Anonymous

Boston is not a handy place to be anonymous. It is small, and familial, and people will talk at you, which is charming when it’s morning and it’s sunny, but not so much when you haven’t washed your hair since Friday and have a penchant for not wearing real pants. 

The people at the coffee shop know me by name now. Sometimes I come in before my bar job and I look like a passable human. Most of the time I sit slumped to the side of a table between classes and I look homeless. They still know it’s me. 

Or maybe it’s that they still know it’s me when I go around pretending to be a solid member of society. The kind who doesn’t pretend not to hear whilst wearing headphones that are not playing any sounds. 

“Miss, you doing ok?” The man beside me had asked me this three times already. This time there was actual sound in my headphones because I was making a playlist for class, but I knew what he was saying. Each time he leaned in close and ducked down toward my face. He smelled faintly of pee. 

I had met him before. He’s part of the group of older people in my Italian neighborhood who pull seven tables together to sit with their two friends and a bunch of plastic bags with individually wrapped snacks to talk about “you know, the lady with the dog who lives off of Battery.” 

He comes in with a man about the same age - which is nebulous because who can even guess at that - a slender man who smells far less like pee. 

“You’re a student?” They had asked me the first time, months ago. 

“Oh no, I graduated a long time ago,” I said. 

“What’s your study?”

I looked at my table, littered with books. I could be studying something. 

“Um, what am I studying?”

“What did you study, what’s your major,” the slender man said. 

This did not solve the present v past tense issue. 

“I graduated in Journalism,” I said. 

“What’s that,” the rounder, leaning man said. 

“Journalism,” the slender man said in a shout meant for half of a harangued married couple.

“Ah, Journalism,” the rounder man said. He sidled over to me by way of leaning in and down enough times that his expanse was suddenly and warmly close to my elbow. “Now, tell me, you must make a good living.”

“Well, I guess I’m OK.”  I didn’t want to have a money conversation with a stranger, in public, who moved quite quickly for someone of such stature, and so I did not mention that I currently do not make any money from a career in which I spent all of my training and money for college. 

I make a living from selling workouts and beers. 

“You live around here,” he said. His face was smooth, save for the under-eye folds of grey and the errant hairs high up on his cheeks. He spoke with an adopted Boston dialect, one that rested just above his heavily accented Indian lilt. A comfortable verbal jacket practiced over years of Northeastern winters spent at these tables, talking about the lady with the dog who lives off of Battery. You know. 

“Yes, nearby.”

“You Italian?”

“No.”

“Ah, she looks Italian,” he said. He slapped the table and his gold ring struck a dead chord. 

“Hmm,” the slender man nodded with his eyes closed. 

“You look Italian. Everyone around here is Italian,” he said. “Me, I’m Irish.”

I suppose you are what you think you are. Or what you think is the most indelible. I think I’m forgettable and sweaty and slightly racially indistinct. This man with an Indian accent thinks he’s speaking with a brogue. 
 
Maybe I’ll try to be anonymous tomorrow. I might have to give up the ghost here. 

Glacial Pace

In fifth grade, my friend’s geologist dad came to school to tell us about climate change. I think he was really there to tell us about rocks, but what I remember most is that he measured glaciers for a living and gave us evidential proof that they were shrinking.

He told us how this affected the polar bears and rising sea levels and how one subtle shift can wreak havoc in unexpected ways, and this was all well before Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio took up twin environmental crusader mantles, but we were into it. 

Glaciers also happened to be near and dear to our tiny Indiana hearts - during the Ice Age, glaciers smoothed out the top half of the state, but as soon as things warmed back up, they retreated, leaving the bottom half all wrinkled after the ironing effect had smooshed the land together ahead of the ice.*

The gradual warming of the earth and the shrinking ice and impending doom was enough to get to me to be charged up about recycling, and I had grand plans for the Rocks of Indiana project that I then procrastinated too long on and stayed up all night making my parents help me nail things to plywood.

This is all to say that it is currently 10 degrees on March 4th, and I wish more people knew how to measure receding glaciers, because it is an inadvertent disservice to climate change that we most often refer to it as “global warming.” 

Because it is, and it isn’t, and it’s more, which is likely the working title of humanity. 

I have a private client who wants to work on balance. She has some shoulder pain and doesn’t always feel steady. I make her do small rotations with her feet. Some flex and point. Inversion and eversion. Subtle movements. We measure her progress with repetition, by coming back to it each session to see how it feels. How many millimeters. Glacial pace. 

If you have pain in your neck, it’s probably coming from something lower down. If your left hip hurts, check your right foot. If your feet need support, work the glutes. 

If the weather drops 52 degrees in 24 hours, look at the .034 mm glacier change. 

If the body connects in swaths and cross patterns, how could the earth be any different? 

We are ice and fossils and wrinkled hilltops, after all. 

None of this is particularly soothing at 3 AM, while I cannot get my hands warm and I stubbornly dream of summer. I suppose I could nail something to plywood or clean my room, but I’ll wait til later. 

---------------------------------

*This is far and away my favorite Indiana fact, and if I know you in person, you’ve probably already heard me tell this story at parties.**

**I’m not invited to a lot of parties.  

Reason

A pepper flake. If I had to compare it to the size of something, it would be roughly the size of a piece of black pepper, churned out of a grinder. Except, you know, plumped up. With legs. 

I had picked up my toothbrush to find him splayed out against the porcelain. He moved drunkenly from one corner of the dish to the other, poorly escaping my police raid in the bold bathroom light. 

He didn’t move with purpose or hustle and for that I felt a kinship. Also I found him next to my toothbrush and not inside my toothbrush and for that I felt an absence of vomit, which is next to kinship in the Rules of Spiders. 

Found elsewhere in the Rules of Spiders, if one were to fall on my head, get tangled in my hair or otherwise hide on my person, all fucking bets are off. 

“What’s going to happen when you live on your own,” my parents asked me as I cowered in the corner of my bedroom, away from the short end of the slanted ceiling where a spider 347 times larger than a pepper flake taunted me by dropping low and piking back up again like some psychopath circus performer. “You gonna call us to come over and kill bugs for you?”

“No. Just kill this one and we’ll work out a plan,” I said. 

I read somewhere that our fear of things like spiders and snakes is innate because we are programmed to move away from things that posed a predatory threat back in the day, and these are two examples that have historically been pretty bad to us. There are some holes in this theory, which might be because I have butchered this information, but I don’t recall the article explaining how snakes and spiders were so different from, say, lions or bears, by which we, as humans, are routinely fooled into hugging for photo ops. 

How much of our fear is truly instinct, and how much of it is a poor arachnid public relations team?

Eventually, I began to learn the art of squishing bugs on my own. Mostly I prefer to sweep them outside, or, truthfully, to ignore them until they realize the shower isn’t such a good place for a tiny, non-waterproof hut. Sometimes I stare them down and reason with them. 

“Where are your friends? I think they’re looking for you, let’s go.”

“This towel has nothing to offer you and plus it’s mine.”

“PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IT’S 4 AM. If you just move away from the toothbrush I will forget all about you I promise.”

This was last night. 

It is now tonight.

And I did, in fact, forget all about the spider the size of a pepper flake, small enough to hide in the bristles of one, Oral B toothbrush, and which now no amount of inspection will be thorough enough for me not to have nightmares about spider eggs in my teeth for all of eternity. 

Sweet dreams, everyone.  

Look for Shore

“Buy more snacks,” is first on the list of things I would have done differently. Closely followed by “do not pack your hairbrush at the bottom of the suitcase,” and “be nicer to the girl who tried to push you off the airplane.” 

In the several, self-reflective hours I spent overnight in the post-apocalyptic solitude that is an empty airport, there ensued a few versions of this list. I’m not a regrets person by nature, but I am absolutely a fan of bullet points, so it was important that I figure out how exactly, and in what order, I could be a better person next time. 

Concurrently, I did not have a lot to do. I wandered the halls and surveyed my coffee options for the morning. I danced around in the bathroom by myself. I ate a whole bag of fruit snacks because this was the only food I had, which resulted in having to lay down on the line of connected chairs, blurred at the edges with sugary death. I did some yoga at 3 AM. And I watched a lot of The West Wing on my phone. (Season 2; the best season, and I cannot have this argument with you because I am correct.) 

“If you can get to Dulles, I can put you on a 10 PM there,” the gate agent had told me, the first time we de-boarded the delayed plane. 

“OK, how much is that, to switch it?” I’ve never missed a flight before, for any reason. I flew once when I was two, and then didn’t fly anywhere again until senior year of high school. Flying will always seem like a thing that rich people do and I’m not quite sure of all the rules. 

“It’s no charge. You just have to get there.” She said this without looking up. How does one type so fast, and why? 

“How do I…?”

“You just take an Uber,” the gate agent sighed. She picked a piece of lint off her jacket and flicked it. 

“Oh. How far is it?”

“Um,” the girl behind me in the line of stranded strangers interjected, “That’s about an $80 Uber, you don’t want to do that.”

“Oh, no, I don’t want to do that,” I repeated.

“Well, you can wait and see then. Maybe the flight will take off in the next hour. We have another flight at 9 AM out of Newark.”

“That’s in 12 hours. Do you put us up in a hotel?”

“No.”

“But, you’re telling me I can either spend $80 to get to Dulles, or I can be stranded overnight in Newark.”

“Yes.” At this, she looked at me directly. There was nothing left to defensively type. We were here, at the center of it. 

“And you can’t pay for a hotel or give me a travel voucher?”

“Now, why would we pay for you when it’s not our fault?”

Now, this, yes, this is a good question. For no other reason than why does there have to be blame involved in order to make things right? This should be at the top of the list. Everyone’s list. The list of ways we can be better humans.

The third time we de-boarded the plane, it was clear none of us would make our connections, and everyone would have to make other arrangements, and everyone was trying to get off of the plane and get to the desk where exactly no gate agents were there to greet us, and I missed all available options for the night because one, eventual, harried employee does not a solution make.  

“Hey, you were on that cancelled flight,” a woman tapped me on the shoulder. She had clean clothes and coffee and brushed hair, none of which I could claim. I was watching my phone, lying on my stomach, wrapped up in the bedclothes of both my scarf and jacket.

“Yes, hi,” I said.

“I’m so glad you got another flight, I was thinking about you.” 

“Oh, yes, thank you. Are you?” My mouth was coated in waxy strawberries and made no effort at sentences. 

“Yeah,” she rolled her eyes. “They have me going to Ohio by way of Chicago, but I’m on my way.”

I’m not one for regrets, and I’m certainly not one to bully myself or others into being grateful for truly shitty things. But this, this, is why 12 hours in an airport alone felt important. 

When we are stranded is when we look for shore. And when we are trying to see, and are seen instead, this is how we answer that question. Be better. Check off that list. 

And next time, buy a bag of chips, too. 

What About New Year's?

There really is no such thing as a clean slate. You can have a piece of slate that is free of bacteria and mostly unstained, sure, and anyone who uses a whiteboard knows that a chalkboard is easier to clean because permanent markers are pranky little twerps and the sun sets ink into scripted ghosts all too often. But a slate, even still, also keeps some informative dust at the corners, some faded patterning under the milky surface. 

And yet, every year, here we are, convinced we can wipe it all off and start over from some beginning that never existed. On a day in the middle of winter where nothing grows and everything feels a buried sort of stuck. 

Zora Neale Hurston’s words, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” has been constant on my mind since September. Mostly because September is when the year starts again for me, and in the space of these months everything has tumbled into what seems like either a great many questions or a few definitive answers. And the fact that I can’t tell which feels troubling and leans me toward questions. But trouble itself is sometimes an answer, and now we’re back to the beginning, except we’re at January, and how sure is anyone of when the year starts new? 

What we seem drawn to, with this slate business, is this idea of spontaneous hope. That something wonderful could happen if we clear enough junk off the table to display it.* That at some point, the clutter in the kitchen is just too much, and you have to decide that this is the day you are sick of your own bullshit, and no one is going to read those nine Crate + Barrel catalogs you’ve been hoarding all year. That now, with a smooth counter and a silent mind, you can sit at the table and wait for something truly fabulous to happen. 

And here is where I would like you to know two things. 

1. You can clean the counter off anytime you want. Maybe it’s the New Year, maybe it’s a random Tuesday, maybe it’s September. You will get sick of the clutter and it’s a good thing, too. Wipe the slate mostly clean, but not because someone told you to, or because this is a thing that people do. Do it because you feel charged to make space. 

2. The really wonderful thing can still be written on a dusty chalkboard. It might happen on a random Tuesday, or in September, or in the twilight hours between 2017 and 2108. No matter how clean you think you scrubbed everything down, what happens now is, and will always be, informed by what happened before. 

The best part about New Year’s is not this recommitment to making ourselves better or setting goals or even the cathartic release of a year not meant to give us answers. The best part, at least for me, a few months into whatever kind of newness I have allowed myself, is a reminder to believe in this collective hope that the next moment might be something wonderful. 

*There is also a purification aspect at work with resolutions in particular - that we are only deserving enough of the wonderful after some serious atonement - which is found in several religions and cultures, particularly toward the end or beginning of a calendar year.

Run and Write

He asked me why I write. 

“I can’t not,” I said. “It bottles up…this thing…it makes me feel sick until I can get it out.” 

Likening this process to a boot-and-rally, while true, also capitulates to why I write; I am not as understandable in my verbal state as I am written. 

There is a satisfaction in sorting through the terrifying debris of a near-constant state of data collection that is the writing process, but it’s not the soothe I’m after. It’s a consolation, sure, but as for the why? Innate purge. 

Last week I was followed out of the Kenmore station by a man who pulled at my headphones and asked for directions to a store “somewhere on the BU campus.” I stood in the center of the stairs and unapologetically blocked traffic as the flatly sweet scent of beer splashed from his plastic Coca-Cola cup. 

“I’m sure if you keep walking this way,” I pointed in a broad stroke, “you’ll find it.” He watched only my face and not my gesture.

“Oh, but also I couldn’t help but notice you on the train, do you have a boyfriend?”

Yes, because you always say yes, because the one time you tried, for authenticity, to say no, it got you involved in some twenty-minute plea about a house in Needham and a 401k and why isn’t that good enough for you? 

“Can’t you just tell him no tonight?”

“Absolutely not,” I said and then I ran away. Boot and rally, run far, far away, even though there are no real safe spaces and why be afraid? Some days I’m convinced I could kill someone before I could be silenced. Other days I’m already silent of my own accord. 

I’ve been quiet throughout the election cycle because the role I’ve assumed on my social media and in my jobs does not foster a great political presence. And anyway, if you make your voting decisions based on me, then how do they count toward your voice at all? We get what we deserve when everyone is truthful. 

Yesterday I vowed to take fewer Ubers because I’m spending too much money not being fast enough getting out of the house. This was immediately before I called the first of three Ubers in one day because it was all upside-down rain and sadness around these parts. 

He could have been any of the drivers I’ve had this week who heard me speak and told me I’m not from here, but it was the second driver who asked where I came from. 

“Indiana.” 

“Are you German, then?”

“No.” 

“No one in the middle knows what they are. This whole grey-ing out in America…you really lose the culture.”

He said it was nice talking to me as I left. I’m not as good when I speak as when I write. I’m not as brave nor concise nor transparent. I am opaque and I break. Run. Run far, little heart. 

There are no more spaces for you to soften into the world, to belly up the pure red of your racing body against shearling and safety. Purge the hurt and go again. Run and write.  

Little Bear

Is the kitchen still open,” she asked with a grimace, knowing the answer.

“No, sorry,” I said, all crinkles from my mouth to my eyes in apology. The kitchen had been closed for almost an hour, but there’s never a warning, no loud announcement. In college, my sorority’s kitchen was closed unless it was mealtime, and since I worked nights, like I do now, I would scrounge up the crackers and marshmallows from the coffee tray off the dining room and write my papers in the basement with these measly snacks.* I do know what it’s like to be hungry without a back-up plan. 

“Ugh, you don’t have like crackers or like, small bites, or like, anything?” She cycled her hand over and over, nearly petting her own fur vest. I wished I could wear her outfit, look sleek like her and not like a child dressed up in a bear costume, but such trends are not for a short, round frame. Unless you are an actual bear. 

“No, sorry,” I said, deftly hiding the Skittles we had hidden in a cup behind the bar. She rolled her eyes at me, walked away, pouted in a corner with her friends. 

“Can we get two shots of Fireball,” her friend said.

“Um, no,” she said. “Can you get me a peanut, or a cracker, or…” her perfect vocal fry trailed off here into traffic and din. She turned to me, hoping to be seen by me but not able to keep my gaze. “I just can’t take a shot if I don’t have anything in my stomach.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.” Because, this is true for most people I would imagine, but the general course of action would then be to pace yourself. Not to beg random strangers for exactly one nut. 

When my manager came by a few minutes later, I asked if he could find any food in the closed kitchen for a desperately hungry patron. He brought her out some chips soon after. It had occurred to me that this girl, with a certain stillness in her eyebrows when she talked, was the kind of girl who would say terrible things about you, with a livelier face, when you walked away. I’ve never been that girl. But I have withheld food from myself, felt my insides wilt and flush at inopportune times, so I figured sending over some relief might be the way to go. 

My dad is big on doing acts of service anonymously. It’s a religious tenet as well, though not the impetus in my family, that doing something nice for someone else without any recognition is the highest form of giving. 

“Who brought these chips over,” she asked the other bartender, a guy. 

“I don’t know,” he said. 

“Well, who is the guy that brought them out because I said I was hungry, and I know it wasn’t her,” she said, pointing to me. 

It’s OK, little bear, you can let the boys take all the credit on this one. Just please eat something wonderful tomorrow and play nice with the other girls. 

*Much like I’ve been doing during this 30-day project. Except I have better snacks and I’ve played almost no Snood. 

$53,000

Because one day, it will all just be something that happened to you once. You keep everything in there, in that soup of a brain you have, and the special things pop up at the same rate as the unspecial ones, ringed noodles all alike. 

I can’t tell you why the memory of the first time I tried to like running bobs to the surface more than others. My grey sweatpants with the broken waistband sagging to the side, impeding any speed I would have gathered from my eager legs, but giving my Debbie-Downer-lungs an out. There were sheep, because it was France, and you wouldn’t recognize me then if you knew me now, but this is probably the story we should start telling children. Not look at me then, what a mess I was and didn’t know what I could become, why didn’t I know what I couldn’t know, but look what you have to look forward to because seventeen is rotten and getting old is rad. 

My junior high writing teacher opened seventh grade by telling us it would be one of the worst years of our lives, and if it didn’t feel like that, then think of how great the rest of everything would be. 

He could have told us the people who felt OK were peaking right then, but he didn’t, and I think this means something grand about him, and something important about how my brain spaghetti now works. 

One day, when I worked for the public school system, $53,000 was accidentally deposited into my bank account. Directly into my checking account, to my name, like a lottery for the mob. I bought my very first Powerball ticket a couple of weeks ago, and I had to talk myself into it like I was cleaning my room. Because what if I did win? What if all that hard work I’ve done to make something cool of my mind is now made easy and dull? It cheapens the millions somehow to not have burned for it. 

To never have hated running before it grew on you, slowly, mildewing you into submission. 

This, of course, was not exactly the thought process I had when I checked my bank account on a February morning to make sure I hadn’t overdrafted my rent check. Sitting in my apartment that I could barely afford, with my hand-me-down furniture and no heat, I called several people and asked them how this could, rightfully, be mine. Or how I might accrue interest on it before turning it in to the proper authorities. The feedback was a resounding, no, your moral compass points to teacher’s pet, so I called the department and agreed to have it debited back out. 

They, however, had no idea it had even happened.

Whether or not they would have figured it out eventually is debatable, and some days my noodles are of one persuasion, and sometimes another. But I do know that I wouldn’t be here now, if my life were one salary richer for no reason. And I do know that I’m happy now, and I wasn’t then, so I’ve decided that I just wasn’t ready to peak yet. 

There are some special things in this soup of mine, but it’s these that broke the surface today, red broth and waxy memories, and it’s all just something that happened to me once. 

Dirty Little Secret

Some guy asked me where I got my arms, and I told him, “my parents,” because I pictured him trying to order them off of Amazon, and it confused me. 

He laughed because he thought I was joking, and then asked if I was an athlete. This made me uncomfortable because I would really like to actually be an athlete, but I’m not, except for all the yoga, and it’s terribly difficult to explain the muscle mechanics of being upside down in a conversation that has little to no attention span. 

I did my best to deflect, as I usually do when it comes to appearance. Growing up in Southern Indiana, it was ingrained at an early age not to discuss certain topics in public. Religion, politics and money were off the table outside of your own house, and it’s a tenet I stick to pretty closely even still. No one will ever convince a polar opposite of their shortcomings in 140 characters. 

If I could amend the taboo trifecta, it would be to include body image and diet on the list. As in, telling people how to control either one. There are just some things better kept inside your house. Or your head. 

Since 2011, I have been gluten-free. It’s not something I tell people unless I have to refrain from eating something, because it sounds like “affluenza” or whatever we’re now calling “general assholism.” 

There have been lots of diets along the way. I ate ten grams of fat or less a day for two years. For another three years I didn’t eat dairy, though that was caused by the lack of fat ingestion. One year I didn’t eat any processed sugar. And then I had four cookies on my birthday and thought the world was ending through the nuclear pain in my stomach. I vowed never again to be so extreme. 

The protein bars and popcorn diet was born of laziness, and the trail-mix-on-sale-at-CVS diet was when I was broke. Peanut butter cured/fueled depression in my first year teaching, oatmeal helped me study for my personal training exam, and I will never be able to eat either one on their own again. 

Most, if not all, of these were ways to try and eat food that didn’t hurt my stomach. I didn’t stop eating bread because I thought it would make me lose weight; I pretty much exclusively eat nachos, in various forms. I did it because it finally made me feel not swollen and not hurt and not a crazed diet monster who hates her insides.  

People don’t need to know that though. What works for my stomach has no bearing on what will work for theirs, and it confuses me when others try to push food ideologies on me like Jehovah’s Vegans. Or when they think muscle tone might be on sale at Target. 

At a Derby party a couple years ago, a friend of a friend offered me a pot brownie.

“Oh, no thanks,” I said. “I don’t eat gluten.”

Some things are just better kept inside your head.

Quotes on Quotes

Pinky swears all around that I used to be better at picking locks. A product of one, shared bathroom for the whole family, and I could pop it open in a few seconds. Prying my way into my own grade-school diary today, however, proved a challenge until I resorted to the tool box. I don’t know what I expected to find. Some seven-year old profundity, I suppose. 

The story that we tell about ourselves starts with the things we do every day. Which activities we pick up, the music that moves us in the minute that it does, which coffee shop we go to on which corner. There are whys in there somewhere, but we usually find those in hindsight. 

You’ll have your favorites, and so will I. The words that narrate what I see of myself and what I want to see of you, picked out and curated in virtual frames and handwritten notebooks. 

Framed in my room: 

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” - Leonardo da Vinci

But liked online two days ago: 

“Practice and all is coming.” - K. Pattabhi Jois

What I remember most about my college statistics class is that I got to write about basketball, and that it was less math and more finding numbers to back up the argument of the piece in the first place. To write an article, collect the proof to tell the story, quotes and numbers and all. The same is true to teach a yoga class or live life for the day. 

Consider what you might sort through.

——————————————————————————————————————————

“Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.” - Scott Adams

But:

“I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don’t even ripple.” - Gillian Flynn

——————————————————————————————————————————

“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.” - Swami Vivekananda

But:

“We are not our feelings. We are not our moods. We are not even our thoughts.” - Stephen R. Covey

——————————————————————————————————————————

“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.” - George Sand

But:

“It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.” - Thomas Huxley

——————————————————————————————————————————

It’s such a complex joy that we can think more than one thought at once. That we can be more than one thing at once, or have a whole day of disparate feelings. 

In the diary, I called myself by no fewer than three different names, used a variety of handwriting styles, and talked endlessly about the different careers I thought I’d have. I also, unsurprisingly, stopped writing after page 37. 

“Also I take gimnastics! [sic] My class isn’t so great.” - Me, page 4

There are whys in there somewhere, lost in the succinct narration of a seven-year old, later collecting quotes like they will tell a better story.

Long Live Mauve

It took me the better part of three years to figure out that mauve was not a color for the ages. 

“You think we should carpet the entire house in mauve rugs,” my mom asked me, incredulously.

“Yeah,” I said. 

“Honey, mauve isn’t a color that will last,” she said. 

“Huh, you’ll see,” I said, rolling my eyes. We had a lamp that was mauve, and a matching lampshade, and it was clearly the most fashionable item in the living room. How could such a stunning color ever go out of style? 

It did, and the only person who would see the error of their ways was me. It was one of the first times I had to grasp the concept of fads and transient fashion sense, and it had seemed to me that colors, like numbers, or people, were something that couldn’t fade in and out like hair scrunchies and patterned sweaters. 

I would repeat this mistake again with the color “forest green,” and then again with things like “bodysuits,” “spaghetti-strap dresses,” and “glitter gel.” I have what you might call, “difficulty with impermanence.”

But because fashion goes in cycles, leotards are back in, and it reminds me that I might have the chance to do all of middle school over again, except without the unflattering haircut and crushing insecurity. 

In seventh grade, my mom threw a “makeup party” for me and my only three friends, to teach us how not to look like hookers. To this day, this is the single reason I know how to do a smoky eye/apply eye shadow at all. I took great pride in putting some shimmer on my lids before school every day, until I got lazy and stopped doing it about halfway through the year. Getting up in the morning was enough work. 

By high school, I had rebelled against it so much that my choir director lied to me in order to get me to put on more stage makeup before a competition.

“It’s good for your skin,” she said to me, heavily sighing. 

“No it’s not,” I said.

“It is actually,” she said, using a tone that implied I would have to put more foundation on, no matter what came next. “The more you use it, the more your face gets used to it, and it stops breaking out as much.”

I didn’t believe her. I rolled my eyes, but I dug into the communal box of mix-and-match concealer. 

“I’m never going to wear makeup,” I seethed to my only two friends. 

Last night, on the questionnaire for my complimentary Sephora makeover next week, it asked me why I wanted a consultation. I figured they didn’t need the backstory on how I dried out all three of my eyeliners by not capping them completely this week, so I wrote about how I need to find a concealer that blends in with my skin better than the one I have. Which is true, so even though I still prefer not to wear any makeup if I can help it, this also means I went from knowing things to not knowing things, to knowing less things with more gravity. I may as well buy some mauve eyeshadow while I’m there.

What if This is All Pretend?

I feel like a fool telling people I’m allergic to incense, so I usually keep it to myself, wondering if it’s something I made up to sound more interesting at one point. Like when I made everyone call me Katherine in elementary school because it sounded more serious. 

Today, I only spoke words out loud to another person just once, in order to state my name and sign in for yoga. Otherwise my voice has been trapped inside my brain all day, wandering the creases with its own devious design. Punching lockers and knocking over trash cans for all I can tell. 

What if it wasn’t the time the clock said it was because you decided it was a different time and then all time started moving forward from there? 

And if someone were there to hear that, they could tell me that I’m absolutely fucking insane. 

I spent my 18th birthday in France, because I lived there for a month on an exchange program at the end of high school. It was the first time I had flown on a plane since the one time when I was small and turbulence knocked Sprite all over my tray. Flying for seven hours didn’t scare me so much as confused me. Where does the time go? How can you spend a full day suspended in space? 

I made it to Paris, and then to my host family, and on my birthday they gave me all my favorite foods, except the shrimp had heads and eyes, and the asparagus was white, and somewhere, back over the Atlantic, I convinced myself that I had actually died on the trip, and everything else I was experiencing was the Afterlife. 

This is a concept I go back to when I’m on the brink of a lot of change, or things are too lucky, or I’m really fucking tired. When I don’t talk to other people at all, I start to think everything I know is something I’ve pretended to myself and made up completely, and therefore reality is a lie. 

What if there was a split somewhere, and this is all pretend? 

Today, in class, we were moving slow, holding postures and I started thinking about how when you move through poses quickly, you know them, you get them down. But when you move slowly, you understand them. Knowing and understanding, two soap bubbles that sometimes, serendipitously nudge and slurp into each other. But not always. 

Sometimes, you move so quickly through time and space that you think you know things that make no fucking sense. And if you talked to even one human about them, you’d understand where those thoughts came from that are wreaking havoc on the halls of your brain. 

As I put my props away at the end of class, I walked through a live fart. The kind that’s so pungent you think you zipped yourself into it. I wanted to be out, unzip, step into better air, but what if this is the new air and there is nothing else? 

What if your regular air was pretend and this is the real air because everyone is looking around like nothing is wrong even though it smells like burning tires covered in shit? 

I walked back over to my mat, in front of the incense, and I sneezed, but no one heard it. 

Night Off

The street next to my house has a sidewalk until it just doesn’t have a sidewalk anymore. You walk down the street thinking everything’s fine, and then you’re plopped out into traffic, next to the cars, wondering what the hell happened and who got to decide that this is where you have to cross the road.

I’ve lived here for a year and a half and I’m still surprised when the concrete cuts out from under my feet. 

But I can tell you now, safely away from actually experiencing it, that it’s directly across from the laundromat, where I go to have other people wash my things because I am extraordinarily lazy and it’s strangely cost-effective. And though we are on the eve of a snowstorm, I dropped off my winter coat today to have it washed. 

“It says not to dry-clean it, but to wash it with delicates,” I said. It’s a family-run business and only one family member speaks fluent English. This was not the one. 

“So you want wash,” she asked me, pointing at my feet, where, presumably, more things to be washed were stashed. 

“Yes, but I don’t have any other things to be washed, is it OK?” I wish more than any other wishes to be able to speak all the languages there ever were. Unassumingly. Just start speaking the language that’s needed, like a superhero of communication. Instead, when I can’t speak the right language, I also stop speaking my own native tongue and sound like a foreigner myself. 

“Is OK this,” I said.

“Ten dollar minimum, you don’t want,” she said. “Dry clean.”

“Oh, no, no dry clean. Ten is OK,” I said. The whole of today I second-guessed the things I’ve thought, said, written, judged, and here was no exception. I panicked that my jacket was too small to go in alone, that it would get sucked up into a panel of the machine, come out horribly disfigured. I abandoned my co-ESL. “I just need it washed is all. Someone spilled beer all over it and it’s so gross and it’s snowing and I don’t know how to clean it.”

I don’t normally have a weekend night off, and I also don’t normally use a weekend night off to be on the other, more awkward, side of the bar, but I was done early and my friends were out and it was on my way home anyway. They were dancing, and I was sober, and some guy came up from behind me, and knocked an entire Bud Light bottle onto my one and only coat. 

I searched his face and all I saw was drunk. It was an accident, but the drooped mouth and the blank stare and my poor jacket, and I wanted to just purely not like him. Like, name-calling, throwing things, not like him. You are stupid and now I hate you and the bottom of my ribs has bottomed out into a bubbly acid I will never understand. The sidewalk that drops off into parked cars and rage. 

“I have to go get napkins,” I said instead. 

“OK, I give to you $6.50,” the lady at the laundromat said. I have no idea what kind of cleaning my jacket is getting right now, but it’s a sweet deal and I can only hope it doesn’t smell like beer and hatred by tomorrow at 5 PM.

A Shitty String of Words

All I want to do is sleep, but I tried that and I still woke up at three AM like it was time to work. I have two terrible habits, and one of them is that I can’t get anything done until everyone else is still. 

A body in motion stays in motion, though sometimes it’s just motion and nothing graceful or inspirational, so while I gave myself permission to be behind in this writing project, I know better than to dip out of the momentum. Unless it’s the middle of the night, my body at rest stays at rest. 

Plus I’m better when I’m busy. In the last three weeks, even though I’ve slept less and feel a constant treading-water sensation, I’ve remembered more tasks, made my own food more often, replied to more emails on time, and generally adulted better than I have in months. One thing to the next thing and if there’s only five minutes between, then the third thing goes there. Too many breaks and I space out, daydream, wish for more. 

Sleep until three because I can. 

But tonight, I’d rather write a shitty string of words than drown for the sake of eyes that might sting less in the morning. 

My eyes refuse to open until they are ready, and they rebel if I force the issue, red with anger and plump with tears, swollen as the pout of a toddler who won’t look you in the face. I can eschew sleep for a few days at a time, and then I sleep for fourteen hours and it fixes everything. I’ve been told this cannot be true, but it’s truth enough for me and the proof is in my eyes which will then open of their own accord. 

Today is not a fourteen hour sleep day. Today is a day I finish things because I have two terrible habits, and the other one is that I start things and abandon them when they are not perfect. 

That’s a lie. 

I abandon them when I can’t make myself be perfect enough to keep them going. 

Once, I thought, if I could, though? If I could force my eyes open, fight through all the streaking pain, be as awake as I could be and write before midnight, if I could? Then would I be real? Then would you stay? Then would I? 

I write about you because it’s all I have left to make you real. 

It’s one thing to the next thing and I work better with a deadline, so if four hours of sleep is the bare minimum, that’s the time I will get things done. Three AM and no sounds, no distractions, no updates, no you. 

My eyes will sting in the morning and they would anyway, so I might as well feel something in the meantime. Even if that feeling is that I’m just barely hanging on to a shitty string of words. 

A brain in motion and nowhere to go.

And What the Fuck, Carly?

“Now that I think about it,” he says, as if he were, just suddenly, thinking about it, “she might have been faking it the whole time.” 

I’m on the train, because I am always on the train. To work, to class, to teach class, to run errands. The little half seat closest to the hinge of the car is my favorite place to sit. I fit in it the way a cat fits in an impossibly tiny vase, but I can also lean against the wall. I’m tired, because I am always tired. 

“Because Carly needs someone like me,” he says, “and all she talked about was getting engaged.” 

Usually I wear my headphones, but I’m running late and they are tangled and now that I’m sitting, it’s less likely I’ll hear any of the rude comments about my ass that I normally try not to hear. I do try, though, I know when you stop talking, I know when you follow me with your voice, I know. But I confuse your voice with other sounds because I’d rather not hear the exact phrase, imbued in my head to infuse my own thoughts with your burnt ones. Now I keep my head down, and now I hear about Carly, and how she faked her way through a relationship, pretending to be interested in someone for the sake of a potential engagement, and what the fuck, Carly? 

He’s still piecing together incredulous truths about Carly’s intentions as I leave. I walk up the stairs of the station to the slushy ground and yellow sunset breathing fire. Sure there is pink in that sky, but yellow as if it were the only color that meant something. 

 At work, I pace, because feigning activity creates a different sort of headphones. 

“We’re trying a separation right now. I’m set up living in a hotel,” he says in a rush. Not a whisper, nothing hushed, but fast enough to make it lighter than it is. 

“I’m paying about two grand in alimony,” the guy next to him says. “Have you been divorced?”

I’ve told you it’s about relationships, and it was as true for that story as it is for this one. For all the stories, even if they want to be more. 

“Do you remember my name,” he says to me. 

“Nope, sure don’t,” I say.

“Are you sure? Just guess.”

I remember, because I always remember. Like those smoky words I try to ignore, they stick to the fibers of my nose, chipotle insults I can’t get rid of for all the other smells in the world. I remember your name and I hear you talk about the woman you thought you loved once. 

The guy who asked me for water pets the soda gun from over the bar top like a sweet and starved cat he found on the street. When I give him his water, he continues to stare at his stray friend with a sad fondness. 

I forget that people take drugs. 

Yellow is the only color that meant something today, and headphones won’t make a difference. She might have been faking it the whole time. Fucking Carly.

Spoons

Sometimes I cheer for the wrong team because I stop paying attention, and I like when people are happy. 

I was a sports reporter for a hot second so it’s not like I don’t understand the mechanics of sporting events. I did also, separately, read the entire NBA rules manual for fun, so it’s not like I need things to be all that exciting all the time either. 

It’s just that it’s a weird thing to look up at a screen to see smiling faces, or listen around you to hear exultations, and feel disappointed, angry, or anything other than associatively glad. 

I wanted to write for magazines. This was early-aughts, when rom-com protagonists were literally, one-hundred percent, all magazine writers, but I had better reasons, like glossy pages make your words look fancy. 

Cosmo has always been the Stepford Wife of women’s magazines, and hypnotically put-together as such. It was there today and I was bored and out of the worst kind of curiosity, and love for Miranda Lambert, I opened it. 

“Dressing for Your Zodiac Sign” was not as bad as it sounds, even though Aries was a picture of a White Janelle Monae, which, why can’t you have a picture of just, actual, Janelle Monae? And no less than four references to blue lipstick later, I wondered if the editors ever played practical jokes when they, inevitably, get bored. Cosmo also generally gives me a tangible hold on my greatest fear in writing - that someday, maybe in the next 30 seconds, I will have zero ideas left to write about and instead will have to take something I’ve already covered, dress it in sequins, call it “Gemini.” 

At some point, I found myself reading an article about how you can lose weight by using real silverware instead of plastic. That, by giving yourself the satisfaction of a weighted spoon, it feels like indulgence and treating your food like it matters, and therefore you will care more about how you’re eating. And if you set aside that this also seems like quite a stretch, the whole thing disturbed me for two reasons: 

1.) I remembered the last time I read Cosmo, and an article that said if you use a lot of spoons when you eat, you are probably fat. In not so many words, of course, but the gist was that “foods you eat with a spoon” are usually not as good for you. Which is a lie, because I eat my vegetables, and everything else, with a spoon because I JUST REALLY LIKE SPOONS, you guys. But the point is that they contradicted themselves, while still somehow hammering home the idea that you need to eat less. 

2.) I had been nodding along with this article until it mentioned spoons, at which point I woke myself up and shook the magazine shut. But the photo was of a delicious looking egg, and a smiling girl and the thought of taking your time to eat something because it means something to you seemed like a lovely thought. 

Cheering for the wrong team again. You sneaky, glossy pages.

The Price of Pants

Most people fall into either the retail side of things, or the service industry camp, and given that I am not a talk-first kind of person, I am definitely the latter. Though this divide is something I came up with in my head to help explain the endless ambivalence to life I had in my two short stints trying to sell pants for a living. And after the sixth pair of pants I tried on today, I relented to the overwhelming proof that I am a terrible salesperson, even to myself. 

I can talk myself, and any customer, out of anything. If you don’t want to buy pants today, hey, you do you and save your hard-earned cash. Do you know how many plane tickets you can get for that sweatshirt? Do I have that jacket, oh, no, I’m poor, but it’s probably good for skiing or other rich people activities. 

They usually put me in the fitting room instead of anywhere near the registers. 

In eighth grade, the cool place to buy jeans was the store in the middle of the mall with the fake cow skull, seven hundred horseshoes, some well-placed plaid accents, and ladder-tall shelves. Given my penchant for eating frozen peas and all of my feelings, fourteen-year-old me generally looked forward to clothes shopping as a goal, until we got there and the idea of what I wanted to look like did not match up to the squat person standing lopsided in the three-way mirrors. Also my mom always thought I took too long in the dressing room, when I was caught up in elaborate pretend conversations with my new, three selves. 

On one occasion, the sales lady, who was probably twenty, so she seemed to have lived forever in the future, told me the jeans I was currently modeling were not the right size for me, and perhaps I should try the wide fit. I was crushed and I never returned. So, stationed in the fitting room section during my foray into the world of luxury clothing, I made sure never to tell anyone they looked bad in something. I mean, I would never say that anyway, so instead I avoided talking about it at all. We were supposed to tell people how things run, what to look for in going up or down a size. Mostly I would just ask them how they felt in it. 

And every single time they would say the bigger size felt better but they just couldn’t bring themselves to buy that number.

And you can’t reason with fourteen year olds, even if they look like ski trips and time travel. 

The conversations I have with my three selves in dressing rooms now sounds much sweeter than it once did. I tried on six pairs of pants today, and all of them fit just fine. Granted, they weren’t jeans, and your actual legs in different patterns can only be so surprising, but do you know how many places I could go for the price of those pants?

Timing

The astrologist told me I would meet someone within the year, but that was in 2013 and not where I wanted to go with this story. She also said he would be a good person and I would be exceedingly happy, which seems like a pretty easy thing to guarantee, since psychopaths aren’t really my type and my optimism is difficult to dissuade. 

I read that timing is near impossible to foretell, so post-reading I feel I’m perpetually on the cusp of some great new possibility. Even though I read that in a fiction story about magic, and most days are like today, where things are great but I don’t talk to a lot of other humans who aren’t drunk. 

You should know that the common denominator for everyone is relationships. It takes about three drinks, but even the bro-iest bro eventually sidles up to his other bros, and dissects the conversation he had with the smoke he’s obsessed with, using analytics and questions like, “what should I text?” 

What kind of shot you send over depends on what kind of message you want to send, how many other girls she’s with indicates different challenge levels, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pick someone out at the bar and say, “I want to date her for two to three years and figure out her brain.” 

I also have never had anyone reel me into a ruse before, but I was wary from the jump. 

The guy came in first. He didn’t want the menu, he did want to start a tab, and he seemed content to watch the Bruins game without an eye to the entrance. She came in about thirty minutes later, looked directly at him with an open mouth, knowing glance, and then sat down exactly ten seats away. 

She held onto her scarf with both hands and looked back over at him. 

He had not stopped looking at her, eyebrows raised, a hopeful countenance. 

I assumed they were an online date, but neither of them said anything and they sat, ten bar stools apart, for the fifteen minutes it took her to decide on a drink. After she settled on Chardonnay, he called me over.

“That woman over there,” he whispered, but pointed, as if she were not, in fact, the only woman in the entire bar. 

“Yes,” I nodded.

“She just smiled at me so big.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“I’ll take another Coors, but tell her I want to get that drink for her too. You know, because she smiled at me.”

I told her. He moved over eight seats and she moved over one. Which is really sweet and they ordered pizza and it’s all part of the alignment of the stars, and maybe someone should ask them if twins run in their families, too. 

Except, I hear things, like the play by play of text exchanges or how if you send over a shot that tastes sweet those girls will go home with you, and all the things you think are just yours on that sea-side of the bar are mine too. And from what I heard, these two totally already fucking knew each other. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that most days are like today. That perpetual cusp is such a tease, and timing really is near impossible to tell.

I Dreamt of You

You will think this is about you, and that’s fine because it is. 

I dreamt of you. I dreamt of you and it was painful. It was sweet and it was solid and it was a lie. I don’t know why I kissed you, but I did and it hurt the most because I knew in my awake life I would know even better, yet I would act the same. 

The concert was a melted sort of ache, the kind you think about for longer than it exists. The kind you wrap up like leftovers and sniff when you feel happy, just to wallow. Wallow, wade, weave yourself into a bath of clear-pitched sound. Her voice was mine, the time you told me it was, before you forgot everything. I used to sing in the shower, and then one day I didn’t. Last week I tried it again, and I worried about the neighbors, forgot where to start, what words would hold true. I suppose it doesn’t matter what I am to you now, as long as I am not what I was to myself, then. 

I dreamt of you. You were sad and bent and I was flitting and distracted, which is true in more ways than I wish to know. You, cowed and observant, listening to voices cloudy with meaning. Your hand on the curve of my back. That guy over there stood with that girl over here and everything here is colored squeeze and violet, like heartbreak but after. That girl over there is standing away from that guy over here. 

What is the thing that holds? Once, I sang. On a stage and it was true, in a shower and it was ashy, in your car - or was it mine? Who is the girl who matters, since it’s real until it isn’t. And back again, I suppose. 

There is something easier about a steady state of later potential. Something about delayed gratification that takes less courage. But fuck it because I want to be brave and strong, and now I am here. At this concert, this guy over here and that one over there, and you, nowhere to be found and everywhere I look all at once. 

You kissed me on the nose, and I should have known. I pushed it, and it was cold, familiar, leftovers wrapped up in a napkin. The ache that melts from the sound of the lights, it rings in my ear and down the left side of my throat. A direct line, tethered to my heart. My heart, swollen and purple, like a day-old bruise. 

I dream in echoes of color, and I dream of you often. You will think this is about you, and it is, but it isn’t because dream you is different and awake me isn’t as strong, just braver, and I know no other sadness with the same reach, the same marionette lines to my organs. And neither do you. 

I’ve been sure of so many things and I’ve been wrong of so many of them. But always, I’ve dreamt of you.

Moments with Sunday

It could have been profound, the way he said it as if it were both the answer he always gave to such questions of commodity, and a brand new thought, sparked from the flint of nothing. 

“Yes, because this, this is a moment in time.”

I took his credit card from him and did not, in fact, start him a tab, because, yes, it’s a moment in time, but he was coked out of his mind. His eyes hadn’t blinked in 42 seconds, his shirt was increasingly unbuttoned, and I wouldn’t be fooled into serving him another beer. 

Sunday is such a butt of a day. Eighty-seven percent of people are in a bad mood because they have to work the next day after some time off. The other percents are mostly brunch FOMO, and some other people who are probably fine, but an eighty-seven percent chance of bad mood clouds is a miserable forecast. 

When one of my friends connects to something you say, she says, “Oh, I get that.” Not like, I have that thing too, but like, I get that. Which I love about her, so I have started doing it too because I have no actual thoughts of my own. For a year or two I was saying, “absolutely” as an entire response to things. Same with “totally.” I’ve been on a “perfect” kick lately, but I feel it’s time to change it up again. I hear “gnar” is making a comeback. 

Most bartenders I know will tell you they are socially awkward. There is a bit of a crutch to limp on by being able to walk away immediately, consequence-free, when faced with discomfort. There is also endless material to absorb, other people to rely on to be phrase-pioneers,  indicators of coolness everywhere, at all times. So my spongy tendencies are in good company. 

On Sundays, I used to do my lesson plans for the week. It would take me about four hours: two to panic-search the Internet for ideas that always seemed better than mine, one to stare at a blank computer screen, forty minutes to make sure I didn’t already teach this same thing before, and twenty minutes to actually type in the words that would relieve me of dread. Plenty of dread came from the actual climate of my classroom, too, but this grey and gloomy Sunday brain-space everyone else walks around with? I get that. 

It’s drudgingly lonely to parachute your optimism for someone else. The more the elses, the bigger the strain on your chute, and suddenly a thirteen percent chance of sun is none. Which is why Sundays, even if I spend them happy, even if Monday is my day off, even if. Sundays will always be a butt. 

His hair was sticking out in at least four contrasting directions, and when I handed him the slip to sign, his gaze went somewhere left of my ear. 

“You’re looking really good in that body,” he told me, or my ear, which made me think of my skin like an outfit and how it would or wouldn’t fit on certain days, and which day was today, and I’m almost completely positive my face showed my reaction to thinking about a skin-suit more than my reaction to him, but they were pretty close in nature anyway. I said nothing and turned to look at something, anything else.