On My Bullshit

It’s that kind of day when I like to pick at the wounds; text exes and people who I have on mute so I can’t hear the deafening silence on their end; listen to the saddest songs; eat up all the most difficult memories—with relish.

All of your days seem like that, thinks the four people who read this.

It’s so typical of me to talk about myself, I’m sorry.

I tell myself that’s what I do here, that’s what this is for. I lament that I am motivated to write when I am hurting, that I am better at it then. That it hurts to do it. That I like that.

I walked to the park with all the tearjerkers in my ears. I had to get up from my desk; it’s not safe here. So, I walk. It’s my go-to move for trying to shed the shroud of my feelings. But, I queue Adele and Rihanna: poke, poke, poke.

I can’t tell if people are looking directly at me more than usual because I am crying or because my bra could be more supportive. I think of that as I walk and give myself a high-five for being clever through the pain. What follows is, well, you aren’t really a sad sack. That’s just the mood. Just the words on the page. You aren’t the shameful sad-clown cliche—you’re a goddamn riot! You are a fucking delight, and it is real, and it is you.

But so is this.

And so I move. Headphones in, “Stay” playing, feet on pavement.

But the park is as fickle and contradictory as I am. In the sun, in the mood, I see vibrancy and I beam, Kelly Clarkson on the wind. But today… I hold the word “stay” too heavily. Consider it as a tattoo. Chuckle at the melodrama. There is cloud cover and an autumnal chill; a woman makes full eye contact as she unbuttons her pants and squats just over the barrier into the brush, not 100 yards from the free public restroom; a very dirty, seemingly unwell homeless man is bouncing on the ground, clapping and shrieking.

And I am immediately in tears.

I see an appropriately intrepid squirrel for the park, fearlessly close to a woman on a bench. I can practically see its little brain tick tick ticking at the notion of leaping onto her shoulder as she lunches. A razor of a memory jumps out at me from the thicket. And I grab it tight.

I recall reading something, somewhere, sometime that posited we cling to the pain because it’s all we have left. I don’t want to let you go, because I don’t want you gone.

Pick, pick, pick.

Circulation

It was a difficult weeked, spotted with pains both physical and emotional, but none I haven’t seen before. Not a weekend I haven’t lived before. Survived before.

My body has turned on me, but only after I turned on it. And I can’t say some of my coping mechanisms aren’t abusive. But only to myself. Well, mostly myself. I am sure there has been a casualty here or there other than me.

—

Timing is a funny thing. Two Julys ago, I met someone. By August, I ended it with him. By end of August, I came back around. He had those glassy star-eyes that so many get when they first meet me. Inside, I was so unprepared. To say my heart—and, literally, mind and body—were piles of broken debris from the person before is to put it lightly.

I have always been tender, easy to bruise, slow to heal. I have always loved big and devoted too much. These sound like good qualities—and they can be. But they are also my downfall. They hurt me, and they hurt those I love. They’re slippery, wobbling feelings that don’t respond correctly to boundaries. And so, as this earnest, tender-himself man approached, wanting access to my life and my self, I bailed. Too much dust in my eyes.

And so began two years’ worth of gauzy trust, half admissions, self lies, and cycles of trying to quit each other. Maybe really just him trying to quit me. Over that time, my self-worth grew. I had time and space and 412 sessions of therapy—both the kind you pay for and the kind your friends have to foot the bill for—to help me heal. (You know who you are.) I have far less self doubt; I have an easier time seeing things that fail for what the are: not totally my fault. Not totally. I don’t believe I am unlovable. Not 100-percent.

—

Blame it on the body, on the time of the month, on the symptoms of things that will pass, and of the things that won’t, but today—not coincidentally the day I write this mush-maudlin, self-indulgent garbage and put it…where? The INTERNET? Were I less dilated and accepting all emotion applicants today, I would mock myself, roll my eyes. Definitely quit reading if I hadn’t already—today, it’s like my skin is too sensitive. The breeze gives me a chill that isn’t just from the ghastly, ungodly end of summer. My mood is too flexible, too fluxible. And it isn’t just the first rattling whispers of S.A.D. I can feel the distinct coldness in my fingers, just at the tips. Bloodless.

It’s days like this my skin has memory, recalls very specific touches. Pines for past affections. Wonders if it will know that very specific tenderness again.

—

It’s a sum total, not a single event. It’s the way my most trusted partner left me for someone else, a classic branch-to-branch lover, never letting go of one until he’s secured his hand on another.

It’s that in my heart, I always knew that was what he was doing, as he set tiny fires and pressed buttons, as I reacted predictably and badly, as those reactions reinforced whatever “truths” already encouraged him to reach onward (upward?) for that next branch. Somewhere inside, I knew this, despite the gaslighting. It’s knowing it for sure now, because north Brooklyn is really as sordid and small as Temptation Island information comes at you whether you want it or not.

It’s that this information came to me within a month of demanding my second most trusted lover never talk to me again. Within a month of his loyal and wordless compliance with that demand. Within a week of what might be a very good major life event—no guarantee yet. No decisions made. And within hours of a very certain major life event. Decision made.

—

I guess it is all that—the good, the bad, the old, the new, the gone—the forgotten and not—that makes me feel electric. Every nerve firing at some invisible stimuli. That makes me swing from borderline manic energy and joy to total disinterest and withdrawal. Calm, but eating my way through 47 snacks, alone and undisturbed in my apartment, empty save the 15 episodes of Veronica Mars I gobbled up. That makes me have just one welling tear constantly at the ready.

Really, though, part of me suspects Kristen Bell could cure cancer if she just smiled at those cells long enough. If not? At least the popcorn-TV quality of the acting and ridiculously overwrought plots will balm my brain into submission. Me and Ronnie and Wallace did not spend all day crying.

—

But it was also a September when that second/more and less and different loved man broke up with me. And when he came back. And when we irrationally ate a roommate’s mushroom chocolate and wandered silent late-night residential streets until I needed to be home, be safe, be cozy.

We laid together in my white-walled room, on my fluffy white duvet, a fan rotating warmish air over us. My eyes were closed and heavy. I couldn’t open them. He pulled hair gently off my face and said, “I am pretty happy. Right now, laying here with you.”

And what he said, and what he meant, fell on the kind of electric-nerve-ending skin that can’t ever forget.

Trimming the Fat

I went on a run this morning, three days after my 3*#th birthday.

Meh, maybe a third of a run. My gallant efforts to counterbalance my remarkable ability to eat my feelings—eat right through boredom, isolation, loneliness, tepid relations and limping ones—were foiled when I ran into someone.

I don’t mean bumped into someone familiar passing by, although that happened, too. I mean about six minutes after that, when I literally ran into someone. Another woman—let’s call her June—shorter and softer than me who tumbled unexpectedly out of her door for a bus while carrying her to-go home-coffee just as my full-on crying run came to its ridiculous crescendo. I apologized maybe more earnestly than I have ever given a person a contextless one-liner, “I’m so sorry.” She didn’t know just how sorry I was.

—

Last night, I went to bed and things were fine. As fine as things usually are on a Monday night two days after my birthday, on which I marked the significant passage of time with strictly insignificant life achievements.

This morning, I awoke imagining the day’s worst problem might be whether or not to concede to my alarm and run before work or change the alarm and snooze just a bit more. That early-morning electronic fumbling landed me on a text message, that—while it turned out to be a childish, thoughtless prank—revealed a deception by someone close to me, an unintended, unforeseen consequence, as poorly researched childish pranks often have. So, quite truly, the depth of my regret and sorrow was utterly lost on June.

But this is July, a month that in 2019 meant a whole lot of Mercury Retrograde and a pretty busted month for a lot of my friends and peers. For those of you who think little or less of star alignments or juju or the syncopation of any energy—negative or positive—at one time: that’s just fine. I don’t really know what I think. I will say that when you and a friend, then two more, then seven more, then a full 20 seem to suffer the same death from 10,000 paper cuts in one weird-weathered month, it starts looking pretty suspicious.

—

Today, the prescription for a heart so broken its unrecognizable (not one big, totalling crash; just countless fender benders and dings til the tin cup was mashed into an Unnamed Polygon) is Neko Case, Neko Case, a walk to Washington Square Park and more Neko Case. It’s funny, once when my life was buggered-to-moving in one fell swoop, I couldn’t listen to music at all. Not a song for months. Very selective listening for months more. Only listening of a kind that either very intentionally pricked my wounds so I could cry or was such detached pop-iness that it maintained my mindlessness. Now, I am moved to tapping, to singing, to annoying and/or alarming my new coworkers with my ever-hoarse voice.

Maybe it was just that for the last 6 or so months I have either been so happy or just so energetic about podcasts as my thinking-mute that I didn’t feel compelled to music. Maybe it is because I’ve been trying out new stuff (lazily). But I am having a renaissance with her prolific, prophetic, mind-reading catalogue.

It seems like when I have to exorcise an Andrew (lord knows it is a thing; it is A THING) for good from my life because we both find our relationship just a bit too delightful a tool for inflicting wounds on me, I turn to her. She is the perfect blend of anger and contemplation, of urgent beats and languid sadness, of fierce “Fuck you!” and fiercer “Fuck me.”

Of admission and accusation.

Of relief and longing.

—

I already wonder if I did the right thing. I already half want to undo it. Half. I already remind myself I am not in charge here, and if there was any undoing, it would be dual-undoing—and that would never happen. And undoing only all my own doing is all I have ever been able to achieve.

I cannot change the tools I have to work with or the environment I have in which to use them. Only what I make and what I allow.

So on that note: This tornado loves you.