CCLXXVIII.
I make so many big plans, and none of them involve another person. Not anyone real, at least, just future capital-t Them, they who have no defining characteristic as of yet, aside from making me laugh too loudly in public places.
I feel as if I’m missing out on the quiet things people do for one another; making two cups of tea instead of one, sharing the newspaper in your underwear on a Wednesday morning. Quick kisses before work, reassurances that you will have someone waiting for you at the other end of the day.
It gets so lonely this time of year. Or maybe it just gets cold, and we forget to pretend.
CCXXIV. The thing about everything
Romanticizing is easy when you’re young and hopeful and believe a little too hard that everything will still work out. That the cheap apartment with its bare, dirty walls and low-ceiling attic bedroom and absentee living room will be the birthplace of your work of genius. That the degree you are paying for and working for and fighting for and fighting over will lead to something other than bursting into rough, ugly tears in front of the accountant in the pressed suit who made all of the choices you should have. That the smoke slip-curling between your lips won’t turn your lungs to mirrors of the dead: two grandmothers, a grandfather, three great-aunts and -uncles. Family, when they cut you open.
But then again,
There is nothing beautiful about the struggle to stay on this planet. Feeling fine is dull, sure, but no one misses the perpetual feeling that, just maybe, this sunset could be the last. Some nights will be worse than others, they’ll mean one hand in the crook of an elbow and a cigarette in the other, anchoring yourself to the steady pulse beneath someone else’s scratchy wool sweater.
“Every extra day we get with you is just a gift with purchase”
Let’s agree to stick around, one way or another.
CCXXVII.
Do you remember back when (everything had the white-gold glow of Christmas lights and potential and) we walked the campus and shouted about hating things with joy in our voices, and it was loud, and it was exciting? Not thrilling, but affirming, like we’d lured friendship in and were going to lock it into place through sheer willpower and the speed of our speech.
commutative: a + b = b + a
associative: a + (b + c) = (a + b) + c
distributive: a(b + c) = ab + ac
These are the things we know, and the first time someone says to me “prove it”, the ground drops out beneath me.
“I’ve got one apple. You’ve got none. I’ve got more.”
“Those are just physical representations of numbers. Can you prove to me, without a doubt, that 1 is greater than 0?”
You are gone, and the ground’s dropped out beneath me, and I can’t yet explain why multiplying by zero makes everything disappear. I can’t prove that you have a voice that rumbles like laughter, but I know I want to write about it, because that’s the only way I know how to keep you with me for the next ninety-nine days.
1>0
Two years is no time at all. Plans change. People are people are the same as they would be on one continent or the next. They come back, or they don’t. These are the things we know, but don’t understand, can’t hold onto, can’t prove.
CCXLV.
I’ve got so many fucking feelings that they pour out of me unasked; on buses I sit tucked between button-down briefcase businessmen and sniffle into my sleeve. If they notice, they say nothing. They just want to get to their cars, you know, get home to a family and a warm meal, or maybe just a dog and a beer. Either way, they’ll forget about the girl who cried on the bus easily enough. So will I, as soon as I switch trains of thought.
This is different.
It doesn’t set in that I’m sad with a capital S until I lie to my mother. My brother wrote me a letter to say he’s been wearing my sweater, maybe I want to frame it. T-shirt weather strikes in November, and I’m angry at the heat. I’ve made new friends. They watch Saturday Night Live with me, neon glow in a dark living room, and don’t laugh when I reveal my long-standing crush on Bill Hader. I agree to all their plans. I’d still rather be a warm body in the passenger seat, eating rapidly cooling McDonald’s french fries, and laughing at my long-standing crush on Bill Hader. He’s got a dumb face anyway.
I am sad with a capital S. I’ll make too much for dinner and eat it all. I’ll make plans and forget them. I’ll fall asleep on the couch at 8 pm, wake with my contacts vacuum sealed to my eyes. Back to sleep. Repeat tomorrow. Repeat. I need to go home. Repeat.
CCXLIV.
A list of things for which I have no use:
- A disregard for the politics involved in taking up space on this planet - on buses, in busy hallways, in crosswalks
- Perfunctory humor
- Pretending not to love someone
I’m angry that I can’t just tell you how much I love you all of the time, that the words would eventually lose their meaning. Am I angry? I used to be, quite often. Not so much anymore. It’s hard to be mad at the world when it’s so large, and parts of it so eager and soft. People will always surprise me; they’ll always be funnier, more compassionate, more creative, more clever, more able to love.
The world is so large, and so quiet. We gravitated to cities in search of each other. The best nights are the ones we let other people document because we’re too busy living them. When it snows I think of you and that we only took walks in the worst weather when we knew no one else would be looking. People find friendship in the strangest of places, our story is special to only us. Our children will cry over the poetry we read today, sock feet on old couches bathed in new lamplight.
The world is so large, and we’re only here to make it laugh.
CCXLII.
(from a 1995 Panasonic digital video)
The only people I love these days are family
I cheer whenever the faces of the bells turn back towards us. The teenagers have run off to find their red-faced counterparts in jerseys, the middle aged couples have tucked in for casual conversation and hot cocoa. I am loud enough for us all. My brother smirks behind brass beneath a brightly colored plume. I think maybe on this planet he is the only person I would die for. The faces turn away.
My father wants to drive a snow plow, but he doesn’t like the cold. He needs ten hours of sleep a night and a snack every forty-five minutes. He should go back to selling furs, keep safe and warm. His face is too eager to hear these things, and we keep walking.
For my seventeenth birthday, my mother gives me a print. “There has never been a day when I have not been proud of you, I said to my daughter, though some days I’m louder about other stuff so it’s easy to miss that”. I’ve kept it on four different desks. Sometimes I miss being a failure because she’d never loved me harder.
Some things are lost to time, but that won’t stop me from trying. We watch The Lion King on repeat
The first cold night of October, I lower the volume on Joan Rivers until she could be telling the story of my father’s birth. I smoke a cigarette in the parking lot behind my building. In my room, a prayer book I drew in when I was three, and tucked between two pages of the Haggadah, a photo from that day - my grandmother has one arm wrapped around me and the other outstretched to keep the cigarette as far from my face as she can without putting it down.
I won’t smoke again. Some things are lost to time.
CCXXVIII.
We’re going to have so much time together.
At least, that is what I tell myself when I miss you. Loneliness springs out of nowhere like the claws on a cat. We’ll have time, time to fall in love with boys in cities and fight in cities and live the weirdest, craziest, fucking-unimaginable-to-our-young-and-impressionable-minds lives in cities. I’m so happy to be with you; when I laugh at your stupid haircut, it is a prayer, a song, a thank you note.
I miss new orange paint and knowing I could always rule the world and eating bland meals because the salt was suspiciously blue, at a table of twelve meant for eight. I don’t like the way people feel, but I didn’t mind it then. The mural was ugly. The mural was really, really ugly.
The last week of school we watched tv in the dark in the same room I’d sneak into on Saturday mornings to sit next to my father and grin his grin, identical self-satisfied smiles, the same room where they’d told us about our futures (and how silly it seems now to sit in a circle and make declarations, how proud and how pretentious, when really no one has any idea where they’ll be a month from now, let alone at the five-year reunion, asking “how did you turn out?” and everyone is lying anyway, everyone but us, when they ask how we turned out, we’ll turn out great, right? We’ll turn out great),
We watched tv in the dark; I drank a soda and fell asleep and woke up feeling lost but safe. We finished it the last day. I cried and touched your hair. It was a thank you note.
CCXXX. my grandmother, joan rivers
Bubbie Joan calls twice daily to tell me stories about doing Hollywood Squares drunk on wine and the 80s. She tells me about getting on Ed McMahon after he accidentally announced her name, about the stage lights and the applause and the hum of the cameras and “Ed wants to pay for your dress” when she calls
twice a day,
every day.
Bubbie Joan pronounces it Yom Kip-per, the way the ladies do, the ones who wear gold jewelry, who grew up in storefronts and took baths in the river, but won’t talk about it unless it’s to make you laugh. She’s got a filthy sense of humor and a cigarette voice, and she sings Dean Martin with scratches like a record player.
She dresses in sequins, but falls asleep on the couch so quickly when we watch The Lion King that I’m not even sure if she knows what happens to Mufasa. I’m not going to be the one to tell her. She dresses in sequins, and her apartment is draped in marble and gold, and I think maybe she’s lonely, but I’m not going to be the one to ask. She smells like exotic countries instead and she doesn’t know how old I am always, but she tells me that she loves me when she calls
twice a day,
every day.
