Shattered

I love seeing my friends. People I love, with whom I have history. I look forward to trips, excursions, parties, bar nights and brunches, operas and sledding and movies and dance clubs. I love getting spontaneous invites and surprise visits and hearing people I'm out with suggest "one more place?" - extending what might have been a perfectly lovely breakfast or walk or happy hour into a day or an evening of catching up, telling stories, and connecting. It doesn't sound like "one more place" as much as "I don't want to part."

But the ends of things, the return trips, the goodbyes and partings and breaks in these connections get harder and harder to step through - the more excited I was to begin, the more planning and preparation I exerted to make the meeting happen, the more time that has passed since I last saw the person I meet.

The goodbye ought to be just as happy, if not more. I am loved! I love! The connection was evidence, affirmation, and a new treasure chest of stories and memories and beautiful things I can look at and hold onto when real life, and separation, come back. The beginning ought to be more fearful and sad than the ending - it might not go well, it might not happen at all. Yet beginnings don't crush me with worry and dread - I'm too energized by change and unknown and figuring things out. All my fear, all my sad, all my love twists inward at goodbyes. Returning home pulls my heart down into my stomach. It shouldn't - my bed is the most comfortable bed on earth. My apartment fills me with joy when I walk in. But to get there, I have to separate from these people I love.

These people I love so damn much. I knew I loved them, came to see them, looked forward to their company, but I had forgotten what exactly it felt like to be next to them, to touch them, to hear their voices. The shape of their faces when they smile and the texture of their skin on my fingertips and the exact span I need to stretch up to wrap my arms around their shoulders. I had forgotten what it was like to love them with flesh and voice and eyes. They were just an idea I loved, but I remembered when they hugged me all these other things that I had forgotten. How tender they are. How full of kindness. How open-hearted and sensitive and joyous. How brilliant. How beautiful, one right next to the other, a sofa full of heroic divinities. And now I know I will forget them again, and they will go back to being an idea, instead of this one specific unrepeatable utterly human being.

I want all of my loved ones within arms' reach, every single one of them, all the time. And I also want this feeling of falling in love with them anew, because it has been two decades and they have become entirely different gorgeous versions of the exact same person I loved the first time, fully bloomed and shimmering-winged, and I get to fall in love with an exciting stranger that is my best friend, has always been my best friend. This love, familiar as myself. I know you like I know my own dream world, but you have all these stories I don't know from these lives you've lived without me, and all I want is to sit next to you and listen to you and watch you be familiar and brand new in buttery baklava layers of sweetness. It is so good to be near you. And I am so very happy, and sad also, because I already miss you. I cannot hold this liquid moment still. I don't want to forget again what it feels like to be your friend.

Each summer my father would appear at the airport as a stranger that had gifts for me. And I wanted nothing to do with him and his foreignness. But ten weeks later after I remembered who he was I had to leave him at that airport and forget all the pieces of him again. And I'm tired of forgetting. I want my loves. Someday they won't be at that airport and I will have forgotten them and there won't be any way to remember again, how they smelled and how they cleared their throat and how they told a punchline.

And the lies Helga tells her son Freddie when he quite rightly sobs at every goodbye, telling him that he will see these people again, that there will always be another time, these lies we tell ourselves so that we don't fall apart like toddlers at every airport and train depot and bus station and repacked suitcase, these lies aren't doing the trick for me anymore. I miss you now. I miss you for every one of the hugs and laughs I will want to give you, that I wanted to give you for twenty years, that I will have in my heart for you, even though my head will turn you back into the idea of you, without your you-ness to surprise me, and hug me back.

I know that missing you is good, and beautiful. I know that I am lucky to have so much love in my life, so very lucky to have these pains of missing you because I have loved you well and hurt myself to sever from your sphere. I know. But I am in public, and I don't have the space or privacy to cry these heavy tears, to process this sadness, this love that wants to stay next to you and wants you to exist only for me until I feel like I can love you all the way through, a full saturation of color, until you can fully know and I can fully know you understand. Only then, only when you really really understand how I love you, until I know without a moment of doubt that you see what my heart holds for you, can I feel peace at you existing outside of my space, can I drive away from you with a bittersweet smile instead of feeling ripped, the quiet letdown of a finished ice cream cone rather than the wailing misery of a fallen scoop melting on the sidewalk.

It is beautiful to love and to be sad at separations and goodbyes. But it is not beautiful quite yet, not until I can properly rage at the hideous injustice of loving people out of arms' reach, people who may not understand how important they are to me.

"You haven't asked her"

"But you haven't asked Jolie what she does." 

His statement froze the three strangers mid-stride. They had been about to melt back into the party; the olive-skinned woman who talked and danced and pealed laughter at her own jokes, her quiet partner whose face didn't seem to move even when it did, and the rotund man lecturing them all on holding cell phones next to their heads. They had chatted, or rather the dark woman had told stories, and Michael had drawn her out further, polishing her loquaciousness until she relaxed and remembered her personality, while the pontificating man had attempted to dominate with Mr. Wilcox-style wisdom. But the conversation had run its course; the kohl eyed woman and the tousled hair man were energized and glancing about the room, ready for further stimulation now that this intercourse - begun in hesitant fumbles - had given them courage, and the quiet still one was going to be the same wherever she was dropped next. 

"You haven't asked her what she does." Michael repeated.

I wasn't ready to talk to any of them. I had tried, though not very hard, truthfully, but I had smiled and responded and nodded and opened my mouth and inhaled, ready to offer words. Other people had been quicker. Or perhaps cleverer, or surely smoother. I hadn't had anything truly wonderful to say. It is easier to let them have what they want. They want to hear themselves. But Michael's words had shamed them, and the Italian woman focused her sharp, striking eyes on me. "Well? What about you?"

I stuttered. She was standing too close to me, and her eyes paralyzed me. She was waiting for me to be amazing and I was warm, and flustered. I don't need the attention. I already am getting more than my fair share of attention, just standing here in my new dress with the tulle-stiffened flounces, shifting my weight in shoes that are just barely uncomfortable. I just want to observe, and be in my head, and let Michael charm everyone else for me so no one notices I haven't said anything. I can't think of what to say. They are talking so fast and I don't know them and don't know what they want from me yet, other than for me to be unthreatening. It is easy to succeed at demure if you don't open your mouth, but now I have to speak and am going to give myself away.

She smiled slowly, watching me struggle, and remarked, "How pretty you are." I was surely supposed to have said something more clever here, but I did not. Michael told them how smart I was, and I watched the conversation form iron bars around me. He was looking at me with such tenderness, knowing I was twisting in discomfort but not realizing putting me on stage was making it worse. He is proud of me, he wants me to be shiny, but I can't be shiny right now, I have too many arms to be shiny, and I love him for being his business self and taking over the room but I just can't do anything more complicated than polite right now. I am slowly leaking life force onto the stripped wooden floor when she strikes, "When are you two going to get married?"

I want to burst out laughing. If anyone who knew me, knew us could have been here in this moment. If he would leap in to save me right here. If she would stop toying with her prey and would have pity on me. "I've already been married," I reply lamely, goawayjustgoaway lady drumming in my brain. I succeed in dumbfounding her, just for a second. "I didn't like it."

"But...but look at him!" she refuses to accept defeat. "Look at him! Of course you want to marry him, you haven't been married to him!"

"Yes, he is very handsome." He is, and God only knows what he is making of this exchange in that tight labyrinth brain of his. He is very handsome, so handsome I can barely look at him when I'm angry, or flustered, or supposed to concentrate on other people. He is very charming, walking into this party and cultivating every person here so that they eat out of his hand and thank him for the opportunity. He is very skilled, very clever, and very aware of how awkward I am. And perhaps I should be pleased that this is the only thing he doesn't do quite perfectly, setting me at ease, manipulating me. Because I think he misjudges the cause of my unease, never suspecting I could be insecure about him, about whether I've pleased him, about whether he thinks he got the bad part of the bargain with me on his arm tonight, and my head stuffed with sawdust.

I want to tell him I don't need the compliments, that the attention is crushing me, that I just need his arm around my waist and the freedom to be vacant and rest on his social skill. But I don't have enough articulateness to even make the attempt. I touch his hand over our shared plate of food. I try to mind meld with him, staring soulfully into his eyes. "What?" he asks, startled. 

I didn't have a very successful evening. But for all of my personal stiffness and dullness, I did nevertheless walk away with this moment. You haven't asked her. All his smoothness and charm, like an athletic ability, and he so fit he is able to double back and pick up stragglers on the steep hill, without worrying he himself will tire. You haven't asked her. You haven't paid attention to my mate. You will stop what you are doing and show her homage. I will use my power to compel you to do so. And this millennia-old male power maneuver that would have enraged me if I were at full capacity, would never have happened if I were at full capacity, and breaks my heart with love at this moment. I am the one he cannot read. I am the lonely child and he is trying to bully his friends into playing with me. He doesn't realize the only reason I try to engage strangers in this mood is to be beautiful for him.

Nighttime thunderstorm

I will put my book down. I was disinterested in movies. Found myself no longer craving the noisy cheer of the bar. I hear the wind pick up, insistent and loud as it pushes the sultry air through the trees and the cracks between my air conditioning unit and the window sash. A storm is coming.

I will turn off the lights and open the drapes. The storm is supposed to last for hours.

The ceiling fan pulls the refrigerated storm air inside, where it tumbles to the wooden floor, past the dusty radiator which is warm from the slow sunset in my west facing living room windows. Their screens glitter with rain, drops I can feel bursting, brushing my hands as they settle on the peeling paint of the sills. It is my fault the paint is peeling from these sills, for I cannot bear to shut out the rain, at least not unless it is sheeting, violently, gushing in.

But this storm has perfect manners. Pleasant rumbles of thunder, popcorn soft, allow for plashing and trickling and leaf rustles and the quiet drone of the fan. It doesn't seek to destroy the paint left on the sills, any more than necessary. Lightning not meant to startle, but to decorate, revealing lilac skies with diamond highlights. 

How can something so troublesome and disappointing during the day be such a blessing and a beauty at night?

I need to move my car before I sleep, out of the university lot which will start ticketing at six am and into my paid parking spot, in the structure a mile away. It won't be an unpleasant task, not in this storm. But I hate to move away from the window. Placidity is a comfortable seat by double windows, looking out onto the dark, polite thunderstorm.

Trust the ants

Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love  -- By Clancy Martin  "Our feelings change from day to day, and yet if we don't expect too much from our feelings, if we don't react to those feelings too vigorously, if we are patient with our feelings, even a bit ironical about our feelings, we will remember that Friday will come around again, and we'll find ourselves once more in love."

I'm working on learning to trust the ants, in my own Psyche myth. I tend to want to leap up and do something, and feel guilty for sitting around thinking. I still sit around and think, a lot, but I don't give myself credit for that work - real work is something you can cross off a list. But what this tends to lead to, in my personal life, is a giant flaming disaster. My Eros is not a fan of being an item on the list, ever. He enjoys the mystery of his invisibility, and an organic unfolding of events and relationships.

I am much more likely to be wringing my hands over the phantoms the female chorus whispers in my ear, about the doom around the corner and about how I need to take a lamp and a knife in the dark and set about creating my own "real" solution.

But I am learning. Trying. Practicing trusting the ants. 

Part of it involves letting the phantoms wash over. A few days can make a world of difference in how big and scary those phantoms look. Coming home from a feminist rally, ideas and horror stories churning in my brain, is NOT the time to sit down to have a serious conversation with my lover. A night out with the girls, listening to their worries for my ultimate lifelong happiness...A week of tidal hormones, cold icy waves under a dark sky...I want his comfort, immediately, I want to bring all of the insecurities to him and have him banish them away with steady solid masculine practicality. And yet, my Eros, I have learned, is not so good at that. His typical response when I reach out in tremulous, amorphous fear of an imagined future is a brusque rebuff, "What? [sigh] I'm really busy."

So I'm practicing letting the phantom hang out for a bit. Trusting the ants. What if he's a Titan, a monster who will eat you and that's why he won't show his face? Well, that is true, that would be really terrible. I'm going to put that on the shelf for a little bit, though, and trust the ants. You need to pull out a knife and a lamp and slay him first, before he suspects that you know his true identity! Well, there isn't really any undoing that path. But I can find a room I can lock, and go in there for a while. Peek out in a little bit when he can't see me, and make a decision then if he looks Cyclopean or mostly just regular.

Because the part that Psyche can never really explain or share is the way it feels the morning after he visits her. The languid happiness of connection. I am allowed to trust my own intuition, too. My third eye is valid and dependable, too - and is acting from more data points than yours. This feeling, of wanting to gambol around in the forest and string flower necklaces for him, is not something I have to set aside in order to find truth - it is part of the truth. 

It isn't the only part. The fear is part, too. And pretending that the fear isn't real is not sustainable, I've been learning. I can't will it away when it comes. I can't logic it away or wallow it away or get it to go away, period. But I can find alternative responses to the fear, that are less drastic, more private, and that permit me a way to practice trusting the ants. Ways that permit me to feel, but still watch for them. To lock myself in a safe room if need be, but without shooting off missiles at people before I do. "What can I do at this moment, to honor and acknowledge this anger and hurt, and to get it outside of myself, without actually turning it loose like zombies or weaponizing it at a person?"

And if I can watch other women's relationships with new eyes, not the eyes of a child who needs to make people get along, or the eyes of a girl afraid for her fellow girl, but the eyes of a heroine, watching her fellow heroine, I can see new things. The disappointment that she feels, but does not allow to overpower her. The weighing she does between her feelings of anger and resentment and rejection, and the decision she makes to love, to listen, to understand, to choose patience and forgiveness and to respond with gifts of tenderness. Not perfectly - not as some strange saint. But as herself, with all her usual edges - and yet, a clear and conscious decision to act with grace. To trust, not just him, but her intuition of him, her choice to open herself, her ability to be ok despite his shortfall. To trust her ants.

And the magic, as an observer, to see this unfold, and to see a graceful response from the hero. Not gallant, not storybook - but a response of a human recognizing grace and returning it.

I can do this, too. I can be my graceful self, instead of my Medusa self. Grace is not a weakness. The grace is a choice, carefully considered and selected from all of your options. It is a gift from strength, because you have it to give, because you aren't in need, because you will need to rely on someone else's grace another time when you do not have reserves of strength.

And maybe the question to ask is not, "Am I ok with this?" and certainly not "What is the worst that can happen if I let this go?" but rather "Where am I, right this moment? How am I, right this moment? I think I am probably ok, despite this. Is this true? Can I leave this for the ants? Can I trust them?"

Because if I can trust the ants, I am free to act with grace instead of panic. I can enjoy the breath in my lungs as I watch them sort the grains, and make order out of my emotional disaster. And perhaps when it comes time to speak, I can speak both with sincerity and strength and with tenderness and compassion, and I will not have to make the compromise that breaks my soul.

Travel wish list

I like to travel. I like spontaneity. When someone says, "Want to go [insert location]?", I always want to say, "Yes!"
Sometimes this works out great.
Often, though, I end up spending a lovely time with friends and wishing I hadn't blown my travel budget on a location I really didn't care to see the first time.
I'm trying to get better about saying, "No, thanks," and being ok with the fact that I will probably be doing most of my travel alone, as a result.
But if you are interested in going to any of the places on my current list, let me know :)

Riad in Fez

Singapore

Brocken, Germany

Greek island...Crete? Santorini? Corfu?

Paris

Tahiti

St. Petersburg

Tanzania

Viet Nam

Istanbul

Great Zimbabwe 

New Orleans

Milan

Quebec City

Algeria

http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/dz 

Miami

Columbia

Gifts I give myself

Clean sheets

A day off

Quiet

Bare countertops

Vacuuming under the furniture

Going to bed an hour early

Looking at the sky

Mending my clothes

Polishing my shoes

Oiling my skin

Cooking for myself

A conversation with a friend

A pot of tea

Solo vacations

Dining out alone

Long walks

Singing
Tulips
Ironing everything in the closet
Window-shopping when I don't want to spend, and listing the items I'm most interested in for when I have money and inclination but no creativity or wisdom: personal collection development so the purchase order process can be cranked out later
Doing something scary
Learning something new
Practicing a skill 

Deciding not to be angry

Deciding not to be afraid

Giving not what is expected, but what gives me joy to give

Belief in myself. Not in what I will do at some future date, or my character, but in the choices I have already made, and in my wisdom to give myself good and perfect gifts, that are not merely shiny in the package but solidly pleasant. The most important gift I can give myself is the faith that the choices I have made have been good for me, the correct choices, that where I am at this moment is true, and where I am supposed to be. Whether someone else is jealous and wants my life is not what makes my life valuable - it's what makes another person unhappy. Belief in myself is the detachment from others' jealousy, both as a misguided sign that I matter and as a sin I must somehow repay. And the past pieces I look at with embarrassment and chagrin, were steps to get here, to this moment of being in the right place. I know myself. I believe in my own path.

http://www.rulit.me/books/out-of-africa-read-69333-51.html 

"The tight place, the dark pit in which I am now lying, of what bird is it the talon?" 

Crumpets

Crumpets are awesome.

I know a lot of people like scones, because they are everywhere. Any bakery you walk into will have scones. Even the bakery at Kroger. But I think of scones like I think of cake. Maybe it's good, maybe it's not so good, but the real question is, "why aren't you eating pie?"

So, why aren't you eating crumpets? If you eat more of them, it will be easier for me to get them.

Soft crumpets are gentle.

Toasted crumpets are crunchy.

The butter seeps into the holes to create fabulous pockets of sunshine calories that burst on your tongue.

Unlike english muffins, crumpets do not try to fight back by stabbing your mouthparts. And they don't have that weird taste - cornmeal? nutmeg? grody shortening? what is that english muffin aftertaste? ew.

Crumpets are just mild, yeasty, soft vehicles for lovely things. That sentence makes them sound like breasts, which I won't argue against.

Crumpets go great with:
butter
strawberry butter
lemon curd
bacon
cream
pots of tea
soft ripened cheeses
blackberries so you can pretend to be Peter Rabbit
Turkish honey but avoid the mad honey
me
Nutella
Jalapeño jelly
ricotta
peaches
saag paneer when you run out of naan or don't want to pay extra for it and can't get the carryout place to substitute it for rice which you can clearly make yourself while you wait for the curry
lox
hot smoked salmon which is better than lox
soft boiled eggs that Jamie makes for you and sets in egg-pants

avocados

things crumpets do not go great with:

people who are going to talk about scones while eating a crumpet

silk blouses