in which i carry on

I thought that having time to let my mind wander might bring about more words, more deliberations, pontifications, or observations. But, all this time hasn’t made me want to write about anything but you. You lurk for me in the quiet places even though I’ve tried my best to tell myself that you need to leave my mind. You’re just so perfect there. I know you’re not really perfect but it’s what I want most, the imperfect parts. I’d like to help your through them or just accept them. It’s the desire that makes you perfect, the glossed over effect of faraway vision. And there is this wall, this insurmountable barrier that even though I want to flail against it, I’m kinda glad it’s there. Because perfect (or imperfect) is easy from far away and always less painful. So the choices I have could be made simple. I could give myself a deadline. I’m good with deadlines, goals. I know how to reach them or let them go. I’m good with finite, or I’m just more accepting of it. Maybe that’s the answer, a day, a time to know for good if good is what we could be.

radio ga ga

Since the day after Thanksgiving I've been listening to Christmas music. I do it every year. And I love it. I don't get the Christmas blues that people talk about- how lonely the holidays are without someone by your side. I'm not a lonely person, I'm just a loner. Except now the time is growing closer and closer until the object of my affection is within arms length and my thoughts a vering from Christmas to attack mode.

This will be the fifth year that I have stood near him when a new year started and this will be the fifth year that I leave the next morning with longing and obsession in my heart. The daytime pre-obsession is a bit quieter this year, but my dreams are peppered with him, even with his friends. And the next day I wake up and he stays with me a little while the way good dreams do, like the object is really there, like there was never a dream at all. And then I have coffee.

Christmas songs on the radio are my background noise this season and I can't help but notice all the wishes to be near someone, cuddled up by a fire, basking in the glow of lights. I have to say that for all of that sentiment that I don't miss I do wonder what Christmas would be like with him and whether he'd be game for a tacky lights tour. While I'm not putting pressure on myself (because I know I'll whimp out) this may be the year that the radio pining starts making a little more sense.

baby mine

In a word- explosion. It’s the best way to describe it. I was sitting at my dining room table when the tiny trickle started. I sat listening for seconds thinking that it was just a new sound in another apartment. And then it was a gush, a flood, a waterfall and it was close and I ran and I screamed.

In the same chair tonight I sat while my best friend said, “Are you sitting down?” At first the thought was a tiny trickle in my mind and then the words she spoke confirmed the gush, the flood, the waterfall.

In one week two things in my life have cracked wide open. The first- my bathroom ceiling. The second- my social sphere. You see, the Object of my affection (or better my old affection, my sometimes wanderlust, my sometimes passing thought) is moving across the country to reside within a very short afternoon drive. This spins my world around, maybe even more so than my bathroom ceiling spitting on me when I pee.

My first reaction to both was a lot of bad words along with the feeling of unsteadiness like trying to water ski- the feeling of gliding, of skimming along- was within my grasp, but a little painful to achieve.

The Object has just been so perfectly out of reach, so perfectly placed on a pedestal that resided across the universe. He has been a routine for several years, a once a year face-to-face meeting, a fluttering chasm of feelings, an unhealthy amount of obsessive time wasted and then slightly forgotten. I’m a creature of habit. I like my bathroom with a dry ceiling and I like my un-gettable gets to stay un-gettable. My bathroom will be fixed, that’s what I pay rent for, but my brain pays my heat in panic attacks and that’s not good for anyone.

me, myself and i

There are moments in my life when I realize a true fact about myself- when an entire emotion or trait takes solid form and sits down right beside me. Yesterday it was sadness and insecurity.

Happiness, contentedness and ease have been my norm, my everyday for most of this year. And after such a long stretch of almost bliss I thought maybe my emotions had been turned off. Maybe I was numb.

Sadness has been a constant in my life- my security blanket, my commonplace. I even say I like the word “melancholy,” that to me it is not negative, but simply descriptive and alright. And “despair”- I know it well. And “funk.” And “low.” But, I don’t have depression, never have. I’m just low key. And for a long time I thought everyone else felt the same way, but that they were just better actors than I was.

Happiness- I know now- feels better, it wears better, it even walks better than melancholy ever could. My doctor asked me recently how I had managed to lose 10 pounds since my last visit. I told her I had no idea and that I wasn’t even trying. I knew I liked my state of mind and how my body was reacting to it. That even if the even keel I was going through was really numbness I didn’t want it to stop.

Yet sadness crept up on me yesterday and shooed away months of what I thought was non-feelings. And part of me was even glad in the sadness because it meant the all my emotions were there. It meant I was not numb. It meant that I really have been happy and even joyful and that I now have a reference point to work my way back to from the gutter whenever I fall in. But, don’t worry- I’m already out.

reaction

I need you sometimes just to be what I fall into. I don’t want to mutter in the low times anymore. It’s too dark there and I’ve been there too long. I like this lightness now, this floating I’ve been feeling. It doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes need you to be the blanket, my wrap around. Because we all need something that makes the ground softer just like moss on a forest floor that dampens the fall of acorns or pinecones- being the equal and opposite force that stops their fall. And it is what I need now, just something I can curl into and lie still with, something that only needs me to be still and quiet- my equal and opposite.

insider trading

I didn’t go to bed on Sunday night because of a boy from London. When I heard London, my ears perked up and my attention remained on him searching for an accent. There was none. He’s American, but a boy who loves London is a boy I could listen to. And he had kind eyes.

We stayed up- a group of us –until the sun came up. I watched green appear on the trees outside the window as I squinted against the increasing light. The notion of sleep was silly. I was still reworking all the words, all the questions, all the answers.

We turned the night into generalizations that turned personal. It started easily and innocently with a hypothetical, a question about what lies behind the curtain of a boy’s mind. He spilled all the secrets, said he shouldn’t be divulging so much. We ate up every word, hung on them.

“Why him and not me,” he asked at one point.

“It’s just a personal choice. It’s like why her and not me,” I replied.

“OK. I get it,” he said and with that I let him go, but we kept talking, almost endlessly about everything.

“I’m sensitive, but straight,” he cautioned us.

“I’m quoting you on that one.” He didn’t know how serious I was. I thought about leaving him my card- an arrow to this blog- a window inside my head. I hinted all night to him, but we had entered the friend zone. I could have- so many times- just slipped in beside him, turned his face to mine. I didn’t- claiming all the insecurities he had released in his conversations. In three hours I knew more about his heart, his feelings, his fears of love than I know about my closest friends. And that felt good. And he made me laugh. With his frankness and openness. I wish that I had said more to him than “bye,” in the morning- more than, “Have fun in London.”

i was the snow

and you scooped me up.

I don't understand the girl who needs to be with someone. I don't understand dependency. I don't understand how the absolute resolve to stand alone is unique. I don't fight the push and pull anymore in my mind. I accept this independence. And yet, I like to watch things like "The Bachelor" and I cheer for the girl who shelters her heart then lets the walls down in the ninth inning. I know that girl. That girl that makes the boy fight for her with everything he's got. But those boys, those boys don't come around very often and when they do I think sometimes I'm more than steel. Maybe I'm titanium. I just know that you won't find me being snow anytime soon. I am not some easily malleable sustance that could melt on contact. Although, I think- somewhere inside me I wish I was.

thinking inside the city

I thought you had to be hard to live in New York, like you had to come here with grit already under your nails. You don't. People here are soft, filtered around the edges like any other place. I’ve had more doors opened for me in New York than I would ever in Virginia. There is a collective spirit here, a bond that automatically links everyone. It is the decision, the absolute resolve, to be alone in a sea of people. That decision of isolation, ironically, is the link- because New York is isolating. So vast, so filled, and yet you can end your day with emptiness in your heart.

"It’s because you don't have really deep relationships here. You have a lot of friends, but the connections are not the same," say the 20 something girls sitting in a pub listening to friends play Irish music. I would argue that what they say isn't true. The closeness they talk of- that exists in college, on common halls, in shared rooms. It doesn't happen outside New York either because of the paring off, the coupling that is inevitable. First you have a friend and you are close and can sometimes finish each other's sentences then that friend gets married - step one in the distance between you. Then that married friend has children - step two in the distance between you. You see your friend, you still love her, but there are now complications, messiness, and babysitters to arrange. And there you are, single and wanting a big city to get lost in, to decidedly be isolated inside of. So, this closeness that New Yorkers want so badly. It isn't an anomaly that is only lacking in Gotham. It happens everywhere. It just looks different.

Maybe you do have to be hard to live here, but that grit under your fingernails is really just grit in your heart. And maybe I have that and that is why I love this place, love this city, with it's noise and brittleness and it's softness, just around the edges, like the Hudson and East River rounding the edges of the hard land.

in which i actually write a post

I skipped two major events in my posting this February. I'm making up for that now.

Most people don't like February. They think of it as a month that drags on in the middle of winter full of crankiness and visible breath. I've always loved February because it holds my birthday. February to me is like a jewel, like the best month every invented. It's different, spicy, unconventional with its 28 days and sometimes an extra. I like a month with spunk and I like February.

This particular one brought on my 30th year which means I was born in 1977 when disco was dying and Madonna was not yet the rage. I don't hold much to age in years and what the societal conventions say about them. But, the things that bother me about age are the things I can't stop, like time. I can't postpone the fact that at some point I will be past the age of having children and at 30 I still have no idea if I even want them. That is what bothers me about turning over a year. I'd just like time to hault and wait for me to get all pulled together, then let's start back up at 21, that was good year- and a good birthday.

The second February event, of course, occurred yesterday and I so gracefully floated over it because V-Day to me does not mean flowers and chocolate (If someone was here to give them to me I would not want them. Valentine's Day is lame-o and meant for middle American men who don't konw how to show love every other day of the year.). I've decided, through some events I haven't shared with you, that I want nothing to do with dating. Maybe it's because I'm so into this single life or because I think I've found the one I want yet my love is unrequited and I'd rather live in the moments I have with him then in the lifetime I could have with someone else because when I look in his eyes it's like every place I want to go and all the places I've never been.

you can’t defile a first edition

It's what I told a friend, handing her a book I found at a thrift store. A little known book, but a first edition just the same. It may never be worth anything, but you can't disregard it's status among other books.

Sometimes I feel like this, like I’m brand new, a minute old, pristine and so innocent. I’m no original. 'You’re one of a kind.' It’s just babble. We’re all the same when it comes to basics, just trying to survive.

A boy once told me something like “when you get to the end of the road, it’s better to have a worn out heart than a pristine one.” What does he know? I thought. I still think.

I like my pristine little heart all glittery and guarded by a fortress of emotions. You couldn’t break in if you tried with a jackhammer.

My 1st edition heart has been shelved a long time and it looks to be never read. My pages aren’t dog-eared, no one has left notes in the margins.

When I get to the end of my road, my heart won’t be worn out and maybe it will be priceless, a one of a kind first edition, still memorialized between it’s own covers.