Monday, August 31, 2015

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.

Friday, August 28, 2015

"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.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

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.