i must not think bad thoughts

The bagel I broke my tooth on at work wasn’t even hard – that was the humiliating thing. For all I know, that particular lower canine just had had enough of being associated with me. When something like this happens, it’s hard not to take it personally.

In any case, I was totally unprepared to feel something familiar floating in the wrong place. I spat out the bite – my first of the morning – as delicately as I could. And there was half of my tooth: bloodless, inevitable. I hadn’t seen one of my teeth outside of my mouth since I was a kid. Six and twenty-six; I’m taller now, but it felt about the same.

It’s hard to concentrate when the geography of your mouth has changed. (It’s hard to concentrate in 2017, period.) I made an emergency appointment at the nearest dentist’s office, and within two hours I was lying back under lights and mirrors and a stranger’s gloved hands. I’d brought the half-tooth in a Ziploc bag, for reasons that now baffle me. Did I think they could put it back in? Did I think I was a jigsaw puzzle? Maybe I was worried that they’d need proof that I hadn’t always been like this, i.e. wrong-mouthed and imperceptibly broken.

When the emergency dentist took his fingers and his mirror out of my mouth, I swallowed and said, “Do you ever have dreams about your teeth falling out?” This is maybe not good small talk, but the day was already off the rails, and I was leaning into it. Besides, he was a very nice man who hadn’t judged me for bringing him half a tooth in a Ziploc bag.

“Of course,” he said. “All the time.”

“Oh, thank God,” I said, and we both laughed.

Someone else did my filling a couple weeks later and then my check-up, so I haven’t seen my dentist friend since. But I think about that exchange a lot. Even dentists, I tell myself approximately one million times a day, have that fear. It’s okay. It’s okay. And I tongue my reconstructed tooth, which is subtly but definitely different-feeling from its predecessor, to make sure it’s still there. It always is, but I’m never convinced until I feel it. It always is, but every time I bite something, I’m sure I felt it breaking. I’d better check. I’d better check.

When my teeth fall out in my dreams, they all fall out, one by one and then in impossible handfuls. To be honest, I think that dreams are mostly the brain composting its leftovers. To be honest, I still look up dream meanings anyway, hoping one of them will explain myself to me. So far, no luck. And I am running out of places to store the things that come out of my mouth.

I just read the newest John Green book because the reviews made it sound basically like a book about my brain and because my therapist just read it too. And really, what is therapy but a chance to form a book club that’s unusually difficult to tell your friends about?

The most frequently invoked image (no spoilers, it’s literally on the cover) is a spiral. The main character gets stuck in her thoughts frequently and at random, in loops that get smaller and smaller and smaller. The farther down, the harder to describe. The more wordless, the lonelier.

But at one point, she observes that spirals go the other way, too: endlessly moving outward, sweeping up everything. At my best, I’m like that. I can make connections between ideas faster than I can reason my way into them. The words appear and I take them. A friend once told me that I must live five seconds in the future, which remains both the best compliment I’ve ever received and my pitch for a terribly mundane Marvel superhero movie.

If I’m fast, I’m fast in both directions. Here I am, saying the right thing at your party. Here I am, checking my tooth for the fiftieth time, cracking my knuckles till they’re long past sore, returning again and again and again to the same thought, as if I ever really left it.

As a little girl, I had rituals. Of course, I’ve come to understand that little-girlhood is more or less comprised of rituals. Adulthood, ditto. But mine were different, urgent, inexplicable; I always felt that the entire world would go sideways if I didn’t do everything right. This door has to be closed twice. This faucet has to be checked and checked and checked again. This is the moment you have to touch something to prove that you’re real, and so is this one, and so is this one. I was, in other words, a small DSM-IV set loose to agonize itself into any number of beliefs and self-loathings, all of them intensely private and shameful.

The first inkling I had that I was not uniquely wrong and broken was in 2001, when I saw an episode of Invader Zim – one of the few I ever watched – called “Germs.” The plot, which I’ve somehow remembered for all these years, involves Zim donning a pair of germ-vision glasses. His fear, when it arrives, is all-consuming; he spends the remainder of the plot feverishly sterilizing and disinfecting everything he can, though the germs always come back. I think it was supposed to be funny. For me, at ten, it was very serious. How did you know that? I wanted to ask. I didn’t tell you. 

I’ve eaten approximately a hundred and twenty bagels since I broke my tooth, and so far, none of them have sent me back to the dentist. I would relax, if relaxing were a thing I did. Who knows? I might still give it a shot.

I’ve had this mantra since I was a kid, sort of like an incantation to ward off bad thoughts, a command to myself to please just be normal for once. It’s shut up, but you have to say it over and over again. Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up. (Or else what? Or else it doesn’t work?) Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to replace it. Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to explain myself to myself the way a friend would. There’s a first time for everything, I guess. This is the year I learn to be gentle with the little girl I still am.

For the record, I am trying out okay. I am getting used to the geography of my mouth with that word in it.

My tiny book club meets tomorrow, and there’s a lot to discuss. It’s not going to be the way it sometimes is, when the words just appear and I take them. So let it be messy. I am no longer collecting my proof in Ziploc bags. I will still exist without it.

I think. I hope. I’ll check.

ain’t we got fun

The American Girl Place Café doesn’t card, perhaps because no one on Earth has ever gone to the American Girl Place Café to get wasted. The presence of children, particularly children who are into historically accurate doll accessories, is kind of mood-killer if you’re trying to party. I was previously one of those children. I can speak with authority.

American Girl dolls, if you were not young, earnest, and bookish in the 90s, are distinctive characters from different eras, with an accompanying book series and outfits. On my playground, at least, who you identified with said a lot about who you were – not that any but the luckiest few actually had one of the dolls. When a great-aunt gave me early-Edwardian Samantha for Christmas one year, it made my entire life and probably directly resulted in both my scholarship to college and my good dental hygiene today. (As an aside, saying that you’re “more of a Samantha” in this context means something very different than it might coming from someone old enough to watch HBO.)

Secretly, though, I always related more to 1940s-era Molly McIntire: bespectacled, anxious, nontraditionally feminine. She liked a good plaid. She wanted to make the world better. I knew that it was unlikely that this really expensive lightning would strike twice, so I contented myself with collecting the books and gazing longingly at her spreads in the seasonal catalogs. I tried to do this openly, to show my Samantha doll that there wasn’t anything weird going on, just a desire for more friendship – and really, wouldn’t we all be friends? Weren’t we all pro-labor reform and mindful patriotism? My concern that a beloved toy might think I was conducting an emotional affair with one of her relatives is 1) totally typical and 2) proof that this entire paragraph has gone entirely off the rails. What I’m trying to say is, these dolls were a Very Important Part of my early life, even as they taught me a lot about my own limited purchasing power.

So I didn’t expect to go to the café, at least not until I married really rich and had wealthy daughters. But last month, there we were: my best friend and her husband, another dear friend, and me. Some dreams come true, belatedly. (I can hear you now, wondering why we spent our short lives doing this. Two words: Caity Weaver.)

Though we were all between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-seven, adult patrons in search of their recent childhoods must not be that uncommon; our waitress was very nonchalant. If you’ve come empty-handed, you’re allowed to choose a doll to sit with you at the table. (Samantha, if you’re reading this: I swear it’ll be you and me next time.) So once we’d picked our tiny dates, Mackenzie the Waitress led us to our table, past half a dozen little-girl birthday parties, handed out the menus, and took our drink orders with a completely straight face. When the cocktails arrived, so did four little tea cups and saucers for our dolls. My best friend’s husband thoughtfully helped his doll drink as we waited for the entrées. “What’s she having?” one of us asked. “A gin and tonic,” he said.

Adulthood kind of hasn’t been what I expected.

The truth is that I haven’t written in a long time, once you subtract emails to my mother. So much has happened in the world, and what do you even say? Even on this blog, I begin posts and abandon them mid-sentence because they seem like such a waste of any reader’s time. I generally don’t know what’s happening and am usually scared: there, I saved you ten minutes.

It’s a weird time to be a writer. Actually, it’s a weird time to be a person. When I check the news, I wish I hadn’t, and when I don’t check the news, I’m antsy until I do. And so the idea of sitting and polishing one string of words, and then another, and then another – the idea of doing the one thing I love most and am any good at – seems absurd. How dare I look away. How dare I assume that my little sentences matter.

And yet you’re reading this, presumably – this silly story about having dinner with dolls. I generally don’t know what’s happening and am usually scared. But that makes me less scared somehow.

The food, by the way, was surprisingly good. Then again, the intended audience of the American Girl Place Café is moneyed preadolescents, so the food had better be good. I ordered, if you can believe it, the “roasted cauliflower and broccoli salad,” which featured “Belgian endive,” a food that I, at twenty-six, am still not convinced is real. Sounds like a conspiracy perpetuated by Whole Foods, but okay.

After dinner, we, our dolls, and our tasteful one-Bellini buzz decided to get dessert. After all, Karen’s birthday had happened just a week and a half before, though we’d been disappointed to learn that you can only get the full birthday party experience if the birthday girl is seventeen or under. But adulthood is all about disappointment, I guess, and Mackenzie the Waitress was very sympathetic, even if there wasn’t anything she could do. She wasn’t judging us; she’d already done enough.

There’s a photo of us with our desserts, of course. It’s on Facebook. (Of course.) In it, we’re obviously delighted, smiling with all of our teeth. I have one arm around Karen, who’s wearing a Wonder Woman scarf she knitted herself. Her husband Ben has put on a bow tie for the occasion. Our friend Monique, architect of the evening, has just placed her dessert between her doll and mine. I’d forgotten that until just now, when I went back to look. These are my friends: people capable of kindness, even the smallest, the silliest.

It has been, to be completely honest, a rough couple of months. The summer stretched on until about two days ago, and the air was so humid that even shadows seemed heavy. I spent August getting the delicate balance of my antidepressants just right again, which I’d put off doing in case I was totally fine and the world itself was struggling. (Turns out the world and I could both use some help.)

What will the doll of 2017 be like? Will she come with a little smartphone for all the breaking news? Will she carry a sign, and what will it say? Will her knees bend? Will she smile?

 

The four of us had settled the bill by eight, and American Girl Place doesn’t close until nine. (This seems late to me, but what do I know? I’m a person who worries about dolls’ feelings.) So we made our way through the store very slowly, pausing to look at all the little props and outfits, the goods necessary for a fictional life. Molly isn’t for sale anymore, but Samantha is back. A lot of the little plastic faces were unfamiliar, since I haven’t really kept up with the line. But honestly, there are only so many molds; how unfamiliar could they be?

At one point, we came across the section of the store dedicated to dolls that look like the children who will take them home. In the display cases, there was one with red hair, wearing an apron and using a stand mixer to make something delicious and inedible. And I felt that old rush of affection I’d had for Samantha in her little bed next to mine, for Molly in the pages of her catalog. When I was a little girl, I loved these invented worlds, and I loved the idea of doing it myself: sitting and polishing one string of words after another. All those little sentences, mattering.

I generally don’t know what’s happening and am usually scared. But there’s still a place in Midtown where you and your eighteen-inch-tall friend can get a drink. There is still such a thing as joyfully wasting time.

Let me believe in a year after this one. Let me learn to cook with endive. Let all of this matter. And let me write it down.

 

 

keep me warm

Last summer, when I wasn’t busy applying to jobs or having mild crises of identity, I taught myself to crochet. It is good to have a hobby that isn’t unemployment or anxiety. Besides, I was already a natural at those, and life is all about challenges.

To be fair, I didn’t really start from the beginning. Some evening in the endless summer of my childhood, when I was maybe eight and freshly myopic and still afraid of most dogs, my aunt showed me how to do the chain stitch. (Side note: in my memory, it was always summer in the 1990s, or else Christmas. Every foggy morning or spring evening has been rounded up or down accordingly. I cannot explain this.) Being an only child in a small family meant that staying the night at a relative’s house was among the chief pleasures of this earth. If you are young and excitable, as I was and still am, everyone who impresses you is a minor celebrity, and no one impressed me more than my own blood; I had made a lifelong study of them.

And so Beth showed me how to turn the hook, how to hold the yarn, and I was in business. I loved it. So satisfying to make something out of nothing, to make a snake that…well, went on forever because I either never got the hang of turning or was too intimidated to try. I could only do the chain stitch. If you wanted an ineffective scarf, I was your girl; maybe bespoke equipment for the world’s gentlest tug-of-war. How you got from a fistful of chains to a blanket was a mystery, and one I did not feel equipped to investigate.

After a while, my fascination ran its course, and I went back to making the other dozen crafts I loved: hand-drawn clothes for paper dolls, little dioramas folded and taped out of scratch paper, scraps of cloth unevenly embroidered. My parents have kept all of these things, done with more enthusiasm than skill, and sometimes we pull them out when I am home. (Like I said: only child.) At some point my projects seemed childish and I stopped. At some point or another, a lot of things have seemed childish and I stopped, though now I so often wish I hadn’t. Not because I would have been a master dioramist by now, but because I miss that girl, the one who made tiny bookshelves and chairs out of extra spelling worksheets.

In 2016, I hadn’t drawn a paper doll for years, but I had just woken up from the last school night of my entire life, and my hands felt empty. After twenty years in school, I was cut loose to wander the apartment in my pajamas at 11 am and try to figure out who I was going to be. There’s only so much YouTube and boxed wine. There are only so many ways you can stall. I missed New York and my boyfriend as much as I loved Pittsburgh and my friends, and at some point I was going to choose which place was next; at some point, I was going to need to admit that I had already chosen.

My best friend knits. A lot of my friends do, actually, but Karen is one of the people I talk to most: multiple times a day, every day, though she’s in Chicago and I’m here. Some kinds of conversation are a sacrament, I think – the kind you can pick back up without preamble, as though whatever time has elapsed passed without mattering. Ours is one of those.

Last year, before the summer began, she and her boyfriend visited me at my old apartment in Pittsburgh, and we all went to a yarn store so I could buy needles and something soft and pretty. I was still a student, desperate to keep learning. On the couch, she showed me the knit stitch over and over until I got it, sort of, then forgot it, then got it, then mangled it, then tore everything out and started again. Her boyfriend sat nearby with a crochet hook and a project of his own. It was quiet. (Side note: in my memory it was always quiet that spring, like we were all holding our breaths, but really, it was only me.)

But after they went back to Chicago, I couldn’t make my hands move right anymore. The yarn kept falling slack and my stitches got looser and wilder, and I tore them out, and I tore them out, until there weren’t any left to undo. By graduation, I’d forgotten how to cast on, and that was the end of it, because you can’t stitch into a row that doesn’t exist.

Once upon a time I had known how to make foundations; once upon a time, that was the only thing I’d known. I laced up my sneakers and walked back to the yarn store alone. Four miles round trip, but it wasn’t like I had class to rest up for anymore. And I bought a set of hooks that looked like the ones I’d used almost twenty years before, though memory is tricky and a lot of things that look familiar aren’t – though I will tell you that when I got back to my apartment and relearned the one stitch I’d ever known, it felt like coming home.

Here is a short list of places I have crocheted:

The New York Public Library, most days on my break from work. Bryant Park when it’s nice. Greeley Square, where I once lost a hook. My office once when it was raining and I was the last person there. My couch, obviously. My bed, obviously. The L train but not the 6, because I only ride it for three stops. My parents’ couch, where my dad sat next to me for hours on end and watched me, sipping coffee, telling me I was patient, and I guess I am. The floor of the bedroom I grew up in, working as fast as I could to finish a scarf for my mother. My dad’s car, whenever he drove me to Michaels last summer because I was home and we wanted to do something, anything, together; because I adore my parents but I was going to leave anyway.

Here is a short list of things I have crocheted:

Five scarves, one for me and four for people I love. Two cats. One bunny. Five pussyhats. Over half of an afghan, though stay tuned. Most of a shawl – remind me to pick up more yarn. Three cactuses. An indeterminate number of tiny octopuses. One deformed semi-rectangle that I am keeping as a reminder that I am allowed to be bad at things, maybe even very bad.

Here is a story: for my birthday, Griffin took me to a yarn store in the Village that we stumbled upon last year and that he’d quietly remembered for, what, eight or nine months, because I had loved it and had refused to buy anything. Did I say it was too expensive? Did I say I wasn’t good enough for yarn that nice? Those both sound like things I would tell him. He told me I had to pick out at least five skeins; he knew me, he said, and he knew I would choose two and say that was enough, that that was all I needed.

In my memory, it was sunny when he said this. In my memory, it is always sunny when I’m with him, even on the days I know it rained, even when it’s night. A person who knows you and loves you and is gentle with you, who can persuade you to be gentle with yourself – that’s sunshine.

In a month, I will have lived in Brooklyn for a year. This feels impossible, but it’s true. My life is happening, and I’m in it.

From here to work is eight miles, if you drive. From here to my last apartment in Pittsburgh, three hundred and seventy-two. From here to the house I grew up in, four hundred and one, though I pretend every day that it’s less.

I think – but am not sure – that if you tore out every stitch I’ve ever made and laid that yarn along the highways, you would make it to one of these places. I just don’t know which one.

How did I hold a needle, back when I sewed? How did I draw a paper ballgown? How did I make those dioramas, those many imaginary rooms, carried carefully from school to the dining room table, where I would explain each piece: a tiny coffee table for tiny books I hadn’t yet written, a bed the size of my thumb, a little rug to warm even smaller feet? Why did I spend so much time on my obsessions, and when did I stop?

A few months ago I taught one of my friends to crochet, and she watched my hands so carefully, the way I watched Karen’s once. Some kinds of silence are a sacrament, I think. Ours was. And then she went home and taught herself more, the names of stitches, the different weights of yarn, the feeling of doing something a thousand times and then a thousand times more. Not perfectly but patiently. Maybe that is a sacrament too.

It turns out I’m still a student. It turns out that I will never know everything, just enough, and just barely. It turns out it isn’t that hard to turn a fistful of chains into a blanket, actually. This girl in 1999 ought to know that. But it’s okay; she’s going to find out.

gone sour

As an elementary-schooler, I had difficulty putting consonants together. I was solid on R, reliable with S, did not stutter, but the complex sounds of the language – ch, th, and so on – eluded me. Maybe this wouldn’t have been a problem if my own last name didn’t begin with a whispered shh, Shah-bahk. But I didn’t talk much anyway: it’s a wonder anyone noticed.

So I went to speech therapy, along with the other kids who couldn’t quite pronounce what they needed to say. I don’t really remember much of it: it was held in a small, warm room where I got to read aloud, my favorite thing, feeling my way through the words I sped through in my head. There were take-home worksheets of vocabulary to practice, accompanied with helpful line art: catcher with attending leather glove, swingset with chains slack, chair with no one in it. At my baba’s house, I said slowpoke and an uncle feigned insult. Or maybe he really was insulted. I was eager to explain that this was homework, not a thing I’d meant about him. I was that kind of kid: eager.

This was kindergarten and first grade, my introduction to academics, like a tiny debutante. I loved school the way I’d loved looking at maps long before their letters made sense to me. These things were proof of the enormous world. I wanted all of it.

But I was shy. But I was anxious. I don’t know which came first anymore. I have always been self-conscious, prone to debilitating worry, though it was college before I understood that not everyone felt like throwing up before tests they’d studied for. As a little girl, I was both things simultaneously, afraid of people even as I longed for them, tongue-tied and hiding behind a sofa if something suddenly made noise. Catlike, maybe, though most of the cats I’ve known have the extravagant confidence of creatures who only fear death, not humiliation. I was skittish. I didn’t talk much, anyway.

I graduated from speech therapy in 1997, able to pronounce anything you threw at me but afraid I might still slip up. When my teachers asked for volunteers to read aloud, I thrust my hand up and closed my eyes, feeling a little sick. This was my favorite thing. And often I was chosen, because I was that kind of kid, not quite a teacher’s pet but a little too nerdy and sincere to be quite anything else. Mostly I said the words right. Mostly I felt such relief afterward, such disappointment it was over, even as I pretended not to feel the cold, wet armpits of my shirts.

From almost twenty years away, my childhood seems gentle and indistinct. I can’t really remember the intricacies of my playground alliances, of the few sworn enemies I had, and the fights – if you could even call them that – that we had by the slides. I never hit anyone, never even swung, because I could argue. Everyone loves a pedantic girl, right? Weird and competent kids have their own kind of power.

There was one accusation, though, that I was powerless against. It came from classmates and their parents alike, sometimes presented to me directly, sometimes relayed telephone-style. It had to do with the way I carried myself those years that I was learning to shape the language in my mouth, those years I was afraid of embarrassing myself and certain that I would, the way I hung back and stayed quiet and avoided eye contact so no one would realize how very strange and uncool I was. Self-deprecation plays very differently than you intend sometimes. It went like this: “My mom says you’re spoiled.”

Or, variation on a theme, “You think you’re better than everybody.”

Or, as the father of some friends once put it while we were alone together on the family porch and I stared at my knees: “You aren’t too good to talk to me.”

a portrait of the (very concerned) artist on the first day of kindergarten, 1996

I still have trouble with certain letters, especially if I talk too fast. And I almost always talk too fast, in part because at nearly 26 I’m still a little shy about you listening to me speak. It’s the classic chicken and egg scenario, if the chicken were something just shy of a speech impediment and the egg were an anxiety disorder. You know: the usual configuration.

(And I do talk too fast, am infamous for it, had to repeat myself endlessly and more slowly until I moved to New York, where everyone is apparently rushed for time or just as eager and anxious as I am. This is my other great self-consciousness. Oh, the misery of not being understood when it took you so much to speak in the first place.)

What’s accent and what’s a trick of my own tongue? I drop the first R in particularly, sometimes in yesterday, always in alternative. (The first months of this administration have been hell in part because I cannot get this one down. Altuhnative, altuhnative, altuhnative.) Sometimes it all comes out at once, not so much a mumble as a crash landing. I do enunciate, sometimes too much, and I tend towards the four-syllable words I’ve loved since I first soldiered through them as a child. In recent years, I have made peace with this, with the fact that I don’t really sound like anyone but myself, though maybe I’m growing into it. A professor told me recently that I’d seemed a little uncanny when we first met, when I was twenty. “The vocabulary?” I said. “The vocabulary,” he said.

I didn’t talk much, anyway, and then I did.

It’s been years since someone called me spoiled for being so quiet. That’s the sort of thing that stops sounding like a good argument once you’re both over eighteen and your household’s parenting style is no longer quite as relevant. That’s the sort of thing that is less cutting when the person you’re talking to is funny, and I – shy, anxious child – learned to be funny. Sometimes I wonder if humor isn’t just a response to fear. Sometimes I wonder if everything isn’t just a response to fear.

Still, I’m myself, and I remember how it stung to be on the playground, the porch, the room where the mothers waited during ballet practice, the bedroom of one friend or another, and to feel like maybe it was true. Maybe, like milk, I was spoiled: unremarkable until I’d gone sour, despite my best intentions.

There’s a way you are meant to engage with the world if you are a little girl, or a full-sized girl, or a woman. There’s a humility that is expected of you, a friendliness whose absence is punished. Lately I don’t give it so much mind, but even on particularly sunny days, when I am telling a story that someone has asked to hear, I wonder: am I talking too much? (Hand up, eyes closed, stomach clenched. This is my favorite thing.)

Pronounce these words for me: spoiled, exhausting, self-absorbed. Say bitch – you’re old enough now. Now say them again. Now say them again.

a portrait of the artist looking profound, circa 2004

The other day I went for bagels with my boyfriend at the place around the corner, which we visit most weekends because they know us by now. It feels nice to be recognized in a city as big as this one. It’s named for our neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bushwick, even though it’s technically a block over the border into Ridgewood, Queens. Neighborhoods are fuzzy. Boroughs definitely are not.

We ate our bagels in relative silence, me slower than him as always, and we split an almond croissant that tasted like sugar and perfect autumn days. And I sipped my coffee and tried to say this thing that’s been bothering me for as long as I can remember. I thought, I feel like I take up so much space. I said, “I feel like I talk too much.”

He said, “You don’t talk enough.”

I looked at him then, this person with warm brown eyes and, just then, a couple of crumbs in his beard, who has spent more time listening to me than most people besides my parents, who was looking back at me. I was all my different selves at once: the one learning to pronounce her own name and the one afraid to speak in case she stumbled through it, the one who didn’t think she was better than anyone, the one who didn’t talk much anyway. And this self, whoever I will later know her as, the one who is trying and trying and trying.

We learned to pronounce consonant clusters in speech: ch, th, and so on. I said, “Thank you.”

Pronounce these words for me: chastened, grateful. Say older. Say good enough.

That’s good enough. That’s good enough.

great again

Dear future self,

 

Please remember that for a long time, a small eternity, you could not write.

 
 
You could not write even though you kept trying, hitting backspace, trying again. The words never added up. They crumbled like sand. Somewhere was a sentence that would explain the way you’d been sleeping, half-awake for late-breaking bad news, coiled like a spring held down for a long, long time. That sentence escaped you, and meanwhile you looked at the ceiling in the darkness, your eyes blurry without your glasses – but anyway, there was nothing to see.

 

You could not write except in Facebook statuses and notes to yourself. Directives: pick up your laundry, buy tomatoes, call your mother. You used to write in the second person in college because you had no idea what you were doing and giving instructions felt like role-playing as God. It had helped when you didn’t know what you were doing. Well, at this particular moment, no one seemed to know what they were doing. Happy new year.

 

Please remember that the morning after the election, you took the quietest train ride of your New York life thus far. The sky was gray and spitting rain, and below ground no one spoke, barely breathed, just looked at the floor and the feet of strangers.

 

At your desk, fourteen stories up from the sidewalk in Midtown, you sat and stared at your phone. So much to do, so much of the morning left. Everything urgent; you, so tired your skin ached. You stayed up on election night to watch the returns and then kept staying up because you could bear neither to see them nor to look away. At one, you went to bed, and at two your boyfriend came in to tell you it was over. Had he been crying? Had you? Earlier in the evening you looked in the mirror to see mascara smeared along one cheekbone from burying your face in the pillow, again and again and again. In the moment before you came fully awake, there in the dark bedroom, whatever he was saying did not yet make sense, and you wanted to say tell me something good.

 

At your desk that morning, you sent texts to your friends: I love you, I love you, I love you. And they texted back: I love you, I love you, I love you. One wrote I’m so sorry, like we’d all died and were sending our mutual condolences from different parts of the void. It felt like that. It really felt like that.

 

***

 

Dear future self, please remember how it felt to wake to a world that was changed each time you looked. This was not a trick of the light. This was an inauguration, this an executive order, and this a press conference; this a tweet replying to a tweet replying to a tweet. Eight years is enough time to get comfortable, to think that the old angry past is dead. What did Faulkner say? The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. 

 

And you, raised on history books, unaware that history could still happen in January 2017. Like the factory only made so much and America ran out at some point in your childhood. Like the textbooks ended because there was nothing more to say.

 

And you, feeling homesick for your own private West Virginia, the one you’d believed in. What a cliche: white girl moves from Appalachian stronghold to the land of the coastal elites, New York for God’s sake, and has some complicated feelings. Brooklyn is full of girls like you. But on election night, you watched your state light up red as soon as the polls closed, and you wanted a sandwich board that said I’m Not From Here, that said But I Don’t Know How To Go Home.

 

So many thinkpieces about West Virginia in the aftermath. They were all variations on the thinkpiece you’d been reading your whole life: what the hell is up with this state? But that wasn’t a question you were interested in: you wanted the photos. Here a house with vinyl siding set along a half-dirt road. Here a close-up of someone’s coal-stained hands. Here a faded hoodie, a crooked tooth, a sign with the president-elect’s name stuck into the yard around a trailer. Total poverty porn. But it still felt good to look at something so familiar. This was your home, remember: you knew it better than some Vanity Fair journalist ever could. Unless you didn’t. And maybe you didn’t.

 

While you were off at college conjugating verbs in Russian and making mix tapes for pretty girls, one long string of dominoes kept falling. Maybe you can see it now, in the future. Maybe you have made a study of the critical moments. You grew up, got braver, did laundry, called your mom. That’s a life. And all that time, the country grew up, got angrier, tried to tell you what was coming. Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to see.

 

 

***

 

Dear future self, I don’t know how this ends. I read the news and don’t read the news, I march when I can and sit very still when I can’t. A week and a half ago this was a different place, or at least we were pretending it was.

 

Dear future self, tell me something good. Tell me that my friends are safe. Tell me that we didn’t do the worst we could, not yet, at least not this time. Tell me that I am really from the place I thought I was from: a flawed country made up of people who were trying their best.

 

Dear future self, I hope you can write. I’m trying, but it’s hard when you don’t trust words anymore. They don’t mean what they should. Like alternative facts. Like make America great again.

 

There is a fear I haven’t shaken for months now, a fear that the meaning is going to leak out of the world until nothing matters: not fury or love or literature or law, not the names of places or people, not me. I am afraid that none of my words matter. I am afraid that I cannot change anything. But I think maybe I can.

 

I can’t write but I am going to keep writing. I can’t sit still, so I’ll march. I can’t sleep, so stay up with me, tell me a story, tell me how we got here and where we’re going.

 

Dear future self, I am writing to you because I don’t know what else to do. Second person, right? Role-playing as God. And, like God, I believe in you. You are the person I need. I am walking towards you as fast as I can.

 

take a minute; take a breath

Here is an unsexy fact: most of the writing I’ve done since I graduated has been for work, articles about the publishing industry turned out roughly  as often as I feel knowledgeable enough to say I understand something, i.e., not very often. The rest of my job is small things, orders to make and calls to transfer and bills to sort. There is, thank God, not much to understand, mostly just tasks to remember. And mostly I remember.

But I do write those articles sometimes. And I still write like myself, i.e., with a set variety of grammatical tics, and so I still make use of a trick I picked up in undergrad: auto-searching each document for those tics and replacing them by hand. Today it was the word worth and then the word consider. Today it was also – as ever – semicolons.

I love semicolons. If I were a punctuation mark, I would be a semicolon; my number-two choice is maybe an ampersand. Did you see how casually I slotted one in? Semicolons are, in my opinion, the great metaphysicians of the written language. Is the sentence over or is there more to come? What is this juxtaposition meant to imply? This pause, what does it signify? Have I been overcome by emotion, or am I simply testing your patience? (The Nina Sabak Story.)

There’s a famous Kurt Vonnegut line about semicolons – and Kurt knew punctuation, particularly a well-timed asterisk:

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

If this was meant to dissuade me, it has only done the opposite. I had this advice in the “Favorite Quotes” section of my Facebook profile way back in the early days of 2007, when I was in high school and had a flip phone with T9 text prediction. Were we ever so young? Did I really send all my texts with full parentheticals and occasional semicolons? I did, to the friends I had somehow hoodwinked into putting up with me.

Over the last few years, I started seeing photos online of a particular tattoo. It makes sense that tattoos can be trendy; anything humans can do to themselves or others could conceivably be trendy. The tattoos were of semicolons.

For a brief moment, that first time, I was convinced that other people had really gotten into typefaces and design too. Not so, minus a few really dedicated librarians who blog their life choices. (Librarians, I salute you.) Instead, the semicolons – behind ears, on ankles, on wrists, on arms – were monuments to mental health struggles, inked into people who were surviving. Is the sentence over or is there more to come? There is more to come.

This was back when we on the internet were still gluttons for positivity, and I had mixed feelings about the resulting articles. There’s a kind of rah-rah Upworthy style to them (no kidding). I am grateful for the pop cultural shift around mental illness, which mostly just means depression and anxiety, but still: grateful. Some words are less frightening to say. Some words are easier. As a person who loves and fears words, this means a lot. But it doesn’t mean everything. The moment after you claim those words, they are still in your skin and blood; they are your skin and blood. At various points of my life, I have been more and less comfortable describing myself in terms of mental illness, just as I have been more or less medicated, but I have always had the same symbiotic relationship with whatever is in my head. We don’t know how to leave each other.

And so, grouch that I sometimes am, I shook out my morning Prozac and bah-humbugged my way through another feel-good share from someone’s mom on Facebook. Look at these depressed people, persevering! It felt like reassurance or like resilience porn, depending on the kind of day I was having.

Don’t let this make you think I didn’t think about how easy it would be to do, about how in a different moment I might want to. Multiple doctors have told me that I am a real trooper when it comes to pain. This is the kind of thing doctors tell you when you have run out of conventional small talk and must turn to the fact that one of you is touching the other with a scalpel.

For a while, my first semester of grad school, I wrote on myself in black Sharpie. It was a difficult time, that month or so between October and November, and I wasn’t sleeping much. Not difficult for any particular reason, really. Just that whatever is in my head and I were at war with each other and it was winning.

What did I write? A lot of things, all on my left forearm because I’m right-handed. Parts of poems, sometimes. Little pep talks. Things I was having trouble believing. Like: you are worthy. Like: you are okay.

For a long time, it was much easier for me to write autobiographically in the second person, and my fiction took a distinct second-person turn too. I had so much to say to this girl I had just finished being, sometimes so recently that she felt like she was still there. There were so many instructions to pass on. Never mind that she was the only reason I knew anything.

So I wrote the word you on the skin of my wrist. You are smart. You are beautiful. It was fall, and I kept my sleeves rolled down so no one would see that I needed kindness so badly that I was etching it into my bloodstream. How embarrassing, my capacity for need. You are enough.

In the Cathedral of the Learning, I locked different bathroom stalls between classes and pushed my sleeves up so I could read myself into being the way I wanted to be. Multiple doctors have told me that I am a real trooper when it comes to pain, but in that cold and sleepless month I thought about the pain I could be suffering, how easy it would be to do. And I didn’t. But I thought about it, and you are a different person after you’ve thought about it.

This pause, what does it signify? Have I been overcome by emotion, or am I simply testing your patience?

I thought about getting a tattoo for a while. It would have saved me time, honestly, because one of my notes to myself was constant, touched up with fresh Sharpie as needed. Three words from America’s semicolon king, David Foster Wallace: this is water.

Sure, I could explain why, but the salient point is that these were words I wanted enough that I considered paying someone to put them under my skin. To be frank, aside from that one brief flirtation, I haven’t ever wanted a tattoo, and I doubt I ever will. They are so often beautiful on other people. For whatever reason, I’m happy just to look.

So little of my life has marked me physically. I have a scar on one hand from a kitchen mishap; I used to have a birthmark on my forehead, till it faded. I cut off all my hair one summer but you’d never know now. My freckles are countable. My shins have healed from several hundred leg-shaving incidents. Sometimes I pick my lips until they bleed, an old habit from my anxious childhood, and they always heal too.

Maybe whatever is in my head is actually me, and I’m the thing that lives in my body. Or maybe my body is me. Or maybe it’s all me and I am going to have to learn to get along with myself.

As a kid, I used to want to change the shape of my head. That’s another unsexy fact. I have high cheekbones, Slavic bone structure, a wide and flat face. I thought it made me ugly for a long time. Like maybe into my twenties. Like maybe I still check the mirror sometimes to see if I look okay, and I do; I look okay.

There’s a peculiar narcissism to depression. You think about yourself constantly, mean and terrible thoughts, then worry if your self-obsession makes you kind of a bad person. Then you worry that your self-obsession has gone meta. Then you write a blog post and check your face in the mirror. (That’s a joke. I promise.)

I said that mostly I’ve been writing for work, but that isn’t true. Actually, I write all the time. I wrote in the checkout line at Food Bazaar earlier tonight, and sometimes I write while I’m making copies, and sometimes I write while I’m walking to the subway or back from it. My brain is a machine that runs on words, and I am forever drafting something, leaving myself notes on my phone that don’t make sense come morning. Recently I saw a panhandler holding a sign that said seeking human kindness, and I wrote that down, too.

My life is full of instructions from myself, tasks I am trying to remember, and mostly I remember.

I wanted to tell you about semicolons. I still text with them, you know. I still text the same friends. Either I have continued to hoodwink them or I am worth putting up with. I think I might be; I think I might be; I think I might be.

witches of the subway

It’s impossible to spend more than thirty seconds in New York without seeing an ad. This is especially true on the trains. I’ve passed the time in many stations by staring across the tracks at a celebrity, or a perfectly photographed orange, or foot-tall letters that spell out a brand name I don’t know. For a brief and brutal period in September, posters for Kevin Can Wait were everywhere, Kevin James meeting my eyes as I waited (and waited) for the L.

Mostly the ads get defaced after a while. Sometimes an anonymous New Yorker will scrawl their tag or draw something phallic, like it’s any other flat surface, but my favorite improvements are the ones that interact with the image at hand. In my beloved Halsey station, there was recently an ad up reading Your Video Could Be Great, under which someone added But You Weak, and I laughed every time I saw it.

Lately there’s another, very literal style of defacement. It’s done by peeling away part of the poster on top, maybe with an X-Acto knife, and letting the old layers show through. Usually this is done to the eyes or mouth of some famous stranger printed larger than life, and it’s unsettling if you’re not expecting it – a particularly spooky collage. The face seems wounded, blinded, and the eyes aren’t empty but full of something you can’t see all of. A concert from last summer, maybe. A kind of soda. Good things whose time has gone.

I feel like that sometimes: like there are things in me that everyone else can see, that I never will. Like all of a sudden it’s gotten very, very dark.

So I suppose it’s just as well I didn’t dress up for Halloween this year. The farther we get into fall each year, the more I find myself haunted. It’s like that sometimes when the seasons change. It’s like that all the time if your brain is sitting in the wrong kind of soup, a chemical wash I inherited from generations of other sad girls, family that’s familiar to me in only this one way. I think of depression as a cat that doesn’t quite love me; it ignores me most of the time, and I frighten it off, and we track each other around the apartment until at last it curls up against me to keep me warm. Is it strange to think of an illness like that, as a companion? But then, what else is it?

This isn’t the same as being unhappy. It’s not at all like being unhappy. Let me qualify myself; let me tell you that, somehow, I ended up as one of the world’s great optimists, almost painfully earnest, just a shade this side of twee. (“You,” my boyfriend says, “are whimsical.”) And even now that the light is getting shorter and I have to bundle sweaters over sweaters in the gray mornings, all of this – this life, this city – seems so impossible and wonderful that I, foolish, eager, must write about it.

In past years I did dress up, you know. My Halloween costumes have always been pretty nakedly aspirational. For proof, there’s my early-90s run as, first, a ballerina; then, a princess; then, a “ballerina princess.” As a middle schooler, I braided my hair to be Anne of Green Gables and was bemused when the neighbors couldn’t place me. She was my hero at the time. She was awkward and lovable, and I was awkward, and I wanted to be lovable too.

Then I became a teenager and got self-conscious and didn’t participate – minus the one party I went to in 2004 dressed as myself and claiming to be a sociopath. “You can never tell,” I told everyone spookily. Partway through the evening, a boy my age introduced himself and offered to get me a can of soda. (Let me parse that: a boy introduced himself and offered to get me a soda. We were thirteen, and this was probably the closest I’ll ever come to a stranger sending me a drink from the end of the bar.) So I sat on the porch waiting for him to return, overwhelmed with excitement, heart hammering too hard to make my costume convincing. A little sociopath who felt everything at once.

This year, Halloween was on a Monday, which made the commute home especially surreal. I rode the 6 downtown with witches and cats and a man whose face was painted like a skull, with tiny girls dressed in butterfly wings. At Union Square I walked down one long hallway next to a dominatrix who may actually have been a dominatrix. She was tiny, a flash of skin and leather, and she held her whip in her left hand. A real whip, maybe; but isn’t anything a real whip if it hurts?

My sole concession to the holiday this year was a trip to Rite-Aid while Griffin and I were briefly pretending we might go out. He’d had to go into work at lunchtime, and when he called long after sunset to say that at last he was coming home, I said I’d go buy us some supplies. Just in case.  And so I prowled the seasonal aisle, examining every last thing that was left.

There wasn’t much, not on October 29. Everyone else had planned better. I ended up at the register with a witch’s hat, some vampire fangs, face paint in lurid shades of white, black, and red. A bag of fun-sized chocolates, not for sharing but for hoarding, and a box of Frankenstein Peeps: I only recently realized that my Jewish boyfriend has had no reason to eat much Easter candy, and Peeps are an important part of my life philosophy. The man who rang me up was familiar the way anyone you see day after day becomes familiar. So many people whose names I’ve never learned but whose faces I’ve learned by heart: each an inoculation against loneliness. The witch hat went into the bag and I swiped my card and then I was out on the sidewalk again, the night unusually warm against my cheek.

(I’m generally in that particular store to buy Magic Erasers and Dr. Pepper and the other mundane treats of adulthood. Last week I bought a scented candle because I wanted to see what being the kind of person who buys scented candles feels like. If you’re wondering, I felt exactly like myself. If you’re wondering, most of the time I feel exactly like myself.)

Back at the apartment, I made pasta and we ate it sitting side by side at the kitchen table, plus boxed wine in cheap glasses, plus the Milky Ways and Snickers we pulled out of the bag in handfuls. The idea of dressing up and going out again seemed like something nice other people might do, so we didn’t, and instead we set up camp on the couch. It was cozy there, with blankets and my crocheting bag and the Wii singing Super Mario Galaxy songs. The witch hat still in its bag, the fangs harmless in their plastic.

I’m so tempted to give in to my basest AP English impulses and say something about what it means that I didn’t make a costume this year, what it means that Halloween is and has always been about disguises, a sort of layman’s drag night. I’m so tempted to say this is my mask as I pull it off and reveal who I really am. But if I’m wearing a mask at all, it’s the same thing as my face, and nothing dazzles about that boring truth.

A few weeks ago, raw-nerved, half-empty and half-sorrowful, I curled into my boyfriend’s chest and cried for reasons that didn’t interest me even then. He stroked my hair until I’d finished wrecking my third Kleenex.

I said, “This is so boring. I am so, so tired of this.” This meaning emptiness. This meaning sorrow.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

And an hour later – I don’t even remember what we were doing an hour later because all these happinesses blur together, and I was happy. Was happy even as I was weeping into his sweater. Am happy often, nearly always, despite the little black cat that trails me around like a familiar.

I will put the witch hat away until next year and try again, and we’ll see if the face paint keeps. I still haven’t ever been a witch. Maybe I’d be good at it. My costumes, remember, have always been aspirational.

This morning I walked along the Halsey platform before the L came, hunting out my favorite of those posters with the collaged eyes and mouths. But it’s gone now; they’re all gone now, most of them. In another week or two, maybe their replacements will be more interesting, but right now all of the ads are crisp and new and ungraffitied. When I look into the photos’ eyes, I don’t see anything but eyes. And I feel like that sometimes: like maybe I’m nothing spooky or unsettling, not a woman-shaped bomb at all, just a woman waiting for the train.

This is my face. It’s the only one I’ve got. I think it is going to do.

without a moon

Last Saturday, I had a conversation with my boyfriend that went something like this.

GRIFFIN: What do you want to do today?

ME: Oh, I don’t know. Something relaxing?

GRIFFIN: So you probably don’t want to go on a thirty-mile bike ride.

ME: Probably not.

Needless to say, the bike ride actually ended up being forty miles. I can’t let a challenge go, even when it’s phrased as a suggestion, and before our Corn Pops had gotten properly soggy I turned to him and said, “So where exactly were you thinking we’d go?”

This was my first trip outside the city since I moved here in July. The route went across the George Washington Bridge and through the green riverside of New Jersey all the way to Palisades, New York, where there’s a café he likes. The whole adventure was supposed to last maybe six hours, including the time it takes to get two bikes up to Washington Heights on the A train; we would be home by dinner.

But I am a very slow biker to begin with, and the New Jersey Palisades are steep enough to squeeze my lungs out. You’d think that someone from the Mountain State wouldn’t spend so much time wheeling her bicycle up hills. I am built lanky, with spidery limbs and not much muscle to speak of, and though I can walk forever I’m not much use if we’re competing on speed. So I trailed Griffin across one state line and then another, occasionally hollering for him to slow down, and when I got lightheaded just a couple miles shy of our long-delayed lunch he dismounted and rubbed my shoulders while I took deep breaths, my head against my knees.

At the café, once we finally arrived, we ate sandwiches so ferociously it was like we’d never seen sandwiches before. It was getting on towards five – so much for that plan. After a while I started feeling tough again, if not fast, and I bought us a peanut butter brownie that we split with forks and our fingers. “It’s going to get dark before we’re back,” he said, “but I’ve got lights, so you stay close to me.”

We’d chosen a route that was mostly free of cars, a park full of trees, and it was much easier heading back to the city than it had been heading out. All those hills went down this time. And I did stay close, like a moth, and I followed the silhouette of his shoulders through the night that fell around us, along the river, the crickets louder than I’d heard them anywhere since West Virginia.

In Manhattan my muscles still felt loose and able, so I decided we’d take the bike path along the island’s west edge and get on the L on 8th Avenue, another nine miles but who’s counting? I can’t let a challenge go. And Manhattan is pretty level, as the boroughs go, the bike path especially. I let Griffin cycle ahead of me until I could just barely see his tail light among the other tail lights, and then I would catch up in one furious burst, the way I’d used to when I was a kid and riding with other boys who were faster than me.

At Fourteenth Street we emerged onto the sidewalk, and there were sirens in the air but there are usually sirens in the air. It wasn’t until we’d gone another block or so east that we both pulled up short in front of a little restaurant that had a TV on, playing the news: explosion in Manhattan.

“Oh my God,” I said. I was raised not to use God’s name casually, but sometimes you want to talk to the manager.

We stood there, the two of us windblown and sweaty, the phones in our pockets gone unchecked for miles. There had been a bomb in Chelsea, the TV said. People were in the hospital, the TV said, over twenty-five of them, but no one was dead. And sirens in the air. And the crowd around us as bewildered as we were, though better-dressed.

Sometimes I wonder what my relationship to violence would be if I were five years older or five years younger. Fifteen years ago I was ten, old enough to remember being herded into the school library, where another TV was playing the news. Something in Manhattan, a place I’d been to once a couple summers before. Those tall buildings, one of them wounded and collapsing. As we watched the live broadcast, there was the flash of a plane and a cavity burst open in its twin, too.

I was too young to understand what was happening, too old not to understand what was happening.

So in September 2016, as I shifted from one rubbery leg to the other and squinted to read the chyrons, I felt as though I had just woken from a dream in which I was anything other than ten and sitting in a middle school library hundreds of miles away from something unwatchable. I had been so afraid in those first confused minutes, and then I realized that no one was going to attack West Virginia. Not except by accident. And I wonder sometimes too what my relationship to West Virginia would be if I had never had occasion to think, thank God this is nowhere.

“Let’s go,” Griffin said, gently, though perhaps everything seems gentle next to a bomb.

Now we know more than we used to. Now we have a name, a face, if not a motive, and the people in the hospital have come home in the right number of pieces. The thinkpieces have proliferated, and the editorials in the New York Times, and the presidential candidates have commented, which is how you know it’s old news.

Yesterday, Griffin was reading the news from his phone and said, “They found a pressure cooker under the Major Deegan.”

“No,” I said, bracing myself.

Then he started laughing. “It was just a pressure cooker,” he said. “It’s just a pressure cooker!”

It’s funny: I cried on that bike trip, but only once, at the very beginning. I’d been afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up, perhaps already knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep up, and my response to myself is never kind when I’m found lacking. “This might be more fun without me,” I said to Griffin once we’d pulled over the sidewalk, hugging myself around the waist and staring at the chain-link fence around some playground I’ve forgotten the name of.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t say that.”

(Like any of the people who love me, he has listened to me say a lot of things that I shouldn’t. These are my own tiny acts of violence and I can’t keep myself from them. Our bike trip coincided with a particularly nasty spell of what I call bad brain, usually anxiety or depression or both, the same amorphous fug I stumble into every few months. That’s what it is to have a chronic condition, even one that’s well-managed. You’re never stumble-free.)

The appropriate moment to cry, I suppose, would have been at the very end, when I found out that this adopted city of mine had yet again been host to something horrific. That would have been poetic. But the fact is, if you are twenty-five or thereabouts, “something horrific” is the thing you are always waiting for. It’s the sound of the key in the door, and you’re the dog listening for it, getting lonelier by the minute. I’ve never had an American adulthood that didn’t involve the words active shooter or terrorism or emergency drill. I barely had a childhood before them.

I didn’t cry, though – was merely a little dazed. After however many bombings and shootings and stabbings, you default to a certain kind of composure. And sure enough, within a few days there would be other news, actual fatalities, and the discovery of a pressure cooker under the expressway would be funny because, small miracle, nothing happened.

Sometimes I wonder what relationship to violence any of us have, we onlookers, we rubbernecking witnesses. Sometimes I wonder what we have done to ourselves, and what we are doing.

While we were still biking through the growing darkness, before anything had happened on 23rd Street, I had the kind of epiphany you have every so often when you’re a woman doing something mildly dangerous. Specifically: I would never do this alone. Traveling through dark, empty places by yourself is the exact kind of activity people warn you against whenever they tell you how not to get murdered. If you’re a woman, “How Not To Get Murdered” is a continuing education course that you aren’t allowed to opt out of.

Then I caught up to Griffin’s shadow, and he said, “Have you ever heard of the Jersey Devil?” And the wind around us blew some more leaves off the trees, and the crickets buzzed like little saws, and I swear there was someone behind me. It’s funny now because nothing happened.

I have trouble sometimes distinguishing between my own fear and everyone else’s. I have trouble sometimes distinguishing between self-loathing and other kinds of violence. Perhaps I would always have been afraid of unseen assailants and exploding dumpsters, of a brain that misfires, and my growing up when I did has nothing to do with it. But I don’t think so.

It’s been nearly a week since we boarded the eerily empty train back to Brooklyn, our shins dirty and palms sore. It’s been a few days since our phones spontaneously played emergency sirens at 8 am and buzzed with the bomber’s description, and we shrugged and kept getting ready for work. Life goes on. They’d arrested him by lunch.

I am doing better now. Well, I’ve come down with a nasty cold, but I don’t mind my body giving out on me if my brain works okay. And it does, for the moment, which is all you can ever really ask.

A few years ago one of my friends was doing inpatient for depression and I mailed them a long letter with a poem I like at the end. That’s the kind of thing that would make me feel better, I guess, though maybe normal people don’t actually crave poetry in difficult times. I wouldn’t know. I’m not one of the normal people.

The poem was by Jack Gilbert, a Pittsburgher, and it’s called “Horses at Midnight Without a Moon.”

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.

Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.

But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down

but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

The summer mornings begin inch by inch

while we sleep, and walk with us later

as long-legged beauty through

the dirty streets. It is no surprise

that danger and suffering surround us.

What astonishes is the singing.

We know the horses are there in the dark

meadow because we can smell them,

can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists like a man struggling

through the frozen valley

who suddenly smells flowers

and realizes the snow is melting

out of sight on top of the mountain,

knows that spring has begun.

 

Of course, there was a moon last Saturday: the harvest moon, orange and lazy over the Hudson. I still thought of the poem, though. I think about it a lot.

 

It was company as I flew down the hills following the little circle of light that my boyfriend had become. What astonishes is the singing.

 

There’s no grand unified theory of violence to be found here. I don’t have a grand unified theory of anything. If I did, I would tell you. All I know is that we’re still here, somehow, on the first day of fall in a year that seems determined to take prisoners. Maybe this is an appropriate moment to cry, too.

 

All I know is that this might not be more fun without me.

 

I’ve got lights, so you stay close to me, and whatever happens next is what happens.

cicada season

I’m not much for nostalgia, but the last month of grad school I started missing the life I was still living. Maybe it’s because all I really knew was how to be a student. In 1996 I first hung my sweater on a hook in the kindergarten cubby, and twenty years later I handed in my master’s thesis. The MFA is a terminal degree, and so unless I change fields or go for a creative PhD, I am finished with all of it. Strange feeling.

And I do mean that I literally handed my thesis in, this half-a-novel I’d picked at and torn up and rewritten and rewritten again. At Pitt you must still make a physical copy and submit it to the department before you’re permitted to graduate. I paid to have it printed and bound at Kinko’s, and I hugged it against my chest all the way down Forbes Avenue. Writing is so lonely sometimes, can feel so insubstantial, that to have one hundred and fifty pages of my own work in my arms was overwhelming. This thing was my weird little baby, and I was responsible for it. (The Little Prince: “You are responsible forever for what you have tamed.” Then again, I don’t claim to have tamed anything yet.)

The Cathedral of Learning was pumped full of cold air in response to the tentative April heat. On the fifth floor, I gave the man in the English office my coil-bound book and the signed committee form. We stood there for a  moment. He said, “Feels like there should be more, huh?” I said, “Sure does.” Then I walked outside to buy myself a milkshake at Rita’s.

I didn’t know what was supposed to come next, and a milkshake seemed as likely as anything.

Nostalgia is a pretty natural response to anticlimax. Anticlimax isn’t the same thing as disappointment; at least, I wasn’t disappointed. It’s more like the following: here I am, having done this thing I always wanted to do, an adult at last. But I am still the same person I was all those days I was just dreaming. 

So what else can you do but feel that all those days must have meant something more? That your dreaming was the entire point? All at once, this surge of affection for the seven years I’d spent as a student at Pitt, for the endless cheap pizza and late nights, the quiet hours bent over one book or another, the places that had worked their way into my own personal history. The gazebo in Schenley Park: I once cried there. The bus stop outside the Carnegie Public Library: I had juggled so many armfuls of plastic-bound books there. The quiet stretch of Dithridge past Bayard Street: I had lived there, walked to and from class there, watched the purple starless sky there.

The end of history illusion is the belief that you are done changing. My fifteen-year-old self embarrasses me more than my twenty-five-year-old self, but at some point in the future I won’t recognize either of them as me. I don’t know what I don’t know, much less what I’ll learn and forget and celebrate and mourn and say, and it’s easier to think that I could predict these things, I really could, if I just gave some thought to it.

I’ll always remember this, I thought, walking down Fifth Avenue with my milkshake in hand, but the truth is, I couldn’t tell you anymore what I was wearing.

A couple weeks ago I found a daddy-long-legs in the bathtub before work. There wasn’t enough time to coax it out before I turned the shower on, and I’ve never been that good with crises anyway, so I apologized the entire time I was carrying it to the toilet, as I dumped it in and flushed. This is the cockeyed philosophy of my childhood. I am alive and I am afraid; you are alive, so you must be afraid, too.

And you know what, I still feel a little guilty. It was such a small thing, spindle-legged and harmless. Besides, I once made a promise not to kill things. I was five and had just run over a caterpillar on my bike to see what would happen, and what happened was that it burst onto the sidewalk, its insides a color and texture I was never supposed to see. Disgusting, but I didn’t cry out of disgust. It’s just that I understood, for the first time, that this moment could not be undone.

You cannot live any meaningful life without understanding that. You cannot live any meaningful life without mistakes, or so I want to believe. But the nostalgia then, at five, for the person I had just ceased to be: a tiny redheaded girl who would never, never, never.

Maybe that’s what nostalgia is, then: a way to miss the person you were. A particular kind of self-indulgence. A school yearbook that is only ever you. It’s been decades since I got glasses and grew taller and stopped seeing caterpillars anywhere at all, the way you stop seeing an entire specific world once you’re old enough. I knew the ecology of the backyard and the shadows of birds, how grass smelled when smashed into my knees, the weight of a rock in my pocket. More things I thought I’d always remember. When was the last time I held dirt in my own bare hands?

The daddy-long-legs was my billionth bug of the summer but the first (and only?) that I killed. Back home, in West Virginia, the seventeen-year cicadas crawled above ground for the first time since 1999. That was the year I was eight, a whole lifetime older than five. Eight, for me, was flyaway hair and the first twinges of an anxiety disorder, ballet lessons that I was never much good at, a little shyness about pronouncing the letter r. Eight was the cicadas, constant and buzzing, their heavy bodies falling improbably through the air. They had eyes big enough to look into. Their weight against my shins was unsettling.

The end of history illusion: the belief that I was incomplete at eight, am complete at twenty-five. And what will I say about this other cicada season one day? Twenty-five: still the flyaway hair, still the anxiety. This was the year I ate popcorn for dinner on the nights when I was tired or sad, the year I finished half a novel and have not known what to do with my hands ever since.

Whenever I was home – never often enough, never long enough – I watched the cicadas through my bedroom window. The remnants of your childhood are supposed to get smaller as you get older, aren’t they? And yet here were these little zeppelins, these thin-winged engines, and their eyes were still just as big.

One morning in June my parents and I went for a drive and, less than a block later, my father abruptly cut the car’s engine and leaped out into the street. “We had a stowaway,” he said a moment later, once he’d shaken the cicada free. He was buckling himself back into his seat as though nothing had happened. Ten seconds, maybe.

One of us said, “Imagine what that ride felt like to him.” Never mind our familial insistence on gendering any and all strange creatures; the question stands. One minute you’re near this bush you’ve known your whole life, and the next you’re trying to find your way back.

I have great affection for things out of their context. I have great affection for things, period. If it can be vaguely humanized, I will feel tenderly towards it: a coil-bound manuscript held to my overheated chest, the tiny glasses of my childhood found in a drawer, a daddy-long-legs in the bathtub. In college, a friend once named my French fries as I was eating them because, as we both knew, I’d be unable to continue. (“Not Phyllis,” he said in mock horror. And then, seeing me hesitate: “Wait, you’re going to let her sacrifice go in vain?” I did not finish my plate.)

New York is good for misplaced things – finding them and being them. There was a deck of cards this week in the Halsey L stop, stacked neatly on the seat of the wooden bench where I wait for my train. There is the crochet hook I lost in Greeley Square. There is me and my tendency, when sad or anxious, to laugh.

Is this nostalgia, what I’m doing now? Does it matter? I will never be this old again, this person again. Everything is forgotten or else becomes a story. I hope I remember a lot. I hope I forget a lot, too, that I give up my stories for better ones as necessary. That I don’t ever decide I really am finally complete.

Here is the cockeyed philosophy of my childhood and adulthood: I am alive and afraid of so much, and you are alive, so you must be afraid of something too. Perhaps it sounds tenderer in my head. I mean it tenderly.

In seventeen years the cicadas will return to West Virginia and I will be forty-two. I’ve never considered being forty-two before, but it sounds nice. The manuscript I handed in will be something else, either finished or forgotten, old enough to go to college itself. The great-great-great-grandchildren of the spider I drowned would have their own great-great-great-grandchildren, a whole lineage of spiky shadows, out of context in someone else’s bathtub.

But that’s later. Now is now, the mistakes I am making, the things I am losing and finding, the mundane anxiety of being alive. This life is not a story yet. I could say that I’ll always remember that, but I didn’t come this far just to lie to you, did I?

i hate to leave this beautiful place

A month ago this Friday, I woke up in my empty apartment and took one last shower in the place I’d spent two years calling home. My beloved roommate had already packed and gone, and the place was echoey without his furniture. In the U-Haul outside was everything I had decided to keep. So many boxes and so many words written on their sides: mostly the word I’d written was books.

A younger version of me had sworn never to do what I was doing, but I locked the front door anyway, got in the truck anyway, collected the friend who was riding with me and aimed north to the turnpike, then east for a long, long time. And hours after we’d slipped the county border, I thought about the city I was driving away from. That was the thing I’d sworn against, you know. I left Pittsburgh.

What do you call homesickness-yet-to-come? What do you call homesickness-long-endured? I felt both of them then. For seven years I’d lived in one apartment and then another in Pittsburgh, learned the twisting streets, covered the map with my body a single second at a time. You could make an afternoon tour of my sorrows and triumphs and all-time favorite lunches. Here’s the newsstand where someone I never met wrote signs of the advice I needed. Here’s the public library whose stacks I didn’t finish working through. Here’s the statue where I kissed someone, the dance floor where I kissed someone, the street corner where I kissed someone. The stoves I cooked on, the bathrooms I cried in, the rooms where my best friends became my best friends and my exes became exes.

That last morning in Pittsburgh, the air smelled like grass and hot bricks and the day that was coming, and it was going to be beautiful, but I didn’t stick around to see.

As much as I loved Pittsburgh, love Pittsburgh, will always love Pittsburgh, I would be lying if I said I felt any hesitation then about leaving it. See, homesickness does not preclude the possibility of multiple homes. If you’re lucky enough, you will love many places so much that you are always missing one of them, and so I exchanged one kind of longing for another.

It takes a long time to drive to Brooklyn. Google Maps claimed I could do it in six, but really it was more like eight and a half. There was traffic, because there’s always traffic, and we took a lunch break somewhere around Bedford, PA, where I bought a Nutella milkshake that took me the rest of the day to finish. A few times I held my breath as the truck scraped horribly against something, though afterwards I couldn’t find a single scratch.

My boyfriend and our roommate ordered a pizza and kept it warm for me while I drove to them, late and then later. My friend coached me turn-by-turn through Staten Island and over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, told me I was doing a great job, helped me parallel park. These are the kindnesses you remember.

In Pittsburgh I have been so many different people. They haunt me in a vague, friendly way. Someday, this person I am now will haunt the person I become, and I like thinking that she’ll know me, even if I never find any way to know her but the hard way.

I wasn’t foolish enough – or am perhaps too foolish – to believe that moving to New York would change me. Not because I don’t believe places have that power; I’m different for every single door I’ve walked through, every plane I’ve boarded. Rather, I have always resented the narrative that New York is the only place that matters, as if every other city were New York with training wheels. As if now I’m from somewhere. Listen: I have always been from somewhere.

But if you grow up as a certain kind of artsy kid, if you navigate the world by spelling your last name before saying it and naming only your home state because no one knows your hometown, then, sure, you romanticize New York. What a name: New York! Site of my dreams since I first stepped foot in it at age eight, biggest city I’d ever seen, land of one million taxis and setting of all the books I loved. Harriet the Spy and Eloise and Claudia Kincaid. All those girls I wanted to become.

And I did resent this city, I did, the way you resent anything that’s laid a claim to your soft underside. In uncharitable moments, when someone makes a joke about small, tragic, corn-fed places, I still do. I want to say: There’s so much country out there, so many places that aren’t boroughs, so many accents that have a home outside Times Square. By the time I was in grad school, I was still reading books set in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but they began to leave me hungry. You know how it is: sometimes you fall in love and stop falling, start missing how it felt when you had something to prove.

I hadn’t come here to live for the first time yet, of course. I hadn’t realized how much was left to prove. Like the joke-tellers, all I knew was what I’d read. All I knew was there were fifteen hundred novels by Brooklyn-based authors named Jonathan, each one with the same breathless flap copy, each one assuming I knew how the trains worked or how Queens was laid out. Which I did not. Had not had occasion to learn. It’s not that I was too ignorant or small-townish to know these things, though. You get tired of feeling stupid after a while, even if the thing making you feel stupid is only as smart as its writer, and its writer is only a writer.

Here’s another truth, though: despite my Appalachian loyalty, despite the hours and pages I’ve spent lauding West Virginia’s ferocity and grit, I left. I went away to college and never came back. Exchanged one kind of longing for another.

The first morning after the move, I was not surprised to wake up and find myself in Brooklyn. No pleasant moment of dawning realization; my brain is too practical sometimes. Maybe it’s just that I visited Griffin so much over the last year and got familiar with the feel of the place. Maybe it’s that I had been waiting for this so long that the grand reveal was less ta-da! and more at last. That’s how it felt, anyway: at last.

New York will change me. I am changing all the time. I am perfecting my mean stare, my subway card swipe. It’s been a while since last summer, but it comes back to you.

In Pittsburgh I have been so many different people, and in New York I will be so many different people, and everywhere I go I leave some little part of myself.

Despite my mixed feelings about being a walking stereotype, I am now an MFA graduate who lives in Bushwick. I take the L into the city for my publishing job, which is on Madison Avenue, where the dogs are all smaller and richer than I am. I have opinions about how slowly the tourists are walking (too slowly) and how hot the subway is in summer (too hot) and what a jerk that driver was, did you see him? New Yorkers say asshole, but I’ll say jagoff. There’s some Pittsburghese I’m keeping.

There are some moments when I miss my other homes so much you’d think I never left a place before. Where are the lightning bugs and that hot-grass smell? Where are the birds whose names I never learned, whose songs I am lacking? Where are the people who know me?

And then there are moments – many, many more of them – when I look out the window by my desk at the Empire State Building, or listen to the ice cream trucks outside the apartment on some sweltering Brooklyn morning. There are moments when I walk back from the bodega with this person I love and neither of us says much, because we don’t have to, because it’s not like I’m leaving.

New York, Pittsburgh, West Virginia: you are the tree I carve my initials into, and you carve your initials into me.

Here are the lightning bugs after all. Here are the stairs to my home. Here are the people who know me.