CCVIII.
“Do you think you can love more than one person at once?”
I think that when I slide my hand into yours, I’ve never meant anything more. I think that at our wedding, sometime after we slip out of our shoes but before we slip into the night, I will kiss someone else on the mouth, and it will be okay. I think that the way you look standing in the ocean makes me never want to look at anyone else again, and we will dance in our kitchen to songs on the radio that haven’t always made me think of you,
but do now.
And I will never stop flying across the country to hold friends’ hands at their mothers’ funerals, and you will always smile softly at movies you saw with someone else, but at the end of the day, when we find each other in storms and between blankets, across crowded rooms and on trains -
- well, you know.
the same way you know that the ways in which I love you are so much bigger than the ways in which I don’t
yet
CCLXXVII.
“What about the cat?”
“You can visit him at your father’s apartment, can’t you?”
When I was young, we’d play a game where he’d dare me to tug at his hair, and I’d refuse, and he’d dare me again, and I’d tug lightly, then harder, and harder yet. I didn’t want to hurt him, and he’d promise that I couldn’t.
These are the things we do to feel better: We drink things that fizz. We take showers. We take pills. We sit quietly at kitchen tables early in the morning and wait for things to get easy enough to consider leaving the apartment.
It’s silly, but I am angry at you both. I am angry that you both have turned me into every character from every indie movie, the disillusioned college student who comes home on break to find that the plates have moved cupboards and the sheets have changed color.
We wear sweaters, we write stories. We do not make phone calls that we know will not be answered.
I haven’t slept in six days.
CCLXXV. a letter to the bloodline
Is there anything more sacred than the songs that grandmothers sing? I don’t want my body’s betrayal to be the thing that links us, so I layer the other things together; things like Friday nights and smelling of smoke and lyrics about sunshine.
Things like your son, who speaks of you and cries in the Hyvee on North Dodge Street.
To my future daughter, I am so sorry that the dominos are being lined up once more as we speak, that we are three for three on loneliness and the line leads straight towards you, that your birthright of my favor will most likely be a burden.
We cry in the Hyvee on North Dodge Street. We are a snapshot of evolution, two stages caught at once: before and during - soon - just you wait. We are both so happy, we are both trying so hard, we are both thinking of you, after, nearly four years gone and still careening madly through our veins.
you make me happy
I do not know whether my mind will lure me away from my life, or if I will just spend the rest of my years waiting for it to try, but I will think of you (and he, and the she that may never appear, I am so sorry, I am so sorry) the entire time.
when skies are
This is your last gift to me, and it will be the hardest to bear.
blue
CCLXXIII.
I am not lonely until I am. This loneliness is the sea-green color of aquarium glass that separates woman from jellyfish. I need to stand on the steps of a monument at midnight. I need to scream into the emptiness at the side the ocean, the lake, the river that runs behind the student union that’s caked in dirt and empty beer cans. Instead, I smoke a cigarette. Instead, I call my mother.
People fall in love in a million different ways. Hillary Rodham meets Bill Clinton in a library on a spring afternoon in 1971. In 2003, Ozzie Osbourne wrestles a coyote to save his wife’s dog. The world is so harsh, but you are so good, too good, let me keep you from sadness, I am waiting, I am here. I will run screaming through the dark if it means you will never know why I feel these things I do.
Henry VIII is inventing divorce and buying a sports car. He emails to ask when he can visit me at school. I call the ocean and get a dial tone.
- Turn your face towards the sun, close your eyes, come and find me.
CCLXI.
There are things I’m afraid to ask, like why now and not then or does this mean two cemeteries
No one doesn’t notice when they stop being loved. It’s a gaping hole with an angry neon sign, flashing all the fucking time. We want to hear “I love you, and I’m proud of you”, but we can’t all say it. It is time to move past platitudes, like “I am a hurricane, and you are the only one who knows how to brave the storm”. Like “our entire job on this planet is to be light”. Like, I am so sick of reading between the lines of your deficiencies.
I don’t have time anymore to be sad, anyway. Not about everything at once. Better to let everything fall apart - or rather, snap cleanly like Lego pieces. You go one way, and I’ll go another. His and hers. Maybe later there will be a playing of old Sonny & Cher songs and sorting old photos and weeping. Maybe that would just be a waste of one more evening. Maybe we’re out of time to waste.
People are people are just people. Moving past the generalizations: this particular love story, at this particular time, between these particular people, is over. There aren’t any further pages. Twenty-two years: a new record. Can you still want to hold someone’s hand after you’ve watched them deal with two-point-two decades of shit?
“Please keep in touch” isn’t secret code for anything but please keep in touch. Call me and tell me whether you are sad, and whether it is the kind of sadness that tightens and tugs and turns you into someone you don’t like. Don’t forget to ask me the same, once in a while. I want you to be the one I dance with at my wedding to an old song that makes us cry, but I can’t want that all on my own.
Did you ever stop to think maybe I’d outgrow you?
I’m out of time to waste.
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.
