I live here now

Acts of happiness today: green paint in more places, hike to the Pacolet River, tired puppy with muddy paws, leftover sandwich from last night, four hours of reading Quiet and Self.

I've been sighing at blue tape and green paint strokes in the kitchen for over a month now. The attached dining area has been finished since before Christmas, but I lost my drive and stopped (not even) mid-way in the kitchen. To my defense, it's incredibly time-consuming, not necessarily a job for a weeknight, and my weekends have been busy and precious. So after four hours of more work, all I have left is the joyous section behind the refrigerator.

Before I knew it was true

I realize now that I'd been writing the end of our relationship since I moved here. All of it was loss, attempts at returning.

At the ocean, I shut him out, wrote to myself in the sand and looked for the eyes of alligators to keep me company. I made conversation with crabs, my only companions on the beach, their legs arced and quick like spiders I would touch.

Hikes were meant to convince me I was strong, independent, and braver than he. All I wanted to do was go to the mountains, take trails to an end I could identify.

The way I looked for faces on the sides of buildings, letting their lights speak from within. The way lone fountains made me cry. The way we stopped saying good night multiple times because once had become enough.

Even before, I was composing the end. I lost the language of happiness. I lost the words to explain our relationship. And when you lose the ability to describe a love or lover even to yourself, you have reached an end. All through, I didn't realize I was crafting a goodbye. Now I do. Now I am finishing the story of our end, the essay that I've been writing for a year and a half, that took shape before I knew it was true.

A poem by Scooter

Are are are are are are you where are and let the bird

(thanks to the dictation app on Cheryl's iPhone and Scooter's excessive vocality)

Incidentally, "Let the Bird" will now be the title of the first poem I've written in 2.5 years.

Glaciers

She remembers sitting in an armchair with Agnes reading the nature encyclopedia, screaming over and over again, first with fright, then glee, when they turned to the magnified pictures of spiders. Her sister read that spiders have book lungs, which fold in and out over themselves like pages. this pleased Isabel immensely. When she learned later that humans do not also have book lungs, she was disappointed. Book lungs. It made complete sense to her. This way breath, this way life: through here.

--from Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith

Rarely can I say this about a novel, but I love everything about Glaciers. Everything. I started reading it at Panera this afternoon over a cup of tomato soup. I made myself stop halfway, when the dinner crowd started coming in, but I could have read it straight through right there at my little table for two, chair facing the wet cars on the lot.

I melt for her words, her phrases, the atmosphere of meaning of this book. It's delicate and deep and lyrical. It has lungs; the entire time it felt like the words themselves were breathing, a long series of sighs held high in the lungs.

I love it so much I could turn right around and read it straight through again.

That's 3 for 3 on books so far for 2012. Now I'm going to write.

For the life of me

Blue eyes

Fear is a friend who's misunderstood.

--from "The Heart of Life" by John Mayer

I asked a boy to prom my senior year of high school. I knew it was my only chance to go, and it would be the last dance. I hadn't been to any others. I had always said no, afraid of what it would mean to be so close to a boy. But this one was sixteen, tall, with icy blue eyes, and he made me sweat with nerves.

So that we could get to know each other a little one on one before prom, we went to IHOP after church one Sunday. We sat a square table in the middle of the crowd of families. He ordered a big breakfast platter (a growing boy), and I got the smallest stack of pancakes possible and an orange juice. I have no idea what we talked about; we had nothing in common except blue eyes and youth group and marching band. I ate three bites and nearly threw up, hiding gags through the white napkin and nods. It was nerves beyond butterflies; it was fear that this younger boy would reject me after those three or four that I had turned down over the years. Boys always equaled fear, and now they equaled nausea.

But all that summer, past prom and leading up to my first semester of college, I called him every day. I thought that's what you did when you were a semi-girlfriend. I never asked him what he thought of me, and I never told him that I thought the way he'd duct-taped the hood of his car was creative. I never reached for his hand, and he never bent to kiss me.

At the end of the summer he asked to meet me in Carey Park, in the baseball field parking lot. I was up for anything, holding on to nothing but the simple fact that he wanted to meet me somewhere. It poured, but I drove there, thought he'd lead me back to his parents' house and we'd spend another afternoon watching movies I would never remember. It poured, and as I pulled up behind his car he was leaning against it, his white shirt soaked through and head cocked back to catch the rain.

I opened the car door and he met me before I could get out. Heavy drops hit my face and legs as I squinted up at him, smiling.

"Hey," he breathed. "I don't think we should see each other any more."

And as he turned and walked back to that ridiculous blue Dodge 600 that always smelled of dust, I started the car again, picking up the song that was playing when I stopped. I let him drive away before I moved. I let the song finish. I drove home not looking at the road but the drops of wet on the dashboard that had come in through the door. I drove home and threw up, the whole summer gone, wondering how something could end if had never even begun.

Signals

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

--from "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" by William Stafford

My dreams are metaphors lately. The kind that you understand because it matches up with your waking mind. Leaving something behind. Falling away. Cracking open.

I'd forgotten what it was like to feel, my body dull around the edges. But it's amazing what happens when you give yourself permission to feel, to open up, to say yes. Something that was dormant for you don't know how long may rise to the surface and surprise you in a way that brings you back, perhaps for good. There are people in your life that you don't allow yourself to let in until suddenly that's all you want to do. All in. And then you're so giddy with this feeling of giddiness that you don't know how to slow down.

In all cheesiness and earnestness, I've had a break through. I'm breaking through. I'm becoming again, trusting, and I'll let you in.

PURIFYING THE LANGUAGE OF THE TRIBE

Walking away means
"Goodbye."

Pointing a knife at your stomach means
"Please don't say that again."

Leaning toward you means
"I love you."

Raising a finger means
"I enthusiastically agree."

"Maybe" means
"No."

"Yes" means
"Maybe."

Looking like this at you means
"You had your chance."

--William Stafford

In patches

I had not mopped or swept the floors in months. I had used paper towels when there was a spill and hoped that eventually the entire apartment floor would get wiped up this way. This method of cleaning the floor, in patches, I imagined was like writing a poem every day until you eventually said everything about the human condition there was to be said. But it didn't really work that way, even in poetry; grimy corners remained while certain floorboards got burnished to a slippery, hellish gleam.

--from A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Through here

"Awesome," I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either "sucked" or was "awesome." We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.

--from A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I recently saw that a bookstore somewhere in America is running a campaign against "awesome." They have bumper stickers that ban "awesome." I think there are t-shirts. When I saw this I had just begun realizing how "awesome" had become my response for just about anything. (I'm having a baby. Oh, that's awesome! / See you later. Awesome! / I think that reading went well. It was awesome.) Where did it come from, this word, and how did it work its way into my every conversation? What do I say if I can't say "awesome"? I still don't know, but I'm trying to be more conscious of its use. So that the "awe" can return to the word, unless it's meant to become the equivalent of "cowabunga, dude" from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Didn't one of the turtles say "awesome" a lot, too? I should do some research on that.

But I can't say that I thought Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs was awesome from the beginning. Or, perhaps, even at the end. What I'll say is that I was impatient for the first half of the book, nodding in awe, yes, at the language--never a dull or unpoetic sentence!--but where was the plot? Why was I so in the head of Tassie Keltjin when I didn't know where she was going or why? Why, half-way through, was I looking on every page for patterns: stairs, race, names, "sounds good," brothers.

"OK," I said, not knowing what else to say. "Sounds good." It was the midwestern girl's reply to everything.

If I don't say "awesome" I'll likely say "sounds good." I believe I texted "sounds good" this morning, even. And I certainly perked up and nodded the several times that Lorrie Moore pinpoints the patterns in our language. As Luke and I walked our dogs today, I made a point to respond at certain points in our conversation with silence or a nod instead of those filler words. And though so much of this book is the thought behind the action--the thought is the response to the action, and therefore the action isn't necessarily the most important element of the book--it's the silences, the lack-of, that propels you. The questions that have no answer. This is the reason I finished the book in one three-hour sitting tonight. Because just after the halfway point I began to get it and I didn't want it to stop, or, the questions became more complicated and Tassie became both more engaged and more withdrawn.

And then the heartbreak. And then more. And the whole time reflecting the words back on the title. And the whole time seeing my family in Tassie's. And the whole time wondering why we do the things we do to each other. And thinking about women and what it means to love and what it means to lose what you love. (Because all of that is ever-present on my mind lately. I try to decide what to eat and all I can think about is love.)

And after it all, I believe this book is a writerly treasure, an artifact of word-envy for those of us who wish for the consistency of surprise in language that Moore seems to have at her fingertips. I believe that, for those of us who experienced 9/11 and all of its repercussions, even in our small towns where no act of terrorism was itself terrorism, and for whom our friends and our brothers were thrust into situations accusatory and deadly, this book will remain in our gut long after we have shut the covers and alphabetized it on our shelves.

9/11 was a beginning of a different way of life, of different lives, because we had to react to tragedy. How do you tell the real story of an event like that? You tell the after. So perhaps I can say that A Gate at the Stairs was brilliant. Certainly Lorrie Moore is genius.

I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story. But now I'd gone back to thinking, no, the wedding was the end. It was the end of the comedy. That's how you knew it was a comedy. The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.

On fighting for a trail

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

--from Wild by Cheryl Strayed

The wind still Kansas

Today: Anxiety.

I keep remaking my list of things to do today and then putting them off. I spent two hours at Panera this morning working on the film festival and intended to spend the whole afternoon writing and reading and critiquing the things that must be critiqued by tomorrow. At 3 (where the 2 hours between getting home and deciding this went, I have no idea), I said I would sit down in the quiet and read for an hour. And hour and a half later I didn't want to stop reading but knew I had to get to work on everything. And that's when the anxiety really set in, the anxiety I felt before school, the anxiety of necessity. And so I decided I would fix this anxiety with a run.

It was colder than I expected, the wind still Kansas. A quarter of a mile in my lungs were burning and shallow. I had to walk, tears forming.

It's been an hour and a half since that 1.3 mile run, and I don't know what I've done. Time is always disappearing. Sometimes when you're lonely the days just evaporate. Sometimes when you haven't been touched in six months you forget how to connect with people. And when you know that it will be a long time until you're touched again, you forget where you are in life and how to complete a simple to-do list. Sometimes knowing what you've lost makes you lose all the more.

Aloneness

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCt had altered that sense. Alone wasn't a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the world feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn't truly understood the world's vastness--hadn't even understood how vast a mile could be--until each mile was beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the strange intimacy I'd come to have with the trail, the way the pinon pines and monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt familiar and known, though I'd never passed them or crossed them before.

--from Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Fear begets fear.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.

--from Wild by Cheryl Strayed

The last, the first.

The scene: December 31, 2011. 9:14pm. Living room floor, hardwood. Space heater on high. The Bourne Identity (which one, unknown). Dog asleep on the couch. Cat asleep on the chair.

The image: Girl in fetus position in front of the space heater, her feet so hot they sting. Fluffy white robe covers all but below the knees. Her hair, wet and wavy and slightly darker from the dye, flopped over on the floor. She is passed out, the image of post-party exhaustion. But she never made it to the party. She sleeps, nulling the indecision of New Years Eve plans: fancy party or writing through the night. She had been thinking that she should spend this first NYE alone the way she wants to spend 2012, but she both wants to be more social (read: fun, interesting, fearless with friends) and write (read: be a writer) in the new year. The Bourne Identity was a distraction from this decision. The space heater was a necessity. The freshly dyed hair was a belated attempt at a refreshed self-identity. The robe was a comfortable placeholder for the clothes she couldn't decide to wear.

The action: Sleep, on her side, until 12:02 am. An infomercial now on the screen. She wakes, startled that she had ever been asleep, and sees the clock. She gets up, stiff from the hardwood, and limps to bed. She climbs in her bed still in her robe, perhaps thinking that she might still get up again and write in the first hours of the new year.

The action: Sleep, in her robe, until 4:54 am. She wakes, startled that the lights are still on, that the tv is still on, and that she is sleeping in her robe. She gets up, turns everything off, feeds the cat in hopes of preventing her from pawing for food in an hour, gives the dog a cookie for waking him, changes into the usual bedtime fare, and gets back in bed. She moves likes a drunk, though she's had no food in 18 hours and only Dr. Pepper to drink. She doesn't care that she missed midnight. She will have her own story to tell.



The last day of 2011
I woke late, at 7:30, and glad. We started with a hike on the trails in Duncan Park, the trails that start just a block from my home, and muddied our feet in the red ground. Fog hung low, and the sun cut through, creating a bright blur to the south, an image you can only hope for in photographs. Through the trees, shafts of light and silent puffs of cloud moving out. Over the bridge, the lake was still, and we kept on the trail until we met its edge. Mallards flapped in the mist and quacked a chorus as they kicked toward the body of the lake and out of the marshy shallows. We followed their tails through branch and limb but headed back, up through the leaves to home.

Because the humane society would be closed on Sunday, the traditional dog-walking day, my Sunday group met at 10 on Saturday, and the four of us ventured to walk them all. It seems many of the puppies were adopted for Christmas, and so they were mostly older than 6 months, all of walking age. I went down the back line, skipping only those, like Duke and Dozer and one of the Boscos, because they were too big for me to handle. I began with Mason, then Jacolby and Odyssy, down the line to Tommy and Tabitha and over to Marley. We walked and played and then had to time ourselves because we were spending too much time with each dog; it was taking too long to walk them all. I left after Marley, came home to let Scooter out on the tie out in the 60-some degree sun of the last day of the year.

I took out the new bookcase I bought last week at Ikea, taking it piece by piece out of the box from my car. I vacuumed out the hair and the rocks, sprayed air freshener. I made my car clean on the inside, something I hadn't done in likely over a year. The outside is still spotted and masked with dirt, but I care less. Scooter and I took five bags of recycling to the bins behind Krispy Kreme, and that lightened my load.

I built the bookcase and arranged my nonfiction books in its cubes. I placed my Steve Snell blue bear and former HUB-BUB green typewriter on top. This place is becoming more and more my home; the yellow walls reflect and emit so much light. The room is open; there is room for moving, for playing, for breathing.

I ate leftover pizza for lunch. I planned on getting Chinese take-out between dying my hair, showering, and going to the party that started at nine. I needed cash for the party. I needed dark hair for the party. I needed to get ready faster. I needed to decide if going to the party is really what I wanted. I ate corn chips in front of the space heater in my robe and watched The Bourne Identity as I lamented that my hair was not as dark as I'd hoped it would be. I wanted to be warm. I wanted Jedsen. I wanted New Years Eves of past. I lay down to rest as I tried to decide what to do. I lay down, and that was my decision.

The first day of 2012
I intended to spend the first day of 2012 doing what I hoped I would do all year. I started by taking Scooter to the abandoned baseball fields in south Hampton Heights, something I try to do once a week so he can run, run, faster than I can for him. He runs across the field to me and past me; he shows me how fast he can be. I hide behind piles of dirt in the middle of the diamond, and he seeks me out, excited to have found me and gets low to the ground.

I intended to swear off fast food a month ago in honor of the new motto I'd like to live by: "Why do I want to invest in?" But I wanted a breakfast of biscuits and gravy, and a friend had told me that Hardee's was the best in town.

I intended to swear off pop years ago, but at the last minute I decided I needed Dr. Pepper with that biscuits and gravy combo.

I ate my breakfast and watched the Sunday Morning program on CBS, learned how to help a hangover that I didn't have. Scooter tried to bite the end out of the paper bag to get to the hashbrowns. I gave him a celery stick so he'd leave it alone for a few minutes. I watched Face the Nation and rolled my eyes. Then church programs came on every network channel except Fox, but I wouldn't watch Fox News, so I flipped through the in-between channels that I never try and found Create. I learned that you use paint stain on outdoor wood rather than paint to allow the wood to breath. I muted the tv and continued reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed. It's about her solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, about her trying to recover from losing her mother, her marriage. I read myself in her, in why I go hiking and go alone. I say I am not crazy for going alone. I say I want hiking to heal me. I read until I need to go run errands. I make a list and, for once, stick to the list. While I'm shopping, all I can think of is reading and writing this. And all I can think of is that I'm so excited that all I can think about is reading and writing; I'm returning, I think. I eat lunch at Panera Bread, my "third place" and order a U Pick 2, tomato soup and turkey sandwich. I savor it and read, while sipping my second Dr. Pepper of the day. I can't stop. Outside, the clouds get dark, and the wind is a Kansas wind, foreign here, and strong. It looks like rain, cold, but it's still in the 60s. I finish a chapter, finish my plate, and drive home.

Writing. Thinking about writing. Blogging. I get to it.

Knock knock. My neighbor needs his car jumped. We talk in the drive while our cars are connected.

Good luck dinner. Celia and Randy explain the meal, the sides: pork, black eyed peas, collard greens, cornbread. All have meaning, all for luck.

I end this first day full of friends, words, and Dr. Pepper. Tomorrow, words and some work.