With My Arms Outstretched

This year, I will wear my rejections as a medal on my chest. Lovers, jobs, schools, publications: I want to paper my walls with the failures of my tries. I'd rather have a lifetime of no than a lifetime of wish I'd asked. I want to ask until my throat is hoarse from pleading. I want to die with my arms outstretched.




Spring Clean

♥   home + heart + habit   ♥

Sunshine. Clean floors. Fresh-baked bread, and madeleines in the oven.

This week was a spring clean of home, heart, and habit.  For the first time in so long, I feel just like myself.

{ photo credit: xavier encinas }




Is Someone Taking Minutes?


Scene: All-department meeting in a chilly, first-floor conference room.

VP. Does anyone have any news they'd like to share with the group?

(Silence.)

JEAN. The Shamrock Shake is back.

(Silence.)

VP. Thank you, Jean.




My Throw-Away Year

With every changing of the clock and the calendar, I am born anew. A January baby ushered swift into the world, always on the promise: This will be my year.

{ This will be the year I will write a play. }

{ This will be the year I will fall in love. }

{ This will be the year I do everything right. }

I sign these oaths on the first day of the year, and I spend the next 364 holding my breath and waiting. I have, you see, an unhealthy attachment to right. The right job, the right man, the right project. I won't make mistakes, I won't waste my time, and I won't be anyone's fool.

My years tend to flounder. I spend my days waiting instead of chasing, holding out for a sign or a lottery ticket. I'm never sure what's right, and I'm so afraid to be wrong. I'd ask a question, but I'd rather wait until I have the answer.

This year, I'm giving myself permission to be wrong.

This year, I want to work on the wrong projects. This year, I want to follow the wrong leads. This year, I want to make bad art, I want to try things I’ll hate, I want to learn things I’ll never need to know. And when the man I love says I need more time, I want to waste the whole year waiting.

This is my throw-away year. This is the year for learning, and growing, and for being a goddamn fool. This is the year for fucking up, and letting in, and breathing out, and marching on. This year, I don't need any answers.

But I do have some questions.




Eating Soup

[photo courtesy chillhiro]

The first two hours of my morning have included:

  • 4 counts of Uncontrollable Crying
  • 3 counts of Frustrating Customer Service
  • 2 counts of Irresponsible Overspending
  • 1 count of Unexpected Snow
  • at least 17 counts of Melodramatic Ex-Texting*
  • and 1 hell of a headache

It's been a Day, but it's only a day.  The thing about being twenty-seven, and not seventeen, is that I Basically Get It.

I get that I am not crazy.  When I walk through the snow at eight o'clock on a weekend morning to stock up on 37 kinds of soup, I get that I am not crazy, or irresponsible, or starting a black-market bisque operation.  The unromantic fact is that my period is starting tomorrow and I am nesting.  I am stocking my cupboard with chipotle corn chowder and creamy potato leek because my primordial brain is preparing for the bouncing baby girl that thankjesusgodandmary is a figment of my uterine imagination and not a real thing.

I get that it is mostly in my head.  When thrice in a two-hour window I am faced with an Evil Being of the Netherworld hell-bent on ruining my life through a cool combination of an unfriendly hello and incorrect change, I get that it is mostly in my head.  I get that most baristas and cashiers and bank tellers are actually not Evil Beings of the Netherworld and that if I seem to be encountering several of them in a row, it is probably my fault.

I get that it is temporary.  When my world is crumbling like a Chips Ahoy under a preschooler's light-up L.A. Gear, I get that it is temporary.  I get that tomorrow, or next week, or five minutes from now, this will all seem like nonsense, and I'll be happy as a clam at high water.  Break-ups are hard.  Winter is hard.  Being poor is hard, and starting a new job is hard, and once a month for approximately three days everything in the whole world is hard.  But winter is temporary, and summer is too, and so is love and headaches and life itself.

So let's all eat some soup.


* can we call this 'exting'?




Eighty Years to Love You

Last night I dreamt I had two days to live. It was sad and it was scary, but it was only barely these things. Mostly I was just surprised. I was in my childhood bedroom; the windows were open and sunlight spilled across the floor. I can't remember ever seeing sunshine in a dream.

This morning I passed Santa Claus on my walk to work. He wore a grey suit and his hat was ringed with dirt. He drank his coffee from a travel mug. He told me to have a good morning and I thought,

Well, why not.



 

Nothing Awful Lasted Long

Today, I am halfway to twenty-eight. People ask you hard questions when you're halfway to twenty-eight. Unfair, mean-spirited questions like What do you do? and What are you working on? and Why haven't you paid us in three months? Questions that leave me with hands that don't know where to hide and feet that can't find flat on the floor.

I think often of the woman on the cover of Organic Style. I see her in the supermarket check out line: her Mona Lisa smile, her slim feet, her creaseless yoga pants. She's sitting in a manicured field and she's meditating on the wheat germ smoothie she's drinking for dinner. She is calm, she is Zen, she is infinite. There are no dirty dishes in this woman's sink.

This woman is my bodhisattva. She is my New Year's resolution, my shining light in the dark. She is my personal Jesus. I live my life in hot pursuit of skin that glows with a gleam only Photoshop can provide. I buy salmon at the market and eat cookies for dinner. I plan to go to yoga and spend the cash on coffee instead. I buy hempseed shampoo and eucalyptus face wash and they sit in a drawer for tens of years until I'm poor enough to dig them out.

And for what?

The truth is that I'm trying to disappear. White-washed and glowing, cross-legged in a field; I tip-toe, I side-step, I back-track. I move every which way but onward ho. Studies have shown that 93% of my life's problems stem from Giving a Fuck What People Think.

And today, walking home in my Target flats from a job I never meant to take, I think of this bodhisattva on a hill with her wheat germ smoothie and her sun-sleek ponytail and I think: Who the fuck is she? Who is this woman with a spotless sink and a spotless mind? Because she is not any twenty-seven and a half I have ever known.

Twenty-seven and a half has three dollars in her checking account.

Twenty-seven and a half is eating chocolate chips straight from the bag.

Twenty-seven and a half is blinking like a loris when someone asks her What do you do? and What are you working on? and Why haven't you paid?

Twenty-seven and a half is moving forward and upward and onward ho. She is teaching her feet to find flat on the floor.

[photo courtesy 油姬]

The Dotted Line

[photo courtesy margolove]

Today, the world is gray: sky, ground, the air between our mouths. The wind gusts and gasps and leaves crackle and snap from the trees; it's cold and it's drizzling and I've left my umbrella in some other life.

He's got the whole world in his hands... A bearded old man sings on the corner, his voice warm and rich and heavy, filling the space between buildings, spilling like syrup down alleys and gutters, and between each word is the clack, clack, clack of my boots on concrete, the gust and the gasp and the crack and the snap, the cold and the drizzle and the gray between our mouths, and suddenly-- it is winter.

==

Three years ago, I wrote:

My first few months in Madison I could have walked a thousand miles without recognizing the sound of someone's sneeze. I went to the movies by myself, I went to dinner by myself; the sun rose and set on my solitude. I wrote every day and I walked every day and the world was the most beautiful it's ever been, ever.

My courage and independence are two of my greatest strengths, but they are packaged side-by-side with isolation, a sort of self-inflicted quarantine. This conflicts with my ideals of community, ideals about which I feel passionately. It's as though I want that community to thrive just outside my bedroom door, like laughter down the hall and dirty soup bowls you find on the counter. I want to exist on its periphery and smile to myself that people are so good to each other. I fall in love with strangers because they don't expect to walk me home.

Sometimes I wonder if someday I will meet someone whose presence won't feel like an ill-fitting overcoat, like something heavy in my pocket that I should've left at home. Someone whose footsteps will fall next to mine like the sound of my own breath, whose body will sleep next to mine like an extension of my own, an eight-limbed Shiva tangled in the sheets.

Love has always felt to me like forging my own signature. Like signing my name backwards and left-handed, with a pen that never had any ink.

But with this one, I am right-side up. With this one, my well is brimming and bottomless, my hand steady and sure. With this one, I have already signed.

A thousand times over, I have already signed.