S--
It's dirty, they told me. At home in Panama city they told me I'd hate it, that it's too expensive, that Costa Rica has been so Americanized that it's not worth more than a passing glance. They told me it's capital is unimpressive and small, that a night, at most, was the best way to see San Jose.
I've been here almost two weeks.
I forget sometimes that I like that: all the dirty busy cities of this world, the buses and trains and hoards of people. Here the cabs are red, and they encircle the city center like I do, seeking a new fare, scrounging about at a somewhat thankless job for ten or fifteen bucks here or there.
I know you hate all that stuff, the people and frenetic pace of giant metropolises, but I love it. I love feeling anonymous in their streets, and here when I walk alone I make sure to do so swiftly and with purpose, and for a minute or two in my head I'm passing for a local, and everywhere I ever go I ask myself the same question: could I live here?
But I suppose we shouldn't call this what it isn't.
I sleep in a nook of the upstairs dormitory that we colloquially call our room. We, Oliver and I, are not very good at keeping our room clean. There are usually clothes and empty packs of cigarettes and all of our chargers to our many devices strewn all over the place. But it works, somehow, and in the morning when the sun rises and streams so fiercely though our windows I never have too hard of a time finding all my toiletries under my bed and dragging them into the sole shower that we all share. This is usually the only time that I am alone all day, and so my anonymous walks through town mid the melee of the urban center will have to serve, in the meantime, as my majority source of solitude.
But here's the weird thing Sam: I need less and less solitude the longer I'm here. My months on the road and especially my week in Panama has left me acclimated to being around people all of the time. There are people packing their bags on their beds outside the bathroom when I'm exiting, wrapped in a towel. There are people around when I'm cooking dinner, and I will turn from the range with a sizzling hot pan only to narrowly miss bumping into one of my roommates. There are people around when I descend the stairs first thing in the morning when all I want is a coffee and a cigarette, but there they are, and they know that I work here, and so they, at seven-thirty or eight in the morning tend to greet me with a barrage of questions. How do I get to Manuel Antonio? Which bus station serves Managua? Can I stay another night? Who's coming back today? I don't know, I tell them. I'll look it up for you after I drink this, smoke this, wake up. And that's on my day off.
We used to do that. Remember? Our little world of two from which we shut everyone else out, and we could spend days and weeks in rooms full of people and still be completely alone. Together.
But I suppose we shouldn't call this what it isn't.
Here, in Costa Rica, we have all arrived alone, or most of us have, and we make our family dinners like we've done this forever and like it's never going to end. We chose who will do the dishes and set them out to dry, and then my co-workers and I will roam about downstairs turning off all the lights and locking up for the night. And when everyone has already gone off to bed, we might pile into Richard's secret bedroom, off the kitchen, and we'll drink cheap wine from a box until the wee hours while we fight over who will open the next morning. It's usually me.
And I know, Sam. I know that here isn't exactly like us, but it seems so similar, like we have nothing save what we've built right here.We so fiercely protect this feeling, and if you're me, then you spend day after day postponing buying a bus ticket to Tegucigalpa wondering if a part of you will die if you cross those borders.
We built something once, you and I. We did, I know it. We built it with canvas and latex paint and razors and songs and eyeliner and cans and cans of Oly. We built it from one, solitary Old Style. We built it from what was left when our parents were gone and we were but 16 and perched at a slate table overlooking downtown-hometown, and we were often skeptical of those who came to live inside our creation. It was real, it was, and I remember how safe I felt sleeping together in our little glass house. I guess I've just never exactly admitted how much I miss it.
My alarm goes off in the morning at 7. I tap the red icon on my iPhone which means I'd like to sleep for nine more minutes, but this fierce Central American sunshine will jar me from my thin blanket in five. Then I'll shower and dress while most people are still sleeping, and by eight I will have descended the marble stairs with my hand trailing the patinated oak banister, and then I count the till and open reception. When my second alarm goes off at nine, I pad into the kitchen and fill the electric kettle, I plug it in and turn it on so it will boil, and while I'm waiting I retrieve a bowl from the upper left-hand cupboard and put one yellow label tea bag inside of it, its tag dangling from a string toward the kitchen counter. You see, Ollie is from Belgium and he takes his tea in a bowl, and he'd likely sleep all day, or at least until his shift at two, if I didn't bring his tea to his bedside.
It was dangerous, Sam. I mean, I think about it all the time. Do you? I held you before everyone else in my life, I would consider you before my husband when making decisions. I left him in Miami for a bar stool across from yours on the opposite coast, and to this very day it seems, somehow, like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Last night we all piled into Richard's bed again and I told my co-workers of you, and I heard myself say, out loud, that I will probably never love anyone as much as I love you. And that's so hard to know, because of all the questions I have left in this wide world I'm quite sure that I can never know you again.
But I suppose we shouldn't call this what it isn't.
I'm not even writing this to you. These letters back home, this is a device, and even if I did still know you this wouldn't be for you. These are for me, to chronicle some largely unimportant stuff that I've done, and this one happens to be addressed to you. Why? I'm not really sure, actually. It just all seems so fitting: all this heat, our strange built family of misfits, the slight late teenager that I met in Panama and shares my room and who's tea I make every morning at nine and how I'm determined this time not to fucking destroy him. I wont, Sam. I wont. We tried to be good to him, didn't we? But I look into Ollie's face now and they look so much alike, or rather Ollie looks as he once did, back then, and I'm no longer so sure. Our distance, I think, would have served him better.
We're older now and these things are easier, at least they are for me. It's easier now to distinguish those things that wont turn out the way that we want them to and I thank my years for that, but it's hard to remember that 22 year old me and 32 year old me are the same exact person, and it makes me cringe to see Ollie's face now and remember that one fateful August ten years ago when I let, for the very first time, a very forbidden pair of lips lower to meet my own.
Fuck, I don't even know what this is anymore.
We spent years designing ourselves as twins, but I'm not sure at all how alike we ever were, because I love this. I love it here, both in San Jose and in the wide world anywhere, and I love the twinge of fear I get when I think of relocating here forever. Because Sam, I could do this. I could live in San Jose and live off a few hours of sleep each night and check in new nomads every morning. I love this because they are actually like me, and so are Richard and Ollie, and I could walk these streets anonymously for years as my Spanish improves. I could keep working here, I could be here, and although I always wanted you to, being anywhere else than our hometown is just something you probably can't, or more aptly wont, do.
This should have some eloquent ending, but it wont. The truth is that a four pack just walked in, I have three new emails to answer, someone's buzzing the front door, and in a half-hour's time I have to turn my till over to Roger and go buy groceries for dinner and I have to go.
But it's cool. Right? I mean, to you, this isn't the first time that I've left.
--M
3.21.2013
3.07.2013
For Eddy: Today, we wait.
E--
We talked of this in Phoenix, and in some ways I agree, that at best it's hard to reconcile the people that we were some twenty years ago and the people we are now. I've made my share of mistakes, yes, but I actually regret very little; it's so easy to look back at 13 and 14 year old us and think, "man, I wish I hadn't been such and asshole back then," but let's just say, for shits and giggles, that we could go back: what would we really actively do differently?
There is always, as I'm sure you remember, so much pressure when you're traveling: pressure to wake at a reasonable time, to see everything there is to see, to make perfect memories. To take pictures of yourself in front of the Tour d'Eiffel and Sydney Opera House. To drink beers every night among new friends. To engage in that perfect holiday fling. And every few days or every week you move on; you fall asleep on a bus or a train and you awake in a new country, and if you're like me then you may blink a couple of times and smile, reminding yourself that you've never been there before. Panama feels nothing like this.
After you drove me to the airport in Phoenix I found out my flight was delayed, but eventually I flew through the night to Dallas and then Atlanta and then Fort Lauderdale. And then I took the long bus ride into South Beach and I saw my girlfriends, and I had just enough time to see them that I miss them more than I did before my arms were wrapped tightly about their tanned shoulders. I had to leave them too soon! We were just catching up, and then I had to get back on the slow and winding bus to Aventura, transfer to the Central line, and I shit you not when I tell you that I was crossing the threshold of the automatic doors of FLL fourteen minutes before my plane lifted its wheels from the ground. And Eddy, I tell you this story not just to catch you up on my last few days, but also to illustrate that this is also exactly how I feel about the last few times, before this week that I just spent with you in Phoenix, that I've had the chance to see you.
I get the feeling that maybe you didn't think I'd respond so enthusiastically when you offered to let me come and teach your 6th grade science classes with you for a day, but I've already spent the last couple months being shuffled around between my friends various lifestyles and professions and I think it's been good for me since I'm in the market for a new one. I've been a bit of a chameleon lately: In Melbourne I rolled my own cigarettes and slept out in the north end grade, and in Sydney my and Dayna's nights would end when the *goon did. I spent days and cold evenings reading alone in Noah's Brooklyn bed just like he might and New Years Eve dancing under the auspices of a seizure inducing green laser in the rear of Tandem Bar with Sally. I babysat for my sister in Atlanta and taught my niece and nephew card games. I joined the ranks of hustlers with Lauren in New Orleans and rode a swift road bike through the French Quarter home every night. And then I was ready to move on, to start making plans, and by the time I was in Austin prepping to arrive in Phoenix the following day I realized how actively and swiftly I'd been changing recently. And then I got a tattoo.
It's crazy Eddy, because I know that we're adults. I know that. But when I see your face, even when you're surrounded by your beautiful home and your wife and child, it's hard for me to not feel like I'm thirteen again and we are in our baggy jeans and flannels and combat boots. But there, standing in front of your class with 25 expectant pairs of eyes on me I was suddenly very aware that you are an adult and that I'm still not sure who I am.
I like Panama City. I like it a little too much and more than most people around me; it's a very transitory place and it seems to put many on edge. Here, travelers arrive from coffee farms in Nicaragua and the jungles in Belize, they come off boats from Colombia wobbly from the open sea, they have sat on the long bus from San Jose overnight and have taxied in from the station at the mall and when they get here there are throngs of Panamanians weaving about the dirty streets and there are cars driving seemingly lawlessly with horns blaring and there are the hundreds of hijas d'escuelas giggling about in their pleated navy skirts and it's off-putting for many. I get that. But the dirty streets and fast cars and humidity all feel like summer in New York which is one of my favorite homes, and I am in love with our most popular pastime here: we wait. We wait for everything. We wait for the kitchen to be less crowded so we can fry our plantains for dinner. We wait for storms to pass and boats to arrive to sail us to South America. We wait for our cohorts to wake so we can figure out what our day will bring, we wait for the ferry to Toboga, we wait for liners to pass through the Canal from Colon so we can watch them lock up and down, we wait for something more interesting than another day in Panama to drive us away. We wait for new people to arrive with news from nearby countries so we can plan our next move. Then we find some reason to wait to plan that move.
There don't exist the same pressures here as Moscow or Rome; most know little of Panama and so we don't feel as compelled to thrill folks back in our various homes with uploaded pictures of well known landmarks. We stay up as late as we want, we drink fifty cent beers from El Chino down the street, we wake and make pancakes and plan our day on the spot. Sometimes we are ambitious: we have designs on a fish market with two-dollar conche negro ceviche or we decide to brave the mean streets of Casco Viejo, but some days, like today, it's is hot and we want to sit around late and then go to the Mall. No matter what we do we return at night and fix our simple meals, and then we pad about in our flip flops smoking cigarettes we've bought on the street for a dollar or so, and then we wait again. Some wait patiently, some expectantly, but I'm fairly certain that I'm the only one who revels in this waiting like it's my only plan at all.
But see, Eddy, I've already been waiting. I've been waiting for money to arrive and planes to land and for emails to be returned. I've been walking and sitting on busses waiting for phone calls from my scattered bespectacled exes. I've been all over the fucking place waiting for something to spark my interest, for something to occur to me to do to end all this waiting and I'm still fucking waiting, and here, where yachts and tankers and cruisers have anchored for days waiting for passage from one ocean to another seems as good a place as any to wait for a great idea.
I've been to Florence, but I've never been to the Uffizi. I've seen but never climbed the Eiffel tower. I chose the Stedelijk over the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Sometimes I regret these things, I think that I wish I had it to do all over again and go to these places, all those ones that you're supposed to, but then I remember that all that stuff is still there, maybe waiting for me to return. Sometimes, instead of planning them to a tee you can let your days and late nights unfold, and you may, having traded a day of snorkeling in the Carribean find yourself able to be one of the last men standing because you slept in late instead, and there on Calle 5 on a small town in the Yucatan you might find yourself sharing the last Corona over a brilliant sunrise with your dearest friend from high school who is about to get married in two days time. And it just might be perfect because you may have no idea that it will be so many fucking years before you will get to have a moment like that with him again.
Eddy, everywhere I go people tell me the same thing. You could live here, you could do this. You could make coffee or paint faces or go to school or watch the kids, and in Phoenix, with you, it seemed so reasonable that I could teach. But for now, I wait. Tonight I wait late to go to sleep. Tomorrow I will wait through the hot, hot midday and on Friday I will wait for a taxi to take me to and from Mireflores and I will return to wait for the washing machine to be free so I can wait for my laundry to finish.
But I can't wait forever, Eddy.
I know this because even here the line handlers all eventually maneuver their vessels through their narrow cut and the sailboats all finally arrive from San Blas to deliver their waiting passengers to Cartagena, and someone might eventually decide on the long trip north and are, maybe even right now, waiting on a bus for it to stop in San Jose so they can wait there for me to arrive in a few days time.
One day my proverbial Saturday will come when I will wait no longer to make a plan, but for now, very real Saturday is looming when I will finally stop waiting and leave for Costa Rica.
Please don't worry for me, I am fine and I fucking love you. But mostly, Eddy, I want you to be proud of me.
xoxo--M
*This is slang for wine in a box. And yes, it is just as fantastic as it sounds.
We talked of this in Phoenix, and in some ways I agree, that at best it's hard to reconcile the people that we were some twenty years ago and the people we are now. I've made my share of mistakes, yes, but I actually regret very little; it's so easy to look back at 13 and 14 year old us and think, "man, I wish I hadn't been such and asshole back then," but let's just say, for shits and giggles, that we could go back: what would we really actively do differently?
There is always, as I'm sure you remember, so much pressure when you're traveling: pressure to wake at a reasonable time, to see everything there is to see, to make perfect memories. To take pictures of yourself in front of the Tour d'Eiffel and Sydney Opera House. To drink beers every night among new friends. To engage in that perfect holiday fling. And every few days or every week you move on; you fall asleep on a bus or a train and you awake in a new country, and if you're like me then you may blink a couple of times and smile, reminding yourself that you've never been there before. Panama feels nothing like this.
After you drove me to the airport in Phoenix I found out my flight was delayed, but eventually I flew through the night to Dallas and then Atlanta and then Fort Lauderdale. And then I took the long bus ride into South Beach and I saw my girlfriends, and I had just enough time to see them that I miss them more than I did before my arms were wrapped tightly about their tanned shoulders. I had to leave them too soon! We were just catching up, and then I had to get back on the slow and winding bus to Aventura, transfer to the Central line, and I shit you not when I tell you that I was crossing the threshold of the automatic doors of FLL fourteen minutes before my plane lifted its wheels from the ground. And Eddy, I tell you this story not just to catch you up on my last few days, but also to illustrate that this is also exactly how I feel about the last few times, before this week that I just spent with you in Phoenix, that I've had the chance to see you.
I get the feeling that maybe you didn't think I'd respond so enthusiastically when you offered to let me come and teach your 6th grade science classes with you for a day, but I've already spent the last couple months being shuffled around between my friends various lifestyles and professions and I think it's been good for me since I'm in the market for a new one. I've been a bit of a chameleon lately: In Melbourne I rolled my own cigarettes and slept out in the north end grade, and in Sydney my and Dayna's nights would end when the *goon did. I spent days and cold evenings reading alone in Noah's Brooklyn bed just like he might and New Years Eve dancing under the auspices of a seizure inducing green laser in the rear of Tandem Bar with Sally. I babysat for my sister in Atlanta and taught my niece and nephew card games. I joined the ranks of hustlers with Lauren in New Orleans and rode a swift road bike through the French Quarter home every night. And then I was ready to move on, to start making plans, and by the time I was in Austin prepping to arrive in Phoenix the following day I realized how actively and swiftly I'd been changing recently. And then I got a tattoo.
It's crazy Eddy, because I know that we're adults. I know that. But when I see your face, even when you're surrounded by your beautiful home and your wife and child, it's hard for me to not feel like I'm thirteen again and we are in our baggy jeans and flannels and combat boots. But there, standing in front of your class with 25 expectant pairs of eyes on me I was suddenly very aware that you are an adult and that I'm still not sure who I am.
I like Panama City. I like it a little too much and more than most people around me; it's a very transitory place and it seems to put many on edge. Here, travelers arrive from coffee farms in Nicaragua and the jungles in Belize, they come off boats from Colombia wobbly from the open sea, they have sat on the long bus from San Jose overnight and have taxied in from the station at the mall and when they get here there are throngs of Panamanians weaving about the dirty streets and there are cars driving seemingly lawlessly with horns blaring and there are the hundreds of hijas d'escuelas giggling about in their pleated navy skirts and it's off-putting for many. I get that. But the dirty streets and fast cars and humidity all feel like summer in New York which is one of my favorite homes, and I am in love with our most popular pastime here: we wait. We wait for everything. We wait for the kitchen to be less crowded so we can fry our plantains for dinner. We wait for storms to pass and boats to arrive to sail us to South America. We wait for our cohorts to wake so we can figure out what our day will bring, we wait for the ferry to Toboga, we wait for liners to pass through the Canal from Colon so we can watch them lock up and down, we wait for something more interesting than another day in Panama to drive us away. We wait for new people to arrive with news from nearby countries so we can plan our next move. Then we find some reason to wait to plan that move.
There don't exist the same pressures here as Moscow or Rome; most know little of Panama and so we don't feel as compelled to thrill folks back in our various homes with uploaded pictures of well known landmarks. We stay up as late as we want, we drink fifty cent beers from El Chino down the street, we wake and make pancakes and plan our day on the spot. Sometimes we are ambitious: we have designs on a fish market with two-dollar conche negro ceviche or we decide to brave the mean streets of Casco Viejo, but some days, like today, it's is hot and we want to sit around late and then go to the Mall. No matter what we do we return at night and fix our simple meals, and then we pad about in our flip flops smoking cigarettes we've bought on the street for a dollar or so, and then we wait again. Some wait patiently, some expectantly, but I'm fairly certain that I'm the only one who revels in this waiting like it's my only plan at all.
But see, Eddy, I've already been waiting. I've been waiting for money to arrive and planes to land and for emails to be returned. I've been walking and sitting on busses waiting for phone calls from my scattered bespectacled exes. I've been all over the fucking place waiting for something to spark my interest, for something to occur to me to do to end all this waiting and I'm still fucking waiting, and here, where yachts and tankers and cruisers have anchored for days waiting for passage from one ocean to another seems as good a place as any to wait for a great idea.
I've been to Florence, but I've never been to the Uffizi. I've seen but never climbed the Eiffel tower. I chose the Stedelijk over the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Sometimes I regret these things, I think that I wish I had it to do all over again and go to these places, all those ones that you're supposed to, but then I remember that all that stuff is still there, maybe waiting for me to return. Sometimes, instead of planning them to a tee you can let your days and late nights unfold, and you may, having traded a day of snorkeling in the Carribean find yourself able to be one of the last men standing because you slept in late instead, and there on Calle 5 on a small town in the Yucatan you might find yourself sharing the last Corona over a brilliant sunrise with your dearest friend from high school who is about to get married in two days time. And it just might be perfect because you may have no idea that it will be so many fucking years before you will get to have a moment like that with him again.
Eddy, everywhere I go people tell me the same thing. You could live here, you could do this. You could make coffee or paint faces or go to school or watch the kids, and in Phoenix, with you, it seemed so reasonable that I could teach. But for now, I wait. Tonight I wait late to go to sleep. Tomorrow I will wait through the hot, hot midday and on Friday I will wait for a taxi to take me to and from Mireflores and I will return to wait for the washing machine to be free so I can wait for my laundry to finish.
But I can't wait forever, Eddy.
I know this because even here the line handlers all eventually maneuver their vessels through their narrow cut and the sailboats all finally arrive from San Blas to deliver their waiting passengers to Cartagena, and someone might eventually decide on the long trip north and are, maybe even right now, waiting on a bus for it to stop in San Jose so they can wait there for me to arrive in a few days time.
One day my proverbial Saturday will come when I will wait no longer to make a plan, but for now, very real Saturday is looming when I will finally stop waiting and leave for Costa Rica.
Please don't worry for me, I am fine and I fucking love you. But mostly, Eddy, I want you to be proud of me.
xoxo--M
*This is slang for wine in a box. And yes, it is just as fantastic as it sounds.
2.25.2013
I've been downhearted, baby.
L--
When I was 17 or 18 I went to San Francisco for the first time. A few months previous my very first roommate, Jono Green, had gone with his then friend Claire for the Pride Parade and I remember thinking, the day he left, what an insurmountable task it seemed to get myself all the way to San Francisco. But that feeling--the intense jealousy of his trip and my all consuming desire to go--just wouldn't leave me, and within a few months I found myself in an Oakland coffee shop about to board a flight back to Seattle having just completed a week in the Bay that seemed much too short.
I was with my ex-husband, whom you know, and his sister Emily who was on the verge of moving to Berlin for a semester of school.
"I haven't saved any money. It's hard, I work at a fucking steakhouse and I'm a vegetarian," this is Emily speaking of her upcoming trip, "and when I get off work all I want is alcohol, and conveniently I always have a fistful of cash when I leave at night. I don't know what I'm going to do. I have almost no money, I haven't learned any German, and I wont have a place to stay for a couple nights when I get there. I don't know where I'm going to sleep."
"I couldn't do it," I offered incredulously, "I mean, you're just going to fly to a foreign country without knowing where you're going to sleep?"
It's funny, because within a couple of years I found myself at a train station in Bern while the Swiss ticket agent explained to me that the train I wanted to take to Germany was already fully booked and I'd have to leave a day early. Five days later I was in Berlin without any money or a place to sleep.
I've told you many, many times about what we thought of you the day you came to our shop on Alton Road. Knowing the other idiots I had been forced to make coffee with since I had arrived in Miami I was wary of the new transfer from Kendall, but when I offered to help you with a line of drinks twelve deep and when you declined citing that you could handle it, my mouth curled into a broad smile when I realized that this girl, meaning you, was dope as hell.
That day was longer ago than I, and you and Rob too I'm guessing, would like to admit.
My first trip returning to Miami after I moved back to the west coast was almost exactly a year later, and a couple days before I flew out from San Francisco on my way to Cancun for my friend Ed and his then fiancee Carrie's wedding, Rob, who was picking me up from the airport, gave me a call.
"I'll come get you at 8," he assured me, "I'll be in my Jetta. You'll see me. And I have the best surprise for you. You'll see."
He took me directly to 16th and Alton when I arrived, pulled into the parking lot of our old coffee shop, and before we had even finished the katty-korner treck to The Abbey you had walked from down the street to meet us. There you were! All the way from Sarasota! And it's crazy Lauren, because in all these years I think now, in coming to New Orleans, is the first time I've come to you.
Where were we? Were we on the plane there? Maybe it was when we had already landed in London when I finally confessed to you that we didn't actually yet have a place to stay. I think we've both had a lot of practice at that since then; that's so weird how that happens, isn't it? It's so much easier to perform a task you once feared after having done it one time. One time! In fact, it was only weeks after that first time in Berlin when I made it to Barcelona and welcomed--welcomed, Lauren--the opportunity to trade a bed for a night of spontaneity.
I thought of you when I arrived in Shanghai. Hurricane Sandy had prevented me from getting a Chinese visa so I wasn't even sure that I would be allowed out of the airport. But they did, let me leave I mean, and an hour later I was escalating from the subway having gotten off the train at a stop I picked somewhat arbitrarily but remembered from looking at a map. I didn't really know where to go, but was comforted by the fact that it didn't really matter since I didn't know where I was. It could be worse, I remember thinking, I could be in London in January, and it could be pouring down rain.
Remember the first time you visited me in San Francisco? You were coming from Florida for a stint on the West Coast, and we went thrifting in The Mission and drank cheap beers at The High Dive and we traipsed about The Tenderloin at all hours of the day and night just fucking begging someone to fuck with us but they never did. And when you were there in SF I could see the wanderlust in your eyes, and it was so fucking infectious that I agreed to meet you in my fair hometown some days later. That used to placate me Lauren, a swift trip up the coast for a couple days or more, but I'm always chasing that first high.
When I was 5, I left the country for my first time. My family and I drove up to Vancouver for Expo 86, and the one thing that really stuck with me, that dazzled me so much that I remember it to this day, was using a touch screen computer at a kiosk to navigate the park. It was amazing! I don't even think I had yet ever even used a computer, let alone one with a touch screen, and it was the most amazing device my young eyes had ever laid eyes on. I went on rides that day, ate cotton candy, maybe had a burger. I don't know, I don't really remember anything else; but there are still days when I casually remove my phone from my rear right jeans pocket, and while I'm navigating it with my thumb on its surface I will think of that very first time that I was farther away from home than I had ever been.
I want that again, Lauren, I want a moment like that one in Vancouver that I will never forget. I've found it a couple of times since, I've felt it. I've felt it in front of a makeshift Catholic altar in an alleyway in Milan, in the view from the 80 mile bridge to Key West, at the bottom of a box of wine in Sydney, and yes, on that empty pedestrian mall in Shanghai. But the trick is that you never know where you're going to find it: you could be navigating a pitch-black mountain highway in California, and, only because you have to pee so desperately you might end up at a viewpoint high above Carson City, and there you might see the thick swath of the Milky Way stretched across the wickedness of Nevada on an utterly moonless night.
And this might be the night that stays with you everywhere you go, because you will never forget how small and fearless you felt right there, in that moment.
Or maybe it's on the floor of Heathrow airport where two girls are tucked beneath their too-small complimentary fleece blankets, drunk from airport wine, while the thick snow outside finally thins to a flurry.
Or maybe it's on your couch on Fat Tuesday when, full from eggs and potatoes, we slept off our Lundi Gras exploits. I'm fairly certain that I will not soon forget when, in the throws of sleep, your hand wandered to your face revealing the back of your wrist from beneath the sleeve of your hoodie, and I smiled when I read the tattoo you've carefully had placed there because I finally understood it.
I didn't know quite where I was going when I left New York again in January, but by Ash Wednesday I had the beginnings of a plan and by the time I got to Austin I was saddled with buyers remorse from all the plane tickets I had purchased. But now, here in Phoenix, I'm relating my new timeline to Ed and Carrie, whom I saw get married in Cancun all those years ago, and I'm calm and collected and I'm ready to do this.
I've told you before that I love you, that I admire you, that you are my friend. But I don't think I've ever told you how much you inspire me.
Never go home.
XOXO--M
When I was 17 or 18 I went to San Francisco for the first time. A few months previous my very first roommate, Jono Green, had gone with his then friend Claire for the Pride Parade and I remember thinking, the day he left, what an insurmountable task it seemed to get myself all the way to San Francisco. But that feeling--the intense jealousy of his trip and my all consuming desire to go--just wouldn't leave me, and within a few months I found myself in an Oakland coffee shop about to board a flight back to Seattle having just completed a week in the Bay that seemed much too short.
I was with my ex-husband, whom you know, and his sister Emily who was on the verge of moving to Berlin for a semester of school.
"I haven't saved any money. It's hard, I work at a fucking steakhouse and I'm a vegetarian," this is Emily speaking of her upcoming trip, "and when I get off work all I want is alcohol, and conveniently I always have a fistful of cash when I leave at night. I don't know what I'm going to do. I have almost no money, I haven't learned any German, and I wont have a place to stay for a couple nights when I get there. I don't know where I'm going to sleep."
"I couldn't do it," I offered incredulously, "I mean, you're just going to fly to a foreign country without knowing where you're going to sleep?"
It's funny, because within a couple of years I found myself at a train station in Bern while the Swiss ticket agent explained to me that the train I wanted to take to Germany was already fully booked and I'd have to leave a day early. Five days later I was in Berlin without any money or a place to sleep.
I've told you many, many times about what we thought of you the day you came to our shop on Alton Road. Knowing the other idiots I had been forced to make coffee with since I had arrived in Miami I was wary of the new transfer from Kendall, but when I offered to help you with a line of drinks twelve deep and when you declined citing that you could handle it, my mouth curled into a broad smile when I realized that this girl, meaning you, was dope as hell.
That day was longer ago than I, and you and Rob too I'm guessing, would like to admit.
My first trip returning to Miami after I moved back to the west coast was almost exactly a year later, and a couple days before I flew out from San Francisco on my way to Cancun for my friend Ed and his then fiancee Carrie's wedding, Rob, who was picking me up from the airport, gave me a call.
"I'll come get you at 8," he assured me, "I'll be in my Jetta. You'll see me. And I have the best surprise for you. You'll see."
He took me directly to 16th and Alton when I arrived, pulled into the parking lot of our old coffee shop, and before we had even finished the katty-korner treck to The Abbey you had walked from down the street to meet us. There you were! All the way from Sarasota! And it's crazy Lauren, because in all these years I think now, in coming to New Orleans, is the first time I've come to you.
Where were we? Were we on the plane there? Maybe it was when we had already landed in London when I finally confessed to you that we didn't actually yet have a place to stay. I think we've both had a lot of practice at that since then; that's so weird how that happens, isn't it? It's so much easier to perform a task you once feared after having done it one time. One time! In fact, it was only weeks after that first time in Berlin when I made it to Barcelona and welcomed--welcomed, Lauren--the opportunity to trade a bed for a night of spontaneity.
I thought of you when I arrived in Shanghai. Hurricane Sandy had prevented me from getting a Chinese visa so I wasn't even sure that I would be allowed out of the airport. But they did, let me leave I mean, and an hour later I was escalating from the subway having gotten off the train at a stop I picked somewhat arbitrarily but remembered from looking at a map. I didn't really know where to go, but was comforted by the fact that it didn't really matter since I didn't know where I was. It could be worse, I remember thinking, I could be in London in January, and it could be pouring down rain.
Remember the first time you visited me in San Francisco? You were coming from Florida for a stint on the West Coast, and we went thrifting in The Mission and drank cheap beers at The High Dive and we traipsed about The Tenderloin at all hours of the day and night just fucking begging someone to fuck with us but they never did. And when you were there in SF I could see the wanderlust in your eyes, and it was so fucking infectious that I agreed to meet you in my fair hometown some days later. That used to placate me Lauren, a swift trip up the coast for a couple days or more, but I'm always chasing that first high.
When I was 5, I left the country for my first time. My family and I drove up to Vancouver for Expo 86, and the one thing that really stuck with me, that dazzled me so much that I remember it to this day, was using a touch screen computer at a kiosk to navigate the park. It was amazing! I don't even think I had yet ever even used a computer, let alone one with a touch screen, and it was the most amazing device my young eyes had ever laid eyes on. I went on rides that day, ate cotton candy, maybe had a burger. I don't know, I don't really remember anything else; but there are still days when I casually remove my phone from my rear right jeans pocket, and while I'm navigating it with my thumb on its surface I will think of that very first time that I was farther away from home than I had ever been.
I want that again, Lauren, I want a moment like that one in Vancouver that I will never forget. I've found it a couple of times since, I've felt it. I've felt it in front of a makeshift Catholic altar in an alleyway in Milan, in the view from the 80 mile bridge to Key West, at the bottom of a box of wine in Sydney, and yes, on that empty pedestrian mall in Shanghai. But the trick is that you never know where you're going to find it: you could be navigating a pitch-black mountain highway in California, and, only because you have to pee so desperately you might end up at a viewpoint high above Carson City, and there you might see the thick swath of the Milky Way stretched across the wickedness of Nevada on an utterly moonless night.
And this might be the night that stays with you everywhere you go, because you will never forget how small and fearless you felt right there, in that moment.
Or maybe it's on the floor of Heathrow airport where two girls are tucked beneath their too-small complimentary fleece blankets, drunk from airport wine, while the thick snow outside finally thins to a flurry.
Or maybe it's on your couch on Fat Tuesday when, full from eggs and potatoes, we slept off our Lundi Gras exploits. I'm fairly certain that I will not soon forget when, in the throws of sleep, your hand wandered to your face revealing the back of your wrist from beneath the sleeve of your hoodie, and I smiled when I read the tattoo you've carefully had placed there because I finally understood it.
I didn't know quite where I was going when I left New York again in January, but by Ash Wednesday I had the beginnings of a plan and by the time I got to Austin I was saddled with buyers remorse from all the plane tickets I had purchased. But now, here in Phoenix, I'm relating my new timeline to Ed and Carrie, whom I saw get married in Cancun all those years ago, and I'm calm and collected and I'm ready to do this.
I've told you before that I love you, that I admire you, that you are my friend. But I don't think I've ever told you how much you inspire me.
Never go home.
XOXO--M
1.23.2013
For Jen: We're singing a song/We don't care if were wrong.
J--
Two of my besties in New York, Namel and Eva, just went overseas for the first time, just a couple weeks ago. They're in London right now and I love seeing their pictures populate on the internet, especially knowing they'll be back stateside soon with freshly stamped passports and stories. I say this like I will be in New York to greet them, but no. I am not and I wont be there. I'm not entirely sure when I'll be back there.
I'm at my sister's house in Atlanta; I've been here about two weeks now. My niece, who is six and shares my birthday, is just fucking absolutely delighted that I've been here for so long. We've fallen into a routine where she comes home from school and I help her do her workbooks, then we all have dinner, then we play cards until she has to go to bed. She hugs me goodnight every night, tells me she loves me, and promises to see me the next day. Her name is Sanaa'Mati, and sometimes I call her just 'Mati' and watch her nose crinkle and a giggle escape. "Why are you callin' me that?" she'll ask and I tell her it's so we'll have the same initial, too. She asked me a question the other day before dinner.
"Auntie Ran, do you know what verma means?"
"Verma?" I repeated the word as best I could, but I had a feeling it was coming from her tongue in a manner that it was not originally placed in her head.
"Yeah. Uh...verma. Ver-ma. It's supposed to mean sick."
"Oh! you mean enferma, don't you?" I asked, then switched to a funny voice, one imitating a heavy smoker or someone stricken with bronchitis, "Estoy enferma, no puedo ir a l'escuela hoy." My display of simple Spanish sent her careening into giggles, and she asked me what it meant. I told her that's what you say when you want to get on an airplane, and then I laughed with her wondering if her proclivity for languages means she'll grow to have the same wanderlust as I.
I remember all those flights between Miami and Seattle, don't you? It all began ten years ago this year; all those months of radio silence, me, teary-eyed and buying flights to London for Lauren and I, a slow eight months of reconciling with Sam but never seeing you. And then, Aaron and Timmy crossing the path right beside Peter Smith and I back in Seattle, as if no time had passed, and within half an hour I was tight inside your arms telling you that I loved you and asking you if you'd seen Matthew. And then, of course, there's everything that happened after that. Including all those airplanes.
Yesterday, on a wild tear, I asked my niece to go grab her guitar because I had decided that we were going to play the guitar. Her Dad was at work and her Mom, my sister, was at the grocery store and I sent her to her room to retrieve a tiny pink six-string, and I tuned it's nylon strings on my iPhone.
"Now what?" she asked, wondering what song I was going to play.
"Now we learn C." I replied.
"What's C?"
"C is a note. It's like...the first note. It's the 'one' of notes," I said, angling Lakricia's screen towards us so we could more clearly see the chord chart I had pulled up, "and this is how you play it."
"What about the rest of them?" she asked frustratedly.
"The rest of the notes, you mean?"
"Yeah. My Dad knows all of those."
My niece lost interest quickly, but when her Dad, my brother in law, returned from the wide world, he found me cross legged on the living room floor trying to play a D chord.
"Hard to play that tiny thing?" He laughed.
"Well, yeah, but easier than a real guitar," I paused, noting he looked puzzled, "I don't play the guitar. I play the ukulele. But I dated this guy. He was an alcoholic and he was drunk and it broke." My brother in law laughed out loud.
"You play the ukulele?" my niece screeched, "Ooooooh, you gotta go get in the car and get another one, and then you can ukulele with me and you can teach me how to ukulele. Ducka, ducka, ducka." She added the sound effect at the end to accompany a strumming motion with her hand, a bit of air-ukulele she was performing, you know, as if she was drawing her fingers up and down the aperture of my non-existant new instrument.
"Sanaa," I chided, "I can't just go out, right now, on a Saturday in the suburbs of Atlanta, and find a ukulele somewhere. That's crazy"
"Actually," her dad said, "There's a music store a couple miles from here. You could probably find a ukulele there right now. For twenty bucks."
I'm here in Atlanta because I needed a plan, Jen. Because I didn't know where else to go. Because I thought I could come back from Melbourne and stay in New York and make all these sacrifices all for a months lease on a new boy far away. I tried, I did. But all that happened was that it all just felt too fucking familiar, all of that thick, overwhelming longing that comes with missing someone and somewhere, and it was so, so cold, and I was sick and tired of sleeping alone in my other lover's bed while he was away and I was getting more and more confused as to who I was supposed to be missing.
I tried, Jen. I tried to figure it all out then but nothing made sense, and I didn't know any better than to iron my best black dress and interview for some high paying job that could grant me enough money to plant me back in Melbourne in as little time as a few months. But then it started snowing, and I dropped off my leather jacket in my storage unit and traded it for a long down parka, and even that wasn't enough to keep the cold from my skinny limbs while I pounded the unforgiving New York pave, and it wasn't enough to keep me from returning to the wrong boys' silent bedroom at night only to shakily peel it's length from me because, even with it's substantial hood and slick nylon shell, it just wasn't enough to keep the rain from my skin. And then one day I walked that half mile south again to retrieve all my archives, and from them, when I got them back to bed and bent the thick spine of my travel journal, fell a single loose photograph. I picked it up from the comforter, turned it to face me, and gazed not upon a photo I had taken myself but rather one of yours, from the Louvre, of the enigmatic marble sculture Cupid and Psyche.
My niece is right. My brother in law, her dad, does know the rest of the chords. He knows them because he's a musician, and yes, I'm telling you that my sister married a rockstar, and yes, I know exactly what you're thinking. Does it run in the family? Yeah, I mean, I guess so. Is that a thing that can even run in a family? I mean, I don't really know, I have no idea if it's possible to have a genetic predisposition to dating musicians, but I can tell you that my sister and I are more alike than I could have ever imagined in the long 27 years I was alive before my arms finally encircled her long, slender neck. A neck that looks identical to mine.
I've never really figured out why I keep returning to them, all of these musicians I mean, but I think it has something to do with needing something irrational; the notion that against their better judgment they still strive to achieve a dream that a such relative few will ever attain. They're statistically destined to fail before they begin, and yet they keep writing, keep rehearsing, keep recording. They continue to spend lazy Tuesday's off from a thankless job perched in their living rooms with guitars in their laps dreaming up new dreams because the previous ones have already been dashed. I respect that, I guess. I value that way of thinking: that ability to pick yourself up and try again against all odds.
I know you remember that year, that one we spent as the three of us after I left Florida, and we rifled through boys like playthings, and it didn't seem yet like a pattern until our birthday when I draped myself across the bassist in your Dad's band and fucked him in my little pink bed with my thigh-highs still on. I say "our" like I mean mine and Sanaa's: our birthday. But you know, Jen. You know that in this instance I mean Matthew's and mine.
It's romantic in an old-fashioned way, don't you think? To love someone from afar? It was for us all those years ago when we'd cue up the same song in our respective corners of the country, clutching our telephones like they harnessed us together, and we'd sing oh, Jen, oh how distance has a way of making love understandable.
Those miles are a hurdle that requires you to fight for that love, and so rendering it more valuable, all without the inconvenience of conflict. I think this phenomenon is what people are referring to when they relate cliches about what distance does to your heart.
I knew it was wrong, Jen. Back then, with Matthew, but it was all just so blinding. It was so goddamned romantic. And yeah, I mean romantic in a sort of Shakespearian way that actually connotes tragedy, but you know what I mean. You were there. Our best friend was in a goddamned cult and I was just so fucking mad at her, and she had just fucking ripped her teenage boyfriend's heart completely apart and traded him for a pony-tailed financier or insurance salesman or something equally as boring that I can't remember. But when I found that little broken boy, his tiny frame suspended about that broken heart that I saw patched together with songs, I had to have it. I wanted nothing fucking more than to take the guitar from his lap and sit there myself. I just had to. And I guess I thought that when all the distance was removed that everything would fall right into place, that the struggle was over, but now I know that's not at all how these things work.
For one, you can't ever take their guitars from their laps.
And it's not just the musicians, it's all of them--the poets and filmmakers and painters and designers and sculptors--all of these creatives have to work twice as hard for half the successes and you can never expect to extricate them from their work; they're one in the same. So Jen: why the fuck have I repeatedly let them do that to me?
I've been on the verge of tears for weeks. And I've cried too, yes, but that seems somehow inconsequential. This isn't like that winter ten years ago when I was so broken that I couldn't feel anything, but rather now I feel everything, all at once, and it started the day I realized exactly what I had to do.
Back when when my brother in law was signed to Virgin Records he used to tour with his band, and my sister, having finished a degree in Public Health at Clark was considering continuing on for a Masters in Human Sexuality in SF or Seattle. But then there was the wedding, and 'life' happened, as they say, both figuratively and literally, and then it was just too hard for my sister to be home alone with two kids while her husband was out there on the road with several weeks of shows. It's too easy to resent them for this, Jen. We see them out there creating their lives and we live to make sure that they can, and month after month we assume that one day, maybe soon, we will be repaid in kind. But we've never exactly asked for that, and now we're just still waiting.
Before I left for Melbourne my plan was to return stateside, catch a commuter flight to Miami, and then slowly make my way across the south until I left for Colombia. But within three days in Australia I knew I was desperate to stay, and within a couple weeks I knew I had to leave and come back, and then, yes, that month in New York I've already related to you. It seemed so simple at the time, I just thought that since I had no real plans and no real commitments then it should stand to reason that I'd have to be the one to return. The musician that I left behind in Melbourne has his work and his bands; how could I possibly ask him to leave that behind just to see me when I have nothing I can't postpone? But then on Christmas I watched it snow outside and thought about this past year and how I nearly didn't live to see it, and that's when I had the first inkling that I just can't fucking do this anymore.
You heard correctly earlier: my sister has two kids. There's Sanaa, yes, but she is joined by her older brother Kamau, who's birthday falls the day before ours. Last week the three of us were playing cards again, and at the climax of a game of Go Fish of which my little niece was victorious, she trotted off to her room having extended her attention span too far with card games.
"Kamau," I said, "Have you had fun with me? While I've been here?" There's a backstory to this, one he doesn't know about my other niece Alexis who is now the same age you were when I met you, and about how I sacrificed seeing her grow up to my need to see the world.
"Yeah, it's been awesome! Are you leaving or something?"
"Not yet, no. I'll be here for a little while longer. But Kamau, I wondered if we could talk. You're older than Sanaa, I can't talk to her about this, and I need you to hear me."
"Okay," he answered simply.
"I don't know when I'm going to see you again. It could be a long time, a really long time."
"Like...until Christmas?" He asked, incredulously.
"Like, until you're in Middle School."
"But...Aunt Miranda, I'm only in the third grade."
And then my young nephew and I shared a silence that he handled in a manner far beyond what his years might dictate.
It was late when I started writing the proposal, and it felt weird. I mean, I write all the time these days Jen, but this felt like it was happening to me rather than by me. And when I was done, I finished filling out all the forms, attached the 2500 word essay I had just written, and sent it on it's way along with my credit card information from which they would charge me about $14.73 on a good exchange day.
"Wait, where are you going? Australia?" My sister asked me after having overheard my conversation with her young son, "When are you leaving?"
"That's not exactly the case," I responded tentatively, "and I don't even know yet if I got in."
"Got into what?"
"Last night I...I applied to school in South Africa."
So Colombia, too, is back on the table. I could fly to Medellin tomorrow if I saw fit. And then? Bogota? Or Panama City--I have this new idea where I'd like to travel overland from Panama to Mexico by bus with naught but my backpack. And why not, Jen? What home do I really have to return to? There's my hometown, yes, but that's not home. Is it New York? I guess, but I just tried to stay there and felt the weight of the cold and my restlessness. Jen, I went to fucking Australia, and even bigger than the feeling of wanting to return is the feeling that nothing is impossible. Seriously Jen, I feel like I could do anything successfully these days save waste this moment chasing a boy who wont chase me back and, as I know I promised you, come home soon.
"Wow, really?" my sister asked of the news, "You know, there's this school in SF that I've always wanted to go to."
And so Jen, it seems that that amazing thing that I mused upon at a booth in the rear of a bar in Northcote, Victoria might be this, because it seems like this is the year when the Singleton girls go to Grad school. Moxie and Roxie have made our list of demands and expect them to be heeded, and on top of that I think I could squeeze 9 or 10 new countries into the next few months, and I already have designs on four new states. We deserve this Jen, it's our fucking birthright. Our fucking dad is long dead, not that he was ever around anyway, for either of us, and this was supposed the thing to teach us that we need no man to complete us. But therein lies the trap that we've found ourselves in over and over--this shit comes so easily to us so we never immediately see the problem in lending a hand. The thing we never anticipate is how many people will accept our help.
Not this year.
On Friday I leave for New Orleans to visit Lauren who accompanied me to London all those years ago. It's funny, Jen, I took her with me on that trip because I needed someone there to make sure that I returned. On our last day it started snowing on our way to Heathrow. Snow! We were two awestruck Floridians who danced about in the cascade; we were thrilled! Until, that is, we sat on our plane for almost seven hours while it was still parked on the tarmac before they finally just cancelled our flight. There was a moment when we were disembarking when I wondered if it was some sort of sign, one that maybe I should just catch the train back into the city and try and make a life rather than board a flight the following day.
I know that I've lived a big life, and I'm always the first one to mention it, and Jen, I'm not saying that I'm regretful, because I'm not. But I wonder. I wonder all the time what I might have done had I always been my own first priority. I look at your photo of Cupid and Psyche and think that maybe I shouldn't have spent my twenties chasing forbidden loves all over the country. I remember that although Melbourne seems exotic and foreign to me that it is Ryan's hometown that he has barely ever left and likely never will. I look into my little nieces face and wonder if she's just another Alexis, wonder if I'll have to painstakingly repair our relationship when she's in her teens.
I see Namel and Eva's pictures from London and wonder what would have happened if I had, ten years ago, gone there alone and never left.
But most of all I see you in my minds eye, the freckles in which are a mirror image to yours, and fuck, Jen. I miss you so much. But I feel at home out here in this great wide world, so maybe, Jen, I've finally arrived.
I love you. More than you know.
XOXO--M
Two of my besties in New York, Namel and Eva, just went overseas for the first time, just a couple weeks ago. They're in London right now and I love seeing their pictures populate on the internet, especially knowing they'll be back stateside soon with freshly stamped passports and stories. I say this like I will be in New York to greet them, but no. I am not and I wont be there. I'm not entirely sure when I'll be back there.
I'm at my sister's house in Atlanta; I've been here about two weeks now. My niece, who is six and shares my birthday, is just fucking absolutely delighted that I've been here for so long. We've fallen into a routine where she comes home from school and I help her do her workbooks, then we all have dinner, then we play cards until she has to go to bed. She hugs me goodnight every night, tells me she loves me, and promises to see me the next day. Her name is Sanaa'Mati, and sometimes I call her just 'Mati' and watch her nose crinkle and a giggle escape. "Why are you callin' me that?" she'll ask and I tell her it's so we'll have the same initial, too. She asked me a question the other day before dinner.
"Auntie Ran, do you know what verma means?"
"Verma?" I repeated the word as best I could, but I had a feeling it was coming from her tongue in a manner that it was not originally placed in her head.
"Yeah. Uh...verma. Ver-ma. It's supposed to mean sick."
"Oh! you mean enferma, don't you?" I asked, then switched to a funny voice, one imitating a heavy smoker or someone stricken with bronchitis, "Estoy enferma, no puedo ir a l'escuela hoy." My display of simple Spanish sent her careening into giggles, and she asked me what it meant. I told her that's what you say when you want to get on an airplane, and then I laughed with her wondering if her proclivity for languages means she'll grow to have the same wanderlust as I.
I remember all those flights between Miami and Seattle, don't you? It all began ten years ago this year; all those months of radio silence, me, teary-eyed and buying flights to London for Lauren and I, a slow eight months of reconciling with Sam but never seeing you. And then, Aaron and Timmy crossing the path right beside Peter Smith and I back in Seattle, as if no time had passed, and within half an hour I was tight inside your arms telling you that I loved you and asking you if you'd seen Matthew. And then, of course, there's everything that happened after that. Including all those airplanes.
Yesterday, on a wild tear, I asked my niece to go grab her guitar because I had decided that we were going to play the guitar. Her Dad was at work and her Mom, my sister, was at the grocery store and I sent her to her room to retrieve a tiny pink six-string, and I tuned it's nylon strings on my iPhone.
"Now what?" she asked, wondering what song I was going to play.
"Now we learn C." I replied.
"What's C?"
"C is a note. It's like...the first note. It's the 'one' of notes," I said, angling Lakricia's screen towards us so we could more clearly see the chord chart I had pulled up, "and this is how you play it."
"What about the rest of them?" she asked frustratedly.
"The rest of the notes, you mean?"
"Yeah. My Dad knows all of those."
My niece lost interest quickly, but when her Dad, my brother in law, returned from the wide world, he found me cross legged on the living room floor trying to play a D chord.
"Hard to play that tiny thing?" He laughed.
"Well, yeah, but easier than a real guitar," I paused, noting he looked puzzled, "I don't play the guitar. I play the ukulele. But I dated this guy. He was an alcoholic and he was drunk and it broke." My brother in law laughed out loud.
"You play the ukulele?" my niece screeched, "Ooooooh, you gotta go get in the car and get another one, and then you can ukulele with me and you can teach me how to ukulele. Ducka, ducka, ducka." She added the sound effect at the end to accompany a strumming motion with her hand, a bit of air-ukulele she was performing, you know, as if she was drawing her fingers up and down the aperture of my non-existant new instrument.
"Sanaa," I chided, "I can't just go out, right now, on a Saturday in the suburbs of Atlanta, and find a ukulele somewhere. That's crazy"
"Actually," her dad said, "There's a music store a couple miles from here. You could probably find a ukulele there right now. For twenty bucks."
I'm here in Atlanta because I needed a plan, Jen. Because I didn't know where else to go. Because I thought I could come back from Melbourne and stay in New York and make all these sacrifices all for a months lease on a new boy far away. I tried, I did. But all that happened was that it all just felt too fucking familiar, all of that thick, overwhelming longing that comes with missing someone and somewhere, and it was so, so cold, and I was sick and tired of sleeping alone in my other lover's bed while he was away and I was getting more and more confused as to who I was supposed to be missing.
I tried, Jen. I tried to figure it all out then but nothing made sense, and I didn't know any better than to iron my best black dress and interview for some high paying job that could grant me enough money to plant me back in Melbourne in as little time as a few months. But then it started snowing, and I dropped off my leather jacket in my storage unit and traded it for a long down parka, and even that wasn't enough to keep the cold from my skinny limbs while I pounded the unforgiving New York pave, and it wasn't enough to keep me from returning to the wrong boys' silent bedroom at night only to shakily peel it's length from me because, even with it's substantial hood and slick nylon shell, it just wasn't enough to keep the rain from my skin. And then one day I walked that half mile south again to retrieve all my archives, and from them, when I got them back to bed and bent the thick spine of my travel journal, fell a single loose photograph. I picked it up from the comforter, turned it to face me, and gazed not upon a photo I had taken myself but rather one of yours, from the Louvre, of the enigmatic marble sculture Cupid and Psyche.
My niece is right. My brother in law, her dad, does know the rest of the chords. He knows them because he's a musician, and yes, I'm telling you that my sister married a rockstar, and yes, I know exactly what you're thinking. Does it run in the family? Yeah, I mean, I guess so. Is that a thing that can even run in a family? I mean, I don't really know, I have no idea if it's possible to have a genetic predisposition to dating musicians, but I can tell you that my sister and I are more alike than I could have ever imagined in the long 27 years I was alive before my arms finally encircled her long, slender neck. A neck that looks identical to mine.
I've never really figured out why I keep returning to them, all of these musicians I mean, but I think it has something to do with needing something irrational; the notion that against their better judgment they still strive to achieve a dream that a such relative few will ever attain. They're statistically destined to fail before they begin, and yet they keep writing, keep rehearsing, keep recording. They continue to spend lazy Tuesday's off from a thankless job perched in their living rooms with guitars in their laps dreaming up new dreams because the previous ones have already been dashed. I respect that, I guess. I value that way of thinking: that ability to pick yourself up and try again against all odds.
I know you remember that year, that one we spent as the three of us after I left Florida, and we rifled through boys like playthings, and it didn't seem yet like a pattern until our birthday when I draped myself across the bassist in your Dad's band and fucked him in my little pink bed with my thigh-highs still on. I say "our" like I mean mine and Sanaa's: our birthday. But you know, Jen. You know that in this instance I mean Matthew's and mine.
It's romantic in an old-fashioned way, don't you think? To love someone from afar? It was for us all those years ago when we'd cue up the same song in our respective corners of the country, clutching our telephones like they harnessed us together, and we'd sing oh, Jen, oh how distance has a way of making love understandable.
Those miles are a hurdle that requires you to fight for that love, and so rendering it more valuable, all without the inconvenience of conflict. I think this phenomenon is what people are referring to when they relate cliches about what distance does to your heart.
I knew it was wrong, Jen. Back then, with Matthew, but it was all just so blinding. It was so goddamned romantic. And yeah, I mean romantic in a sort of Shakespearian way that actually connotes tragedy, but you know what I mean. You were there. Our best friend was in a goddamned cult and I was just so fucking mad at her, and she had just fucking ripped her teenage boyfriend's heart completely apart and traded him for a pony-tailed financier or insurance salesman or something equally as boring that I can't remember. But when I found that little broken boy, his tiny frame suspended about that broken heart that I saw patched together with songs, I had to have it. I wanted nothing fucking more than to take the guitar from his lap and sit there myself. I just had to. And I guess I thought that when all the distance was removed that everything would fall right into place, that the struggle was over, but now I know that's not at all how these things work.
For one, you can't ever take their guitars from their laps.
And it's not just the musicians, it's all of them--the poets and filmmakers and painters and designers and sculptors--all of these creatives have to work twice as hard for half the successes and you can never expect to extricate them from their work; they're one in the same. So Jen: why the fuck have I repeatedly let them do that to me?
I've been on the verge of tears for weeks. And I've cried too, yes, but that seems somehow inconsequential. This isn't like that winter ten years ago when I was so broken that I couldn't feel anything, but rather now I feel everything, all at once, and it started the day I realized exactly what I had to do.
Back when when my brother in law was signed to Virgin Records he used to tour with his band, and my sister, having finished a degree in Public Health at Clark was considering continuing on for a Masters in Human Sexuality in SF or Seattle. But then there was the wedding, and 'life' happened, as they say, both figuratively and literally, and then it was just too hard for my sister to be home alone with two kids while her husband was out there on the road with several weeks of shows. It's too easy to resent them for this, Jen. We see them out there creating their lives and we live to make sure that they can, and month after month we assume that one day, maybe soon, we will be repaid in kind. But we've never exactly asked for that, and now we're just still waiting.
Before I left for Melbourne my plan was to return stateside, catch a commuter flight to Miami, and then slowly make my way across the south until I left for Colombia. But within three days in Australia I knew I was desperate to stay, and within a couple weeks I knew I had to leave and come back, and then, yes, that month in New York I've already related to you. It seemed so simple at the time, I just thought that since I had no real plans and no real commitments then it should stand to reason that I'd have to be the one to return. The musician that I left behind in Melbourne has his work and his bands; how could I possibly ask him to leave that behind just to see me when I have nothing I can't postpone? But then on Christmas I watched it snow outside and thought about this past year and how I nearly didn't live to see it, and that's when I had the first inkling that I just can't fucking do this anymore.
You heard correctly earlier: my sister has two kids. There's Sanaa, yes, but she is joined by her older brother Kamau, who's birthday falls the day before ours. Last week the three of us were playing cards again, and at the climax of a game of Go Fish of which my little niece was victorious, she trotted off to her room having extended her attention span too far with card games.
"Kamau," I said, "Have you had fun with me? While I've been here?" There's a backstory to this, one he doesn't know about my other niece Alexis who is now the same age you were when I met you, and about how I sacrificed seeing her grow up to my need to see the world.
"Yeah, it's been awesome! Are you leaving or something?"
"Not yet, no. I'll be here for a little while longer. But Kamau, I wondered if we could talk. You're older than Sanaa, I can't talk to her about this, and I need you to hear me."
"Okay," he answered simply.
"I don't know when I'm going to see you again. It could be a long time, a really long time."
"Like...until Christmas?" He asked, incredulously.
"Like, until you're in Middle School."
"But...Aunt Miranda, I'm only in the third grade."
And then my young nephew and I shared a silence that he handled in a manner far beyond what his years might dictate.
It was late when I started writing the proposal, and it felt weird. I mean, I write all the time these days Jen, but this felt like it was happening to me rather than by me. And when I was done, I finished filling out all the forms, attached the 2500 word essay I had just written, and sent it on it's way along with my credit card information from which they would charge me about $14.73 on a good exchange day.
"Wait, where are you going? Australia?" My sister asked me after having overheard my conversation with her young son, "When are you leaving?"
"That's not exactly the case," I responded tentatively, "and I don't even know yet if I got in."
"Got into what?"
"Last night I...I applied to school in South Africa."
So Colombia, too, is back on the table. I could fly to Medellin tomorrow if I saw fit. And then? Bogota? Or Panama City--I have this new idea where I'd like to travel overland from Panama to Mexico by bus with naught but my backpack. And why not, Jen? What home do I really have to return to? There's my hometown, yes, but that's not home. Is it New York? I guess, but I just tried to stay there and felt the weight of the cold and my restlessness. Jen, I went to fucking Australia, and even bigger than the feeling of wanting to return is the feeling that nothing is impossible. Seriously Jen, I feel like I could do anything successfully these days save waste this moment chasing a boy who wont chase me back and, as I know I promised you, come home soon."Wow, really?" my sister asked of the news, "You know, there's this school in SF that I've always wanted to go to."
And so Jen, it seems that that amazing thing that I mused upon at a booth in the rear of a bar in Northcote, Victoria might be this, because it seems like this is the year when the Singleton girls go to Grad school. Moxie and Roxie have made our list of demands and expect them to be heeded, and on top of that I think I could squeeze 9 or 10 new countries into the next few months, and I already have designs on four new states. We deserve this Jen, it's our fucking birthright. Our fucking dad is long dead, not that he was ever around anyway, for either of us, and this was supposed the thing to teach us that we need no man to complete us. But therein lies the trap that we've found ourselves in over and over--this shit comes so easily to us so we never immediately see the problem in lending a hand. The thing we never anticipate is how many people will accept our help.
Not this year.
On Friday I leave for New Orleans to visit Lauren who accompanied me to London all those years ago. It's funny, Jen, I took her with me on that trip because I needed someone there to make sure that I returned. On our last day it started snowing on our way to Heathrow. Snow! We were two awestruck Floridians who danced about in the cascade; we were thrilled! Until, that is, we sat on our plane for almost seven hours while it was still parked on the tarmac before they finally just cancelled our flight. There was a moment when we were disembarking when I wondered if it was some sort of sign, one that maybe I should just catch the train back into the city and try and make a life rather than board a flight the following day.
I know that I've lived a big life, and I'm always the first one to mention it, and Jen, I'm not saying that I'm regretful, because I'm not. But I wonder. I wonder all the time what I might have done had I always been my own first priority. I look at your photo of Cupid and Psyche and think that maybe I shouldn't have spent my twenties chasing forbidden loves all over the country. I remember that although Melbourne seems exotic and foreign to me that it is Ryan's hometown that he has barely ever left and likely never will. I look into my little nieces face and wonder if she's just another Alexis, wonder if I'll have to painstakingly repair our relationship when she's in her teens.
I see Namel and Eva's pictures from London and wonder what would have happened if I had, ten years ago, gone there alone and never left.
But most of all I see you in my minds eye, the freckles in which are a mirror image to yours, and fuck, Jen. I miss you so much. But I feel at home out here in this great wide world, so maybe, Jen, I've finally arrived.
I love you. More than you know.
XOXO--M
1.01.2013
NYCD: An introduction to 2013.
[Greetings from Georgia! I've finally cemented the tracklist and NYCD2013 is almost done. You can expect this to be listenable by Rob and Meg's birthday which is, if you don't know them, January 31st. But I've made you wait so long already that I thought y'all deserved a bit of a preview. Enjoy.]
Hey dudes,
I've forgotten how we usually do this. Does that word apply? Usually? Maybe that's not quite the right word to describe an activity I haven't participated in several years. I'm not really sure where to start, so I guess we'll begin with the why.
Why now? It's been years! And suddenly out of the blue I decided to make this again? Well, basically, yeah.
By New Years Day 2012 I had managed to, in practice, erase the previous three and a half years from my history--meaning that I simply reversed my person and became who I was before Labor Day weekend '08. I instantly quit participating in every activity that I had become accustomed to and eliminated every habit I had picked up, and the last year has seen me adding back to those habits selectively.
I thought I should try adding this, too.
I think this is what we used to do, right? When things have been hard, when we'd lost sight of our dreams, when we needed some inspiration: we'd set it to a soundtrack and workshop our lives through our headphones. We'd drive into the sunset with a specific album playing. We'd insist on a specific track before boarding a flight. We could decide, unanimously yet without speaking, what song was required of a nearby jukebox and sing every single word together when our selection finally plays.
Ten, right? That's how many points we used to go over before this starts?
1. Way back in '02 when this started I used to give songs to people. Then in '05, for seemingly no reason, I changed it and made it chronologically. In '04 there was a two disc set. '03 was late, remember? Really late. If I remember correctly it came out after Valentines day. So next year, how will we remember this one in the pages of NYCD2014? Well, I don't know if we will. I'm not a fortune teller, guys. I may never do this again. Or I might do this forever. Again.
2. I used to use this time to warn people that they may not want to take a song literally lest they take something the wrong way. I don't think this really applies this year. As far as I can remember every song save one was assigned for content rather than occasion, and even that song's lyrics probably apply to the story. God, that's a really good song actually, it's one of my favorite covers of all time. It will also mark the very first time that I have included a song by someone I know personally; I've certainly dated enough musicians for this to surprise even me.
3. More than once I've used NYCD as a conduit to help rectify some rift in my circle of friends. Just to be clear, I don't do that anymore. If you're reading this and think that seeing that there's a NYCD this year might be a sign that I've decided to reconnect with you or forgive you or something--before you get your hopes up, that's almost certainly not the case. The exception might be that you're one of my exes and I would like to speak to you in 2013 to continue my Exes in the Inbox series. That being said that's not really the point of NYCD, but it would be a happy accident.
4. It has just occurred to me that there are a lot of you out there who have no idea what this is or how important it has been to some of us or why it's so spectacular that it's returned this year. Welcome to NYCD. It's been six years since I've done this, and this will be the sixth one I've made. It might be the last. It might not. But I can tell you definitively that there once was a time where my entire circle of friends and I all knew every word to every song from every NYCD, and I'm guessing this year will be vastly different than that. That makes me kind of sad, you guys.
The idea that our histories can all be set to the same soundtrack has always offered me a specific kind of comfort that has made it possible for me to go all over the place without all of you. In track 17 I mentioned wanting to do something amazing this year--and I still want and will have that--but keep in mind that what I deem amazing and what you deem amazing may be vastly different from one another.
I've spent a lot of time in the last year trying to distinguish the things that I truly value from the things that I merely like. I used to think I liked traveling. I don't. I value it. I don't feel like myself when I don't participate in that activity, and I'm sure that you'll notice that this years' compilation has a lot of traveling songs. It's true! It does! But why shouldn't it? I visited 10 states and three countries last year, and I don't even consider last year particularly travel-heavy for me. It's more than what I do, it's who I am, and NYCD was always an opportunity for me to feel close to y'all even when I'm far away. I guess I needed that again this year.
I want this to be as pervasive and important as it has been in years past, but I'm prepared for it not to be. The last few weeks has found me feeling...lonely, I guess. I don't get lonely, or I didn't, or something, but maybe now I do. I miss you guys desperately, so whatever it is called when you miss someone so much that it hurts is what applies. So please, listen. Listen well, listen actively, and then let me know what you think. Let's talk. I have some time these days, so call me. And know that every time you listen to this you are helping to make it possible for me to be out in the world somewhere missing you so goddamned much, and every time I hear from you is just one more reminder that "I'll be coming home soon."
I really, really love you guys.
5. Look, this is a really good NYCD, and furthermore it really sounds like NYCD. If you're new to this then you may not quite understand, but the veterans among you will hear it immediately. Artists that you may have expected to hear on NYCD are there, it's really, really poppy and there's even a Beatles cover. Wait, that's a lie. There are two Beatles covers. Also, I'm sure that some of you NYCD veterans will swear up and down that I've put a song on NYCD2013 that was already on NYCD2003. That's not entirely true; just know that this wasn't some sort of oversight on my part.
6. I've done my best to insure that BONYCD includes the songs that we all remember and not just the songs that I remember. That being said, I'm sure I've disappointed at least a few of you with some song or another that I've omitted. Know that songs were also chosen because of the purpose they served inside of a place and time, and sitting here now, typing this, ten years having passed since I first made one of these, it's so much easier to love some of the hardest of these times for the way that they've fueled all the stories that came later. What I'm trying to say is that I did my best.
7. I have all the originals of NYCD going back to 2002, and all of the additional material that went with creating them. Every note I wrote workshopping a story, every preliminary playlist--I have all that stuff. In the back of a notebook I used to make NYCD2006 there's a list called "consider for future NYCD's" and it's just a list of really beautiful, really poignant songs that I've never actually been able to use. I used five of them this year.
8. Speaking of originals, you've obviously noticed that you haven't received...well, anything. There's no real hard copy this year save the one that I will compile, create, and present to my favorite ex because he's a techophobe luddite child. I wont edit this sentence before I give him this, so you can be assured that he will text me the first time he reads this saying something that starts with the capitalized word 'woman' that is followed by at least one exclamation point. I crack myself up.
Anyway, because of some stuff I'll be doing in 2013, I also plan on going completely digital with my NYCD archives, too. In a couple months I will carefully scan and catalogue each one, and then give all of the originals to anyone who wants them. So, um...do you want them? They're cool. And in color.
9. So no one gets a song, and no one gets a copy...so who is this for? Namely, everyone. Seriously, if you are reading this, this is for you. I'm not following or tracking NYCD posts, pages, or downloads, so I will literally never find out that you read this or listened if you don't want me to. So go ahead. dive in.
10. I used to always use this point to dedicate NYCD to someone, and I will uphold that tradition. NYCD2013 is dedicated to Nathan "OMG Andy" Lind, and he knows why.
So this is the part where I'm supposed to quote one of my favorite authors, tell you that this year, finally, I will live only for myself, and then leave you with my phone number and address.
Haha. Sure. Why not.
"It reveals to me two facts. One: she loves me deeply. Two: she is completely indifferent as to whether or not she ever sees me again. Looking past her to her suitcase I ascertain that it is not yet full. Good. Because she has promised to leave room in it for this manuscript."
I do what I want. And I wanted to make this for you.
All my love,
Miranda Moure
M@MirandaMoure.com
347.7MOURE7
Hey dudes,
I've forgotten how we usually do this. Does that word apply? Usually? Maybe that's not quite the right word to describe an activity I haven't participated in several years. I'm not really sure where to start, so I guess we'll begin with the why.
Why now? It's been years! And suddenly out of the blue I decided to make this again? Well, basically, yeah.
By New Years Day 2012 I had managed to, in practice, erase the previous three and a half years from my history--meaning that I simply reversed my person and became who I was before Labor Day weekend '08. I instantly quit participating in every activity that I had become accustomed to and eliminated every habit I had picked up, and the last year has seen me adding back to those habits selectively.
I thought I should try adding this, too.
I think this is what we used to do, right? When things have been hard, when we'd lost sight of our dreams, when we needed some inspiration: we'd set it to a soundtrack and workshop our lives through our headphones. We'd drive into the sunset with a specific album playing. We'd insist on a specific track before boarding a flight. We could decide, unanimously yet without speaking, what song was required of a nearby jukebox and sing every single word together when our selection finally plays.
Ten, right? That's how many points we used to go over before this starts?
1. Way back in '02 when this started I used to give songs to people. Then in '05, for seemingly no reason, I changed it and made it chronologically. In '04 there was a two disc set. '03 was late, remember? Really late. If I remember correctly it came out after Valentines day. So next year, how will we remember this one in the pages of NYCD2014? Well, I don't know if we will. I'm not a fortune teller, guys. I may never do this again. Or I might do this forever. Again.
2. I used to use this time to warn people that they may not want to take a song literally lest they take something the wrong way. I don't think this really applies this year. As far as I can remember every song save one was assigned for content rather than occasion, and even that song's lyrics probably apply to the story. God, that's a really good song actually, it's one of my favorite covers of all time. It will also mark the very first time that I have included a song by someone I know personally; I've certainly dated enough musicians for this to surprise even me.
3. More than once I've used NYCD as a conduit to help rectify some rift in my circle of friends. Just to be clear, I don't do that anymore. If you're reading this and think that seeing that there's a NYCD this year might be a sign that I've decided to reconnect with you or forgive you or something--before you get your hopes up, that's almost certainly not the case. The exception might be that you're one of my exes and I would like to speak to you in 2013 to continue my Exes in the Inbox series. That being said that's not really the point of NYCD, but it would be a happy accident.
4. It has just occurred to me that there are a lot of you out there who have no idea what this is or how important it has been to some of us or why it's so spectacular that it's returned this year. Welcome to NYCD. It's been six years since I've done this, and this will be the sixth one I've made. It might be the last. It might not. But I can tell you definitively that there once was a time where my entire circle of friends and I all knew every word to every song from every NYCD, and I'm guessing this year will be vastly different than that. That makes me kind of sad, you guys.
The idea that our histories can all be set to the same soundtrack has always offered me a specific kind of comfort that has made it possible for me to go all over the place without all of you. In track 17 I mentioned wanting to do something amazing this year--and I still want and will have that--but keep in mind that what I deem amazing and what you deem amazing may be vastly different from one another.
I've spent a lot of time in the last year trying to distinguish the things that I truly value from the things that I merely like. I used to think I liked traveling. I don't. I value it. I don't feel like myself when I don't participate in that activity, and I'm sure that you'll notice that this years' compilation has a lot of traveling songs. It's true! It does! But why shouldn't it? I visited 10 states and three countries last year, and I don't even consider last year particularly travel-heavy for me. It's more than what I do, it's who I am, and NYCD was always an opportunity for me to feel close to y'all even when I'm far away. I guess I needed that again this year.
I want this to be as pervasive and important as it has been in years past, but I'm prepared for it not to be. The last few weeks has found me feeling...lonely, I guess. I don't get lonely, or I didn't, or something, but maybe now I do. I miss you guys desperately, so whatever it is called when you miss someone so much that it hurts is what applies. So please, listen. Listen well, listen actively, and then let me know what you think. Let's talk. I have some time these days, so call me. And know that every time you listen to this you are helping to make it possible for me to be out in the world somewhere missing you so goddamned much, and every time I hear from you is just one more reminder that "I'll be coming home soon."
I really, really love you guys.
5. Look, this is a really good NYCD, and furthermore it really sounds like NYCD. If you're new to this then you may not quite understand, but the veterans among you will hear it immediately. Artists that you may have expected to hear on NYCD are there, it's really, really poppy and there's even a Beatles cover. Wait, that's a lie. There are two Beatles covers. Also, I'm sure that some of you NYCD veterans will swear up and down that I've put a song on NYCD2013 that was already on NYCD2003. That's not entirely true; just know that this wasn't some sort of oversight on my part.
6. I've done my best to insure that BONYCD includes the songs that we all remember and not just the songs that I remember. That being said, I'm sure I've disappointed at least a few of you with some song or another that I've omitted. Know that songs were also chosen because of the purpose they served inside of a place and time, and sitting here now, typing this, ten years having passed since I first made one of these, it's so much easier to love some of the hardest of these times for the way that they've fueled all the stories that came later. What I'm trying to say is that I did my best.
7. I have all the originals of NYCD going back to 2002, and all of the additional material that went with creating them. Every note I wrote workshopping a story, every preliminary playlist--I have all that stuff. In the back of a notebook I used to make NYCD2006 there's a list called "consider for future NYCD's" and it's just a list of really beautiful, really poignant songs that I've never actually been able to use. I used five of them this year.
8. Speaking of originals, you've obviously noticed that you haven't received...well, anything. There's no real hard copy this year save the one that I will compile, create, and present to my favorite ex because he's a techophobe luddite child. I wont edit this sentence before I give him this, so you can be assured that he will text me the first time he reads this saying something that starts with the capitalized word 'woman' that is followed by at least one exclamation point. I crack myself up.
Anyway, because of some stuff I'll be doing in 2013, I also plan on going completely digital with my NYCD archives, too. In a couple months I will carefully scan and catalogue each one, and then give all of the originals to anyone who wants them. So, um...do you want them? They're cool. And in color.
9. So no one gets a song, and no one gets a copy...so who is this for? Namely, everyone. Seriously, if you are reading this, this is for you. I'm not following or tracking NYCD posts, pages, or downloads, so I will literally never find out that you read this or listened if you don't want me to. So go ahead. dive in.
10. I used to always use this point to dedicate NYCD to someone, and I will uphold that tradition. NYCD2013 is dedicated to Nathan "OMG Andy" Lind, and he knows why.
So this is the part where I'm supposed to quote one of my favorite authors, tell you that this year, finally, I will live only for myself, and then leave you with my phone number and address.
Haha. Sure. Why not.
"It reveals to me two facts. One: she loves me deeply. Two: she is completely indifferent as to whether or not she ever sees me again. Looking past her to her suitcase I ascertain that it is not yet full. Good. Because she has promised to leave room in it for this manuscript."
I do what I want. And I wanted to make this for you.
All my love,
Miranda Moure
M@MirandaMoure.com
347.7MOURE7
12.27.2012
For Lisa: All adventurous women do.
L--
I've thought a lot about what I would say today. I've thought about it for a year. If you want, we can do this in a list, just like last time.
1. The weirdest part is that it itches. All the time. Of course I mean my scar, the one I have on my arm that I will likely die with. Sometimes it hurts, and I am still incapable of having my blood pressure measured on my left arm.
2. I've spent a lot of time over these months trying to become myself again because I spent a few years as someone totally different. This blog was a huge part of that. I can't believe it Lisa, can you? I mean, how did I live without this? Now it seems crazy to me, as does the idea that I would ever, ever give it up simply because some man--any man--required it to date me.
3. Wow, it's been a really long time since I posted. 12 days. Thankfully, 12 days now qualifies as a long time, as I went almost three years without posting and finally ended the radio silence with a letter to you, exactly a year ago. Today.
4. Last year after Chase was arrested, I slept fitfully on and off for a day. Then I texted Woody. "I'm kind of in a pickle, Wood," I said, "and I miss you." I asked him to fly out to see me. He said he would. I didn't see him until the following May when I flew to my fair hometown and spent half of my trip naked with him even though I was there to see a different boy. I always was a sucker for my exes.
5. I went to Planned Parenthood a couple weeks ago. Don't worry, it was just for an annual, but it was so weird being back there and surprisingly overwhelming. Last year my one visit to Planned Parenthood turned into a seven-week ordeal involving several different tests, meds, and many a white knuckle. This year was totally painless. "Anything else you'd like to note?" my nurse practitioner asked me, "and are you still happy with your IUD?" No and yes, I answered. My vagina seems fine these days and I love my IUD, getting it might be literally the greatest thing I've ever done for myself. During my pelvic exam she checked to make sure that it was in the right place; that the strings were still there and nothing had shifted improperly. Everything was a-okay, she said.
I thought I learned a huge lesson back then, Lisa--about who I should be sharing my life with and who I should be sleeping with how to respect my vagina--and I remember those things from my twenties, from before I met Chase. I missed her and wanted her back so desperately that sometimes I forget that I've learned some valuable things in the last few years, too. Things I don't want to let go. And I forget that no matter what I try to revert to, I'm still a different person than the girl who drove that giant orange Penske truck from SF to Seattle when I was still just barely 27.
What I'm trying to tell you is that my period is now five days late.
And in a broader sense I'm telling you that 27 year old me and 32 year old me have vastly different ideas about pregnancy. Specifically about what to do should it occur in my uterus.
Thankfully, five days late for me is still two days early for normal women, but wouldn't that just be so me? Meet a perfect boy, have to leave him far away, and then accidentally get pregnant by a different one in a matter of weeks?
I love old me, I do. But new me just can't fucking do this. This is crazy, Lisa. It's irresponsible. And yeah, I've had sex all of once since I've been home, but just this fear, this uncertainty--the fact that this whole situation seems exactly like something I would find myself wrapped up in--it belies a notion that it's ultimately my fault, or at least my responsibility. I mean, I'm the only common denominator, here. And I don't want this. I don't want this to happen.
Thank you Lisa. Thank you for my blog, because honestly, I don't know how else I would have processed the last week, let alone the past year.
I love and miss you.
So much.
XOXO--M
I've thought a lot about what I would say today. I've thought about it for a year. If you want, we can do this in a list, just like last time.
1. The weirdest part is that it itches. All the time. Of course I mean my scar, the one I have on my arm that I will likely die with. Sometimes it hurts, and I am still incapable of having my blood pressure measured on my left arm.
2. I've spent a lot of time over these months trying to become myself again because I spent a few years as someone totally different. This blog was a huge part of that. I can't believe it Lisa, can you? I mean, how did I live without this? Now it seems crazy to me, as does the idea that I would ever, ever give it up simply because some man--any man--required it to date me.
3. Wow, it's been a really long time since I posted. 12 days. Thankfully, 12 days now qualifies as a long time, as I went almost three years without posting and finally ended the radio silence with a letter to you, exactly a year ago. Today.
4. Last year after Chase was arrested, I slept fitfully on and off for a day. Then I texted Woody. "I'm kind of in a pickle, Wood," I said, "and I miss you." I asked him to fly out to see me. He said he would. I didn't see him until the following May when I flew to my fair hometown and spent half of my trip naked with him even though I was there to see a different boy. I always was a sucker for my exes.
5. I went to Planned Parenthood a couple weeks ago. Don't worry, it was just for an annual, but it was so weird being back there and surprisingly overwhelming. Last year my one visit to Planned Parenthood turned into a seven-week ordeal involving several different tests, meds, and many a white knuckle. This year was totally painless. "Anything else you'd like to note?" my nurse practitioner asked me, "and are you still happy with your IUD?" No and yes, I answered. My vagina seems fine these days and I love my IUD, getting it might be literally the greatest thing I've ever done for myself. During my pelvic exam she checked to make sure that it was in the right place; that the strings were still there and nothing had shifted improperly. Everything was a-okay, she said.
I thought I learned a huge lesson back then, Lisa--about who I should be sharing my life with and who I should be sleeping with how to respect my vagina--and I remember those things from my twenties, from before I met Chase. I missed her and wanted her back so desperately that sometimes I forget that I've learned some valuable things in the last few years, too. Things I don't want to let go. And I forget that no matter what I try to revert to, I'm still a different person than the girl who drove that giant orange Penske truck from SF to Seattle when I was still just barely 27.
What I'm trying to tell you is that my period is now five days late.
And in a broader sense I'm telling you that 27 year old me and 32 year old me have vastly different ideas about pregnancy. Specifically about what to do should it occur in my uterus.
Thankfully, five days late for me is still two days early for normal women, but wouldn't that just be so me? Meet a perfect boy, have to leave him far away, and then accidentally get pregnant by a different one in a matter of weeks?
I love old me, I do. But new me just can't fucking do this. This is crazy, Lisa. It's irresponsible. And yeah, I've had sex all of once since I've been home, but just this fear, this uncertainty--the fact that this whole situation seems exactly like something I would find myself wrapped up in--it belies a notion that it's ultimately my fault, or at least my responsibility. I mean, I'm the only common denominator, here. And I don't want this. I don't want this to happen.
Thank you Lisa. Thank you for my blog, because honestly, I don't know how else I would have processed the last week, let alone the past year.
I love and miss you.
So much.
XOXO--M
12.15.2012
La Petite Mort.
I
was asleep when my plane was approaching Melbourne, but when the wheels of my
737 hit the tarmac it jarred me awake immediately; I woke so suddenly that my
heart pounded stiffly in my ribcage and my eyes flew open wide, but the
adrenaline wore quickly and my face broke into a wide smile when I realized
where I was. That's it, right outside, I thought to myself
while peering out the tiny window, out there is Australia, and you've
finally made it here. It's weird to think of this now, of what I
thought it was going to be like before I'd actually been, because although I
was far from disappointed, the fantasy I had of Melbourne and the reality of
being there were nothing alike.
I'm home now, and by home I mean that I'm in New York, which is the closest place I have to a home anywhere. It feels like home here, and when I'm anywhere else I usually can't wait to return. I tend to get complacent in smaller cities; I fall into a routine of ease and let myself go inside the luxury of time and a slower pace and I don't really like who that makes me. It's like a little death, letting go like that, and I always hate myself for, even briefly, giving in to the fallacy that the slow security of my hometown or some warm southern metropolis is something I need in my life. I don't. I spent over three years chasing security, found it in the strong arm of the wrong man, and coveted it to a fault. Trust me: I'm better off insecure. I do bolder things when I don't know what's happening next.
I’ve been searched before going through customs. A long time ago in my early twenties I was stopped, albeit randomly, in Cancun. I wasn't allowed to leave the airport until they had removed everything from my entire bag and lined its contents up on a long table right beside the aisle where all the disembarking international travelers queue through. There was no judgment from the immigrations officer, but I heard more then a few snickers from other passengers as he pulled several generous handfuls of condoms from my zippered front pocket and began to pile them in a multi-colored mountain right in the eye line of every passer by. Even he couldn't help but releasing a small titter; he looked at me and shook his head just a little bit and smiled.
"It's spring break," I said, shrugging my shoulders and giggling, as if that explained why I needed almost 100 condoms for a week’s vacation in Playa Del Carmen.
Getting searched in Australia was far from a giggling matter.
"So I'm finally right about to leave customs, I mean, I can see the door, and the agent who takes my declaration form suddenly gets a stick up his ass because all I have with me is one small backpack." I'm telling this story back in New York, just a few days ago, to Noah upon his return from Florida. I had been laying sick in his bed for almost two weeks in his absence, and while it seemed weird at first to be sleeping in his bed with him gone it was suddenly odd to have him there. Home. In his own room. Lounging on his own bed with me.
"So they searched you?" He asked me.
"And interrogated me. Like 'what brings you here' and 'who do you know here' and 'oh is this Thao guy your soulmate' and all this business. It was crazy! They took every, single, thing from my bag. They unfolded and read all of my receipts. The counted my American cash and asked me how much money was in my checking account. They took my laptop and read whatever they could find in a couple of hours. Then they handed me my phone and asked me to enter my password."
"Why, I don't get it. What did they do with your phone?" I laughed when he asked this.
"They looked at every picture and read all my text messages. And then they came across one I sent to you a couple days before I left. They were, like, infuriated. And were all: 'who is this Noah?' and 'how do you know him?' and all of this stuff. They completely flipped out. I had no idea what to say."
"What? which one?" He then reached for his own phone, curious as to what I could have possibly sent to him that was so incendiary in the eyes of Australian customs, but I beat him to the discovery and refreshed his memory. It was a picture, actually: I had sent him a photo of a single Vicodin. One. Solitary. Vicodin.
"Oh, shit. What did you say?"
"What was I supposed to say?" That's not a lie. I mean, what was I supposed to say? I'd been dreaming of coming to this country for the vast majority of my life, and now I was walking a fine line of being granted entry or immediate deportation. Had I done anything wrong? Well, actually, I had forgotton to declare a few ounces of Chinese tea that I had acquired during my brief stint in Shanghai, but that was an honest mistake that they didn't even care too much about. No, the tea wasn't a big deal. Rather, they were very intrigued about who this man was on the other end of the oh-so-illicit Vicodin text message.
"Who is he?" They asked me. When I related this story back to Noah, I guess I just let him believe that I said something dismissive and simple, but the truth is that I was already a couple hours into being questioned and was starting to lay myself completely bare. I feared telling a mis-truth, more even than I usually do, and equated any omission to my possible deportation. Put simply I was starting to panic, and some kind of undeserved guilt was building up in my chest that was feeling tighter and tighter with every minute that passed.
"What do you mean?" I asked the small blond agent, who was at the time holding my iPhone in her latex gloved hand.
"Who is this Noah? Who is he to you?" I swallowed hard when I heard her repeat the question.
"Who is Noah to me?"
"Yes, it's fairly straightforward."
"Straightforward?" I countered, "You think that question is straightforward? I've spent the better part of this year trying to answer that question, and you think I'm suddenly going to know, now, after having spent the last two days traveling here all the way from Brooklyn where I left him; you think now I'm suddenly going to be able to tell you who Noah is to me?"
It's been over a month now since that day entering Australia for the first time, and I'm apparently no closer to answering that question. Things changed for me overseas; my plans changed. I'm supposed to be in Florida right now, but instead I'm waiting around till at least Monday to interview for a job I'm not positive that I want as part of a plan that I'm not sure I want to pursue. Everything is so up in the air. But this is my wheelhouse, I tell myself when I start to panic about my current state of flux, this is what I do. I figure it out as I go along. I go big. I live boldly. But sometimes the mantra just isn't enough.
After finally making it through customs I spent a huge portion of the next 24 hours wishing I was back in New York. I felt disenfranchised and tired; but halfway through Saturday I got a message from Thao beckoning me to come to the bar that night. Part of me didn't even want to go--Australia wasn't turning out like I thought it would and my yet only friend had already gone to Sydney that morning while I slept--but I agreed, eager to turn things around.
I met Ryan that night.
So you could say that things definitely turned around.
It only took another day or so for "I want to go home" to turn into "I never want to leave."
But I did. Leave, I mean. And then I was sick. And I spent long days and nights in Noah's bed trying to figure out what I was going to do next but only hitting the hard wall of lingering illness. And then Noah came home, home to New York, and, suitcase in tow, found me still lounging about in his bed upon his return.
It's weird to think of this now, of what I thought it was going to be like when Noah came home before he actually came, because the fantasy I had of how I thought I would behave and the reality of what happened were nothing alike.
I had been in New York for almost two weeks, but it suddenly felt like home with him framed in his bedroom doorway, him with his perfect fucking beardface and careful smile that I know so well that I hadn't seen in so long, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and felt the welcoming little death of security.
"So, good times then?" Ryan asked me the next day about reuniting with Noah.
"I guess so. It's complicated. But I'm glad he's home this week," That's not a lie. I am glad he's home this week, but it's not exactly like I took the time to explain to Ryan that the little death of embracing security was nothing when compared to la petite mort of embracing Noah. I omitted the rest unconsciously feigning that it didn't matter anyway, but since then I think I've started to panic, and the layers of my decision have begun to unfold, and some kind of undeserved guilt has been building up in my chest and it feels tighter and tighter with every minute that passes.
But this is my wheelhouse, I tell myself, sometimes I am rash. This is what I do. I figure it out as I go along. I go big. I live boldly.
But sometimes the mantra just isn't enough.
--M
(P. S. -- This piece is the result of a request from Julia. You are similarly always allowed to make requests of me if you have a favo[u]rite story of mine, and I will most likely indulge you. Also: VANESSA, if you are reading this, and I hope you are, email me at M@MirandaMoure.com. I didn't get to say goodbye before I left The Disco for Northcote.)
I'm home now, and by home I mean that I'm in New York, which is the closest place I have to a home anywhere. It feels like home here, and when I'm anywhere else I usually can't wait to return. I tend to get complacent in smaller cities; I fall into a routine of ease and let myself go inside the luxury of time and a slower pace and I don't really like who that makes me. It's like a little death, letting go like that, and I always hate myself for, even briefly, giving in to the fallacy that the slow security of my hometown or some warm southern metropolis is something I need in my life. I don't. I spent over three years chasing security, found it in the strong arm of the wrong man, and coveted it to a fault. Trust me: I'm better off insecure. I do bolder things when I don't know what's happening next.
I’ve been searched before going through customs. A long time ago in my early twenties I was stopped, albeit randomly, in Cancun. I wasn't allowed to leave the airport until they had removed everything from my entire bag and lined its contents up on a long table right beside the aisle where all the disembarking international travelers queue through. There was no judgment from the immigrations officer, but I heard more then a few snickers from other passengers as he pulled several generous handfuls of condoms from my zippered front pocket and began to pile them in a multi-colored mountain right in the eye line of every passer by. Even he couldn't help but releasing a small titter; he looked at me and shook his head just a little bit and smiled.
"It's spring break," I said, shrugging my shoulders and giggling, as if that explained why I needed almost 100 condoms for a week’s vacation in Playa Del Carmen.
Getting searched in Australia was far from a giggling matter.
"So I'm finally right about to leave customs, I mean, I can see the door, and the agent who takes my declaration form suddenly gets a stick up his ass because all I have with me is one small backpack." I'm telling this story back in New York, just a few days ago, to Noah upon his return from Florida. I had been laying sick in his bed for almost two weeks in his absence, and while it seemed weird at first to be sleeping in his bed with him gone it was suddenly odd to have him there. Home. In his own room. Lounging on his own bed with me.
"So they searched you?" He asked me.
"And interrogated me. Like 'what brings you here' and 'who do you know here' and 'oh is this Thao guy your soulmate' and all this business. It was crazy! They took every, single, thing from my bag. They unfolded and read all of my receipts. The counted my American cash and asked me how much money was in my checking account. They took my laptop and read whatever they could find in a couple of hours. Then they handed me my phone and asked me to enter my password."
"Why, I don't get it. What did they do with your phone?" I laughed when he asked this.
"They looked at every picture and read all my text messages. And then they came across one I sent to you a couple days before I left. They were, like, infuriated. And were all: 'who is this Noah?' and 'how do you know him?' and all of this stuff. They completely flipped out. I had no idea what to say."
"What? which one?" He then reached for his own phone, curious as to what I could have possibly sent to him that was so incendiary in the eyes of Australian customs, but I beat him to the discovery and refreshed his memory. It was a picture, actually: I had sent him a photo of a single Vicodin. One. Solitary. Vicodin.
"Oh, shit. What did you say?"
"What was I supposed to say?" That's not a lie. I mean, what was I supposed to say? I'd been dreaming of coming to this country for the vast majority of my life, and now I was walking a fine line of being granted entry or immediate deportation. Had I done anything wrong? Well, actually, I had forgotton to declare a few ounces of Chinese tea that I had acquired during my brief stint in Shanghai, but that was an honest mistake that they didn't even care too much about. No, the tea wasn't a big deal. Rather, they were very intrigued about who this man was on the other end of the oh-so-illicit Vicodin text message.
"Who is he?" They asked me. When I related this story back to Noah, I guess I just let him believe that I said something dismissive and simple, but the truth is that I was already a couple hours into being questioned and was starting to lay myself completely bare. I feared telling a mis-truth, more even than I usually do, and equated any omission to my possible deportation. Put simply I was starting to panic, and some kind of undeserved guilt was building up in my chest that was feeling tighter and tighter with every minute that passed.
"What do you mean?" I asked the small blond agent, who was at the time holding my iPhone in her latex gloved hand.
"Who is this Noah? Who is he to you?" I swallowed hard when I heard her repeat the question.
"Who is Noah to me?"
"Yes, it's fairly straightforward."
"Straightforward?" I countered, "You think that question is straightforward? I've spent the better part of this year trying to answer that question, and you think I'm suddenly going to know, now, after having spent the last two days traveling here all the way from Brooklyn where I left him; you think now I'm suddenly going to be able to tell you who Noah is to me?"
It's been over a month now since that day entering Australia for the first time, and I'm apparently no closer to answering that question. Things changed for me overseas; my plans changed. I'm supposed to be in Florida right now, but instead I'm waiting around till at least Monday to interview for a job I'm not positive that I want as part of a plan that I'm not sure I want to pursue. Everything is so up in the air. But this is my wheelhouse, I tell myself when I start to panic about my current state of flux, this is what I do. I figure it out as I go along. I go big. I live boldly. But sometimes the mantra just isn't enough.
After finally making it through customs I spent a huge portion of the next 24 hours wishing I was back in New York. I felt disenfranchised and tired; but halfway through Saturday I got a message from Thao beckoning me to come to the bar that night. Part of me didn't even want to go--Australia wasn't turning out like I thought it would and my yet only friend had already gone to Sydney that morning while I slept--but I agreed, eager to turn things around.
I met Ryan that night.
So you could say that things definitely turned around.
It only took another day or so for "I want to go home" to turn into "I never want to leave."
But I did. Leave, I mean. And then I was sick. And I spent long days and nights in Noah's bed trying to figure out what I was going to do next but only hitting the hard wall of lingering illness. And then Noah came home, home to New York, and, suitcase in tow, found me still lounging about in his bed upon his return.
It's weird to think of this now, of what I thought it was going to be like when Noah came home before he actually came, because the fantasy I had of how I thought I would behave and the reality of what happened were nothing alike.
I had been in New York for almost two weeks, but it suddenly felt like home with him framed in his bedroom doorway, him with his perfect fucking beardface and careful smile that I know so well that I hadn't seen in so long, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and felt the welcoming little death of security.
"So, good times then?" Ryan asked me the next day about reuniting with Noah.
"I guess so. It's complicated. But I'm glad he's home this week," That's not a lie. I am glad he's home this week, but it's not exactly like I took the time to explain to Ryan that the little death of embracing security was nothing when compared to la petite mort of embracing Noah. I omitted the rest unconsciously feigning that it didn't matter anyway, but since then I think I've started to panic, and the layers of my decision have begun to unfold, and some kind of undeserved guilt has been building up in my chest and it feels tighter and tighter with every minute that passes.
But this is my wheelhouse, I tell myself, sometimes I am rash. This is what I do. I figure it out as I go along. I go big. I live boldly.
But sometimes the mantra just isn't enough.
--M
(P. S. -- This piece is the result of a request from Julia. You are similarly always allowed to make requests of me if you have a favo[u]rite story of mine, and I will most likely indulge you. Also: VANESSA, if you are reading this, and I hope you are, email me at M@MirandaMoure.com. I didn't get to say goodbye before I left The Disco for Northcote.)
12.09.2012
The Scale of Things.
Last winter I spent hours and hours in bed trying to stay warm, trying to figure out what I was going to do, and dropping pounds ferociously. This week feels nearly identical.
On my last day in Melbourne I found myself drinking cheap champagne on a way-high-up balcony overlooking the Melbourne CBD. With me was Gina, whom I had met on my first day staying at The Disco, and Raz, who joined us after a hot, arduous day at work. A couple sips into my first glass I started to feel a little lightheaded. I had just spent the majority of the day drinking a bottle of bubbly on St. Kilda beach, so I assumed that maybe I'd just had a bit too much alchohol and exposure that day. Or something.
Raz and I took a seat inside for a while. It was still easily 90 degrees outside, so I welcomed a cold pint of ice water and a healthily rotating ceiling fan indoors, especially since I had just narrowly avoided fainting outside.
"I'm so sorry Raz, I feel so weird and I don't know why," I said, apologizing to him for steering him away from what was essentially my going away party, "I mean, the last time I fainted in public I was..."
There was a long pause. I froze. He froze. And then, silently, I raised my left index finger to him as if to signify that he should hold on for just a minute, then retrieved my phone from my bag and immediately opened my calendar.
"Are you okay?" he asked me.
"Well," I answered, looking my three-week-love full in the face, "this is awkward, isn't it?"
Don't bother freaking out. I got my period before even reaching New York, but the symtoms prevailed. By half-five last Saturday I had left JFK and made it successfully to my former lover's empty bed in which I was soundly asleep by six. When I woke up at eleven I was feeling even worse. My sinuses had turned into a solid brick and my temperature had climbed at least a couple of degrees. Sick. Really sick. And I only found out exactly how bad it was as the days have gone on. If you were wondering, I'm still in bed.
I had thought I was feeling better and went out briefly on Thursday. I had thought that I would go to the grocery store, run a couple errands, and then hightail it up to Greenpoint for dinner with Sally, but after just a couple hours of verticalness I started to lose feeling in my fingers and toes. I shook my hands violently in hopes that my digits would pink up again, but then all the blood ran from my skull and my vision filmed over in a pointillist swirl of red and green, and I took a deep breath just before my knees buckled and I fell, in a heap, on the concrete floor of my storage unit.
I was there looking for, among other things, my nail polish remover.
I never found it.
I decided against dinner with Sally, but bought some food on my way home and ate it in bed. I threw up an hour later.
My very favorite dress is a sheer pinstripe number that I picked up at Urban Jungle in Bushwick over the summer, and right after purchasing it I returned home only to promptly hack a foot from it's length. The combination of ultra-short and sheer is extremely revealing, and I generally reserve it only for wear over my bikini. I wore it my last day in Melbourne, and when I put it on that afternoon I noticed in the mirror that I was missing and inch or so from my waist that I swear I had when I left New York, and I remember thinking that I would definitely have some explaining to do when I got back stateside. Now I'm so thin that I actively fear getting on a scale which I will have to soon, most likely, as I'm now eight days in and still can't keep anything down; I'm going to starve to death if I don't see a doctor soon.
I knew long before I left Melbourne that my plans for this winter would change. I planned on fucking off until March on the sunny beaches of Florida and maybe even a stint in Colombia or California. I knew things would be different, but I never thought I'd be shackled to New York by some unknown illness, incapable of so much as feeding myself.
At least if it was pregnancy I'd know what was going on, but it was likely easier to relate to Raz that I was sick rather than pregnant, especially since he's so very far away.
"Well that's good then!" Raz told me after I told him the news, "Although, we would have had a pretty hot baby. Especially if it had your face, your body, your arms, your legs, and my thumbs! I have great thumbs."
Last winter I used to return home to the solace of my bed after closing at Studio with Noah. I'd strip down to my knickers immediately after walking in the door and I'd lie there, in pain, noting how my undies stretched across my hipbones without touching my stomach. I'd splay my fingers into the divets in my chest created by my protruding rib bones. I'd think about eating and taste the bile in the back of my throat. I'd fear having to return to the doctor and step on the scale again.
This week. This feels nearly identical.
--M
On my last day in Melbourne I found myself drinking cheap champagne on a way-high-up balcony overlooking the Melbourne CBD. With me was Gina, whom I had met on my first day staying at The Disco, and Raz, who joined us after a hot, arduous day at work. A couple sips into my first glass I started to feel a little lightheaded. I had just spent the majority of the day drinking a bottle of bubbly on St. Kilda beach, so I assumed that maybe I'd just had a bit too much alchohol and exposure that day. Or something.
Raz and I took a seat inside for a while. It was still easily 90 degrees outside, so I welcomed a cold pint of ice water and a healthily rotating ceiling fan indoors, especially since I had just narrowly avoided fainting outside.
"I'm so sorry Raz, I feel so weird and I don't know why," I said, apologizing to him for steering him away from what was essentially my going away party, "I mean, the last time I fainted in public I was..."
There was a long pause. I froze. He froze. And then, silently, I raised my left index finger to him as if to signify that he should hold on for just a minute, then retrieved my phone from my bag and immediately opened my calendar.
"Are you okay?" he asked me.
"Well," I answered, looking my three-week-love full in the face, "this is awkward, isn't it?"
Don't bother freaking out. I got my period before even reaching New York, but the symtoms prevailed. By half-five last Saturday I had left JFK and made it successfully to my former lover's empty bed in which I was soundly asleep by six. When I woke up at eleven I was feeling even worse. My sinuses had turned into a solid brick and my temperature had climbed at least a couple of degrees. Sick. Really sick. And I only found out exactly how bad it was as the days have gone on. If you were wondering, I'm still in bed.
I had thought I was feeling better and went out briefly on Thursday. I had thought that I would go to the grocery store, run a couple errands, and then hightail it up to Greenpoint for dinner with Sally, but after just a couple hours of verticalness I started to lose feeling in my fingers and toes. I shook my hands violently in hopes that my digits would pink up again, but then all the blood ran from my skull and my vision filmed over in a pointillist swirl of red and green, and I took a deep breath just before my knees buckled and I fell, in a heap, on the concrete floor of my storage unit.
I was there looking for, among other things, my nail polish remover.
I never found it.
I decided against dinner with Sally, but bought some food on my way home and ate it in bed. I threw up an hour later.
My very favorite dress is a sheer pinstripe number that I picked up at Urban Jungle in Bushwick over the summer, and right after purchasing it I returned home only to promptly hack a foot from it's length. The combination of ultra-short and sheer is extremely revealing, and I generally reserve it only for wear over my bikini. I wore it my last day in Melbourne, and when I put it on that afternoon I noticed in the mirror that I was missing and inch or so from my waist that I swear I had when I left New York, and I remember thinking that I would definitely have some explaining to do when I got back stateside. Now I'm so thin that I actively fear getting on a scale which I will have to soon, most likely, as I'm now eight days in and still can't keep anything down; I'm going to starve to death if I don't see a doctor soon.I knew long before I left Melbourne that my plans for this winter would change. I planned on fucking off until March on the sunny beaches of Florida and maybe even a stint in Colombia or California. I knew things would be different, but I never thought I'd be shackled to New York by some unknown illness, incapable of so much as feeding myself.
At least if it was pregnancy I'd know what was going on, but it was likely easier to relate to Raz that I was sick rather than pregnant, especially since he's so very far away.
"Well that's good then!" Raz told me after I told him the news, "Although, we would have had a pretty hot baby. Especially if it had your face, your body, your arms, your legs, and my thumbs! I have great thumbs."
Last winter I used to return home to the solace of my bed after closing at Studio with Noah. I'd strip down to my knickers immediately after walking in the door and I'd lie there, in pain, noting how my undies stretched across my hipbones without touching my stomach. I'd splay my fingers into the divets in my chest created by my protruding rib bones. I'd think about eating and taste the bile in the back of my throat. I'd fear having to return to the doctor and step on the scale again.
This week. This feels nearly identical.
--M
12.01.2012
Sixteen Hours.
[I finished this about 12 hours ago on flight MU538 to JFK from Shanghai. Enjoy.]
“This isn’t fair,” I
said, “this isn’t fucking fair.”
“No, it’s not. But
it’s going to be okay.”
R—
At first I was just in shock, the first half hour or so. And
of course I mean the first half hour after I stood on your front porch and
raised my flat right palm to you as if to say one last goodbye. It’s weird that
we parted this way, don’t you think? I mean, I’ve done this before—these boys
and airplanes and all of these goodbyes—but I think this might be the first
time where I was the one left on the inside of the threshold a few hours before
I climbed aboard a plane.
Actually, I’m on a plane right now. A giant Airbus jet that
is shaking so violently that it feels as if we’re going to fall out of the sky.
I’m not scared of flying; I don’t actually think this plane is going to crash,
but goddamn. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
It took everything I’m made of just to make myself get on this flight, maybe I
shouldn’t have after all. But if you’re reading this that means I landed safely
somewhere, likely in New York as scheduled, and that I am currently spending or
about to spend a long weekend in South Brooklyn alone and trying to forget that
I posted this letter, and I’ll be hoping that someday soon will be the day that
I wont look for you when I wake up in the morning because it feels like fucking
torture every time I wake up and you’re not there.
Let me clarify that: it’s not so bad that you’re not there,
I mean, we did that a handful of times in Melbourne, the scant five or six
nights that I spent there but not in
your bed. I just mean to say that it’s not so much that it’s bad that you’re not there, it’s that you’re not going to be there, and this will
continue for the near-future forever, some kind of indefinitely, and when I
wake up the memory of this hits me in waves and my breath catches in my throat
and tears well in my eyes and now I’m on this goddamn plane and I can’t sleep;
I’m on a 16 hour flight from Shanghai to JFK and I can’t just go the fuck to
sleep because I can’t bear waking up again only to slowly realize that you’re
gone. It feels horrible, and yeah, I’ve done this before but not like this. Not
with oceans between us. Not with passports and visas and over a day of air
travel that costs a month’s wages; not with us being two different nationalities.
This just isn’t fucking fair.
I spent last night in Shanghai. When my plane from Melbourne
landed there yesterday it jolted me awake and I realized that I was alone, in
China, again. I realized that you were gone and it was cold outside, that I had
to go through Chinese customs, that it was dark, that I couldn’t call you, that
you were gone, and that it was a long way on two slow trains to my hotel and
that you were definitely gone. The only thing you assuredly need to travel
smoothly through customs in a mildly communist country is a smile, and it was
the one thing I couldn’t quite muster. They pulled me aside immediately,
double-checked my itinerary with the airline, and then finally sent me on my
way. I went straight to my hotel, locked myself in my room, chain smoked the
last of my Champion Ruby, and fell asleep under two beds worth of blankets that
I had spread across just one.
I had drawn the shades before I went to sleep, so when I
woke up I didn’t know if it was early or just dark, and for a split second it
felt exactly like being in your pitch-black bedroom at noon. It didn’t feel
weird to be alone, it just seemed like you had risen early for work and left me
sleepy and naked in your bed. But then my eyelids slowly parted, and the far
wall seemed just a bit too close, and then it was clear that this was not your
guitar-laden bedroom but rather was the stark Chinese hotel that I had fallen
asleep in the night before, that this was nothing more than a very early, very
lonely, very rainy morning in Shanghai. It was 5:23, my flight to New York
wasn’t until almost noon, but I got up anyway and stood still for far too long in
a hot, hot shower, then picked up my clothes from the bathroom floor that I had
just removed and put them all back on. Down the street, at the All Days
Grocery, I spent the equivalent of about five Australian dollars on four packs
of Double Happiness tailor 20’s, and I returned to my hotel and shoved them in
the top of my backpack before making the long trek back to Pu-Dong International
to catch my flight to New York.
A couple years ago, was it on Facebook? Thao put up a
picture of a message arranged on a refrigerator in those magnets that you give
to kids to learn their letters but that never actually hold anything up
properly. It bore a bunch of your names, you and your friends I mean, and I
remember seeing it then and giggling. “It’s weird though, because now I’ve
totally met you guys,” I told you, “I mean, I’ve put some real flesh and blood
faces to a list of names.” You just laughed, noting that the really weird part
was that you had, in fact, helped to make that sign.
I wish I was there right now. It’s about half-midnight on
Saturday night in Melbourne, and if I was there we might have sat outside
together and drank tiny bitter beers, and by now we could have retired to your
bed to look at my train map on my phone. I could show you everywhere I’ve lived
again; the L Jefferson, the M Knickerbocker. The R 45th. The G
Nassau. I would show you where the F splits from the rest of the orange line
and stops right in front of Gallery. Then I will scroll up and show you Harlem,
Yankee Stadium. Down for 14th street, the East Village, The
Financial District. Over to Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
“These are like fairy tale places to me,” you said when I
first showed it to you, “I mean, you live
there. In New York. And this is your train map.” Yes, yes, that is all
true. I live in New York, and I’m dying to lift that veil of New York for you,
to make it real and static, to show you all my favorite places just as you and
your friends have done for me in Melbourne.
Is that what we should have done? With our sixteen hours? I
just assumed that I should use that time to come clean—that if we were
purposefully putting off some kind of conversation until a designated time then
it should be less about saying all of the things that I had been scared to say and
more about doing the things that I fear doing. Like make plans. Hard-fast
plans. Plans to show you about my fairy tale town via unlimited Metrocard and a
train map. But that would require months of planning, of foresight, are you
feeling me? Doesn’t this totally scare you? I mean, I’m not going to beat
around this one, let’s get straight to it: what if you buy a plane ticket, to
The States, and start dating someone else in the meantime? What does that mean?
I’m desperately in love with Melbourne. It’s dethroned both
Berlin and Mexico City as my favorite city that I’ve ever been, and it’s pretty
obvious why. It has the educated populace and freneticism of New York but those
narrow palm tree-lined streets and fierce bohemia of San Francisco. It’s both
port and beach town, it’s downtown and uptown and suburb and fast trains and up
all night and sleep in late on Sunday. It’s literally the perfect city for me, and I’m kicking myself for waiting so long to
go. But then again, maybe I went at the perfect time: me, a single
Australiophile, and you, having just missed your flight to Brisbane. But now
I’m having a hard time divorcing the two from each other—you and Melbourne—and
I want both so badly that I’m not sure which one I actually want more.
It’s not fair that it has to be like this. I mean, fuck. Don’t I deserve you? I deserve to be able to date you, don’t I?
Like normal people do, because we could be the best daters ever. If we lived
but a few tram stops away from each other we’d be dating famously by now—we’d
have kept a few more secrets from each other and I wouldn’t have to be on this
goddamned plane right now—In fact, I’d probably have just seen you tonight for
the first time after you were away playing that festival last weekend, and I
would have worn a bright red dress and smiled broadly when I finally saw you
out back at the bar, and I would have greeted you with hugs and asked you how
your show was. That’s what normal couples do, you know. They hang out on
weekends and the occasional Wednesday; they definitely do not live together
immediately and then part citing that one of them has to fly home to America.
But then again, they are also not usually as lucky as we to have had a perfect
three weeks. Perfect.
“I want to see you again. Like this. I mean, I’m not sure
what I mean.”
You assure me we’ll see each other again, and I believe you,
and I even believe when you tell me that the time between will find you
comparing every woman you meet to me, because I think I might just do the same.
It was Saturday…morning, right? When you missed your flight
to Brisbane to see your favorite band only to find me at the bar later? I used
to do that to—fly around to see bands play when they weren’t touring where I
lived—I would have been similarly infuriated had I been told I couldn’t board
my flight.
Real quick: do you want to hear something crazy? I’ve been
on this plane for ten hours, and I’m another six from disembarking. Can you
believe that?
Anyway, I’ve done that before. Flown across my country or up
its’ coast just to see a band. Many times, actually. And once, very famously in my circle of friends I
should add, I flew home from a music festival feeling, for the first time, what
it was like to have a boys’ name on the tip of my tongue and his naked body in
my minds eye and no earthly idea when it might be that I’d see him again. We
parted on a street corner in a north Seattle suburb and I took red-eye out of
Sea-Tac that night, and after narrowly missing my transfer at Dallas/Ft. Worth
I finally got back to Miami the following early afternoon. I found my decrepit
Volvo in the Parking garage at MIA, maneuvered her onto I-95, and screamed all
the way home while listening to Gomez’s sophomore album louder than my slight
speakers could handle. I parked illegally behind my South Beach apartment after
I had finally made it across the causeway, and with my luggage still in the
trunk of my car I bounded through my unlocked back door and through my kitchen
to my desk. There, I switched on my desktop and, on but a two-week advance, immediately
bought another plane ticket out west.
I tell you this to illustrate that it’s wildly different
this time.
You are 10,000 more miles, 1600 more United States dollars,
and six months to three years of immigration paperwork further away from me now
than this boy was from me then.
My girlfriends in Seattle might point out, however, that
otherwise you are strikingly similar to him both in stature and statistics. If
you met them, my girlfriends I mean, they would laugh and note that you are,
like him, three years younger than me, a musician, can just barely not squeeze
into my jeans, and live far away. But they will delight in all the ways that
you do not fulfill this same cannon! You’re name doesn’t start with the same
letter as mine and your accent might just make them forget that they are
supposed to chide me for having done this before. Been there before. Done you.
Boarded planes for you. Missed you and loved you and no, wait. That’s gross. I don’t love you.
I’ve only known you a few weeks.
I watched you sleep for a long time my last night in town.
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said, and you said you didn’t want to either,
but I told you that you had work in the morning so you held my hand in yours
and you touched your forehead to mine, and I watched as your whole body went
slack and your breathing slowed. It’s not fucking fair.
“Are you awake?” I said softly, and your chest continued to
rise and fall as it had been for the last few minutes.
There was no answer. You were warm and heavy and paralytic
with sleep, and I was wide awake and too, too hot, and upset.
“Raz,” I said again, “You’re asleep, right?” No answer.
“I love you,” I whispered, and I raised my left palm to meet
your cheek, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
We spoke of this, of what would happen now. We spoke of
every unhealthy and psychotic thing we would each do in the wake of my leaving:
me writing some 3000 words of piss and drivel and addressing it to you and you
pouring over all of my social media with a fine toothed comb. We laughed at
this! How funny we are that we would not only fulfill every stereotype, but
also admit it before hand. The only thing I didn’t tell you was that I had laid
the long night in your bed knowing exactly when and where I would write this
story down, knowing already exactly what I would say in print; I had already
written parts of this in my head even before it came out of my mouth as a
whisper.
I didn’t make your bed or fold your laundry before I left. I
wanted to, but I fucked off too much and ran out of time. “Quit crying and get
in the shower,” I told myself, “you can cry all you want in China.”
I had just enough time to leave you a note.
You are, Ryan. You are the single best thing that has
surprised me this year.
And it has already been a very surprising year.
XO—M
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