Fall!)—I’ve been yanking and pulling at the little lip of denim inching down my post-brie-consumption hips…and realizing I don’t have a single pair of pants that gracefully accommodates this ever changing, feast-or-famine portion of the figure which is like a barometer of one’s moods and stance toward life.

Through the puddle

Just now a cloud has pulled up
while I was talking to the Emptiness

of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves

at the bottom of the ocean.
–Jason Shinder

It was March and the sidewalks were full of rain, when the man I was newly seeing stopped our ungainly umbrella-walk to look at some children. There was a large puddle on the cement in front of us, and these kids were playing in it—taking advantage of another crappy Ithaca day and finding in it cause for lightheartedness. X., beside me, sighed deeply and said, “I guess I’m just going to have to go through the puddle.” He was referring to the fact that officially, he was still someone else’s, and he was going to have to go through all the fallout of ending a long-term love.

He is a man I still sometimes wonder about. If I hadn’t, six months later, moved to New Mexico for grad school (where he sent cakes and other whimsical gifts to me through the mail), would we have stayed together, married? He’s long since wed someone else, and after following suit into (and in my case, out of) matrimony, I have put the question to bed. But the puddle is still there, so to speak, and I’m beginning to realize—as New Orleans evinces its painfully abundant fall beauty—that this time I really do have to go through it.

In the puddle are heartache, loss, my own ambivalence about intimacy. It holds the things those of us who can’t fall asleep do to avoid getting into bed (and also the peace that might eventually find us, given a chance)—which, for me, is mostly aimlessly surfing the web, scrolling through photos on Facebook that represent all my far-flung friends, as if the images could become less flat and distant, could accompany me in this haunted interior murk that rises up when the noise and the lights die down, when my child is asleep in her pink plastic bed and I go in to turn the AC up and look at her closed and flowering face.

Eye or I?

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me... –Emerson

When I was 14 and spent the summer at camp in Blairstown, New Jersey, I had a couple of firsts: I finally bled (the last among my peers to do so) and had my first huge crush on a man. His name was Richard and he was 19, from London, fond of soccer and chess. I don’t know what created such combustion within me—a yearning that lasted for years. At first, he was just a cute guy my cabin-mates in our so-called “Algonquin Village” gushed about. Then, as I turned my own focus on him—because these other girls had, they must be on to something—I found him to be an excellent blank screen for projecting almost anything. He was tall, spiky-blond hair (this was 1989...), blue eyes and that accent that made wonderful things happen, as if he had melting ice cubes in his mouth so that everything he said was cool and without edges. And, God bless him, he was mostly quiet. So I had no real idea about his personality, opinions, etc. and could imagine all the best, imagine he secretly noticed me, too despite the fact that he was dating a girl his age who worked in the dining hall (my friends and I, envious, called her the “Kitch Bitch”). There was also the strong taboo element: others in whom I confided about my crush told me he would be arrested if he even laid a finger on me—which, duh, wasn’t exactly off-putting. When I left camp at the end of the summer, dragged away in my parents’ Volvo, I missed him—whose longest sentence to me had been, “You don’t have to pick those chips up, they’re biodegradable” (in that accent)—for months, for years.

That was the time, the moment, when my focus definitively changed from me looking out at the world, to me seeing everything through the Other as I imagined this Other looking at me, through me. (I am reminded of philosopher Simone Weil’s idea that God, who is referred to as male, can only love her as the space in Creation that she takes up; the more fully she submits or removes herself, the more God can fill and possess the space she leaves behind.)

…I was wearing a long tie-dyed t-shirt over my bathing suit, floating on an inner tube down the Delaware along with Richard, another counselor called Sarge, and a handful of kids, all of whom were somewhere in my line of sight but not nearby; when in a moment that seemed to magnify into a revelation, a shift, a bolt of knowledge or love, I saw everything around me—the swirling water, my bare legs and feet, trees rising up on the shore, the vivid Pennsylvania summer sky—imbued with significance and specialness as if I was not alone, as if Richard were inside my gaze, like I was imagining being him, almost, or feeling him finding my perspective fascinating and larger-than-life. This is how falling in love made me feel (and has): it replaced my “I” with the eye of the beloved in an ecstatic act of subjection, a hyper-aware openness.

How can I relish life with just my own eyes (and “I”), my own days, “reality” that feels like a ribbon ironed flat?

This is larger than a self-esteem issue, although that is involved. It’s why I write—as an act of reflection, to give the world to myself as if from outside, so I can feel the space that I, too, take up.

Single

The last time I saw my recent ex was on a hot August night when I visited his workplace. Nursing several glasses of wine, I had a long conversation with a woman a few years younger than me who bartends there. She had intentionally taken a significant amount of time away from romantic relationships to focus on herself. In that time she had done a cleanse, yoga, and a lot of reflecting, and is also training to become an alternative healer. Glowing with health and beauty, she concluded her description of her ongoing “single” experience by saying, in a tone of evident satisfaction: “My head is so quiet now.” My response was jealousy, for my head was not quiet. My head was like a 4 AM party that needs to be broken up by police or concerned neighbors. Even as I registered my response to this woman’s words—and her state of secure wellbeing—I could feel the howling wolves and broken glass of my inner hysteria…which, a couple of hours later, prompted me to initiate the end of that romantic relationship.

Now, about a month post- this latest breakup, I realize that I have either been in love with or dating someone since I was 18; almost half my life. What would it be like if the psychic energy I have been channeling toward men were poured back into me and my life? I also realize that to be a 35-year-old unemployed single mother is a horrible cliché. Around me, everyone I know has paired up. They have built or bought enduring structures. They appear able to, in the lingo of my Counseling studies, “form and maintain satisfying relationships,” both intimate and communal. Since about 18, non-sexual relationships have interested me very little: something that becomes clear whenever there is a holiday and I have no plans; that was apparent last month on my birthday when I did not receive a gift. How can I advise other people on how to succeed in relationships—of all kinds—until I can define what such success means to me?

I do not want to be judgmental here about my (or anyone’s) strong drive for love and sex. Trying to scrub these parts of me away or condescend to them would mean harming myself…which is exactly what I want to stop doing. I just want to press pause and see how I arrived at this state of things.

I am reminded of the end of the Jane Kenyon poem “Eating the Cookies,” which is about cleaning out the house after a close relative has died: the speaker pauses in her packing/folding and, for a moment, presses the last cookie from the tin against her forehead, “because / it seemed like the next thing to do.”

A Transparent Life

When asked if I plan to have a second child, my answer is an immediate NO! as if I have been asked, instead, to debone a whole fish. (As Sara nears school-age, I have been delighted to get sleep, poetry, and other kinds of freedom back.) But there is another urge that has been growing in me for years: to join so many Americans in the strange act of writing a memoir.

Memoirs, in my understanding, used to be something you wrote when you were older or had experienced something catastrophic. Now, the field has been opened up and it seems that anyone, no matter how young or inexperienced, can write a memoir about anything. My creative inspiration has always been experience, and the only experiences I feel confident about recording are my own. Anais Nin wrote, “We write to taste life twice,” and I think there are some of us who have that taste—for whom living once isn’t enough. To have an experience, good or even awful, is one pleasure; to recreate past worlds of sensation and feeling is another that suggests a further pleasure of opening the vault of private experience to a wider world (why I blog): making private life into public record. Clearly, some people would rather be shot in the face than do this, but I have had an exhibitionist streak since the times when, during naptime in kindergarten, I would cross to the boys’ side of the room and flash them (who suggested this—them or me—is unclear).

I have read many memoirs this year as I’ve turned this wish over in my mind. Some were beautifully written—like Mary Karr’s Lit—some were about some combination of food, romance, and France; or, extending this further, butchery and infidelity (I really like, and was slightly embarrassed by, Julie Powell’s second book). Some also served as a self-help manual for the reader, teaching by example; maybe all, since another person’s story can always be internalized. Some I’ve read and thought, I can definitely write a better book than this person. But when it comes to it, I can never commit to a topic (depression? motherhood? marriage/divorce?) and get started. Maybe underneath, there is some conviction that I don’t dare speak about my little experiences; that I have nothing valuable to say to people.

During my senior year of college, I worked as an artist’s model. Once a week, myself and several forty-somethings met at a beautiful little house out in the country—lots of warm wood and glass doors, a transparent kind of house—and ate avocado salad and plates of rotini, sometimes proceeding to the outdoor hottub with our wineglasses and sharing a joint. Then, off would come my robe and I stood (or sat, knelt, or lay) among some white pillows in the center of the basement room under a spotlight. I did this, for something like $20 a session, because I thought it was a cool thing to do and because it scared the hell out of me. As a result, I did not create the best or most graceful poses. I think I looked rather stiff and awkward and, as one (male) artist remarked, I appeared skinnier when wearing my clothes. My nipples, as another person despaired, kept changing size due to uneven heating of the room (this was winter in upstate NY). In other words, I was completely under scrutiny: more than physically, it felt like. Because I believed the body—my own not-so-skinny 21-year-old body—to be the gateway to love, to being known as a person by another person. This was something I could barely conceive of at the time, since I’d had very few lovers and was about 10 years away from discovering the clitoris and any sense of ease during physical intimacy. But to reveal oneself, I learned, is an opportunity, opening one up to criticism, joy, and the complexity of things.

Self-disclosure, whose different forms I’ve pursued ever since, has never brought happiness—for long. But it has occasioned knowledge and, as my friend recently wrote in an email reflecting on my (transparently) messy life, knowledge is the most faithful of lovers.

Coming Home

My daughter returns from her month-long stay with my mom in the Northeast on Tuesday—and I can’t wait. It was a strange period of “vacation” time without her. I was laid off from my job, fired by my boyfriend, and enjoyed considerably more alone time, and 30 Rock episodes, than one person should have to withstand. (Liz Lemon, I am you!...) I also slept really late a few times and was accepted into Loyola’s graduate Counseling program, so it wasn’t all bad. Overall, though, the feelings I routinely experienced during this time make me think of a practice that my stepfather used to indulge in: walking across hot coals barefoot while chanting cool moss…cool moss…

Today I bought a cute tablecloth so we can eat meals, which I will theoretically make instead of microwaving, at the dining room table (not in front of the TV/at the computer, as was the custom before she left). With the crystal candlesticks from my dad’s parents’, the table I have been hauling from place to place for years—and have egregiously under-utilized—suddenly looks warm and sweet…and I realize that the one thing I need in my life right now is some kind of domestic happiness. I want to embrace the love I have in my life, with my child, and be able to really feel and give love (the real and nurturing kind, not the kind that steals from you and makes you less-than), in my body and in the space I create around me. This has always been the thing it is hardest for me to do; and I wonder why.

I keep trying to find a copy of the Laurie Colwin novel Family Happiness at used bookstores because I want to reread it. It’s about a woman who is split between her family, with whom she has a happy and secure connection, and her extramarital lover, who “gets” her like no one else; and chooses, in the end, to stay on both paths without ever having the two meet. Colwin’s writing is existentially comforting, nuanced, and buoyant and I need that now. I don’t think, though, I will be following the path(s) chosen by Polly Solo-Miller, the main character in the book. I want those two things together: a love, and home. Is it possible? I am going to hope. In the meantime, there is just a tablecloth. And three placemats.

Untying the Knot

For years, I’ve been wondering what to do with my wedding rings: two simple white-gold bands, the engagement ring featuring a pink tourmaline surrounded by two tiny diamonds. During the two-year separation, I occasionally brought them out of their black box in the bathroom closet and wore them (usually while cleaning, for some reason) to give myself a jolt of weird security. Their existence suggested I had once had things figured out: there had been a man, a cat, a rented house, and dinner to come home to, followed by Law and Order reruns. At the same time they were a reminder that I had failed to fulfill their promise. I had loved and, like so many others, lost, leading to a division of zero assets and the temporary moniker of “defendant.” Once in a while I would actively consider parting with them, especially after my ex remarried two summers ago, pushing our unsuccessful union further into the zone of irretrievability. But I felt paralyzed by indecision. Pawning them seemed so crass. Better to keep them—out of sight, out of mind?—or, someday, do something meaningful and ceremonial like toss them over a waterfall, experiencing a cathartic sense of release.

In the end I sold them, today, to pay my energy bill. The transaction was held at a cardboard box-cluttered jewelry store in a strip mall in the suburbs. The buyer—a guy with the same first name as my ex-spouse, which seemed poetic—dropped them in a plastic Krewe of Rex cup intended for beer conveyance during Mardi Gras; weighed their slight physical presence; and wrote down an amount that almost covers one month of AC use in New Orleans. Goodbye…

Were we even there?

Today a high school acquaintance “friended” me on Facebook and I accepted (though, as usual with these requests, I had never spent any personal time with her in my life), then checked out her profile. The thing that struck me is hardly unique among people my age: her profile picture was of her kids, not her. On closer examination, I saw that she was there, but in the background, with only her face and a sweet, self-effacing smile showing around the bodies of the small children she crouched beside.

This morning at 5:40 AM my daughter, in the next room, began crying, as she always does but not usually this early; and I lurched out of bed to see what was going on. She requested milk in her sippy cup, and when I told her that it was still time to sleep, not eat, she insisted, “I hungry!” So I got the milk, gave it to her, and flung myself back into my bed, in anger that I could not express toward my child. I can barely remember a single day in the past 3 years when I have been able to wake up on my own, when I wanted to, instead of being interrupted out of sleep.

The dining room in my apartment is a room that is never used. It holds a little piece of my grandparents’ house, where I spent so much happy time as a child, in the form of their 50’s wooden table, chairs, sideboard, and jelly cabinet. Large, red-toned portraits of them, taken in the early 1980s, rest high up on the walls looking down at me so often—I feel—in disappointment that I have no innate abilities (or maybe willingness) to create a warm and nurturing home; to keep a relationship, a marriage, a contract, a pleasant demeanor…erect a Christmas tree, host dinners, enjoy being a member of the larger social structure. How did I get this way? Is this how I am supposed to be? Is there some model for “bohemian, neurotic, introvert parent” that is missing in our culture? Do these labels absolve anything—just because I know I have these qualities, what do I do?

And so, the picture of my high school acquaintance kneeling in a streambed with her four children and muscular husband awakened old debates in me and a yearning for that word “family,” which is so fraught that it is impossible to feel positively about it and impossible to live without what it represents.

The division I feel inside continues in my life, in which I am dating someone who, though he has a daughter, too (older than mine), does not want to be involved with my child, at least at present, or to see me as a mom. He prefers that we get together outside of our domestic situations, current and former. So while our exes babysit, he picks me up in his sporty car like I am a teenager, and we progress from restaurant, to bar, to bed, to a brief iced-coffee session in the morning, then back to our separate obligations. This world we inhabit is about romance, leisure—illusion. Because how can these things be real when they ignore huge parts of our experience and identities? And yet, what single mom would not want such a break from the rigors and disappointments of life? A chance to enjoy globes of red wine, animated discussion about art and relationships, spontaneous time together; and avoid mundane conversations about dry cleaning or potty training?

On one of our first dates, he and I went to a wilderness preserve in another part of the state. It was just before spring had begun, and the irises he was hoping to show me hadn’t bloomed yet. Instead, there were all these waving, brassy stalks where, in a month or less, the flowers would surely appear. They were dry like husks. They resembled wheat, nourishment, but also gave an impression of decay. It was a windy day, and there was something displacingly eternal—I know of no better adjectives for this—about the sound the wind made blowing these parched golden things around. It was a dry, old moan-hiss that said, the world has been here forever, and this life is just an accretion of perceptions arranged in time, not necessarily wedded to anything stable…look deeply into anything and it will blow away.

It was a second or third date. We held hands, or his arm was around me, as bundled in our coats we walked and sat and listened in the quiet, far from highways. I don’t know what he was thinking, but on top of the thrill of feeling his body in contact with mine, that newness, I felt a detached weariness, like we were each just collections of particles experiencing other collections of particles, forming them into stories and feelings. Were we really even there at all? I imagined how months before we met, that sound had been there, with only the small life—insect, fish, mold—subsisting in that mute place to witness it; and it would be there in the utter blackness that night after we left, when people in the cities and towns nearby were fashioning certainties of their plans and happiness.

 

Irises at Jean Lafitte National Historic Park and Preserve

I love...oops

Last night I spontaneously declared my affections to my boyfriend in the traditional style: in which, after weeks of unconscious deliberation, one stares into the face of the beloved and deploys the word love, hoping that it may be said back or at least, that one won’t be ejected from the beloved’s lap. Similarly to when I said I’m pregnant to someone else 4 years ago, it did not go well.

After the stunned silence and polite, non-I-love-you- infused reply from him, he asked if I would like some water (we had been finishing dinner) and went to get it from the other room, probably doing his best to restrain himself from leaving the apartment and from there, the country. I felt as if my insides were coated in tar, or that I should request my water with a side of arsenic. In short, I sort of extremely wished I could take it back. Now my miscalculation is sitting in the middle of my life, both of our lives, like a poop in a hotel sink. If the relationship does end it will be the first time, in my experience, that I love you has been the cause.

Afterwards, we failed to fuck. Nothing puts a damper on sex like saying those words to a man who is not desirous of hearing them; or at least, hearing them from you.

And today, some decision must be made. Do I take the email he wrote this morning—in which he spoke of his love for his recent ex, relief in finally being over her, and weary repulsion, now, for all things love—as a final end or a post-I love you male freakout? I think any self-respecting woman would end things with him, but self-respect has not been my thing. A trail of past missteps and humiliation had led me—over a candlelit dinner in his bedroom; after being referred to by him as his “girlfriend” multiple times; after 3 months of amazing sex, planning a vacation together this summer, and several calls/texts throughout each day—to tell my lover that I love him. Big mistake.

Easy come, easy go

Today my job with the Census, which was supposed to last until the end of the month, ended. I am dropped back into a familiar void: of not checking my bank statements out of fear, hoping I can coast on the fumes of cash past; wondering how I will continue to pay Sara’s daycare and my rent costs alone, wondering how I got to be almost 35 and in this position. Reader, that question will not be answered here but probably relates to my inability to check bank statements, stop buying lip gloss / red wine, or function while emotionally flattened—which, since graduating college, was most of the time.

On the plus side, I can lie in bed eating sea-salt encrusted dark chocolate and reading O Magazine. I bought a new notebook at Borders last night because I intend to start writing again: yes, the aforementioned writing that will never be published and, if it is, only a few will see. I feel like there is more welling up and I need to connect…and this past 5 weeks spent in meetings, wearing a nametag, driving over the steep Mississippi river bridge to New Orleans East, sitting in church cafeterias and community centers, walking the streets with my black Census bag, has definitely exhausted and disconnected me, even as it’s been affirming and invigorating (making money, being valued by the world in some way). I am hoping that I will be rehired for the next Census operation next month. But in the meantime, it’s back to the world of unemployment, guilt, and creativity.

Over 9 months of unemployment, even as I have lost much in terms of the means to be materially secure and proud of myself—and have wrestled a group of new poems from some inner necessity—I have shared a common fate with many other people in this country at this time, and I believe that is valuable...and provides perspective. A beautifully-dressed woman in her mid-50s who recently began working in my Census “crew” (only to be told, 3 days into her job, that we’re out of work) spent last week moving out of her home, which she lost after 3 years out of a job. “Now I live with my mother in the ghetto,” she told me. There was a kind of question in her careful but blunt tone of voice—why this, what now, why me?

I don’t know what the answer is for her, and can’t imagine being forced to make such a transition. For me, I am just trying to survive until August when I plan, if they’ll have me, to enter Loyola’s MS in Counseling program and from there—after years of homework, further debt accumulation, and a lengthy certification process—a new life and career I hope will carry me and my child forward for the long haul. One dream is definitely finished: while I will still write, I won’t try to live as a writer anymore. I won’t take jobs in coffee shops and bookstores, or volunteer at a holistic studies institute (I’m sure my mom still cringes at the thought of months I spent living in a tent in Rhinebeck, NY), in order to have the time and emotional space to write. I won’t pursue a creative PhD to be more competitive for academic jobs. I won’t market myself as a freelance editor or writer, making a business out of words and reading; or try to direct my skills into related fields such as marketing. And I won’t do any of this for the most impractical reason of all: my heart isn’t in it.

Outside the door

I seem to be entering, or revisiting, a depressing phase as a poet—the old struggle of should I keep doing this? This is coming up because in the first months I was in New Orleans, I was very productive and now find myself faced with a poetic “product” or body of work ready to be disseminated—in literary mags, to chapbook and book contests.

But I’m deeply tired of the public poetry world: the money part (paying to enter contests you won’t win), how you have to be grateful for a remotely positive rejection, the bullshit that does get published that I find tepid or otherwise uninspiring (I’m not saying all published poetry is tepid, of course, but definitely some). And for what? So a few other, um, poets—talk about preaching to the choir—will read your scribblings? Probably they’re also jockeying for position, of necessity thinking: is this work better or worse than mine, has this poet won more or fewer contests/publications than I have? Even if someone is passionate about others’ writing, she cannot help but position her work/herself in relation to it and to the larger culture and conversation, which includes competition and doors that either open or stay closed. Yes, I can write for myself and never publish. But in this world of instant connection to everything, such a pose does not feel appropriate or realistic. With so many opportunities to connect, why would I make a goal of creating in isolation and obscurity? But self-publishing or doing so on this blog just wouldn’t give me the sense of affirmation I can’t help but crave.

I believe in saying something: in speaking out, preferably in a way that can be understood/felt not only by a few who are within the same official poetry forum, but by some in the wider human community. I believe in the power of writing to organize and capture, or even bless, a moment or emotional process that otherwise would have bloomed, died, and gone unnoticed. And I will keep standing up for that. However, whereas in my 20s it honestly didn’t feel important that I had no significant success and recognition to speak of for my labors (and trust me, it IS labor), in my 30s it does, creating a feedback loop of: if this is not going to be noticeably valued by or useful to others, if these words are sent out into the wind, then why am I putting so much energy into this, what is the source that will keep feeding this vocation? It turns out I can’t be like Tibetan monks who spend days or weeks completing sand mandalas, only to immediately dispose of them. I want to hear a response from the world besides the one that basically says: “Thanks for your $20, which will promote the publication of another writer; but your poem/manuscript did not make the cut.” (And if I did hear a more positive answer, as sometimes happens, how satisfying could that possibly be given the narrow margins within which such success is measured and appreciated?)

Lately, not only does it feel insulting and crappy to accept this reality, it feels limiting to have—as a life goal—writing for a few, while essentially hiding from the people in your own family who will never understand or like your writing. Going forward, I would rather reach other people in a tangible, humble way than promote my “so smart, so artistic” self in a finite and less-than-hugely significant one. (Caveat: if this unassuming, real connection can happen through writing, that’s fine too, but in that case it probably won’t be poetry.) I am glad for the moments of connection and recognition I have felt over the years as a poet in a larger community of writers; and I have found folks I met in this sphere to be among the most compassionate and nuanced people I know. But the question of whether such rewards as are available can sustain my whole existential enterprise is, well, a question.

Growing up, thinking that I was intelligent and creative kept me from feeling like shit. I clung to this side of my nature in order to avoid the other things: being judged unattractive, unpopular, clumsy in my skin—a flawed human like everybody else, but somehow worse. It’s a classic story. Now, the thought of moving away from this identity—born of pain and a need for approval—and becoming a therapist seems to offer a way of having my voice actually be heard: of receptively entering into an intimate conversation with the world outside my door.